A Candidate for The Order
From Great White Desert
A Candidate for The Order
by Michael A. Hoffman II; (1988)
This book is dedicated to the memory of Joseph Palace (1889-1967).
"This was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood; that I was in a world where it was not possible for me to be good."—George Orwell.
Some of the people of Rochester, New York were simply hoping that no one tried their patience today, that everyone would cooperate in easing the hours until darkness and the relief it would bring from the ferocity of the August heat.
Others were urgently hoping that someone would try their patience, would get in their way, would do something rude and give them an excuse to pounce.
It was that kind of day.
John Schmidt stood on the concrete stoop of his apartment house sipping a Budweiser Tallboy. He couldn't afford air conditioning and his wife had all she could do to keep the kids under control in their cramped quarters. Gulping his beer, Schmidt knew that he couldn't overcome the stench of the car exhaust, the blare of the suitcase radios or the scorching power of the midday sun. He closed his eyes instead and pictured a waterfall in the woods where he used to hunt, in Tompkins County. He imagined himself at the base of it, as its cascading waters soothed and showered him, in the splendor of what had once been an old Indian grove.
"You can't swing a bat like that, Wolf!"
Schmidt snapped out of his brief reverie. His oldest son Thor was chiding his wildest son Wolfgang about one of the hundred-and-one unconventional things the younger boy always seemed to be doing. In this case, his novel way of holding a baseball bat.
"Those two, what a couple of characters," Schmidt thought as he grinned and shook his head good-naturedly.
"Thor, I've told you a million times, Wolf has got his own way and you're going to have to let him go that way and make his own mistakes," Schmidt counseled.
"But Dad, he'll never hit the ball holding the bat like that and it'll be a boring game," Thor answered.
Schmidt stood up from the porch stoop. "There are worse things in life besides boredom," he said as he walked over to Thor and reached for his arm so he could turn him and give him a hug. The child pulled away petulantly.
Thor was a redhead with blazing green eyes and a temperament to match. He favored his Dutch-Scottish mother in his good looks. He was eleven and at a new stage, that of questioning his father. He was becoming aware that his father was not like other modern fathers. His father was different and while Thor loved and respected Schmidt, he was also beginning to dislike him. There were many reasons for this, as Schmidt knew.
Wolf was eight and saw his father as one heck of a hero. He was tuned into Schmidt in a way that the other children were not. Schmidt had the hunch that when Wolf got to be ten—or twenty—the boy would still feel the same way about him. Wolf was fair with pale skin and brown hair. Glinting, blond strands popped out of his mop-top like wayward branches on a young tree.
Schmidt drained the last of his Tallboy and tossed it into a dented chrome trashcan on the sidewalk. He heard footsteps descending the tenement stairs. It was Gerry with Gretchen and the baby.
Geraldine MacCallum Schmidt, 30 years old, mother of four, chef, fabric artist and clothes maker, horsewoman and registered nurse—too busy having babies and caring for her own to work in a hospital taking care of strangers for money. Still gorgeous after twelve years of marriage.
"Here's another cold one, John," she said as she handed him a replacement Budweiser.
"You mean you can spare time from that sewing machine to come down here for a minute?" Schmidt kidded her.
She took in sewing because it was her way of making money while remaining at home with her children. This was in defiance of a capitalist society which encouraged women to go to work to serve strangers, so as to make money to in turn pay other strangers to raise one's children, while the parents are slaving away for the Almighty Buck. "The insane equation," Gerry called it. She didn't fall for it and even though Schmidt was laid-off from the factory, she didn't covet shiny junk. Schmidt considered himself fortunate to have her for his wife.
Here he was, a certified college professor who couldn't get a teaching position because of his "evil views," who then went to work at a factory that moved its plant to Taiwan six months later. Now he was part-timing it as a bouncer at a liquor store.
They took no welfare from the System.
Schmidt popped the top on his second beer of the day. Gerry squeezed in next to him on the slab of concrete. She gave Schmidt a hug as he surveyed the street.
It was daily becoming more and more crowded with black, brown and indeterminately colored people. Schmidt believed they had been cruelly deceived into leaving their farms, rural towns and native jungles for a "land of opportunity"—the modern American moonscape pockmarked by the burnout of countless human lives. A place that was ravaging and devouring the spirits of all people in as unnatural and inorganic a System of social and economic organization as the world had ever seen.
They were victims too, these non-White people from a thousand different locales, whose hearts and souls were inevitably pulverized into white powder whenever they overstayed their sojourn inside the Western technological imperium.
"That's the powder," Schmidt had told Gerry one night during one of his marathon gabfests, "with which the System makes Oreo cookies. Dark on the outside, white on the inside, just like the Black separatists say."
From the vantage of his stoop, in the midst of this river of humanity, Schmidt caught himself mumbling "Oreos" at the passing non-Whites. He evinced particular disgust at the sight of a black kid bedecked in gold chains, a $100 jacket and $90 sneakers.
"Look at that one," Schmidt declared, gesturing with his head. Gerry turned left and saw a tall, malnourished negro of about fifteen outfitted head-to-toe in the most costly of consumer attire.
"They call that liberation? Led by the nose by the ad men, that's all it is. A worse slavery, because the System tells them that's where it's at: lusting body and soul for the gaudy baubles held before them by Madison Avenue huck-sters, like toys before a young child," Schmidt observed.
Wolf, playing baseball in the street whenever the traffic emptied out of the boulevard, had given his novel overhead swing two full at-bats and struck out as many times. Thor had whizzed strike after strike past him as Mike McGowan, one of the neighbor kids, acted as catcher, squatting behind a trash barrel lid that served as home plate. With Wolf at bat again, Thor groaned at the prospect of his younger brother's unique swing.
"Daaaaad," Thor moaned as his pitching hand rested on the ball which was stuck defiantly on his hip, "Why do I have to keep going through this over and over? Wolf is never going to hit the ball!"
Schmidt stuck his head down toward Gerry's lap so Thor wouldn't see him laughing. He tried to regain his composure and couldn't. Gerry knew that if Schmidt continued to laugh Thor would be offended. She intervened, "Thor, Wolf's been patient with you many times. Now it's your turn—"
"When?" Thor queried her in childish outrage. "When was he ever patient?"
"When you're in the bathroom, that's when!" Wolf shot back.
Schmidt silently laughed so hard he couldn't conceal his body's convulsions. He quit trying and sat up from Gerry's lap just as Thor fired a murderously fast pitch straight at Wolf. Wham! The ball sailed through the air after the younger brother's swing connected this time, landing in high bounces too disorienting for Thor to catch quickly. Wolf safely made it to second base—a fire hydrant—and stuck his tongue out at Thor. Even Thor had to smile at the high spirits of his younger brother. Mom and Dad clapped for both boys.
"All things come to the man who waits," shouted Gerry at Thor, who screwed his mouth into a grimace.
"Sure Mom," he said with mock agreement.
None of the Schmidts were aware that in making it to second, Wolf had knocked over some guy's pint of Wild Irish Rose, which lay sprawled in the street, dribbling its high-proof rotgut into the gutter.
"Goddamn mo'fuggin' honky kid gotta go meff wid ma drinkin' likker," howled a muscular, middle-aged negro in skintight Jordache jeans and a sleeveless black T-shirt. Around his neck hung a solid gold necklace. The money for it would have bought the Schmidt family a month's groceries. As he cursed, the man stood himself up from the sidewalk, drunkenly leaning to and fro.
Gerry had a vise-like restraining grip on her husband's forearm. Schmidt remained calm. He was about forty feet from Wolf and could get to him in a few seconds, if he had too. He didn't want to stand; that would be "provocation" in the eyes of the police.
Wolf was oblivious to any danger but Thor and Mike were closely watching the negro and some of his crack-addict pals behind him. Wolf was looking at Thor, "C'mon, get Gretchen to bat me in," he demanded, referring to his sister.
One of the drunk's buddies, the only White in a gang of about eight, stepped forward. He had a patch of brillo-pad on his chin and long, greasy black hair tied back into a pony-tail.
"Hey, Hitler Youth!" he shouted, while doing an imitation of a goosestep, "Hotsi-totsi, we gotta another Nazi!" The crowd of negroes broke into laughter.
Years of televised propaganda had done its work. Schmidt and the boys were sometimes singled out on the street and even in anonymous phone calls as "German scum, baby torturers" and "Nazi bastard" mostly because the epithet-tossers knew the family had traditional German and Nordic names. Schmidt had refused to Anglicize his name to Smith. He was proud of his German heritage and proud of the crusade his father and uncle had waged on the Eastern Front, against the bloody communist dictator Josef Stalin.
But the crowd confronting him and his children now, knew nothing about Schmidt, only that he had chosen to give his children "pagan" names. This was enough to mark the family as one that marched to the Thoreauian beat of a different drummer, a cadence increasingly smothered in the emerging egalitarian Utopia, where being different is elevated to the status of a supreme principle, so long as it can be licensed and marketed by Pepsi and MTV. Pity anyone in Utopia who really did dare to be different, referring to forbidden legacies for inspiration and nomenclature.
The drunk weaved toward the fire hydrant. He was about a yard from Wolf, who saw that all eyes were on him and the strange dark man with unsteady legs. Schmidt stood up and walked casually toward his son, careful not to inflame the situation by moving too quickly. Gerry ordered Gretchen to take the baby back into the apartment, lock the door and stay there. The sounds of muttered curses and "sheeeet" came from the men behind the wino.
As Schmidt approached the hydrant, the negro turned and faced him. "Man, git the hell outta day way, cuz ahs gonna trash dat fuggin' kid o'yo's for messin' wid my bottle."
Schmidt pulled three dollars out of his pocket. "Gee, I'm awfully sorry about this. Here's enough to buy yourself another bottle." The negro appeared surprised and mollified by Schmidt's offer of money. "Wolf's only eight," Schmidt told him, "and honest he didn't mean to—"
"Hey man, you can't buy us off," the White punk interrupted. "We're the People and we don't dig you. You think you're better than us but ..." he paused for effect, "but you ain't sheeeet," he said, imitating the negro pronounciation of the word and cognizant that his macho tone of challenge and put-down would produce more agitation among the blacks.
Reflexively the drunk chimed in, momentarily forgetting the proferred cash, "Des right," he leered, "yo ain't sheeeeet."
Sounds of "Go bro," "Tell that cracker!" and "Cut 'im" came from the other men.
"Okay Thor, Wolf, let's go home now. The game's over," Schmidt wearily replied, though he burned inside at the cowardly stance he believed he had to take for the sake of his family, in the demented racial climate politicians and media executives had fomented.
"But Daaady," Wolf protested, "I want to play more baseball."
It struck Schmidt how truly hot the sun had become. The rushing cars deposited their exhaust in clouds of foul air. He smelled the stinking, alcoholic breath of the pop-eyed goon in front of him, who was mouthing-off to a father and menacing an eight-year-old child, both of whom were only trying to live peacefully in the "all-new, improved" integrated America. Schmidt could feel control slipping as the rays of the sun struck the back of his neck like a thousand white-hot needles.
"I won't lose my control," Schmidt thought to himself. "That's for these people, not me. I will retain my discipline and turn away." He looked at Wolf and Thor one at a time and using his eyes signaled solemnly toward the porch.
The drunk, the White punk and six others with whom they had been "partying," grew impatient with this unexpectedly tolerant honky.
Wolf gave them the excuse they needed.
As his father was gently nudging the boys away from the gang with the slow, deliberate pace one reserves for walking away from a mad dog, Wolf shook his fist at the punk and grinned mischievously. The punk became enraged.
"You vicious little Nazi shit, I'll teach you to get smart with one of The People!" he screamed, swinging his open hand in a powerful slashing motion, in an attempt to slap Wolf. Wolf ducked. The punk missed. The two sides froze.
A mob had gathered. Schmidt heard the familiar whine of one of the local liberals, Mrs. Miller, an emaciated woman with bags under her eyes. She wore a garish, green pantsuit.
"There's that damn Kraut, at it again. He just can't leave The People alone," she fumed. "You racist bastard, the State ought to take those kids from you. You're teaching them to hate!" As she shouted the words, the liberal lady's face was contorted into a mask of hatred.
Schmidt clenched his fists. Every bone in his body cried out for him to smash the punk who had dared to try and harm his son and to tell this Miller dame to go to hell. But a part of him counseled against it.
"They won't let you teach anymore, Schmidt," he thought to himself. "The only hope you've got for putting food on the table is the prospect of another factory job. The union guy told you to hang in there and there'll be an opening for you at some other plant. But if you fight these people now," he advised himself, "you could lose that chance. Humble yourself, fella, it's not worth it."
With these thoughts racing through his head, Schmidt heaved a sigh, took a breath, grabbed Wolf by his collar and proceeded to steer him and his brother the additional twenty feet to the stairwell of their apartment house, where Gerry was anxiously waiting.
The White punk strided quickly toward them. He maneuvered himself next to Wolf and with a deft motion of his foot, tripped the child. Wolf fell hard on the concrete, striking his mouth. True to form, he didn't cry. He rolled himself onto his side and Schmidt saw blood in his son's nose and mouth.
"That's it!" Schmidt exploded as he hunched himself into a Marciano crouch and burst forth with a crashing left hook into the chin of Wolf's assailant, following it with a right upper-cut to his jaw. The punk collapsed to the pavement, unconscious.
His drunken crony jibbered excitedly as he tried to extract a knife from his back pants' pocket. Schmidt spun around to face him and launched a side kick into the negro's solar plexus and a front kick to his larynx. The black sprawled on the sidewalk, his hand still jammed in his back pocket. He was conscious and from the manner in which he writhed in pain, he seemed to have broken his hand.
Schmidt made a quick 180 degree survey of the sidewalk in both directions. Before him lay two men. On the right, Mrs. Miller and her crowd of upper-class Whites glared, almost without motion. On the left, the six negroes were all standing.
"If I have to fight 'em all," Schmidt thought, "this August sun just might witness my last day under its gaze." But he was too cross to give a damn.
From where the blacks stood they could just barely make out Schmidt's eyes. Something in those eyes gave a youth named Larry intimations of his own mortality.
"Sheeet, honky's crazy," he muttered to his companions, as the six foot, two inch Schmidt stood near the curb with his fists clenched, panting in regular, measured breaths like a healthy predatory animal, sweat streaming into his eyes.
"Let's book," answered another, named Jimmy. There were some more mumbled curses and whispered put-downs, mingled with evil looks cast in Schmidt's direction. Then the men shuffled toward the drunk and dragged him to his feet. He cried out in pain as he was moved, wrenching his hand from his pocket in the process. They walked him between two of them. Four others made a point of bouncing up and down as they shambled east on the boulevard, sharing a bottle and occasionally casting a backward glance at Schmidt. Their White associate was left to the ministrations of Mrs. Miller and a man in a business suit, who were leaning over him in an attempt at resuscitation.
Gerry had taken the boys upstairs. Schmidt marched up too, walking through the crowd of spectators, looking straight ahead.
Once inside his home, Schmidt washed the grime from his hands, peering at the care-lined face that stared back at him from the bathroom mirror. He felt unclean for even having had to talk to them, much less strike them with his hands and feet. And he was worried. How would this affect his chances for a decent job?
Gerry entered and embraced him. They held each other for several minutes. Wolf followed her and wrapped himself around his father's leg. Schmidt looked down at him and was alternately shocked and elated. Shocked because the beautiful face of his youngest son bore for the first time in Wolf's life, several ugly-looking abrasions and a split lip that was turning purple. Elated, because the boy cast up at him a big grin, brighter than the day's sun.
- II
There was heavy knocking at the door. Gerry pulled away from their embrace and looked up at Schmidt with apprehension. He gave her hand a gentle squeeze and untangled Wolf from his leg. Husband and wife approached the door. With mutual fear, they noticed that Schmidt had not locked it.
"Who is it?" Gerry called out with a strong voice.
"P'lice officers. Open up, lady," a husky voice answered.
"Do you have a warrant?" Schmidt called to the faceless voice on the other side of the door.
"Don't need no warrant, Smiff," said the voice, "we in pursuit of a felon who has just committed a felony."
Gerry gasped in horror and instinctively ran to lock the door. Schmidt restrained her. He could see the cop cars in the street. They had used only flashing lights. No sirens, special tactics. Like he was Charles Manson.
Gerry stood in the middle of their living room, her eyes pleading with Schmidt. "Better open up, honey or they'll break it down and claim I resisted," he said with regret.
"Let's gather the kids and run, John—out the back stairs," she urged.
"Better open it now, Gerr," he said quietly. When she did, two negroes in uniform entered; a short, thick, very dark woman with flaring nostrils and her chubby mulatto partner.
"We gon' read you yo' rights, Miffa Smiff," the fat cop announced.
"It's Schmidt and there's no need. White working people don't have any rights in this country," he told them.
The policewoman poked her thumb into her partner's shoulder, "Ah told you he a Nazi," she said.
"What's my husband charged with?" Gerry demanded.
"Aggravated assault and if yo' don't keep some distance and some respect, we gon' to apprehend yo' too and those pretty kids o' yours be down at Juvenile Hall for a while," the female cop warned her.
Juvenile Hall was worse than a jungle. They ran a prostitution ring there. Gerry automatically took a backward step. The thought of her precious little ones in that detention facility threw a bucket of ice water on her defiance.
"It's alright, Babe," Schmidt comforted her, "It's a trumped-up charge. I'll be okay." He hugged and kissed her. Before he could do the same to the children the police handcuffed him and took him away.
John Schmidt sat for four days in jail, in a urine-stained cell. In the next cell a White transvestite performed sex acts with other inmates. A black pimp told Schmidt he had "a nice bod" and that Schmidt would soon be having a "date" with a negro weightlifter.
When Schmidt informed a White guard about these threats, the jailer shrugged his shoulders and looked at his watch, measuring how much time he had before he got off his shift and on to Lake Ontario in his new boat.
Schmidt had a preliminary hearing before an amiable, white-haired negro judge.
"Mr. Schmidt, it says here you nearly beat to death Ralph Peterson and Tyrone Hayes. You are charged with aggravated assault in the first degree. How do you plead?" the judge asked.
"Not guilty."
"I'm told you're indigent so I will appoint you an attorney."
"No thank you, Judge, I'll represent myself."
For the next sixty-eight days, Gerry took in many more baskets of sewing. She also began soliciting for ironing. Her best friend Debbie helped out with the kids. Wolf got wilder and Thor grew bitter at his father, who he was coming to regard as a man hell-bent on ensuring that the family never had any of the video games, vacations or flashy clothes that even some poor families managed to scrape together.
Bail was set at $50,000 under the provisions of the State's new, model "Hate Crimes" bill. The city's two metropolitian newspapers ran banner headlines about the case. The Upstate Journal wrote, "Racial Strife Leads to Beatings." The paper reported that "in an argument over a liquor bottle, a 32-year-old unemployed White factory worker, John Schmidt, is alleged to have assaulted two men, one of whom was black, after racial slurs were traded." The article omitted all mention of the attack on Wolf and the injuries he sustained.
It was accompanied by an editorial decrying the "rising tide of White racism and bigotry in the nation." While making a claim of "not pre-judging the incident on Exchange Street last night," the newspaper went on to cite it as "part of a pattern of increasingly virulent White hate crimes" which were "painfully reminiscent of what happened in Nazi Germany."
Schmidt did a lot of reading, contemplating and calisthenics in the county jail. He formed some solid friendships with a few of the other White inmates and together they kept the rapists at bay.
His trial took two days and was conducted before an all-White jury. His wife was the lone witness on his behalf. Gerry's friend Debbie and Fred from the factory volunteered to take the stand as character witnesses but Schmidt chose not to endanger their livelihoods by such exposure.
Sixteen people testified for Peterson and Hayes. Schmidt ripped most of their perjured testimony to pieces. It took the jury two hours to reach a unanimous decision. When the nervous White jury foreman read the guilty verdict he was careful not to look at the defendant.
While awaiting sentencing, Schmidt was interviewed by a probation officer, a "Ms. Rubinstein." They met in the jail's visiting room. She wore expensive designer fashions and large frame glasses that gave her the appearance of a microencephalic owl. Her manner was stiffly officious and condescending. After chatting about a number of mundane facts in Schmidt's background, the conversation became more pointed.
"I understand you hold Masters Degrees in modern European history and American literature from the University of Indiana at Bloomington, where you supposedly earned some academic distinction. Is that correct?" she queried.
"Yes, that's true," Schmidt answered laconically.
"And I believe you taught for two years at the Community College of the Finger Lakes. How did that go?"
Schmidt became lighter at the thought of his days as an instructor at Canandaigua's junior college, located in a beautiful bend in a lake, near an ancient hill sacred to the Iroquois Indians, shrouded in cthonic magic and mystery.
"That went very well." He would have related some pleasant details—just talking about Canandaigua elevated his mood. But something about the woman's tenor and "vibe" put him off sharing anything special with her.
"After that, you were offered a position at Hobart College where, I understand, things did not go as well for you. Can you tell me why?"
Schmidt flicked his neck uncomfortably. The whole thought of Hobart was as painful to him as Canandaigua had been pleasant. He had been fired after three months.
"I was, uh, terminated ... Yes, that's the word for it, 'terminated-for-behavior-grossly-unbecoming-a-faculty-member,' "Schmidt replied.
Ms. Rubinstein maintained her squinting gaze and puckered smile. "Please continue, Mr. Schmidt," she prompted.
"I had taught literature and one course in history using books by Dr. Arthur Butz, Dr. Robert Faurisson, Dr. James J. Martin, David Irving—"
"Anti-Semitic hate literature, according to my information," Ms. Rubinstein noted.
"The truth is never 'anti' anybody, Ms. Rubinstein. It can't be the enemy of any people. Reality is healthy for us all. However, if you don't wish to concede to these historians the status of creditable scholars, then let us say that there are at least two sides to every question. I chose to provide my students with a controversial alternative to the standard, one-sided academic fare so that they could partake of the adventure that is—"
"Mr. Schmidt, I'm sure we've heard it all before in the writings of Goebbels," she retorted.
"Could all Jews be so totally traumatized," Schmidt thought to himself, "by their own 'holocaust' propaganda, that they can't reason independently of it? Is everything even tangentially connected with World War II forever to be framed in terms of cliches and hackneyed, half-century old stereotypes?" His musings were interrupted.
"Mr. Schmidt, I understand that as a result of the introduction of these hate books into your teaching syllabus the Jewish Human Rights League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and concerned civic and Christian groups sought your removal from the Hobart staff," Ms. Rubinstein declared, still maintaining a slight smile.
Schmidt saw that further reasoning was hopeless. He was a stereotype in a world that promoted such typecasting under the guise of combating stereotypes. Whatever he said, however unique or true it may have been, would be compressed into a caricature and any information which would not fit its confines would be ignored and discarded.
The American people were given the impression that they knew all about human beings like Schmidt. On TV, radio and in print one image was created to encompass the tens of thousands of individuals who dissented—for myriad reasons—from the dogmas of "Holocaust" pietism, miscegenation and Zionism. Such individuals comprised the Evil White Man, a figure of cosmic sadism and depravity, existing in what was otherwise a universe of moral shades of gray, where notions about crime and sin had long been expunged in favor of an existentially neutral, do-your-own-thing posture. Unless of course your "thing" was thinking independently of these three "holy" doctrines. Then the prop department is wheeled out and one is instantly cast as a stock character from the annals of ultimate monsterdom: the lynch-mob participant, the Hitler goosestepper, the psychopathic loser.
In this Theatre of the Spectacle, all who do not believe the "Holocaust" tales or who object to being forced to live and go to school with those of other races; or who refuse to pay taxes to fund what they cannot in good conscience support, either have a hidden "neo-Nazi agenda" or are dupes of those who do. By this standard, those who dare to think for themselves and question Jewish authority are not truly human beings at all, but either goose-stepping thugs, fiendishly clever Goebbels-style manipulators or mentally deprived sheep. System-sanctioned Israeli thugs, Hollywood-style manipulators and millions of network television-addicted sheep are not subjected to scrutiny in the propagation of this stereotype.
"I won't argue with you, Ms. Rubinstein," Schmidt sighed, "I was fired for offering facts and documentation subversive of a multitude of establishment dogmas."
"Why didn't you just get another teaching position somewhere else?" she asked.
"I tried—fifteen or twenty other colleges and universities—some were very interested, at first. But then, after a phone call from the ADL, I was told that they had no openings at that time or that they couldn't hire me."
"You're referring to the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith, the Jewish service organization? You hate them, do you, Mr. Schmidt?" Ms. Rubinstein inquired, her wan smile dissolving. "You have some paranoid fantasy that they're persecuting you?"
"You know, lady, if there's one thing I wish you wouldn't resort to," Schmidt cautioned her, "it's the device of psychological projection. I get no kick out of not being able to teach. I derive no particular thrill from being black-listed by the ADL. I don't measure the value of my life or the worth of my soul on the basis of how much I am hated or opposed. I speak to you only of facts.
"If you want to assign some Freudian load to me," Schmidt continued, "go right ahead. But it neither negates or modifies the reality of my predicament. I am not the one who believes all of history has been out to get me from the beginning of time. It was not my people who made a religion out of persecution-mania and moral blackmail over 'suffering.' Don't project your hangups onto me," Schmidt admonished.
"I can't obtain a teaching job," he went on, "because every time I apply for one, the ADL sends a lie-filled 'backgrounder' report about me to the college administration. It contains a modicum of fact over which a heavy portion of character assassination and outright fabrication are layered. And why not? Even to question the accuracy of an ADL allegation is 'anti-semitic.' I have a copy of it. My wife can show it to you. The upshot of it is that any college that hires me will be regarded as expressing 'Nazi sympathies' and will become subject to economic boycott and media libel."
"I don't care to see it, Mr. Schmidt."
"No, I don't think you did."
"Mr. Schmidt, flippancy and anti-semitic innuendo are not exactly the hallmarks of intellect."
Schmidt took a deep breath, trying to find a sight on which to fix his eyes—the cigarette-stained counter-top of the conference table, the concrete cinderblock wall painted a canary yellow over still-visible grafitti, or Ms. Rubinstein. For a brief moment they found each other staring. The probation officer trembled involuntarily and almost imperceptibly when their eyes met. Schmidt wanted to find something warm in her eyes but he would have settled for even a spark of curiosity. Her thick lens obscured them but not enough to totally conceal a glazed look that unsettled Schmidt.
"If I were writing a novel about those eyes, this is the part the System's reviewers would quote and cite," he thought to himelf, "to sensationalize my articulation of an inhumanity in this woman. But do we dehumanize when we recognize a lack of humanity in someone, or only when we ascribe such a condition in error? Or is the perception itself so suspect by virtue of the self-serving nature of all man's perceptions, that we dare not ever articulate it? If that's the case, I guess I'll have to police my own thinking from now on.
"But that's the point, isn't it?" he queried himself. "I mean, I really do get a sense of extreme, almost inhuman hostility from this lady. But I suppose the sign of a properly conforming American would be to choose politically correct thoughts over one's own inner voice. Yet it's by heeding that voice all these years that I've been able to—"
Ms. Rubinstein cut in on Schmidt's Pirandellian reverie.
"Let's move on to other areas," she declared, regaining her official persona as she shuffled folders and notebooks in a flurry of bureaucratic activity.
"I understand that one of the manifestations of your neo-Nazi lifestyle, which provoked the minority people in your neighborhood, were the peculiar names you've chose for your children, who ... are ... called—" she hesitated as she searched through a series of voluminous folders overflowing with paper, "Freejaw ..." Schmidt cricked his neck in disbelief. "... Gretchen ... Thor and ... Wolfgang." "It's pronounced 'Freya' not 'Freejaw,'" Schmidt corrected her didactically.
"Are these the names of Nazi leaders, Mr. Schmidt?"
"They're the names of my ancestors—," he said matter-of-factly.
"I see," she said as she searched somewhat absent-mindedly through more papers.
"—some of whom were the sons of God," Schmidt finished his sentence. Ms. Rubinstein looked up from the table. Her mouth was slightly open and her heavy glasses had slid almost to the tip of her nose.
"What?" she asked weakly, pushing her glasses upward with her index finger.
"The long and the short of it, Ms. Rubenstein," Schmidt announced, "is that I don't believe that God is a Jew."
The bureaucrat displayed no visible annoyance. She merely looked at him for a brief moment. Schmidt turned away from her to a section of the wall where someone had tried to scrub off the graffito "Pablo." Whoever it was managed only to partially obscure "Pablo" beneath a white coating.
"So you gave your children these Nazi names in an attempt to indoctrinate them into your brand of paganism?" Her voice was louder now than it had been at any time during the interview.
"They are not Nazi names. I told you," Schmidt protested. He was becoming worried that she was working up a case for taking his children from him.
"Look, lady," Schmidt continued, "can't you see beyond your own Chosen Race chauvinism for even a minute?" He pushed away from the table and stood up across from her. "This is a great, big, wonderful and beautiful world." He was waving his arms as he described it.
"Every nation of people has its own sacred tradition which grew out of their local situation in a synthesis between the blood—the communal genetic heritage of an extended family—and the soil, the good earth, the genius loci or what we might call the spirit of their homeland." He was on a roll. He could feel the oratorical gears clicking. It would all unfold in his mind like a map and he would be able to take almost anyone through it clearly and knowingly from beginning to end. He had the gift of the teacher and the teacher's faith in the New Testament idea that the hearing of the good word, by anyone, would change their lives for the better. Schmidt held that hope now for Ms. Rubinstein, though he was carried along as much by his own pedagogical aptitude as by his faith in her ability to open to new information.
"You Pharisees have your own deity and your Talmudic tribal diary and that's fine—for you. But every nation, including Europe, has its own spirit of place and unique sacred tradition as practiced by their wise and noble ancestors. I mean no offense to your tradition because I want to be faithful to my own. Each culture has a story to tell. To suppress any one of them makes us all the poorer."
He put his hands on the back of the chair before him and paused to give her a chance to respond. He was smiling a little, hoping to show her that they could explore this area together, without mutual suspicion or hostility. As he gathered his thoughts, he decided he would next use the analogy of native ecology's reverence for diversity in species, to underscore the natural basis for peace and friendship so alien to contemporary, artificial One-World schemes.
"You're pathetic," she stated with a slam of her file folder. "It's no wonder you're capable of beating homeless men in your neighborhood."
Schmidt started to say something in his own defense but the words wouldn't come out. He stood stiff-frozen for a second, his thumb and forefinger suspended in mid-air, his lips pursed to speak.
"I think it's time, Professor Schmidt," she hissed, "for you to learn, that what you're doing to your children by forcing them into that Aryan crap is exactly what Hitler tried to do and that is how you'll end."
She had stood up mid-sentence. Schmidt noticed she was shaking slightly. He slowly sank into his chair, stoop-shouldered, as she angrily stuffed her notebooks and papers into her briefcase.
"I don't force my kids into anything," he said quietly, to no one in particular. "I only want them to be able to choose intelligently between—"
"This interview is over, Mr. Schmidt," she informed him through clenched teeth. Her things packed, she shoved a chair out of her way.
She stood like a sentry by the door, her arms folded over her chest.
He was up again. He scratched his head in confusion and exited without looking at her.
At his sentencing, Schmidt's probation report was on the elderly negro judge's desk.
"Do you have anything to say before I pass sentence, Mr. Schmidt?" the judge asked him.
"Yes I do. I did not assault those men. One of them attempted to slap my eight-year-old son and later succeeded in tripping him onto the pavement where he split his lip and sustained cuts to his face. His injuries might have been considerably worse. My other assailant was reaching for a knife which the police admitted was in his back pocket. That man has a previous conviction for manslaughter already.
"I have the right to protect my children and no matter how sick this society gets I will continue to fight for them if I must. When the day arrives, as it apparently has now, that a White father can no longer defend his offspring against potentially serious harm, then that is the day when the criminals have taken over the law and the families become the criminals," Schmidt answered.
The judge signed a document on his desk as he addressed the defendant.
"Your wife confirmed the details of your account. You have no past criminal record," Judge Davis said as he stopped writing and rested his chin on his right hand. In his other hand he dangled a pen.
"It's hard on the family man these days," the judge said softly, almost as if he were reminiscing. "There's very little respect for fathers and mothers. Very little respect indeed," he repeated wistfully, looking through Schmidt rather than at him. Abruptly he returned to the paperwork on his magistrate's desk.
"Mr. Schmidt, the probation department has recommended that you be sentenced to the maximum penalty under the law, a term of four years in state prison." Schmidt's heart beat faster.
"I've already served nine weeks in the county jail for nothing and now—"
"Slow down, son" the judge admonished in a friendly voice and then, in a slightly more stately air intoned, "This court sentences John Schmidt to time served, sixty-eight days. Case dismissed." Schmidt closed his eyes for a moment, saying a silent prayer. Then he opened them and nodded his head in thanks at the white-haired old black man. The old man nodded back.
Gerry ran to him from the spectator's section and squeezed him in a bear hug. Schmidt made a memo to himself not to forget the old man's mercy amid the bitterness he was feeling. "That would be an enormous defeat," he told himself, "to permit yourself to indulge that anger you've got inside of you now. A fully-human being maintains his powers of discrimination, come what may. There are plenty of men of the quality of that judge on the other side, and plenty of rotten ones in your own kind. Don't forget it, Schmidt."
He promised himself that he wouldn't forget the mercy he had received, but his body was making him remember sixty-eight days in storage. That would not be soon forgotten either.
- III
The wheels of thousands of cars raced into the oblivion of the autumn night. Moving fast, then slowed by obstruction. Orderly, yet going where? Different autos, different styles, family wagons, Blazers, Thunderbirds, Camaros, Toyotas and Caddies. The choices of modern living. The corporation's alternative: "Be yourself—choose Pontiac"; and "the Ford Free Spirit Beckons to You."
Above this midnight ride of the chromed coffins are the brightly lit billboards pushing whiskey and violence on the backs of badly dressed women, neither virgins or mothers. Behind them both, tiny boxes, as isolated from the others in their neighborhoods as the car-cubicles isolated their drivers. In each box a few white or yellow lights are sometimes seen. But in all the boxes shines a pallid light, flickering in a manic dance, casting crooked shadows on the walls of the inhabitants.
Through it all—the river of cars, the signposts of the money-changers and the tiny houses of the spectres who haunt the scene, walked Schmidt.
"Hope it's worth it," he thought as he paused before a grimy liquor store window whose neon booze sign sent flickers of blood red into the pulsating street scene beyond the pane.
"You know I'd like to help you guy, but ..." Schmidt was not really listening to the patter of the liquor store owner. It seemed to synchronize alarmingly well with the aimless thanatos motion in the street, a whining, pleading sound giving near-perfect voice to the spirit of accomodation and mediocrity Schmidt found everywhere in the city.
"It was good having you work the store, John. You know, you could really talk the trouble-makers down. Hey, remember that time you talked Hank Morton out of his knife? Or when you got that wino to give back Linda's watch?" the owner said. "I can give you a loan, Johnny, but I can't give you back your job. InCAR and the JDL came by the other day. One of 'em put a tire chain and a .38 on the counter here. I got their hint, Johnny. They let me know I'd have a rash of busted windows—and busted heads—if I signed you back on," the store owner said.
"'Johnny,' where does he get off calling me that?" Schmidt thought. "Reeling off those a-b-c gangs like some crazed first-grader afraid he'll forget his alphabet. InCAR, the International Committee Against Racism, Maoists; and the JDL, the Jewish Defense League," a smile crossed Schmidt's face but too fast for the merchant to see. He was still explaining his decision to lay Schmidt off from his bouncer's job.
Schmidt was in a bad way. Welfare would clear up a lot of the difficulty and Gerry could work "under the table" and supplement the state's dole. But neither of them would have it that way.
"The International Committee Against Racism," Schmidt thought, "consists of the biggest bunch of black, brown and yellow racists on two feet." He recalled the time he observed the look of pure hatred and envy one of InCAR's female thugs had given a beautiful little white girl with olive-green eyes and reddish-brown hair one afternoon, for no other reason perhaps than that the child was such an affront to the Establishment's equality doctrine.
"Forced to compete in a beauty contest with Whites, the InCARite would lose by a mile and she knew it," thought Schmidt. "In the Establishment's modern, multi-racial 'paradise,' it's a beauty competition every day—in the schools, the businesses and on the streets. How degrading for negro women," Schmidt reasoned, "when the System described as 'black' a female role-model and figure of beauty on television or in a magazine who was actually a light-skinned, light-eyed mulatta who was four-fifths White, or as black people called them, 'high yella.'
"Far better for pure black women, who have the innate beauty that God grants his creations before they are hybridized and mongrelized," thought Schmidt, "that they might live in a society that elevated them to a standard of beauty instead of some coffee-colored half-breed. Then they'd be spared having to measure up to the formidable Aryan female beauty."
"Schmidt, you haven't heard a damn thing I've been saying," the shopkeeper complained.
"I wish that was true, Marcham. I wish I hadn't heard your words of compromise and cowardice. Jesus!" Schmidt shouted, "I don't know why I'm on the side I'm on. If we were both Jews and I was taking it from all sides as a Jewish father and symbol of the defense of my children, you'd stick by me. Instead, you're just another White renegade justifying freezing out a fellow White family man because you won't take a stand," Schmidt told him.
"Listen, Schmidt I've been more than fair with you. You're just an outlaw right now. Especially after that newspaper story." Schmidt started to interrupt. Marcham lifted his hand palm up in the air, as if to stop him.
"I know. I know you told me your tale about your kids being innocent and all, but it looks like you must have egged those street people on."
Schmidt asked with exasperation, "Why? Why would I do a thing like that when I never did it here, as the bouncer in this store, where I would have had more justification as your employee?"
"Aw, don't get me into the whys and wherefores, Schmidt. Point is, you're just a damn dinosaur. You don't get the message, do you? The White race and all those glory days that you read about in those books of yours are finished, pal. Ya might just as well enjoy the ride down the tubes, because that's where we're heading anyway. Play ball with the other people you're forced to share this land with, Schmidt, and it'll go a lot easier on everybody. We Whites can still enjoy some of the nice things in life. So what the hell, enjoy 'em for the time we have left to us. Don't knock yourself out for a lost cause," Marcham counseled.
"What about honor, Mr. Marcham, or doesn't that figure in your cash register world?"
"Yeah, I know about you knights in shining armor. Everybody's a self-serving asshole except for you and your narrow group of circle-jerks, right, Schmidt?" Marcham asked as he stood with his arms folded over his chest, a cigar poked into the corner of his mouth. "The rest of us are just dishonorable money-grubbers, huh? Well let me tell you something, pal," Marcham declared, gesturing angrily with his cigar to make his point, "the biggest dishonor is for a man to fail to provide for his family. Maybe that's something you never thought of."
"Why am I here trying to get my job back then, Marcham?"
Marcham paused, stuffed his cigar back into the side of his mouth and shook his head in disgust. "God gave you a brain. Did you use it to make your family proud? Did you give them a nice home? Did you give your wife some security? Naw, you threw it away for a bunch of bullshit that deep down inside, you don't even believe yourself."
Schmidt moved toward a rack of bottles and his long silhouette cast a shadow across Marcham. All Schmidt could make out in front of him now was a short, heavy-set presence and a tiny red circle of fire.
Marcham said, "You can get on your high horse all you want. You can mock me and you can hold yourself up on a pedestal as a hero of our age, I don't give a damn. All I know is that my kids live good and so does my wife—which is more than can be said for yours!" the shopkeeper emphasized with a final jab of his cigar. Schmidt felt his fists tighten as a response from his autonomic nervous system to the burst of anger in his ex-boss.
The shopkeeper stood in the dim light behind the counter. Schmidt could just make out his hands on his hips, in a posture of obvious challenge. Marcham raised his chin and stepped forward into the light as he pressed against the counter, looking derisively at Schmidt. The storeowner would deliver one last rebuke. Banging his cash register open he scooped out a fistful of cash and waved it at Schmidt, "That's how I give out honor," Marcham said with finality. The sound of that last sentence fell like a dark rain on Schmidt's already morose state of mind.
Yeah, right, your family's living good on the backs of the White people your booze ruins, blinds and cripples," Schmidt shouted hoarsely. The door opened and a formerly handsome man with a creased face staggered into the store.
"O'Hanlon, my man, c'mon over," Mr. Marcham welcomed the derelict while simultaneously waving Schmidt out the door. "Now what'll it be?" the owner asked. The drunk slurred his words. Schmidt didn't wait to hear the drunk give his reply. He was seized for a moment by a desire to sweep his hand across the display table full of whiskey bottles, but he resisted the impulse and slammed the door on his way out.
Striding toward home, he walked slightly bent over, with his hands in his pockets.
"Maybe Marcham's right," he thought. "What if he's right? I'm supposed to believe in my family as the root of community and look at what I'm putting them through. It's easy for me to condemn, to play the prophet of righteousness, but it's my wife and kids that pay the dues for my actions." He paused on the sidewalk and leaned against a brick wall. He felt like he was holding it up—almost as if, were it not for a constant act of will-power on his part, the bricks and the very ground beneath him would collapse.
"Marcham is right. I have to find a better way for those kids, and for her."
Schmidt's tall figure joined the line of other shadows merged in the downtown pedestrian crush. Stooped, ruminating, waiting for God or Godot but knowing at some sub-cellar of their mentation, that what they really desired, what would truly make them free, was right in front of them for the asking, if they would but struggle to have it. If they would turn off the inner running dialogue of negativity and doubt. But tonight John Schmidt was immersed in a chasm of doubt.
"Daaaaaady!" Wolf whooped as he hopped into his father's arms, a straw cowboy hat cocked on his head. The child wiggled with delight and abandon as his Dad tickled and pulled at him. Thor sat disconsolately on the threadbare couch and hadn't looked up when his father entered. Gerry was in the kitchen with the girls.
These days Wolf was brimming with pent-up energy and hyperactivity. Ever since the "incident," as Mrs. Schmidt had trained the kids to refer to it, she had kept them mainly indoors. Thor would occasionally violate the ban. He had a part-time job cleaning a Mom and Pop grocery after hours. But the proprietors told his mother that he hadn't always come to work. Where Thor went in that time Gerry didn't know. With Schmidt out of jail, she assumed it wouldn't be long before the mystery would be solved.
For now there was a kind of stale, prison vibration in the apartment. Schmidt detected it and after supper they gathered up their sweaters for an October evening walk in the neighborhood.
"Please, Schmidt, no," Gerry pleaded. Her eyes were care-filled but bright nonetheless. "Let's play it safe for a while, huh?" she asked him with a playful nudge in the chest. The boys groaned when they saw that her blandishments were making him waver. Schmidt couldn't overrule her. He was so consumed by the argument that had transpired with his old boss that he was content to collapse in a kitchen chair and ruminate.
The children were in bed when the phone rang.
"It's for you, honey," Gerry announced to Schmidt.
"Who is it?" Schmidt asked wearily.
"Who's calling?" Gerry asked. With her hand covering the telephone's mouthpiece she whispered, "It's a reporter from the Journal. Do you want me to say you're asleep?"
Schmidt wanted to say yes. Just the sound of the word "sleep" made him feel like falling into a long cocoon of night and oblivion. But at the same time another part of himself wanted to confront a representative from the same paper that had so twisted the truth of what happened that fateful summer night. Without replying to his wife's question, Schmidt rose and took the phone.
"Hello."
"John Schmidt?" a pleasant male voice at the other end queried.
"Yeah, this is Schmidt. Is this the guy who wrote that story about me?"
"No it isn't, Mr. Schmidt. I'm James Hall. I'm on another assignment but I may do a background piece on crime in the city. I'd like to speak with you about it." The reporter's voice had a tenor of reasonableness and honesty which Schmidt had heard before in others. Once he had trusted such a voice, in his days as a professor. He yearned to trust again, to have a sympathetic ear and to pour out his grievances with the expectation that the entire story would finally emerge in print. The truth. For the whole world to see. Instead, he held back.
"I don't see any reason why I should talk to you, Mr. Hall. If you work for the Journal you must be as bad as the rest of them. That's a lie paper by liars. I don't want to hear from you." Schmidt began to hang up.
"Look, Mr. Schmidt I thought one of the things you used to argue for was dialogue between people. Isn't that what you said at Hobart?"
The sound of the word "Hobart" gave Schmidt a chill. This guy had been doing some research. He placed the receiver back to his ear.
"How do you know about Hobart?"
"I've done some checking. You were brave—a little stubborn—but brave," Hall said.
Schmidt wanted to believe in this reporter. He needed to believe that some member of the Establishment's communication arm was capable of honesty and could reflect it in an article or a broadcast. Schmidt also knew his desire was probably foolhardy. "Just hang up," he commanded himself. "Hang up, Schmidt." He heard the words echo in his head.
"Mr. Schmidt, I'm over here at Larsen's bar. Do you know the place?"
"Yeah, I know it," Schmidt said. It was a nice little neighborhood tavern.
"Why don't you join me here and the drinks are on me," said the newsman.
"It's late, Hall. I'm tired of you and your paper and your tricks. Nice try but no cigar." Again Schmidt began to hang up.
"Mr. Schmidt, you surprise me. You once told your class, 'When we close off debate on any subject, when we eliminate dialogue with any human being because of narrow assumptions, we kill a part of ourselves and of society's quest for the good and the true.' I believe that's a direct quote." Schmidt nodded his head. It was verbatim alight.
"Yes, that's how I used to talk, Hall, back when I was young and stupid and still believed I could feed my family and speak the truth at the same time. Unemployment, jail and a few other details have changed all that. So if you don't mind—"
"Those are ideas that ought never to be abandoned, not for any hardship," Hall said with what seemed like genuine conviction. Schmidt was struck by how the reporter's voice rose a note on the last sentence, as if he really was concerned. "Probably a damn good actor," Schmidt thought.
"Just to prove how wrong you are, I'll see you at Larsen's. Fifteen minutes?" Hall asked.
"Yeah ... okay," Schmidt said reluctantly. "What an idiot I am," he thought as he put the receiver down, "I took the bait."
Gerry looked at him with a sparkle of anticipation. Cocking her head hopefully she asked, "Something good, honey?"
"Damn reporter wants to pick my brain for the price of a beer."
Larsen's was a noted hideaway in the city. It was always clean, the usual bartender was a husky, black-haired, broad-shouldered Irishman, an ex-fireman and Catholic of the old school. He ran a tight ship, ladies were treated as such and the jukebox was stacked only with tunes from the '40s and '50s, repelling that "certain element" that White people had become too cowed to even talk about.
The booths were empty except for a tall, thin man in his late thirties, balding and sharply—but not overly—dressed in a sport jacket and loose tie. He recognized Schmidt immediately, rose and they shook hands.
"Jim Hall, Mr. Schmidt."
"Hi," Schmidt said dryly. They seated themselves in a booth and Hall ordered two Heinekens.
He asked Schmidt, "I hope that's okay?"
"Sure. I'm not much for most of those high-priced brews but Heineken's okay." After their beer arrived, Hall settled into his seat. He looked like a bit of a kid. "Something about the carelessness of his manner," Schmidt thought.
"My editor basically doesn't even know I'm talking with you John. He thinks giving you any more publicity will encourage vigilantism."
"Well, good. Because any more publicity like what the Journal's given me so far and my ability to do anything constructive in this town will be finished."
"Why don't you sue the bastards?"
"Bastards?" thought Schmidt. "Who does this guy think he's kidding? He doesn't really hold his bosses in low regard, he's just laying it on thick."
Aloud Schmidt said, "If this bullshit keeps piling up I'm going to need a pair of wings to stay above it." It was a deliberate insult. He watched Hall's reaction closely. The reporter took a long pull of beer. After replacing his glass on the table Hall stared at Schmidt for a moment. Schmidt detected authentic hurt in the reporter's eyes.
"Alright, I get your point," Hall said slowly. "You're going to play the wronged victim for the rest of your life and every cop and every journalist from now until Doomsday will become the target of your injured feelings. I'm sorry. I had you pegged for someone else," he said as he gathered his car keys to leave.
Schmidt slumped down in his seat. He was talking to the ceiling. "This used to be a helluva great country. But now it's just the land of checkbook justice." He sat up and looked directly at Hall. "I can't sue the bastards at your newspaper because I don't have any money. Leftist lawyers won't help me because they say I'm a fascist and conservative lawyers say I'm bad for business. So there's no justice and no basis for a lawsuit by that criterion," said Schmidt.
Hall knitted his eyebrows together and scratched at the space between them. "Alright, how about a letter to the editor then?"
Schmidt spit bitter laughter across the table. "That's alright for you, Hall. You're big time. I've got a family to feed."
"How long does a letter take to write?"
Schmidt bit his lower lip and spun a green-colored glass ashtray around the tabletop. "Come on. What the hell does a letter mean? It's finished. Over. The damage has been done. They wouldn't print a letter from me anyway."
"They might if I asked them to," the reporter stated firmly.
"Why are you suddenly my partron saint? You come out of the woodwork and play guardian angel. What's in it for you?"
"A story, John. A story about a man who has taken more than his share of unfairness and injustice from the world but who didn't allow it to warp him. A story about a husband and father who retained his humanity in spite of it all," Hall declared.
Schmidt stroked his chin with his hand and turned away from his host, looking toward the deserted booths to his right. Speaking slowly and turning back to look straight into Hall's eyes he asked, "Am I supposed to believe that all of a sudden, out of the goodness of your heart, you're reaching out to a guy in my position? With the kind of enemies I have?"
"If you haven't been warped, it's a great story."
"And the last one you'll ever do, if you're really what you say you are. You've got it backwards, Hall. They give out the Pulitzer Prize for making guys like me look like monsters, not human beings."
Hall loosened his tie. "Two more over here, Tim," he told the bartender.
Schmidt wasn't a naturally suspicious person and it strained him to have to be so skeptical of this man, with whom it might have been easy to relax and who Schmidt would have enjoyed getting along with. But he absolutely had to keep up his guard.
"Cops and reporters are often one and the same," Schmidt thought. "It's bad when you have to doubt the neighborhood cops. But where the hell is the neighborhood any more and who commands the cops? Do they go to my church? My schools? My clubs?"
Schmidt almost laughed outloud at his own irony. He didn't go to church, didn't send his children to school and was a member of no clubs.
Hall detected a flutter of a smile from Schmidt. "It's nice to see that a martyr can feel good on occasion," the reporter said.
"Are you going to spend the rest of the evening knocking me because I don't trust you?" Schmidt asked with effort.
Wordlessly, Hall reached into his wallet and extracted a scratched black and white photograph of a dignified-looking man of middle age. He pushed it across the table to Schmidt. "Know him, John?"
Schmidt pondered the photo for a moment. "Should I?"
"I guess not," Hall replied with resignation. "That's my father, Dr. Anthony Canfield Hall." Schmidt returned the picture. "His 1957 monograph on the dangers of 'the peaceful atom'—as nuclear radiation was called back then—was universally mocked. He endured a sustained campaign of vilification. He was hounded from the faculty at Johns Hopkins and died a premature death."
Schmidt was only faintly engaged with Hall's words. He was tired. He forced out of himself an obligatory courtesy, "I'm sorry to hear that."
"So was my mother. She died a year later," Hall said falteringly.
Schmidt nodded. "Now who's the martyr?" he asked churlishly.
Hall took a breath and ran his fingers through his thinning hair. "That's the idea, don't you see, John? Like you, I have the right to indulge in feelings of resentment toward the scientific establishment and my father's superiors at the medical school. He was penalized for being ahead of his time—for seeing what's universally recognized as fact today. I admit that when I was growing up and began to grasp the full import of what had happened to Dad, I was bitter, yes. I think it's quite natural to experience that for a time. But then you go through a dangerous phase," he said, taking a sip from his beer. "A period when you can move beyond it or let it distort your whole perspective on life."
"To forget what happened to your father is an act of betrayal."
"But I haven't forgotten," Hall said. "It's not an all or nothing equation, John. I honor my father every time I give some other iconoclast a hearing. He wouldn't want me to carry a burden of retribution or a sense of martyrdom all my life."
"How do you know? He's dead," Schmidt said harshly. Hall tightened the grip on his glass momentarily, then released it.
"Your belief in your own omniscience is kind of staggering to a lesser mortal like me," Hall said with sarcasm. "Schmidt, I'm a newsman. Mostly I'm relegated to the obituary columns and the ladies' garden parties circuit. Every so often my assignment editor gets shortchanged and I'm given a piece of something I can cut my teeth on. A long time ago I decided that whenever I had that opportunity, I'd write an article on some upstream swimmer, somebody who's obviously not in this life solely for the bucks. Whenever I can do that—and it hasn't been often—I'm honoring my father."
Hall continued, "Nobody has to know that but you and I. If I write an article about you, it's really another installment in the Dr. Anthony Canfield Hall memorial journalism series. That's how I keep my Dad's flame alight, not be permitting a brooding anger to fester into full-fledged misanthropy. You too can find a similar way to stand up for your principles. So long as you preserve your own faith and hope in people, you haven't lost. But if you sacrifice those qualities, you've permitted yourself to be defeated by the very forces you set out to overcome."
Schmidt guzzled his Heineken. He didn't want to hear these words. He felt entitled to be mad; entitled to feeling alone against the world. He hadn't wanted to remember that life's script sometimes doesn't match the pre-planned one we mentally construct for ourselves. He wanted to forget that what happened to him had happened to other men, like Hall's father, and that life went on in spite of it all. People continued to have hope that things would get better. Sometimes, through that very belief itself, the outlook improved.
Jim Hall raised his glass for a toast. "To what?" the still anxious Schmidt asked.
"To all the beauty there is in life, in spite of everything," Hall responded.
Looking straight into Hall's clear blue eyes, Schmidt tapped his glass against the reporter's. "What was it Emerson said?" Schmidt told Hall, "Even in the mud and scum of things, there always, always something sings!"
"If we listen hard enough, we can hear it. Even in these painfully un-Emersonian times of abundant mud and scum," Hall answered.
"Yes," Schmidt nodded in agreement. "Scumbags and mud people are all too prevalent in this 20th century America."
A shadow darkened the reporter's face. "Are you really a racist, John?" Hall asked with some disappointment.
"Are you really a child molester, Jim?" Schmidt shot back. Hall looked bewildered. "Don't look so dumbfounded. It's the same thing. If you're White and racially conscious, God help you. You're evil incarnate. Worse than a child molester."
"Why do you describe the opprobrium as being attached exclusively to White racism? All racism is evil," Hall pointed out.
"Because—" Schmidt rebutted, "and you should know this—the myriad black, Jewish, Puerto Rican, Mexican and Oriental racists of this world are praised, stroked, encouraged, financed and given the Nobel Prize."
"You're bitter, aren't you?" the reporter said with concern.
"In the face of a bitter truth, what would you have me do, get up and dance a jig?"
"You could transcend it, just as we discussed—"
"Now hold on a minute, it's one thing to encourage going beyond personal feelings and emotional states, it's quite another to advocate transcending reality and natural law," Schmidt cautioned.
"Then don't overlook the fact that it's within your power to transcend the bitterness itself," Hall said.
"Sure we can choose to transcend it, Hall. Just like you can choose to transcend feelings of panic and alarm when you see your four-year-old kid playing in rush-hour traffic. I guess I'm just not that 'relaxed and in the groove.' Life for me is not a search for a therapeutic solution. I never want to 'adjust' to the unconscionable and the unnatural."
"So you're of the opinion that two wrongs make a right? Because other groups of people are racist it's permissible for you to be one too?" Hall asked.
"I could spend all night lecturing—"
"You're the professor," Hall said with a twinkle in his eye.
"Not any more I'm not. But I'll tell you this: a man who can't see the natural plan doesn't deserve an explanation," Schmidt told him.
Hall squinted his eyes and toyed with his beer glass. "What you're suggesting is that racism is the natural order?" he asked with a come-on-you-don't-really-mean-that tone.
Schmidt responded, "I used to correspond with Noam Chomsky, the linguist and civil libertarian. Here was one of the world's must erudite wordsmiths complacently using the word 'Holocaust' without any exact definition and in exclusive application to the sufferings of one nation of people. And he was either completely oblivious to the Orwellian implications of this Newspeak or he deliberately used it to his own advantage."
Schmidt continued, "It's the same thing with 'racist.' What the hell does the word racist literally denote? A person who identifies with his own people. I maintain that it is quite reasonable and natural to identify with one's own ancestors and the unique diversity of natural creation, which produced the separate races in the first place. Just as I'm against hybridization and monocultural agri-business in farming, I am against extinguishing racial differences. In fact the corporate capitalists weakening our botanical seed stock are also often times the same ones propagandizing for One World and One Race, the better to market their consumer junk to the broadest number of customers. I would no more want to see only one hybrid race of people on this planet than I'd want to see only one strain of corn."
"But we do have to transcend tribal identifications, John."
"And when we do you can kiss your ass goodbye," Schmidt said with earthy candor.
"I don't get it."
Schmidt spoke with his elbows on the table and his hands apart, palms spread outward. "The root of the word 'kindness' is concern for one's own kind. You can't be truly compassionate to any other people until you care passionately about your own kind. You can't respect others unless you respect yourself, and that attitude applies to communities of people as surely as to individuals. Those who say otherwise are either profoundly artificial cosmopolitans or they're setting us up for rule by a master race that advances itself by urging all other people to adhere to egalitarian dogma and submerge into a faceless mass, while the 'Chosen Race' alone claim the rights of racial separateness and preservation."
"And who's behind it all, John, the Jews?"
"There's a funny quality to reality which I've noticed," Schmidt said. "It's that facts don't go away just because the media and the academy have built up an elaborate attack on them. The bottom line is: What if there are Jewish plots and conspiracies? Should I fail to investigate and if necessary expose them just because you gentlemen of the fourth estate deny their reality? I'm sorry, but your profession doesn't carry that kind of weight with me. I was brought up to question authority and where reality comes into conflict with the prestige of the System's 'Chosen People,' I'll opt for reality. You ought to have learned the same thing from your father's experience."
"But not about The Holocaust, John," Hall emphasized with the same quasi-religious vehemence Schmidt had seen in many others. Schmidt chuckled with a peculiar mixture of mirth and disgust.
"Hall, I could be just as insular toward your father's battle with the medical establishment of his day. I could ask you what his struggle has to do with exposing an historical hoax and—"
"Well, obviously courage, John, but to suggest—"
Schmidt rejoined, "It's more than the courage of the iconoclast operant here, it's a principle. On one side there are the dogmas and priesthoods of the world, be they medical, religious or political. They demand that you believe based on their carefully filtered version of the world; what the 'experts' and the other recipients of the prestige-bestowing media decree, shielded from any real challenge or debate by their monopoly stranglehood on information and education."
Schmidt went on, "On the other hand are the independents. Call them dissidents or revisionists as you like. They're found in all fields of human endeavor and they live by the principle that one's own most cherished beliefs must always be open to revision and even total overthrow, in the presence of more accurate information or the discovery of previously unknown facts. In my own research at the university I was surprised to discover that other nations of people besides the Jews have experienced tragedies on a scale that might be described as a holocaust. I also learned that early-day Bolshevism, the forerunner of modern communism, was led and staffed by a Jewish majority and it was this Jewish Bolshevism which committed horrid atrocities and war crimes against the White peasants and workers of Russia and Eastern Europe, from 1917 right through the 1950s. And now we see—"
Hall interrupted, "But again John, even if what you say is true, does that mean we should hate the Jews?"
"Do you hate the Nazis, Jim?" Schmidt asked.
"Well ... I, well, yes. But that was different."
Schmidt gave Hall a solemn knowing glance. "You see, Hall, even you, a man who like so many other well-intentioned people has made a veritable religion out of condemning hatred and embracing love, at the same time you've made a special exception in the case of the Nazis. Why?"
"No doubt you'll tell me," Hall said wryly.
"Because we're dealing with a systematic religious ideology which has been inculcated almost universally; a complete philosophy of mind, actually, which so many people crave because they're too lazy to do their own thinking. By the rubrics of this System, it's wrong to admit that other people suffered in holocausts, that Jews themselves committed holocausts and that a certain amount of revulsion toward Jews might be expected as a result of their crimes, a revulsion you were willing to articulate toward the Germans. Talk about schizophrenia and a double standard. The Jews have manipulated most of the Western world into according them rights of a racial-state for Jews and prerogatives for separation of their people, all on an enforced ignorance of history which decrees that Jews have suffered more than anyone and are therefore entitled to special consideration. While the rest of us are urged to take a hop into the racial melting pot, the uniqueness of the Jewish people is safeguarded. How this scam was established is a story of a conspiracy so labyrinth it would take a few thousand volumes to fill. Am I supposed to shrink from opposing it because the media has made it buffoonish or even downright satanic to do so?" Schmidt declared.
Hall sat with his arms folded on his chest, listening closely. "I don't know what you're supposed to do, John," he said glumly.
"I'm supposed to fulfill my destiny. We all are. We're supposed to search for the truth and the first truth is the truth my German ancestors called, 'the truth that speaks from the blood.'"
"But you ought to consider the effect such statements about blood and the Germans have on people. You've got to frame your discourse in such a way as to—"
"I'm not intimidated by matters of style. The media wants to decree that it's grossly incorrect to speak of conspiracies. Yet, when the Jews insist there was a gigantic Nazi plot to exterminate them from the face of the earth, intricately orchestrated down to the last meticulous detail and conducted entirely in a secret code, that's not a conspiracy theory, that's truth. And not only is it supremely correct to believe this media-approved conspiracy theory, every high school student from here to Hoboken had better believe it or else he's an ugly anti-semite, a bigoted, jack-booted Nazi. Of course minor little details such as the fact that are no written orders for this 'extermination,' no forensic evidence of it, and hundreds of thousands of Jews who 'miraculously survived' it, are not permitted to get in the way of this mandated imposture."
The reporter appeared distressed. He bit the fingernail on his forefinger and slowly rubbed his nose. "I'm disappointed, Schmidt. I thought you represented something more than this standard hate-rhetoric."
"Well, I know, it's very declasse. But however traumatized you are by the lifetime of indoctrination you've already received, that traumatization takes nothing away from the truths I espouse," Schmidt answered firmly.
"Whatever your claims about World War Two extermination, it almost sounds like you're angry enough to exterminate Jews now," Hall asserted.
"I'm only concentrating on the Jews because they're the most energetic force behind the enslavement of independent consciousness in our age. Unlike you I don't have to check myself every twenty minutes to see if my inner thoughts are politically correct. If Andean sheepherders from Lake Titicaca were the culprits I'd cite them instead."
"What if the villains were White Christians? What would you do then? Wouldn't the racial loyalty you proclaim compel you to cover up for your own?" Hall said intently.
"Of course not," Schmidt leaned back with his hands in his pockets. "The best of our thinkers, from Nietzsche to Celine, have stated repeatedly, that the strength of our people lies in their ability to face the harshest truths without flinching. It may come as a shock to your comic book level understanding of White separatists that I do not regard the Jews as evil or even a problem for my people."
"What are you getting at?" Hall asked.
"The problem is never with people of the other races, the problem is always with the people in your own. Recall what I told you earlier—my supreme criterion is nature and her law. When Jews, negroes and Asiatics promote their own agendas at the expense of my race, they are only doing what comes naturally to them. As long as my own kindred seek unity and solidarity for our people, all is well. Perhaps not in the profoundly unnatural liberal vision of a conglomerate of hand-clapping, multiracial ding-a-lings trooping off to McDonald's for a Pax Americana of unfettered consumerist life—but for me that's not life anyway, it's death-in-life."
Schmidt continued, "The Jews would never have gotten to square one in their peculiar glasperlenspiel were it not for the cooperation and connivance of traitors among my own people. In this whole diorama, it is these capitalist and Marxist, White race-traitors who are the main ones acting against the natural plan. I can assure you that I am utterly disgusted with reactionary White conservatives who put the onus of villainy upon the Jews. Were it not for the treachery and treason within our own ranks, the Jews today would be working out their plans for world dominion in the shade of a palm tree on Madagascar. The extent to which Jewish mendacity and moral blackmail have power today, is a sympton of our decline but not the cause of our demise."
Hall stared into his empty glass for a long time. Finally he lifted his head. "Is that what you were hinting at when, after I asked if you were a racist, you asked me if I was a child molestor?"
"Are you?" Schmidt asked seriously, fixing his eyes on Hall's again. The reporter stirred uneasily. "Your newspaper made it a crime for me to defend my children, thereby opening them to unhindered molestation."
"I'm sorry about that, John, I really am," he said remorsefully. "I'm going to do what I can do to redress it." He picked up the bar tab and counted out a pile of bills. "But I want you to also be clear about something. I sympathize with you as a man who has the courage of his convictions. But I'm not persuaded—so far—that your views are right. I want that understood."
"I wouldn't want it any other way." He knew that a mind is not changed in one evening. "I don't expect clones for friends," Schmidt emphasized. They both rose from the table and shook hands. Hall made his exit. Schmidt lingered, staring into his empty glass.
"How about another beer for you, Schmidt?" asked Tim in a mellow tone. The subdued lighting, the bartender's reassuring voice and the warmth of his surroundings put Schmidt at ease for the first time that day.
"I pass," he said as he puzzled over whether or not he had alienated the reporter with his tendency to lecture. As Tim cleared the table Schmidt questioned the appropriateness of his vehemence and desire to explain himself to one of the few honest reporters left. "God knows," he thought to himself. "I'm doing the best I can, Father God. I want the best for my family and you know I'm tired of having to fight the whole world all the time. Let this meeting with Hall signal the start of a healing for us all," Schmidt prayed as he flipped a tattered buck onto the table.
Meeting the reporter had given Schmidt a new lease on life. His hopes for normalcy were coming into possible realization. In Hall's relaxed and reasonable presence Schmidt felt that these qualities were also still present in the world at large and could be accessed without compomising his principles.
Two days later the journalist visited the Schmidt family in their tenement apartment. It was an unseasonably warm evening and he brought a half-gallon of strawberry ice cream. Meeting the reporter and seeing him greet his father with approbation, gave Thor renewed confidence in Schmidt. Thor ate the dessert as if in a dream. He looked from Hall to Schmidt and back to Hall again with a big, silent thank you written on his face. Meanwhile Wolf climbed all over the reporter as he sat in the apartment's one easy chair. Hall was the mountain and Wolf played the part of the fearless tracker from Butler's Erewhon, tumbling onto Hall's shoulders as Hall good-naturedly submitted to the horseplay. Schmidt richly savored the scene and the rebirth of his eldest son's affections.
After the children were asleep, Gerry served coffee to the men and then returned to a quilt she was making. Schmidt sat in the kitchen retightening a table leg which came loose about twice a day. The threads were stripped. Outside the kitchen bay window, a waxing crescent moon rose in the sky like an ethereal bone moved by an invisible hand.
Schmidt and Hall talked for a long time of their mutual loves: fishing, astronomy, baseball. And their mutual heroes—Jefferson, Emerson and Thoreau. Their compatibility was astonishing. After Gerry retired for the evening the conversation became more serious.
Hall was casully dressed in a sweater, sport shirt and corduroy pants. He shifted his legs and crossed them at the ankles. "John, I want to do a story on you," Hall said, reading Schmidt's mind and anticipating his own proposal. "I know you'll tell me how crooked things are. But if you don't have some faith in someone, life's not worth living. I've faced harassment too. Not on the scale my father did but I've chosen a quieter path. You need contacts on the inside just as much as you need openly defiant allies. I'm not saying I agree with even half of what you say, but I see no reason to refuse you a chance to rehabilitate yourself just because you're White." They both laughed at that.
Hall proposed a full-page article humanizing the Schmidt family—not emphasizing race or ideology—but publicizing the family's self-reliance, fierce independence and dedication to bedrock American ideals. Schmidt was elated and agreed enthusiastically to the project. There was one condition, however.
"If I'm going to pull this off, Schmidt, I'm going to have to submit the story when my regular editor is away and take a few other risks as well. The one thing I ask of you is that you and the children stay off the streets as much as possible until the article is published. After that you'll be in the clear and it won't matter. But right now you're a sitting duck. If you and the children were to go back to relaxing and playing outside and those street people attacked you again, then there would be precious little I could do for you in the mounting hysteria. My piece wouldn't be published and you in turn would be crucified. That's common sense, John. I want you to demonstrate some or I can't go through with this."
Schmidt bristled at the thought of enforced claustrophobia. It rubbed him wrong, yet he sensed that what the reporter was talking was essentially correct. "But maybe what I've got to do is show this guy that we can kill two birds with one stone," he thought. Then to Hall, "How long before the article is published?"
"A week, maybe two, tops. It has to be printed by then because after that the regular city editor will have returned and there won't be another opportunity for months. All I'm asking is that you keep the children inside, just as your wife has been doing thus far. The only difference is, whereas Gerry saw no end to this confinement I can tell you that if the gangs mess around with you after my report appears in the Journal, it will be a whole other ballgame. You'll have allies among some elements of the police and you'll have the interest and potential support of the people of Rochester as a whole. But if you don't restrain yourself now, you're going to blow the whole thing," Hall cautioned him.
Schmidt rubbed his hands together and twisted his large frame in his chair, pulling the chair closer to the reporter. "I don't like that gleam in your eye, Schmidt," Hall said. "You look like a mischievous kid anticipating Halloween."
"Jim, the children haven't gone outside for any extended period for months. Oh, sure they accompany Gerry or me for groceries or a quick walk to the corner drugstore. But Gretchen and Wolf are getting so they don't know what fresh air smells like. Some nights Thor loiters at a video arcade when he's supposed to be cleaning old man Allen's grocery, but what sort of outlet is that for a boy his age?" Schmidt rose from the table and restlessly paced the room. He glanced at Hall who looked appalled at what Schmidt was about to propose.
"The children are prisoners in their own home and that must end," Schmidt declared.
"Okay, John, what's your plan?" he said with considerable trepidation. Schmidt turned toward the bay window. The moon had risen almost out of view, leaving in its wake a few faint pinpoints of starlight on an otherwise blank slate. Into these Schmidt gazed for a moment, then turned quickly and pounded the table with his fist, looking directly at Hall. "I can't wait two weeks for my children to be free, dammit! Why should they miss out on what little childhood they have in this inner-city hellhole as it is, just because of fear of offending a bunch of terrorists? It goes against my grain."
Hall rubbed his neck as if it had suddenly become painful. "John, listen to me now. I mean really listen. Mr. Henshaw is the principal of St. Mary's grade school, over on Chestnut. Do you know the place?" Schmidt nodded that he did. "They need tutors. It's a private arrangement and you could tutor right from your apartment. Eventually, if you work out, Henshaw might get you in as a classroom substitute teacher, and then, who knows? It would be up to you. The sky would be the limit. But even that little job will be completely impossible for you to obtain if my story is not published. Do you understand, John?"
Hall asked sharply. Schmidt fairly jumped at Hall as he clasped the reporter's hand in both of his, shaking it until Hall thought Schmidt would pull his arm right off his shoulder. "You sneaky, wonderful guy you, how did you ever manage it?" Schmidt asked with gratitude.
Hall pulled away testily. "John, you haven't agreed to what I'm proposing here and until you do your happiness and gratitude are misplaced. I'll be pleased to join in the celebration when you tell me you appreciate my efforts enough to stay in this apartment for two lousy weeks. Now I want your word."
Schmidt stared at him for a moment, then slowly released his hand. Hall sat still in his chair, bewildered, as Schmidt resumed his pacing. "I do appreciate all your efforts, Jim, don't misunderstand. But you can't give me a guarantee that any editor at your paper is going to print this piece of yours. And you're forgetting something else—you've admitted yourself that your clout at the Journal is zilch. This whole deal might turn out to be a pipe dream, correct?"
"Yeah I'm a zero," Hall said acidly.
"Jim—" Schmidt remonstrated, "don't take it that way. All I'm telling you—"
"Goddamit," Hall exclaimed, "I wouldn't propose this to you if I didn't think we had a fighting chance. I'm not a complete idiot, just because I work for the news media, you know," he said red-faced.
Schmidt had difficulty suppressing a laugh. "I could say something now, Jim," he teased.
"Go ahead, make jokes while my career and your future are on the line. Great, I'm teamed with an eccentric who's also a clown. Terrific. Just what I need," Hall said as he slapped the armrest of his chair in disgust.
Schmidt stood with his big hands in his pockets, his head and shoulders slightly tilted in a pose of confidence. Had Gerry seen her husband at that moment, she would have recognized his body language as sheer stubbornness. She had seen it often enough.
"Okay, Jim, this is the way it has to be: I've got to be me. I can't collaborate with you on this and erase myself in the bargain. I haven't sacrificed a career only to turn around now and let some newspaper dictate my children's life. So get this straight—my children are going out to play. Period. If you don't like it, there's the door," Schmidt announced, gesturing with his chin as he gambled desperately on Hall not leaving. "You need that tutoring position, Schmidt," he reminded himself.
Hall was out of the chair. He walked over to the stove and fixed himself another cup of black coffee. He stood silently drinking and looking out the window. As he did so, he shook his head several times. Watching the reporter, the tension in Schmidt grew. To expunge it he went back to tinkering with the table leg. The silence of the passing minutes were finally broken by the sound of china lightly striking the bottom of the sink. Hall jingled a pocketful of coins and keys as he leaned against the kitchen refrigerator.
"Maybe I have more respect for you now than I ever did, John. There aren't many men that I've met that would risk the opportunities I've put before you, in the name of principle. But," Hall paused, as Schmidt caught himself swallowing a cotton-mouthed dose of apprehension, "being the person that I am, who also has some self-respect and principles, I cannot work with you if there's going to be absolutely no give-and-take between us. At some point in our friendship you're going to have to demonstrate some willingness to yield. It can't all be one way pig-headedness."
"I never said it had to be all one way," Schmidt said.
"C'mon Schmidt, see things from someone else's perspective for a change, will you? This whole arrangement is on your terms. So I'm telling you candidly, I can buy ninety percent of what you've demanded, but no way am I going all the way on it. I'd be doing you a disservice as well as myself. The way you have it planned now, this thing is foreordained to fail, meaning that you'll come out of this feeling doubly vulnerable and victimized. I will not be party to that. We're either going to work out a formula for success—something your wife and children deserve very much, even if you on your crusading white stallion do not—or else I'm going back to the garden party circuit where the biggest risk I take is trampling Mrs. Farquar's tulips."
"I knew it was too good to be true," Schmidt thought. "Now he's talking about playing it safe an hour after he proposed taking risks. How typical. Yet I want that job—but dammit my children won't be imprisoned for the sake of a chimera!" Schmidt argued internally. He vocalized, "I can't see any way around it, Jim."
"Then ..." Hall said slowly as if he might regret his own words in but a few seconds, "you must promise me one thing."
With sadness and resignation in his voice, knowing he couldn't do whatever it was Hall wanted, Schmidt replied quietly, "What's that?"
"You're the maniac who wants to put your children back on the street, not me. I don't like it one bit. But it's obvious that you're intent on your gambit, so I want you to pledge that no matter what happens out there in the street, you yourself will not get involved. Send your wife down with a bazooka, call me immediately, call the cops and hope for a better crew than the one you drew last time—do anything except leave this house yourself," Hall said as he moved into the midst of the kitchen, gesturing as he made his case.
The reporter continued, "If those SOBs attack your wife and kids and you're not in on it, I can defend them in print. I can make those assholes look bad. We can still salvage your tutorial and my story. It will be ten times more difficult for the propaganda machine to paint women and children in a negative or culpable light. But if you wade into another fight—I don't care how much you and your family are in the right—with the ill-will that's already assembled against you, I have to inform you that there wouldn't be a thing I could do. And I know you, John, at least enough to know that if your kids got into a scrap, you won't be able to resist going out there. When you do, you're beyond the pale."
Schmidt's eyes blazed with giddy excitement as he snapped his finger and pointed at Hall. "Heh-heh-heh," chortled Schmidt, "You're just a damn worry-wart, Hall. I thought you were a tough-guy metropolitan reporter but you worry like an old lady," Schmidt ribbed him.
The reporter shook his head solemnly and waved Schmidt off. He was about to lecture Schmidt in much stronger terms but decided against it when Schmidt came around the table and stood in front of him, exuding a certain physical confidence which Hall seemingly could not resist. The former college professor's eyes sparkled with sentience. Some insight had dawned on him.
"What if I do promise you that I won't go out into that street even if the kids get into trouble, will that make a difference?" Schmidt queried with mock solemnity, moving his shoulders up in a show of gentle compromise.
Hall was wary, "What are you plotting, Schmidt?"
"So now who's a believer in plots?" Schmidt asked with a laugh. Hall shook his head warily.
"Let me get this straight," the reporter said. "You mean you'll give me your word of honor, that you won't go out there and that if there is touble you'll call me? I've got a pager, John—I can be there in a matter of minutes, right ahead of the cops."
"I'm 'free, White and twenty-one.' I don't need to rely on ZOG police or a cub newspaper reporter for my family's protection. You'll see," Schmidt said with iron confidence.
"John, I know I shouldn't allow myself to believe you but for some insane reason I do. It's uncanny, but I believe that you won't go out there and that your kids will be alright."
"Now you're talking, Jim. Stick with me and you'll see there's a responsible, American way to accomplish objectives. I'm glad you'll do the story and I hope to heaven nothing does happen out in the streets, but if it does, we Schmidts still have some frontier savvy and more than a few mountain-man tricks up our sleeves."
They both laughed and Hall was shaking his head and rubbing his neck all the way down to his car. In the street Hall took an empty whiskey pint bottle off his hood and tossed it into a nearby trash can. Unlocking his vehicle, he started the motor and above the noise of the idling engine notified Schmidt, "If you can pull this off, you'll have the second chance my father never had. But if you blow it—well, don't blame me or society for the consequences."
An Indian summer wind blew through the shabby, deserted boulevard. Schmidt spoke over it and the noise of the engine, "You've helped me to see a couple things—things I was aware of but pushed into the recesses of my mind. I'm not searching for an extreme way out of this. I'm not deliberately trying to blow it. But I just can't permit myself to become another cowardly System-drone, denying my children their rights just because the mob thinks it rules our streets. I'm taking your advice, believe me, because if I wasn't I'd be out in those streets to guard my boys. So this is a kind of compromise, but I'm confident my plan will prove eminently successful. I want you, as a friend, to cut me enough slack to permit me to walk the middle ground between extremism and capitulation."
The two exchanged handshakes. Hall looked up at Schmidt with a trace of wonder. He put his car into gear, holding down the clutch and brake, "I do believe in you, John. I just hope your faith in whatever scheme you're hatching becomes a reality for us all."
Schmidt declared, "There's just one more favor I'd like to ask."
"And what's that, John?"
"The next time you come by here could you arrive in an American-made car instead of this Japanese piece of junk of yours?" he grinned as he punched Hall's door.
Hall threw his head back and laughed. Making a circling motion around his ear with his index finger, he told Schmidt, "You're nuts. Just plain nuts," as he eased off the pedals and into the street.
- IV
A few evenings later, Gerry and Gretchen were beginning their work on the quilt which Gerry had been commissioned to create. Schmidt didn't know it yet, but when it was completed it would bring in $350. It would make a difference, a dent only, perhaps, but considerable help nonethless to a penurious family. Gerry regarded the quilt as much as a symbol of the new-found hope the entire family was experiencing as a matter of money.
Outside, in a tiny fence-enclosed backyard they shared with a White family in the next apartment, a backlot filled with junk cars, half-burned mattresses, abandoned stoves and refrigerators, the Schmidt boys were rehearsing what appeared to be a delicate choreography, as they had for virtually every waking minute of the last seventy-two hours. Gerry had a pretty good hunch about what Schmidt was up to. She and Gretchen took a break from their hand-stitchery to peek out the window and laugh involuntarily at the sight they beheld: there in the dim light was enacted a nocturnal ballet whose dramatis personce consisted of a giant and two wild Indians.
Under the street light they saw Schmidt swing Wolf between his legs. Then Wolf reached for something that was deftly handed to him by Thor. Schmidt feigned a fall. Thor ran behind him and executed what looked like a gymnast's full-leg split. On a signal from his father, Wolf let out a war whoop and spun his legs to the right. Schmidt gave the all-clear signal. The boys relaxed, sweating and breathing hard.
Despite her reservations, Gerry was content that Schmidt was animated and engaged again, having overcome his bout of ennui, which he had fought on the fringes of catatonia. She was delighted to see him follow through on his determination to teach the boys total self-reliance and responsibility for their own safety. "Had he permitted Mr. Hall's caution to deny him this, eventually he might have turned on the reporter and identified him with cowardice and the denial of freedom," Gerry thought. "Instead, he's striving for the best of both worlds—the challenge of sovereignty and the greater challenge of cooperating with those who extend a hand of genuine friendship, be they policemen or reporters, so long as they are sincere."
"Your father is a great man," she told Gretchen, "in many ways and for many reasons, but maybe more than anything, he does what he does for love of us. He's found a peer in the Establishment who offered him advice. Your father was not too proud to take it. As a result," Gerry paused almost disbelieving her own words, "he has a chance of teaching again! Something he had never dreamed possible, especially after the incident."
"Dad seems to have more faith lately," Gretchen replied. "And he laughs more! This morning he carried me over his shoulder all the way from the store and told me I was light as a feather." Gretchen giggled, "But when we arrived home he insisted that I carry him over the threshold."
Gerry nodded recognition. "When Schmidt was at the university he was one of the most fun-loving and light-hearted men I had ever met—he played more practical jokes than a barrel of monkeys. And then later he wearied of it, especially after they fired him from Hobart. He became heavy and serious. Oh, he still had his moments," Gerry reminisced, "but it's so tough to live without faith, Gretchen, without faith—and hope—in your future and your leaders. It consumes a person. And the effect on a man as inherently joyous and sociable as your father has been particularly difficult to witness."
"But aren't there an awful lot of corrupt persons in government and media?" asked Gretchen.
"Oh yes," her mother responded in a subdued voice, as her needle pulled a blue-colored thread through a fabric block, "there's no denying that. I've seen the injustice, the hatred and the lies Schmidt has had to endure at the hands of bigoted and self-righteous people, merely because he refused to tailor his tremendous curiosity and research-bent to suit those who cannot tolerate a mind that takes nothing on authority and everything on evidence. Your father questions everything. A committment such as his deserves praise and honor. He's an ideal teacher because he shares his sense of discovery and wonder with all his students. The excitement and the danger of the high adventure that is learning, when that learning pays obeisance to nothing except the truth, as it is within the best of our ability to perceive it, no matter what powerful forces in religion, government or media that truth may offend.
"Your Dad is struggling mightily," she continued, "against an equally negative force, the temptation of extremism. It would have been very understandable if your father had abandoned himself to an extremist stance after the way the police behaved toward us, when Wolf was assaulted and your father risked his life to protect us. That and the malice he encountered at the hands of that unfortunate woman probation officer, might have caused him to fall victim to the tendency to become what one opposes. I'm not sure how it might have turned out for John had he refused to take Mr. Hall's call last week," she added. "But because he kept alive within himself a corner of flexibility and openness, he was privileged to meet a man with a family history not unlike our own, a record of going against the herd and received opinion. Then your father had to confront the fact that his predicament is not unique. He saw that others have faced similar dilemmas, yet they transcended the bitterness and anger by which pioneers and visionaries are sometimes defeated—or allow themselves to be."
"But wouldn't Dad have a right to be angry and bitter?" Gretchen said.
Gerry closed her eyes in momentary contemplation. While they were shut she said, "Yes, but sometimes it's more prudent not to take even that which is ours by right." She opened them anew, "Sometimes we're made strongest by our abstentions rather than our indulgences, because what we possess, possesses us in return, for good or ill."
"Is that why Dad is doing those gymnastics with Wolf and Thor?" the young woman asked as she threaded her needle. As she did so. Schmidt stood beneath the street lamp in what he referred to as "the compound." It consisted of a maximum of seventy square feet of maneuvering space. No one on the street could observe them and in the privacy and close confines of the enclosure his sons repeatedly enacted their ghostly dance.
They had been thus engaged for three backbreaking days, punctuated by breaks for rest and food, fruit juice and the remnant of strawberry ice cream. They had thrown themselves into the relentless workouts, body and soul, with the kind of devotion that only the young exhibit. Schmidt found himself deeply moved by their spirit, which endured the gruelling austerities of his regimen without complaint.
"Youth is hope reborn every day, in every hour that a White-Goddess-Amazon gives birth," he thought. "Even if the bastards cover the whole planet in concrete, Aryan children, like summer flowers, will emerge through the cracks.
"If only more fathers would teach their children personally," he ruminated, "instead of abdicating that sacred duty to ZOG's schools, where through drudgery and propaganda, the promise of Aryan youth lies dead in boredom's vat, like a clock hand stuck in a spoiled hunk of fat." He became incensed at the thought of it. Then he released the emotion. "I've got my own here with me and that's enough for now," he assured himself.
The boys seemed to have their father's technique mastered. He only stood silently in the shadow of the lamppost as the children moved with speed and agility through a final routine of no mean complexity and whose significance was known only to the three of them. "And God willing, that's how it'll remain," Schmidt thought.
That evening, after the children were bathed and in bed, Schmidt and Gerry shared coffee at the table with Gerry seated in Schmidt's lap.
"They're ready, Gerr," Schmidt announced with an exultant confidence and pride of accomplishment, as he downed his coffee in two gulps. "Those boys could take on Godzilla if they had to."
"Honey, don't you think you're exaggerating just a wee bit?" his wife quizzed him with a trace of a smile as—with her hand on his shoulder—she playfully tugged at his earlobe.
"Okay, okay," Schmidt said in mock retreat, "I suppose I'm stretching it a little. Let's simply say they're ready for—" he paused in feigned reflection, "two Chinese divisions and a pack of junkyard dogs." He grinned mischievously.
"Ohhh, Schmidt," Gerry moaned at his bad joke as she twirled the hair over his ear with her forefinger. She started to sip her coffee but drew back from the rim of her cup with a wince. "Ow, that's hot," she exclaimed.
"That's not the only thing that's hot," Schmidt announced with a wicked laugh. She giggled. He howled a rebel yell, "Wahooo," as he waved a triumphant, clenched fist above his head, "I'm going back to work and not in some factory!" Gerry's eyes conveyed to Schmidt an unmistakeably smodering eros. They kissed and rose from the table entwined in a caress. After making love they fell into a well-deserved, deep sleep.
Three sharp raps struck Schmidt's front door. He was a light sleeper and awoke immediately, glancing at the illuminated clock dial on his dresser. It read 3:21 a.m.
"Who the hell is it at this hour—Fred on a drunk, the nigger KGB or what?" Schmidt mumbled. He was trying to ascertain whether it was his affable but sometimes tipsy pal, or another call from Rochester's Mutt and Jeff squad. Schmidt grabbed a short aluminum baseball bat from beneath the bed, put on his underpants and sneaked into the kitchen, colliding with the wobbly table leg, and knocking the corner of the table to the floor with a loud crash.
"Damn," Schmidt whispered in a fit of annoyance as he stood still, listening. Careful to turn on no lights, he made his way cat-like through the living room. Reaching the door, he thought of calling Jim Hall, but it seemed preposterous at this hour. Hugging the wall next to the outer doorway, he was motionless, listening intently.
"Hey John, why don't you quit clinging to that wall to the east of the door, or is that how you sleep?" a deep masculine voice spoke from the hallway.
Schmidt lifted his head and thought for a moment. His eyebrows and forehead raised upward the second he realized who it was on the other side. He knew of only two men who would be able to determine which wall Schmidt was hugging in darkness and on tiptoe, and this was the voice of one of them.
Schmidt unbolted the top lock and the chain and then flicked the deadbolt cylinder to the left, pulling the door open.
The hall was unlit. In the past, Schmidt had replaced lightbulbs at his own expense, but they'd been stolen just as quickly. Now in the wan moonlight filtering through a narrow, dust-coated hall window, there stood a massive presence and behind him, Schmidt sensed another.
He was shocked that Brent had come; that Brent was here, now.
The stocky figure awaited an invitation to enter.
"Come in, come in," Schmidt whispered in an anxious tone, scratching his head.
Brent Bane's athletic frame moved silently into the living room. Behind him a giant of a man, six feet eight or nine with a shaved head, also came through the doorway, bending to get in, as if he were entering a children's playhouse.
Once the door was rebolted, Schmidt put down the bat and flicked on a lightbulb in an adjacent closet, leaving the closet door open. The three of them stood staring at each other.
Brent Bane had been Schmidt's teenaged best friend at high school in Palos Verdes, the peninsula overlooking Los Angeles. He had been one of the best gridiron halfbacks southern California had ever seen. Fearless, if not downright crazy, with great speed and strength, Bane—with Schmidt as left guard—smashed up a dozen teams on the way to a championship season that some regarded as their school's greatest year of football.
Bane and Schmidt had been students of Dr. Robert F. P. Thomas, a high school physics teacher who gave them a philosophy and vision very different from the gestalt of the liberal-consumerist world.
Thomas had spotted Bane and Schmidt in class and on the football field and selected them for private tutoring.
They began with Greek and Latin, physics and boxing. In their junior year, Thomas placed them on a rugby team, while they read Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Juvenal and Caesar in the original languages. They studied Shakespeare and the 1611 King James Bible. In English translation they read Celtic, Scandinavian and Teutonic chronicles.
In the senior year they read more from the classics of English literature as well as the writings of Nietzsche, Richard Walther Darré, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Spengler, Heidegger, and Brooks Adams; the poems of Robinson Jeffers; the epistemology of Charles Hoy Fort and Réne Guénon. The American Founding Fathers with special emphasis on the papers of Madison, Jefferson, John Quincey Adams, George Mason and John Jay were studied carefully.
Together with twelve other boys recruited from all over the western states, Dr. Thomas had passed on an ancient flame. He had let them know that he was not alone in this, that there were other teachers in a kind of sub-rosa association, performing the same function, initiating the same process in other boys and in a few instances, girls as well.
At graduation in June, each of Dr. Thomas's students was advised—but not ordered—to follow a certain path. Bane was counseled to join the Marine Corps knowing full well he would see combat in Vietnam. Schmidt was directed toward college and a university career. Others were advised to farm, work oil rigs or learn carpentry and the building trades; another to medical school.
Some of the advice, on first glance, made little sense and not all of the youths had followed it. It was actually Schmidt who had wanted to join the military service and Bane, who was academically brilliant, had sought a college degree. But the old man's counsel was validated, at least by the experiences of some.
Bane and Schmidt stopped communicating years before: after Bane returned from 'Nam with a Silver Star and Schmidt had completed his bachelor's degree. They had simply gone separate ways.
Now he was here, standing before Schmidt after all these years. "What does he want?" Schmidt thought, "This intense, high-cheekboned man from another time and place."
The giant removed a small black box with an antenna from inside his coveralls and walked around the room with it. Schmidt understood they were sweeping his apartment for signs of electronic eavesdropping—"bugs." The giant gestured something to Bane.
"There are no directional mikes pointed at your place, Schmidt, and the room itself is clean, but I'm still going to—"
Bane paused as he pulled a cheap transistor radio out of his pocket and tuned it to a brassy AM station, "back us up here." He stood it upright on the chipped coffee table in front of the couch.
"Read about you in the paper, Schmidt. We've got an informant in this sector who sent us the clipping. I couldn't get to you sooner because I had some work to take care of elsewhere. But as things developed, we had to come this way in connection with another operation anyway, so we can give you a hand. We've got advance intelligence on your enemies and we think we'll be able to help you take care of your problem," Bane announced in clipped tones.
Schmidt didn't ask them to sit. The pair didn't look fatigued and he was too surprised by their visit to engage in social graces.
"Who's this 'we' you're referring to, Brent?" Schmidt asked.
"We are the Order of Einsatzgruppen. You dropped out too soon, John, too soon to obtain the full teaching. That's why you're in the mess that you're in now," Bane said. His tone was neither of rebuke or remonstrance. It was clinical and matter-of-fact.
"Einsatzgruppen," thought Schmidt, "the Special Action Group commando of the Waffen SS, the deadliest and most ruthless military formation of the German army—the fire brigade of the SS—legendary for hurtling into the center of savage combat with murderous Red 'partisan' terrorists."
Of Bane, he queried, "Is this what Dr. Thomas was preparing us for back then?"
"He saw far, John. Of course he sought different categories for each of us—support, intelligence, combat."
"Is he still alive?"
"Yes he is, John, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Care to know what category he had suggested for you?"
Schmidt didn't want to know. Not now, not just when he was about to depart this arena of constant conflict and opposition for the light of an above-ground life, in a world still capable of reform and rebirth. Bane answered his own question.
"He had you pegged for combat, John." There was a note of challenge in Bane's tone.
"Then why didn't he suggest Vietnam to me?"
"He told me you were too passionate for a racially-mixed army. In a White man's corps you would've had a fighting chance. But in a half-nigger unit you would've ended up leading some wild and hapless front line charge with little or no support from South Bronx rugheads and White punk dopers."
"How did you survive, Bane?" Bane heaved his massive chest. Dressed in mechanic's dark green coveralls he looked like someone you'd only want to mess with if you were shoved into a corner, and even then, you'd have to wonder if you could hurt this guy with anything less than a sledgehammer and a blowtorch.
"I just terminated the coons and dope freaks in my unit," Bane said flatly. Schmidt felt a mounting horror well up inside him. He wanted no part of this nauseating nightmare standing in his living room. He wanted him to leave, immediately. He heard himself ask in a high voice, "How?"
"I terminated them," Bane said with a slight squinting of his eyes, as if the process was akin to nothing more exceptional than frying an egg.
"Yeah, okay," Schmidt nodded incredulously as he changed the subject. "So what brings you here at this hour, Brent? What do you need?"
There was a period of silence. The tension in the room grew.
"Only to lend a hand to a drowning man, John." Bane's words opened a floodgate of memories in Schmidt. Bane and Schmidt had been the closest of friends, through many hair-raising escapades and life-dramas. Each had saved the other's life on more than one occasion. Every healthy adolescent is expected to raise a bit of hell, but these two had been boundary-breakers: street-fighters, drag-racers, surfers, cliff-divers, wild men. Bane had almost drowned off the peninsula one night while towing a boat full of girls with a rope tied around his waist. It had been a dare after a winning game against San Pedro. He had overextended himself.
Bane would not cry out as the cramp in his side started to send him down. But in the "silent science" Dr. Thomas had taught the boys, Schmidt, who was also on board, had intuited—in the midst of a conversation with a lovely young woman—that Bane was in peril. On the pretext of a double-dare jest and with a burst of heart-pumping adrenaline, he jumped into the water and brought his friend and the boat safely to shore.
In another incident, the duo were hitchhiking Hawthorne Boulevard when a carload of Mexican gang members bounded out after them. The Mexicans flashed knives and chains. Schmidt was losing ground in a fight with two of them. They both could box and threw punishing jabs while Schmidt could do little more than cover up and watch for a chance at body-slamming their legs.
Bane had kept the other three more than amply occupied in spite of the deadly jingling of the chains which whipped past his head. He took a stab in his tricep and a broken rib before shattering the jaw of one and breaking the arm of another. The third assailant fled as Bane proceeded to take down Schmidt's two attackers with a choke hold. He ended their assault by smashing their heads together with a sickening thud.
By alluding to the near-drowning, Bane was making a veiled offer to pay Schmidt back for having saved his life. But Schmidt was truly frightened by whatever assistance Bane might offer now. He was convinced that whatever it was, Bane's remedy would be worse than Schmidt's problems.
"You owe me nothing. You paid me back on Hawthorne Boulevard, Brent," Schmidt said softly, remaining awkwardly by the door.
"I guess I did, didn't I?" Bane said with a trace of resentment. "You're embarrassed by us, aren't you, John? We represent the dark closet of your mind where you've stored all the lessons of the past, freely given in the hope that you would give in return."
Schmidt was annoyed at this inference that he was in debt. "I never asked Dr. Thomas for his training. Sure I'm grateful for the classical education he gave. I've endeavored to transmit it and his philosophy of altruism to my own students. But if you're going to tell me I've got to join an extremist group that advocates violence in order to repay the Old Man for my education, then you're wrong, Bane. There's hope for this country yet. We can still do it through peaceful assembly, in cooperation with the few decent people who remain in the media, the courts, whatever."
Bane smirked. "You always were naive, John, but that's part of your good side, I suppose."
Schmidt answered him in kind. "And you always were a hothead, Brent, and that's not the good side of anybody. If anything, you and your band of crazies are destroying our chances to convince people that our cause is just."
The Order commander folded his arms on his chest and stood with his legs spread apart, like an oak tree anchored to the living room floor. "How so, Schmidt?"
"Because the friggin' System is everywhere pushing the image of the White Man as moral leper, hatemonger and gas chamber baby-killer and you and your gang just help the New York Times and the other rags hang the label on our people all the more."
"Oh, now I get it. In other words, you want me to worry about my image in the Jew media?" Bane mocked. Turning to the giant he asked, "Maybe we ought to hire a PR man from Madison Avenue and beg the kikes for a trade-off: we'll stop fighting their toxic world order of filthy lies, industrial pollution, mental genocide against the White race, destruction of our Constitutional Republic and coverup of nigger crime and they in turn will accord us the privilege of being known as responsible conservatives in the pages of their august journals. Is that it, Schmidt?"
Schmidt exhaled and said, "Unlike you, Brent, I respect the law. The rightful law of this land is the Constitution of the United States of America and it's only through rigorous adherence to that law that we can—"
"The Constitution is a piece of paper, Schmidt. When there were men and women worthy of the name comprising our judiciary and juries then the Constitution was invested with its rightful power and authority as the supreme law of our land. But now, in a nation comprised mostly of a herd of animals masquerading as White people—craven, cowardly, TV-addicted sub-humans whose chief concerns are eating, screwing and spending—then you can wipe your ass with the Constitution."
With anger rising within him Schmidt declared, "Our Constitution and Bill of Rights are the finest plan of government ever devised on this earth. I believe their providence may even bear some of the hallmarks of divine inspiration."
"You think I don't know that?" Bane said. "Do you think that knowing that is going to enforce Constitutional law against the piracy of the lawyer's monopoly and their corporate state? Is it going to somehow magically transform a nation of slaves who don't know what the law is and wouldn't care if they did?"
"Brent," Schmidt said, "consider this: whenever there has been a revolution by sincere freedom-fighters, it has first been preceded by mass organizing, with violence reserved strictly for self-defense, not for some 'justifiable' violence that degenerates into terrorism. This is the only way to win. Help build a mass movement in this country, Bane. When I get back on my feet financially, maybe I can begin to give a few speeches. That's what we need the combat men for, as the security for the speakers, revisionist historians and populist political leaders. You've given up far too quickly on the American people. More and more they are ready to listen."
Bane shook his head, "What a puddle of puke," he smirked as he walked to the living room wall and rested his back against it. The giant stood at parade rest. Despite his great size there was intelligence in his face.
Propelling himself off the wall, Bane resumed his stance facing Schmidt. "You know who the real enemy is, Schmidt? It's not the Jew, the black or the Asian. They're not our real enemies. They're not the ones who can defeat us. There's only one force that can defeat the otherwise invincible Aryan man and we can see it any time we look in the mirror. That's our only real enemy.
"Contemporary Americans, Europeans, Commonwealth Anglos—you name 'em—are the most miserable excuse for an Aryan nation that this planet has ever seen," Bane said. "I've only ever found one redeeming element in this mass of humanity—the dirt poor Whites defamed in the System media as 'hillbillies' and 'rednecks' and 'White trash'—those racist epithets approved for mass consumption by our ZOG overlords.
"I stand with them, they who experienced a slavery and oppression in colonial America and the antebellum South worse than the blacks ever knew. They who rose up in Shays' Rebellion, the Green Corn Rebellion, who trod the backroads of the Pacific Northwest as Wobblies, who fought the international capitalists side by side with Dennis Kearney in San Francisco and hand to hand in Harlan County and a hundred other towns from Appalachia to Oregon. Our model isn't the Populist Party, it's the James Gang—Confederate guerrillas who never surrendered. Those are my people, my prototype, my passion. They wouldn't give a plug nickel for you, your historical revisionists and your respectable political leaders. So now you want me to waste my time bodyguarding you and a bunch of soft-handed bookworms all over this country while you make appeals to pot-bellied, double-chinned, boob-tube Babbitts who are supposed to represent our national salvation? Never," Bane said as he smashed his fist into his palm.
"Bane, you're muddling the issue, these people—" Schmidt began.
"These people nothing. Those fat upper and middle class swine already know the score, they don't require any more speeches, books or tapes. They need to stand up and fight for their rights now—in the streets, everywhere. They know fully well their daughters are gettin' it on with mud people and Khazars and the White girls who aren't, are out aborting their precious angel-babies because the angel's birth would interfere with the car payments and the stereo and VCR purchases. It's quality not quantity from now on in this fight, John. We're building a warrior elite who are going to bring the war to the front yard of the scum who rule this evil, dishonorable, toxic System. The System keeps telling their cannon fodder that the war is with Nicaragua or Iran or South Africa when all the time it's right here in the heart of the beast. We're bringing the war home, where it's always been.
"The men and women on our side, our genuine comrades, cannot stomach one single minute more of lies, compromise, cowardice or mental and physical attack on any of us anywhere. We're not daredevils, in the main. We're organized and we're careful. We take risks when necessary but our goal is to build a guerrilla infrastructure and by our actions and our courage, resist the System and bring the best of our people, inspired by our example, into our ranks. Then, together we'll build a White separatist nation in the Northwest."
Schmidt admired the man's intensity and committment, but he also believed Bane to be possessed of a world-view that had all the marks of a juvenile fantasy stoked in some hothouse of enmity where fresh air and sunlight never ventured. "He's too far gone to reason with," Schmidt told himself. "But I owe Brent one last attempt at modifying the course he's set upon. Every human being deserves that effort, especially this once so promising individual."
"In another era, I might have agreed with you, Brent. Certainly your passion was shared by the men at the Alamo, in the Battle of Berlin and hundreds of other places where our people fought against all odds. You know I'm not enamored of the notion of being 'on the winning side.' That's not why I object. It's that you're too impatient, too eager to take shortcuts, too warped by a society you profess to condemn, a society which pushes the idea of an instant solution at us from every angle and you're pushing the same thing."
At long last Schmidt chose to be seated. He motioned the two men to the couch. For the first time the giant spoke, "No thank you," he said very slowly in a deep gravel voice as he shook his skullhead. Bane, from his vantage at the back wall, eyed Schmidt poker-faced.
Schmidt proceeded, "All your methods do is get a lot of good men arrested. Then Movement resources are dissipated in payments to lawyers and in raising bail, just exactly what the alien forces in this nation desire. What we need are decent and responsible White fathers to raise large families and guide them through the storms that lie ahead. You can't do that from a prison cell. Your 'Order' is an outgrowth of the Survivalist groups with their worship of armament and the hardware of death, for their own sake. But what the Survivalists really ought to be called is Victimists because due to their fetish with firepower it's usually their arms cache itself which gets them sent to jail for years, mostly with them having never fired a shot. So, the supposed source of the Survivalist's salvation more often than not becomes their one-way ticket to a ZOG dungeon, while the people without the stockpiles of guns, retain their freedom."
"That's a contradiction in terms, Schmidt. No guns equals no freedom," Bane replied.
"Well then bury the guns or keep a hunting gun that can be easily converted. What I'm saying is that all this Survivalist braggadocio makes for more harm than good."
"What you're doing," said Bane, "is similar to denying the worth of a car because some people are drunk drivers. I know there are some Grade Z assholes who say they're part of us. But we're not them. We're in control. We choose our people. No one chooses us." Bane paused. His features seemed to soften as he spoke, "The Order is a small network. You'd be surprised at how few cells we have, but we've accomplished more than you can know. We've stayed the System's hand many times. We've saved Aryan lives in the process."
Schmidt shifted uncomfortably in the chair. It was getting late. He was getting nowhere. It was time to wrap this up and bid the men adieu into the darkness from which they had come. "One last shot, Brent. One last shot because I do owe you this one. I would hate to see you throw your incredible talent away on a lifetime of morbidity and violence. A life that can only end in death or imprisonment for you and tragedy for your family. I suppose that nothing I can say can change you—not that you want to change. But let's chalk this up to my belief in the powers of osmosis."
Bane threw a glance at the giant which Schmidt couldn't read. "You think that what you're about to say might sink into my thick head someday, huh?" Bane asked with a wink.
The former professor tightened his lower lip, pushing it between his teeth and biting it for a moment. "You could say that Brent, sure." Bane raised one eyebrow in response and then hung his head down, staring at his black motorcycle boots, looking bored.
Schmidt rose from the chair, one hand in his pocket, the other extended in mid-air, in the classic way of an old-time expositor. "We're living in a time when revisionist historians, the great peacemakers in the tradition of Harry Elmer Barnes, and grassroots, self-educated legal scholars and activists in the tradition of fearless pamphleteers like John Lilburne and Tom Paine, are having considerable success in overturning the 'Holocaust' propaganda on the one hand and the lies of the lawyers, judges and bureaucrats seeking to block the restoration of our Constitutional Republic on the other.
"Whether your macho lust for guns and blood will let you admit it to yourself or not, Brent, we are gaining allies in high places. Increasingly, professors, scientists, state legislators, reporters, even a few, decent lawyers who cherish our heritage and who are finally opening their eyes to what is being done to it, are coming over to our side. Not with suicidal, frontal assaults on ZOG but through quiet diplomacy, the building of a network of contacts, the formation of a solid bastion of influential support and expertise. Couple this with the continued disaffection of the small businessmen, the farmers and workers and it's obvious that this nation still has an eleventh hour opportunity for salvation and renaissance.
"But if this grand coalition continues to be slandered as overtly racist and violent because of the crimes of The Order gangs like yours, can't you see that it will be you yourselves who do the bidding of the Jews by derailing the last great hope for our nation? The Jews love to connect historical revisionism and the restoration of our Republic to gunplay. They love to tar us all with the brush of 'extremist hate group.' If guys like you could practice self-restraint, when the American people discover how much they've been lied to—how the IRS and a 1001 other bureaucratic parasites are usurping criminals and not legally constituted—or how all those gas chamber and bars of soap claims are utter falsehoods—then there will be a revolution in this country."
Bane stopped staring and lifted his head. His face shone with the eerie beauty of the dedicated fanatic. "I don't want any reporters, professors or lawyers on my side. I just want to cut their throats," he hissed.
"I'm a professor, Brent," Schmidt announced.
"I'm beginning to see that," Bane answered archly.
Schmidt lost his temper, "What am I supposed to do, beg your forgiveness for not being the perfect, true-believing killing machine? Am I only absolved of the sin of trying to feed my family when I take up an M-16 and go follow you, Bane?" Schmidt shouted. Bane made a motion to skullhead. The giant crossed the floor to the table and turned up the volume on the radio.
"Dammit Bane, what about the typecasting of our people with blood libels and the Mark of Cain? Stereotypes of us as butchering monsters drummed in every day in ways that no other people have endured? A hate propaganda that instills feelings of worthlessness, miscegenation and abortion in our people?" Schmidt took a few steps closer to Bane. His neck muscles protruded like rope cables. "What gives you the right to support this psychological warfare against us by fulfilling the Jews' ugly stereotype of us? We don't need any more White devil caricatures. They're killing our souls with that image!"
"The Jews will always invent White devils," Brent replied philosophically. "They're the masters of illusion, an illusion that only has power if you let the Pharisees compel you to care about what their fantasy is this week. It's a fact of history that they will always cast Aryan Man as the devil incarnate and themselves as God's Chosen, in order to distract people from the massive reality of their evil and to dissuade us from ever lifting a finger in revolt against their power."
Schmidt's anger continued to bubble as Bane remained leaning against the wall at his ease. Schmidt tossed his hand in the air, "Oh, yeah, right, sure, so what's your remedy, Brent—compound the evil? Give in to the stereotype? Act out their script?" Schmidt demanded indignantly.
Now Bane stepped toward Schmidt. His hands were lifted in front of him, palms out, in a gesture of reconciliation. A shadow of the smile of the true-believer appeared at the left-hand corner of his mouth. His dark attire strikingly highlighted his extraordinarily pale skin. His close-cropped hair—so blond it was almost White—had the look of straw. He had the appearance of a beefy, All Hallows Eve apparition as he asked, "'Has it been before? Then it will be again.' Bhagavad Gita, John. Remember? The chronicle of the Aryans and of Arjuna, the varna warrior. It is you that acts in the Khazar's melodrama according to their script, not I. Like so many of our people, you're sold on the value of public opinion polls and what the Jew TV is lying about this week. What was it Céline said? 'Nothing can modify the soul. No training, no methods, not even the famous 'love' can modify, exalt or detract from the soul. The soul doesn't give a damn.' Remember that?"
Schmidt nodded yes in a "so what?" posture.
"The world-view you've articulated is a reaction to a Jew psy-war offensive. There's nothing creative in anything you're advocating. You're not actually writing your own script at all, in spite of your protestations and admonishments. Yours is just reaction and like all reactionaries your energy is easily parasitized by the Enemy. You've got to grok this picture, not just look at it. You've got to see the whole pulsating grid, not just the Rationalistic diplomacy and politics of it. When you see with that kind of vision, you've got a laser that cuts through most of the blindness that was the price of our admission to this life, in the process Nietzsche described as 'willed forgetfulness.'
"All sentient life, at the radix of its consciousness, knows what the Aryan represents, in the same way these beings know that fire burns and water is wet. God made us the archetypes of His image and the truth that beauty represents. Aryan man and Aryan woman are the crown of creation, even the angels envy us, as it says in Genesis 6:2, as it was also written among the wisdom-traditions of all the nations. We're the Sky People, Schmidt. If the perception of this modern hell era has become so degraded that people are willing to believe the flickering vampire light of the cathode-ray tube, when it pronounces that the Jews are the saints and martyrs of the universe and Aryans its despicable satanists, then that's the world's problem. That's the condition of the world in this contemporary cycle of time, a cycle of decay and decline. You can beat your head against a wall over it all you want. You can even beat your breast with innumerable mea culpas before the System's media, hoping to exculpate yourself in the eyes of the public, protesting your innocence of the crime of loving your own people. If the public really believes that these Khazars are the authentic progeny of Abraham and Isaac, the 'Chosen People of God,' made in His image and likeness, I say, let them believe it. Any White man whose inner vision is that decayed, is not worth attempting to convert. By virtue of their bad judgment they've committed an unforgivable sin against the Spirit. They are the self-condemned. To chase after them with flattery, circumlocution, anxiety over how they will react to our message when it is a message of unvarnished truth, represents the prostitution of a stellar cause. I don't care what those swine call me, I won't cast my pearls before them."
Schmidt had felt Bane's words with his body as much as his mind. They had disoriented him. He was back in his chair, his head in his hands; his hands almost over his ears. He looked like a child of the 50s covering up in an A-bomb drill. He held the position for minutes. He heard a slight rustling from the giant and Bane but from the sound of it they kept their stations. "Everything I can think of in connection with them is military," he thought. Ever since his brief adolescent infatuation with soldiering ended. Schmidt had developed an aversion to anything connected with the military. "Perhaps if I lie here they'll think I've fallen asleep and just go." After a couple of minutes he rose and was startled to see Bane staring at him motionlessly. "One of Dr. Thomas' stalking techniques," Schmidt recalled to himself.
Rising fully from his chair, he arranged his hair and rubbed his lower back with his hand. There was another awkward silence—awkward for Schmidt. He sensed that the two in front of him weren't in the least fatigued. He himself felt talked-out and stale, yet the redoubtable teacher in him wouldn't let go of his compulsion to explicate. "Of all the Nietzschean power raps I've been privy to," he caught himself mumbling, "and all the soliloquies on the diamond-like quality of perception that attends life lived at its most electrifying, yours is among the best," he told Bane, watching for a reaction. There was none. Bane looked at Schmidt with an expression of openness and interest.
"Unfortunately for your sales pitch, Brent, I'm not a kid any more. I'm not that easily awed by offers of initiation into another go at 'saving the race.' I grok too and while you were talking I saw all the car-bombs, amputations and crying mothers and children that your actions and those who oppose you, will generate. I hear the screams of the wounded, and the cries of the bystanders. I see the widows of your men rotting in boredom and frustration. I see the men themselves, desiring from a prison cell the warmth of their toddler's hands, a single caress from their struggling-to-be-faithful young wives.
"Like all revolutionaries, Brent, you've fallen victim to the conceit that you alone are far-sighted. You and your associates alone are the men with vision. But I see the nightside of your glory and the back of your empire. Almost all revolutions are a cover for murder. The murder of one's enemies, yes, that's how it starts, in the name of self-preservation, that most iron-clad of the murderer's alibis. And then comes the murder of former comrades who make the mistake of opposing you or simply dropping out. All this blood prepares the fertile soil for the inevitable murder of the innocent. The ones you and your opponents didn't mean to kill and for which you will offer your sincerest regrets.
"So I haven't just heard your words intellectually, Brent. I have seen them and smelled them and touched them. It is murder that you preach and no better murder than any other that has roamed this poor planet since Cain. I hate all propaganda. But most of all the propaganda that emanates from my own side.
"Some of what you say is probably true. But it's the enthusiasm with which you pronounce it that I find suspect. If your crusade were necessary at this time, if we had no chance at all and it was extinction or combat, I would still question your elation. Such horrors, if forced upon us, ought to be conducted with sorrow and humility; with full cognizance of the cataclysm that is bloodshed. But you savor it. You revel in it. You'd think you would have seen enough in 'Nam but perhaps that scene only brutalized you all the more. As for me, I've witnessed my fair share of death and fighting and it sickens and disgusts me. I feel now as though I've a fever."
He sank down on the chair once again. Even his desire to gain the maximum attention for his words by standing. was leaving him. "You've always been a man of great faith, Brent. I never had that virtue. I probably asked to see my obstetrician's medical license the night I was born. But now, for the first time in my life, my faith is growing. It's risky and it makes me quite vulnerable. But it's an opening, a chance to be part of the heartbeat of this world that throbs and glows with the merciful tolerance of energy itself, an energy which pulsates across all the ideologies, isms, dogmas, doctrines and casuistries of a thousand sects and factions. Or as the Good Book says, 'He maketh it to rain upon the just and the unjust.'"
Bane folded his arms across his chest. "It's a nice fairy tale, John, and one that I'd be the first to indulge in, in another time and place. If you have the luxury to be at peace with God's enemies, then I pity you. As for me, well, maybe I am the cold killer you've sketched. And though it's none of your business, it's no violation of my personhood to tell you that I long ago forgave my enemies. It's God's enemies I cannot and will never forgive. Sure, you can trot out all the arguments against religious fanaticism. But I'm not religious. I despise those institutions and the wolves that batten on them. And you're right of course—I may be deluded. But I've never seen any guarantees against delusion in any of life. It's a misfortune we're all heirs to. As for the bloodshed and the killing, I do it without cruelty or compunction. I would be a liar if I said it makes me sad. I'm a soldier, John, a soldier of The Order. That's all I'll need on my gravestone. I would've killed Soviet-Jew commissars in '20 or '42. I would have killed Yankees at Bull Run. I would have killed the railroad bosses, the coal miner owners of industrial America. I would have killed priests and bishops and kings in medieval Europe. I probably do it with elation, you're throroughly right on that call. Maybe it's because I never went to an Establishment university like you did, so I'm not saddled with the Sturm und Drang that has been your lot. I'm a man of action, not contemplation. Just a simple soul, Schmidt. Whether it was the Peasant Rebellions of medieval Germany or sharing a horse with the James Gang, I have always taken an elemental pleasure in slaying the enemies of my people. I wish I could say I feel guilty, maybe it would humanize this brute beast in your eyes. But I don't, man. I just feel alive."
Bane hardly moved while he spoke. He was not an accomplished talker like Schmidt but he compelled attention in spite of his wooden delivery, due in part to the carelessness of his speech. He had the demeanor and attitude of a self-assured man who didn't particularly care what impression he made. He walked now toward the edge of the table, in the center of the room. In spite of his heavy boots he made no sound. "I am a holy warrior of the Bruder Schweigen," he proclaimed. "I am not fighting for the here and now in the largest sense, though I yearn for temporal victory as much as any man. But the measure of the Aryan, and what makes us who we are, was expressed by Rostand when he wrote, 'The best cause is the lost cause.'
"Did he mean that we want to lose? No, not at all. He meant that our call was to total purity and abandon—like Arjuna—because that's our duty and our dharma."
Schmidt was on his feet again, feeling numb and vacant. He began to speak but no words would form on his lips. Bane pulled a Camel out of his pocket and lit it up. He offered one to Schmidt who didn't smoke but who was rattled enough to take the proffered cigarette now. He and Bane shared a match. Schmidt took a long draw and held the warm air in his lungs. Bane took a drag and exhaled both smoke and words.
"I'm here tonight, John, because our informant gave us some background on the White punk who messed with your kid. He's on the fringes of InCAR. He's been instrumental in intimidating other Whites in other neighborhoods. He's being directed by InCAR operatives whose identity is as yet unknown to us. We can arrange for you to go one on one with him. He won't be able to get your identity, we can arrange an alibi for you and you can administer a good enough beating so that he won't mess with you or your kids again. Intelligence tells us that he's still smarting from his first tangle with you, so if you hit him now you'll probably prevent whatever he may be planning."
The cigarette was giving Schmidt a headache. It tasted like metal shavings. He felt as burnt as the cancer stick itself, which he quickly stubbed out on the coffee table.
"That's illegal," he announced to the pair of Order soldiers. In the room the words sounded like a cinder block striking soft, wet turf.
"What you're letting happen to your children is illegal by the highest law, Schmidt," Bane said, spitting the syllables. "Your allegiance to this Talmudist lawyer's code will make you sorry one day soon."
"What's that, a curse, a friggin' malediction, Brent? The only problem I'll have is if your damn Order snoop squad decides to get pig-headed and interferes with a delicate situation. That will be the problem for my kids. What I'm dealing with requires finesse. All you know is howitzers and heavy fire. You bring your firepower and your ubermensch pose into my life and everything I've worked for will be finished."
Bane scooped up his radio and started toward the door as the giant unbolted it and entered the hallway first. Schmidt wished Bane had shown some reaction to his last remarks. He needed a guarantee from Bane that The Order would not interfere in the plan Schmidt and the boys had outlined.
"I've got a plan of self-defense, Bane," Schmidt called after him, in a stage whisper, from the middle of the living room. "I can't raise my family on your superman philosophy. I have to live in the real world."
The Order commander stepped into the doorway, his frame shrouded in the dark of the hall. "The hour is getting late, John," Schmidt heard the seemingly disembodied voice pronounce. "And that self-deceiving bullshit you've stuffed yourself with is just an excuse to cop to all the System incentives for being a nice boy, a 'good American.' I've got a family too but I suppose you've gotten too slow and obtuse to guess that. They're doing very well because they are truly protected, wrapped in an invincible armor of purity, truth and duty. It's your wife and kids I pity, living one foot in the Aryan world and the other in La Cesspool Grande, split in half by an indecisive husband and father who refuses to do what he was put on this earth to accomplish." Bane pulled a card from his side pocket. "I'll be back in a few days, before we move on to another operation in a different sector. Here's a number where I can be reached. Don't call from your own phone. The code is 'Starfire.' Give it and leave your message."
He walked out before Schmidt could hand the card back.
- V
For two consecutive nights the Schmidt children played outside for the first time since the confrontation, and they did so without incident. Perhaps the chill night air of autumn had driven the thugs away, or maybe word was out that the Schmidt family was too tough to trifle with, as word is often handed down in tough areas after people have proven themselves.
Meanwhile, Schmidt was in the process of obtaining a cab driver's license, a first step toward the new apartment, and a quick source of revenue until he obtained the tutoring assignment. Jim Hall was trying to obtain the rental on the edge of the suburbs.
Things were going well for Schmidt but he was apprehensive about the fact that in the fatigue of his early morning meeting with Bane he'd neglected to get a guarantee from him of non-interference. "If The Order has me under surveillance," Schmidt reasoned, "they may step in at a sensitive moment, 'for my own good,' and blow everything sky-high." It was a worry Schmidt couldn't shake.
He was still unemployable due to the machinations of the local "Human Rights" Commission, which maintained a blacklist of "bigots." But if Hall's plans could proceed without the involvement of an outside group like Bane's—and at this point that seemed like quite a big if to Schmidt—two key City Council members were prepared to overrule the Commission after Hall's article about Schmidt was published. Hall had pulled all the levers of office politics. He had gone directly to his substitute supervisor, a garrulous, functional alcoholic who occupied a slot in the paper's middle management on the basis of his sole attribute of being unthreatening to the top management. While Hall's regular editor was away the current substitute was little more than a factotum responsible for reporting gaffes committed while the executive was absent; that was the sole deterrent to journalistic adventuring. Hall told Schmidt that if he pulled the article off, the strong human interest aspect of the story would get Hall's chestnuts out of the inevitable fire that would ignite after its publication. Schmidt had joked that Hall had better file a job application with the taxicab company just in case.
The reporter informed Schmidt that his temporary supervisor had informed him that as long as the piece ommitted politics and stuck to the human interest angle about poor people struggling to survive, it could run. Hall's insurance was a one-line quotation from Schmidt that the summer incident had been "regrettable." Schmidt balked at the statement and brooded over it for two days. In that time he came to the hard-boiled asessment that the reporter was not exactly the heroic type. No doubt Bane would have condemned Hall as a system toady for even desiring some insurance against being fired or attacked by the various "civil rights" groups in town. "But this was real life," Schmidt thought, "the real life Bane refuses to operate within." So Schmidt relented and gave the statement. It was the key to getting the article printed and to obtaining assistance from important Whites inside the bureaucracy. Beyond the taxi-job lay a return to teaching and even if it was only at a mediocre parochial school, it was a start on the road back to Schmidt's great passion.
On the third evening of the children's new-found outdoor freedom, Gretchen and Gerry joined them outside with the baby in tow, as Thor and Wolf played baseball in the street with the McGowan kid and another neighborhood boy, Rusty Wojiecz. Each evening Schmidt stayed inside as he had promised Hall. Tonight he was reading newspapers and savoring the remnant of a lobster dinner Gerry had prepared in celebration of the sale of her quilt, for which she had been paid $350.
Things had been too calm of late. Schmidt never trusted such periods in his life. It was part of what he termed his lack of faith. Now, the combination of his reading and a more than ample supper made him drift off. Sleep came quickly to the man under pressure.
He dreamed of the barn dance. He was back in college at the University of Indiana at Bloomington where he had earned his Master's in History and American Literature. By a stroke of serendipity he had heard about a newly-built barn in the neighboring countryside and the dance that was to be held on its virgin floor. It had been the harvest season and the hippie women wore their grandmother's old-fashioned cotton dresses, and the men decked themselves as amiable Hucks and Zekes, in ripped, button-down sweaters and baggy, thrift-store pants.
The barn was lit only by lantern-light and a toothless, wiry old man in a porkpie hat and a threadbare suit crafted an infectious, irrestible fiddling rhythm, supported by rough-looking farm hands playing banjos and guitars. Schmidt had himself a dance with Gerry and a contented rock in a big brown oak chair, next to a bench full of his college friends, the Dutchman and Joe and Andy; laughing quietly as they swapped stories and a jug.
The October air blew the fragrance of wheat stubble and maize through the lantern-lit barn and the shadows of the dancers seemed as one: first twirling fast; now slow and gay, another moment clogging and punching their feet wildly in the air to the reels of the fiddler empowered by the heartbeats, ruddy cheeks and twisting, churning legs and torsos of the folk in whose feet his music flowed.
At its height, when it seemed the stoneman with the mysterious toothless grin could play no faster, Schmidt had entered the flying bundle of writhing joy that was the circle of cavorting dancers, slipped his arm into Gerry's and caught in her eyes—in the nanosecond that elapsed—desire, married to the wondrous spirit of the night. And off they flew, throwing huge shadows on the hardwood and dancing in the meter of their collective breath, out of which was conjured a multitude of old faces remarkably akin to those of Ceres and Pan, Hecate and Dionysius. And there on the improvised stage, up high in the eye of the musicians' frenzy, appeared Till himself, with his pointed ears and beard, making ribald gestures and casting his impish smile into the lantern light.
Round and round went Gerry and Schmidt. And then it was over. And they were outside under a blanket of stars, whose edges were held aloft by the fingers of a maple tree, beneath which they gulped hot cider and held each other against the gathering cold, Schmidt kissing Gerry's fruited lips and knocking teeth as she giggled hoarsely at his whispered joke.
They leaned on each other and trod the leaf-strewn lane that seemed aglow with the faint orange light of deciduous jewelry. Down the lane and back to town they walked. With each step closer to the city, the wonder seemed to fade and a memory of tension flooded them. They seemed to each other less as figures in a spectral enchantment and more as actors in a painfully lit, noisy farce, where one impelled participation only by summoning the exertion intrinsic to the unnatural.
When they were in the downtown, the warm, grain-dusted lantern light shone no more, except inside them. Hugging, they each fed the other's light when it flickered and threatened to go out in the stare of a disapproving, sour-faced woman dressed out of a K-Mart catalogue, or in the hellish grinding noise of all the machines in the city. Holding tight to each other as to buoys in a sunless sea, they nurtured their light for the whole of that autumnal evening.
And it did not die. It lived through the morning and many more mornings, turning up in Schmidt's writing and in Gerry's quilts, not as a theme you could point to and say, "That's rustic." It was nothing so prosaic. It existed on the fringe of their art, hinting at a propinquity with an undulating wave never captured, but sometimes seen in the spaces between the beat of persona. It walked up Schmidt's spine in unexpected benediction when he remembered his Poe and spoke the hymn before an altar of wildflowers.
They checked each other for it, from time to time, and in their adventures and their agonies its continuing presence confirmed the secret blessing bequeathed by that Arcadian fountain that had flowed twelve years before, in an unassuming hardwood barn, amid fields of ripened corn.
"Or had it been a thousand years?" Schmidt wondered, as he awoke from a dream of a dance to the music of time.
Schmidt was harshly brought to his everyday senses by the screeching of car tires and a string of shouted curses echoing in the street below. His first impulse was to bound down the hall stairs three at a time. But remembering his promise to Jim Hall, he ran to the front window and threw it open, putting his head out for a better view. Below, Gretchen, Gerry and the baby were seated on the steps.
"What's up, Gerr'?" he queried with urgency, unable to see the boys.
"A truck had to brake for the McGowan's kid's dog, honey, that's all," she said.
Schmidt smiled. He'd trained the boys well and hard. But he'd prayed just as hard that there would be no confrontation. The article would be published the day after tomorrow. The reporter had taken some complimentary photos of Gerry and Gretchen quilting and even interviewed the lady that had bought the quilt. Schmidt was photographed swinging a bat with Thor while Wolf peered from beneath his cowboy hat. "Please God, let this go smoothly," Schmidt prayed as he shut the window against the night air. "We've got to make it through the next forty-eight hours. Then maybe I can get back on the schedule you intend for us, Lord."
Schmidt had his hack license processed the next afternoon and that evening he and Gerry sat happily at the kitchen table planning their new apartment, as Gretchen cleared the supper dishes. The boys were back outside and doing fine. Hall called to inform them that the article had been typeset and layed out for a second page "features" report. His editor chose the quilting shot to run in full color and told Hall, "It's a great piece, brimming with insights and crisp reportage."
Studying the floor plan of their new apartment, Gerry kidded Schmidt about where he wanted the couch to go. "We ought to take it to the dump," he told her.
"Oh, Dad," Gretchen scolded him in her tone of exasperated, adolescent omniscience, "then where will we sit?"
"In your mother's lap!" Schmidt shouted impishly, grabbing for Gerry.
"Hey big fellah," she said, as she pushed him away, "who do you think you are?"
"Your husband, baby," he told her as he yanked her into his lap.
"I don't believe this," Gretchen declared, "Adults playing musical chairs," she said as she rolled her eyes and returned to a sink full of dishes.
Gerry took Schmidt's hand into his. "I want you to know something, John."
"What's that, baby?" Schmidt asked goofily.
"Now, listen, Schmidt." He started tickling her above her hip. She squirmed and pulled his hand away, "Listen to me," Gerry insisted.
"I'm paying attention, teacher."
"I want you to know, John, that I think the way you've chosen for us is good, but even if you had chosen another, more difficult path, it would have been alright too," she said with great sincerity.
"Hey now, Gerr, women aren't supposed to say that. I thought women wanted security, period."
"I know you're joshing, John Schmidt. But don't give yourself that kind of bum rap, even in jest. You've always respected me and my intelligence and my desires—" she hesitated, "including my desire to have some adventures."
"Gerry has always been strong," Schmidt thought, "but why this declaration right now? Could she have overheard me and Bane the other night? She hasn't mentioned it and neither have I. Yet here we are, on the threshold of a new, secure life and she seems to be indicating a sense of claustrophobia," he surmised.
"Honey, you're in favor of this move—I mean, did you have something else in mind?"
"Nope, not at all. I just want you to know," she said as she looked deeply up at his eyes, "that I'd follow you anywhere."
"You're so enigmatic," he told her, as he hugged her.
"That's corny, Schmidt."
"I know it's corny, it's supposed to be corny. Lots of truths are corny."
"You mothafuckah!!!" The curse resounded from the street to the Schmidt's kitchen, powered by a megaton of menace. Schmidt's eyes locked with Gerry's for a flickering second. Then they sprinted through the apartment: Schmidt to the living room window; she racing down the stairs.
The horror Schmidt glimpsed was etched in gray and coal black. It propelled him from the sill to the pay phone in the hall. He had a quarter taped under the coin box for just such an emergency. It was gone. He whipped his pen-light out of his shirt pocket, switching it on as he swept its light across the base of the phone. Nothing. Frantic, he fumbled through his pants pocket, fishing out a nickle he thought was a quarter. "Please God!" he groaned aloud. He dug deeper and dragged a lint-wrapped quarter to the coin slot.
"4-9-7, 6-1-8-5" he mumbled. Ringing. Ringing. Ring—"Jim Hall here," a strong voice answered. Schmidt heard music in the background and a woman's voice.
"It's going down, Hall!" Schmidt's voice cracked.
"Oh shit. Stay there, Schmidt. Don't go out there! Don't move. I'll be there in five minutes and the cops will be there in three. Promise me, Schmidt!" Hall commanded.
Schmidt heard a loud, whacking sound, threw the phone into the receiver and ran to the narrow hallway window, slamming it upwards. Every ounce, every fibre, every sinew of his being screamed at him to hurtle down the stairs to that street.
"Brain over brawn, brain over brawn," Schmidt chanted nervously, repeating the byword he had given the boys over and over again. "It's brain over brawn tonight, no matter what Bane says," Schmidt shouted to himself, "My duty, my way, Brent."
It had happened like this:
The White punk was back, reinforced by a skinny, acne-ridden Vietnamese of about sixteen and a husky negro in his twenties. Wolf and Thor were on the street, Thor hitting baseballs to Wolf. The trio had sprinted from an alley into the boulevard and slammed Wolf onto the concrete. Thor immediately went to his aid and was blocked by the punk.
"Where's your Nazi father, you little bastard?" the man shouted, reaching to grab Thor's neck in the process. Thor ducked, bobbed, weaved to his right and swung his bat in a hard swing into the punk's head. The blow struck the man's ear. Blood gushed copiously and the Red screamed, "Muthafuckah!!!" and went down on both knees, rocking his head in his hands.
Wolf lay curled in a protective ball in the street, elbows covering his head and face and his knees tucked up under his chin exactly as his father had instructed him. The Vietnamese and negro threw hard kicks into his torso and four or five landed before Thor took the fight to these two.
Thor ran to Wolf and stood over him, straddling him, the bat a few inches above his right shoulder and a look of murder in his eyes. He was met by the Oriental who pulled a long knife. Thor cried, "Left-one!" to little Wolf and pretended to swing his bat in the direction of the Vietnamese but spun instead and caught the black—who had been behind him—in the solar plexus. The negro doubled over, gasping for air.
On Thor's coded command Wolf emerged from his fetal position and crouched on his haunches. His mother was on the scene as Wolf flashed his fist in a movement she had watched him execute with his father a dozen times. Tilting his elbow upward and drawing his small, tightly clenched fist across his chest, he smashed his elbow full-force into the groin of the Vietnamese who had just ducked Thor's feigned swing.
"Aaaaargh!" the teen screamed as Wolf continued to repeatedly smash his groin. But something was wrong. The Vietnamese hadn't dropped his weapon. Instead he continued to clutch it tightly in his fist. Thor wanted to bash the black one more time to put him out of commission but he knew he absolutely had to turn on the Asian or Wolf was going to be stabbed. Holding the bat in home run swinging position, Thor connected on the knife-wielder's jaw, which was instantly fractured in three places. The Oriental fell to the pavement in a heap.
In the few seconds it had taken Thor to neutralize one attacker, the negro was back in the fray and on Thor's back, using Thor's own bat to lock him into a potentially fatal choke hold. The hardwood was pressed violently against his neck, under his larynx and the black had it braced tightly enough to cause unconsciousness quickly. Thor was turning colors and starting to go limp. In such a contingency his father had trained Wolf to tackle at knee level while biting at whatever flesh was accessible. But the eight-year-old had received a powerful blow to his kidney when he was kicked. Wolf could barely move—his lower body was stiff and unresponsive.
The White punk was also back on his feet, bleeding profusely from his ear and screaming in fury for Thor, who was locked ever tighter in the negro's deadly grip. Schmidt watched in agony, tears streaming down his face, as Thor grew progressively limp. Suddenly Gerry was in the street.
She grabbed the punk by the hair before he could reach Thor. She twisted the white renegade's neck with tremendous force as she drove his face down onto her upraised knee. Tossing him aside like a rag doll, she charged the negro who, upon seeing her running in berserk fury toward him, released her now nearly-comatose son. Swinging the bat powerfully from left to right the black shouted at her, "Okay White bitch, I gonna break this bat off in yo' ass."
Thor was barely conscious. He saw blood and through the blood his mother, in great danger. He summoned his muscles to move but he lay where he was in the street, immobile. The black swung once and Gerry moved away, toward his side. He swung again, harder, this time at her face, missing it by a few inches. The thug was standing a couple of feet from little Wolf.
Pounding his kidney as if commanding it back to life, Wolf turned himself into a human log and rolled his body across the asphalt at the negro's ankles.
Upstairs at his window vantage, Schmidt was biting deeply into the index finger curled into his fist. "You're yellow!" he shouted at himself, deeply ashamed. He moved out to the fire escape. If Wolf's maneuver failed to stop the bat-wielding negro, Schmidt would have to go down into the street, and if he went down, a prison sentence would greet him on swift wings, courtesy of his numerous enemies in the city of Rochester. "If it has to be, hopefully I can get down the fire escape in time," Schmidt thought. And then he cursed his own tentativeness with his next breath. "Hopefully?" he asked himself. "What the hell's wrong with me? I've got to go—" His thoughts were interrupted by the life and death drama in the street below as his family fought for their lives.
Wolf's roll made the negro tumble backward over him. Gerry ran around Wolf and jammed her heel into the negro's throat, forcing it in deeper as he flayed at her with his arms, trying to grab her legs.
"Run, kids, run!" Schmidt bellowed from the fire escape. Thor was up, although on weak legs, his bat firmly in his hands again, his face twisted with rage.
"No, he tried to kill my mother!" Thor screamed, "and nobody touches my mother!" Thor ran toward the downed black with his bat upraised.
Schmidt summoned every drop of parental baritone. "THOR!" Schmidt's voiced boomed with authority. The boy paused and looked up at his father. "Get your mother and Wolf up here now." Thor hesitated, then obeyed, lowering his bat.
"Daddy?" It was Gretchen's voice.
"Where are you, honey?"
"On the next landing with Freya."
"Okay, sweetheart. You did well. Get in the apartment, hurry."
A late-model Ford Fairlane came screeching onto the scene. It was Jim Hall with a wide-lens 35mm Yashica. "Everybody okay?" he called out.
"I don't know," Gerry said, disoriented. "Wolf's bent over and I can't get him to straighten up.
"Get him in the house, Gerry," Hall told her, "an ambulance is on its way." The reporter started snapping pictures. The negro had fled but the other two lay bleeding in the street.
"Jesus Christ, Jim," Schmidt shouted, "to hell with the pictures, give those guys some First Aid."
"I will, I will, but I've just got to get one more—" Hall squeezed the button that whirred the camera's motor automatically.
Schmidt couldn't believe this. "Jeez, what's the matter with these reporters?"
Gerry and the boys trooped up the stairs. Schmidt scooped them all into his arms. "We did it. We did it! I kept my promises and you licked them by yourselves," he said ecstatically. "Dear God," he said, looking upward. "I hope you never put them through anything like this again. But we did it," he said, hugging them with a bear-like enthusiasm.
Schmidt carried Wolf into the living room and laid him gently down on his good side. Gerry applied a compress to his kidney region. The child was crying now and sweating profusely. "It's okay, son, it's going to be okay." Turning to his nurse-wife he whispered, "Is he in danger?"
Gerry probed Wolf delicately. "There'll be some blood in his urine and we'll have to watch for a fever, but I think he's going to pull through without permanent damage. I'll have to observe him for a few days before I can be sure," she said, fighting back tears. Schmidt nodded as sirens wailed and police cars and ambulances arrived. He went to the window and watched the confusion.
Hall was talking to a detective and trying to explain what happened. More photographers and reporters arrived along with a mobile TV unit from WOKR. "A three ring media circus," Schmidt said. "There goes Hall's exclusive."
Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, a retired couple in their eighties who were usually terrified of everything, had left their apartment and were in the hallway. "Are your wife and children alright, Mr. Schmidt?" Mrs. Anderson asked.
"Yes, Mrs. Anderson. They're safe," he told her as he heard the sound of two large men trudging up the stairs. They were White cops and different from the last ones who visited. Hall had seen to it. Their first question was about Gerry and the kids.
"Are you folks okay?" asked Detective Bill Rodgers.
"Yes, thank God, I believe we are," Schmidt replied.
"I'm Sargeant Rodgers and this is Officer Beaumont. We need to get statements from you and then we can throw the book at those punks for attempted murder."
Gerry's face was streaked with dirt and perspiration as she ministered to her eight year old. Her hair dangled in her eyes. She paid little attention to the officers.
"Thank you, Sargeant. Right this way to the table," Schmidt said as he led them into the kitchen.
For the next two hours policemen came and went, exhibiting courtesy and understanding. Hall had telephoned from the newspaper to say he was "going to burn the midnight oil and do a story that would shake the city to its foundations. We don't have to stick to a bland human interest story any more, John. Your wife is a heroine. What a story! I could get a Pulitzer prize."
Schmidt rolled his eyes upward. "Friggin' reporters," he thought. But what he heard next perked him up.
"Do you still want to see that apartment tomorrow?"
"You bet!" Schmidt replied.
"I'm sorry you had to go through an ordeal like this, Schmidt. I can imagine what it must've been like to sit this one out. But we pulled it off, John! And when you get your newspaper tomorrow, your family will be the heroes of this city and that mob will stand exposed."
"Thank you, Jim, on behalf of all my family, thanks."
"Aw, don't get sentimental on me. You're the one who deserves the praise, professor. And if you need anything or any of that mob's high-priced bureaucrats run any interference, you know where to reach me—you'll have police protection tonight, I confirmed that. Now you're holding me up, I've got a story to write."
"Jim, there's just one more thing."
"What's that?"
"This article tomorrow?"
"Yes?"
"It's going to do a lot of good. More than you can know. It might be the beginning of turning some people around—towards moderation."
"That's right, John. See you soon." The reporter hung up.
Schmidt knew Hall wouldn't understand Schmidt's specific reference. Schmidt planned on getting a copy of the article to a certain Brent Bane. Maybe it would make a difference.
By ten p.m. the police had finished their interviews. A female medical-social worker offered to hospitalize Wolf at the city's expense but Gerry declined and produced her registered nursing license. This satisfied the lady and the officials departed, leaving a policeman on the first floor landing to ensure no more attacks that night.
In contrast to their first experience with the cops, everyone had been kind, including a black cop who had guarded the hallway. As Schmidt finished his phone call with Hall the policeman told him, "That was a bad scene out there tonight, Mr. Schmidt."
"Yessir, it was."
"The bad apples spoilt the bunch," he said.
"For sure," Schmidt replied before reentering the apartment. "The bad apples," Schmidt thought. "This policeman sees it too. He looked at me with real respect."
After a long hot shower and a check on Wolf who was resting comfortably, he and Gerry retired to bed. Tomorrow, John Schmidt would start a new life.
- VI
Tomorrow came to the Schmidt household in the form of five quick knocks on their front door. It took Schmidt longer to awaken this time. He had been sleeping the sleep of the truly exhausted and the sound of the knocking had barely penetrated the outer fringes of his consciousness.
Three more knocks, sharper and heavier than before.
Schmidt rolled onto his side and squinted at the lighted clock. 2:05 a.m.
"Bane," thought Schmidt. "Go away, Bane," he whispered to himself, "I don't need you."
Now the door was being pounded. Schmidt looked at Gerry, innocent in her sleep, stretched out at ease, arms extended, her beautiful, freckled face a portrait of benign pulchritude.
"Sleep fair maiden," Schmidt whispered melodramatically, grateful that such a woman as this had chosen him.
Schmidt threw the bolts. As soon as he did the door flew open and a powerful spotter light beamed into his eyes, blinding him. He instinctively moved to reshut it.
"Police officers, Schmidt, don't move," barked a man's voice. Four powerful hands grabbed and handcuffed him. Lights went on in the apartment.
A complete tactical unit SWAT team in bulletproof jackets, carrying automatic weapons and with faces blackened, sprinted into the apartment. A cop with an M-16, with a full clip on auto, stood pointing the barrel directly at Schmidt. A half-dozen of the policemen searched the premises, dragging Gerry and the children out of their beds. They were marched into the living room followed by a policeman with a .357 magnum pointed at the back of Gerry's head.
The children were given a shove into the arms of two burly cops who hustled them out of the door. "Nooo!" Gerry screamed, clutching deperately at the arm of one of the lawmen.
"Have you cops gone totally insane? What the hell's going on here?" Schmidt demanded, walking into the rifle barrel which was now indented about an inch into his upper body. At the first sign of resistance from the parents, two policemen with red cross patches on their sleeves entered, backed by a half-dozen more men brandishing clubs and mace.
"Back off!" the cop with the machine gun snarled at Schmidt, shoving him with the gun barrel into a corner.
"Don't you dare tell us what to do. Where have you taken my babies?" Gerry screamed with rage. "You kidnapped them!" she shouted as she ran around the officer in front of her. Another cop emerged and slapped her to the floor. Four more seized and held her. The cop covering Schmidt stepped back a foot and braced his rifle against his shoulder, pointing it in Schmidt's face. He was under orders to shoot if Schmidt moved a muscle, and the "I dare you" look on the cop's face was indication enough. The medical officer took a syringe filled with a brown fluid out of a black bag and injected it into Gerry's upper arm.
Schmidt quickly reviewed his options. He could fight with his feet and probably go to prison, which was just what they wanted. Or he could remain calm and wait until he could get to Jim Hall. He tried to stay calm.
"2-7-5 Ram clear, commander. All secure," the team leader announced on his radio as it crackled and popped with the cacaphony of official chatter. In response to the all-clear command, the unit commander marched up the stairs from his post on the street. He wore no name tag. Behind him stood two women, one of whom Schmidt recognized as the medical-social worker who had given Wolf permission to remain out of the hospital, to be cared for at home.
The commander stood rough-guy style in the middle of the living room. "Mrs. Schmidt, you are under arrest for attempted murder, violations of the U.S. Civil Rights Act and contributing to the delinquency of minors," the commander declared in a brusque tone.
Schmidt sat on the couch, shaking his head. Gerry was drowsy, attempting to fight off the effects of the drug, to no avail.
"Read her her Miranda," the chief ordered.
"Yes sir," said an underling as he recited the meaningless litany to a semi-conscious Gerry. Gerry was thrown onto a hospital stetcher and carried out.
"Get the kids, John, please get our kids back," Gerry wailed as her voice trailed off with her descent to the street and a waiting police van. Schmidt was stunned. Tears welled in his eyes. Six SWAT team members now held him down as a police-medic administered the same medication to him. After the needle was removed they set him down on a couch and the commander approached him.
"We don't have anything on you yet, Schmidt. You've been restrained and tranquilized for your own good. Your wife will be booked on a Class A felony. Your kids are in Juvenile Hall. They'll either be given back to you at some point in the future or put up for adoption. If you so much as breathe the wrong way I'll have you slapped in jail so hard you won't know what hit you. Got that?"
Schmidt was on fire with pure revulsion. But he kept a calm demeanor and merely nodded at the policeman. "These women will explain to you about your children," he said, pointing out the two who had accompanied him. "Alright, let's go," the commander told the lawmen. All but one cop exited.
The medical-social worker approached him. "I'm Wendy Rabinowicz, Mr. Schmidt. Your children have been taken away from you because your wife fomented their attack on minority youths. Here are the papers explaining how you can appeal. You're scheduled for an emergency hearing before Judge Cohen tomorrow at 3 p.m. And a word of advice, Mr. Schmidt," she cautioned, "Don't come on like Mr. Super-German in front of Judge Cohen. He's a Survivor of Auschwitz."
"When can I see my kids?" Schmidt asked with desperation.
"That's up to the judge. Ask him. Alright, Ms. Tartinelli, you finish the paperwork on this guy. You can un-cuff him now, officer." After freeing Schmidt, the cop and the social worker left the apartment, leaving Ms. Tartinelli alone with Schmidt. Schmidt felt dull and exhausted. Sleep seemed like the most urgent need, but he pushed it away from himself.
"There are papers to be filled out, Mr. Schmidt, which frankly can give you a better chance before the judge tomorrow."
Schmidt raised his head up from where it hung between his legs. He peered at the state functionary. She appeared puzzled and distant. He pointed with his head in the direction of the door through which Ms. Rabinowicz had just exited. "Yeah, I've got a good chance with them," he remarked in despondence.
"You mean Jews, Mr. Schmidt?"
"Not all Jews, but her and that Judge Cohen, the JDL patron."
"Well, the judge is a Survivor and Wendy is the daughter of Survivors. What do you expect? They deserve special treatment. I was just watching a TV special about that."
"And I'm the survivor of a street attack, lady. I'm a survivor of the kidnapping of my wife and kids because they defended themselves. And we don't even want special privileges. All we want are our Constitutional Rights," Schmidt hollered.
"Calm down, Mr. Schmidt. I have only to press a button on my call-monitor and there'll be six policemen up here in one minute."
"Look lady, make sense, will you? How can you defend those people's special privileges over what they say happened to them fifty years ago—how can you compare that to the reality of what you've just seen happen to my family?"
"The past is as real to them as the present is to us," she said wistfully.
"Fine. My German relatives—women and children—were burned to death in the mass murder Allied air force firebombing of Dresden that killed 80,000 German civilians. My grandfather survived the first wave of bombers, making it to the banks of the river Elbe, where he and several hundred other civilians were strafed and machine-gunned to death in broad daylight by low-flying U.S. Air Force P-51 Mustangs. If he had lived through this Allied holocaust perpetrated against the German people, wouldn't he have qualified for this semi-offical 'Survivor' designation? Wouldn't that make me the grandson of a Survivor?" he asked, barely able to hold his head up.
Ms. Tartinelli stared at Schmidt blankly. "I don't remember seeing anything on TV about any holocaust in Dresden," she retorted.
"TV? TV! Is that the whole measure of your reality, what gets on the Jew's TV screens, lady?" he shouted hoarsely.
"Mr. Schmidt, I was warned that you are an extreme anti-semite. I am not here to debate you. Kindly fill out these papers and you can see all about this in the morning."
Schmidt stood up. "Lady, I hope I don't have to tell you where to stick those papers."
"The nerve! You ought to show a little more courtesy to public officials," Ms. Tartinelli observed as she primly gathered her possessions. "A man in your position has no right to—"
Schmidt could hear no more. "A man in my position has every right. Now get out," he told her. She left at once. "Got to get to Hall, Jim Hall," Schmidt repeated groggily. Grabbing his flashlight and another quarter he illuminated the pay phone dial and rang the reporter.
"Mr. Hall's answering service," a female voice responded.
"Yes, this is John Schmidt. I need—"
"Oh yes, Mr. Schmidt. Mr. Hall left an urgent message for you to phone him at the Upstate Journal. I'll give you the number."
"Thanks, operator," he muttered drunkenly.
Dialing the newspaper directly, Schmidt was told Hall was in conference but would return his call immediately. Schmidt went back to his living room, bolted his door and flopped on the couch. When the phone rang, John Schmidt was in a deep narcotic sleep.
He awoke at 2:15 in the afternoon. He was stunned by the lateness of the hour. "My Gerry, my kids, what the hell's the matter with me? I'm losing it, I'm losing it, I'm getting completely spaced-out," Schmidt chastised himself. "I've got to get down to the jail, to Juvenile Hall and Jim's got to come with me and expose this. There's an answer in here somewhere and I'm going to find it. I'll straighten it out," he reassured himself.
He quickly gave his face, hands and teeth a cursory wash, combed his hair and put on fresh clothing. On his way to City Hall he stopped and purchased a copy of that morning's Upstate Jounral from a streetcorner vendor. When he read the headline, an icy load of adrenaline sent needles into his heart: "Neo-Nazi Hate Cult Led Children in Race Attack," it blared across the top of the front page. Schmidt stood shaking as he paid the vendor, and almost fell into the gutter trying to read the article. Seating himself on the curb he began to read. The byline read "By Jim Hall, Upstate Journal Staff Reporter."
"A neo-Nazi gang led by Hitler-devotee John H. Schmidt, a former professor of literature at Hobart College, has been broken by police after a four-month investigation culminated in the arrest of thirty-year-old Geraldine MacCallum Schmidt, after a street battle in which Schmidt's wife and sons targeted minority youths for beatings and bludgeonings."
The article went on to describe how a Vietnamese youth, Nyugen Vin-Bien, had received a broken jaw and a neighborhood "youth counselor who had tried to stop the racially-motivated attacks, Ralph Peterson, had been brutally clubbed and was hospitalized in intensive care with a fractured skull and cerebral edema after the attack which police say was unprovoked."
The article was accompanied by photos of the bleeding and injured Bien and the unconscious Peterson. Other photos showed Thor using the bat to strike Peterson. "Wait a minute," Schmidt thought, "Thor hit that guy when the fight began. I wasn't even outside at that point, so who could've taken this picture?" Schmidt struck himself with his fist. "It was a set-up. Hall had advance information and had someone catch the whole confrontation on camera." Another photo showed Schmidt teaching the boys a proper baseball swing with the bat, a photograph taken during one of Hall's "human interest photo opportunities." Only now the picture was accompanied by a caption that read, "Lethal Lesson." Schmidt turned to a sidebar article accompanying more photographs on an inside page. It was "By Pat Alderstein, Managing Editor, Upstate Journal." In it the editor bragged that the paper's "intrepid, veteran investigative reporter infiltrated the remnant of violent, neo-Nazi cultists who taught their offspring hatred the way other parents taught their children the Pledge of Allegiance."
The paper described Gerry as a "fanatical neo-Nazi" and the kids as "wolf cubs" and "pathetic tools of their father's crazed ambition to exterminate all Jews and negroes from the face of the earth." The parents had "instigated other racial confrontations in the neighborhood. This attack was precipitated when the bat-wielding Thor Schmidt, eleven, demanded money from a third boy, a black youth whose identity is being protected for fear of retaliation by the Schmidts."
The article continued in a similar tenor for another column. The report would be picked up by the wire services and reprinted in hundreds of newspapers across America and in Canada, England and Australia. Schmidt got up from the sidewalk, leaving the paper in the gutter. He had one more piece of the puzzle to confirm or deny. "I should have done this a long time ago," he told himself as he dropped a coin into a nearby pay phone.
"Information, I'd like you to check for a home or office number for a Dr. Anthony Canfield Hall."
"One moment, sir." Schmidt placed the phone in his left hand and took a pencil and a scrap of paper out of his shirt pocket.
"I'm sorry, sir, checking in Rochester I do not have any listing for any doctor by that name."
"Then check Victor, Canandaigua and Pittsford, operator." He could hear the buttons on her computer keyboard clicking rapidly.
"I'm sorry, sir, I show nothing at all for a Dr.—"
"Then check the whole, goddamn 716 area code."
"Sir, I will not provide service under these conditions. I think you'd better—"
"I'm sorry, Miss. I am. My children are in serious trouble and this doctor may be able to—"
"Checking the entire 716 region I do show a Dr. Anthony C. Hall in Buffalo, would you like his office number?" Schmidt leaned against a cinderblock wall. He took a breath.
"Yes, please." After breaking two one-dollar bills for a call to Buffalo, Schmidt deposited the correct amount of change and direct-dialed Dr. Hall's office.
"Good afternoon, Problem Pregnancy of Buffalo, may I help you?" a cheerful woman's voice answered.
"I, a ... yes, uh, Problem Pregnancy did you say?"
"Yes, sir," replied the polite, almost amused voice.
"Well, a ..." Schmidt was scrambling to organize his thoughts, "My ... girlfriend has a problem pregnancy and I was wondering if Dr. Hall could handle it?"
"Twenty-four weeks or below?" the voice queried pleasantly.
"What's that?" Hall replied.
"Is your friend twenty-four weeks pregnant or less? Dr. Hall aborts women twenty-four weeks or less at a special, reduced rate."
"Oh, she's twelve weeks pregnant."
"Would you care to have your friend come in for a consultation with Dr. Hall?" Schmidt went through the motions of making an appointment.
At the end of the arrangements he asked the receptionist, "Is Dr. Hall the father of the distinguished Rochester journalist Jim Hall?—if it's okay for me to ask, that is."
"Why, as a matter of fact, he is," the receptionist replied.
Schmidt hung up the phone slowly, like a man in a trance. "It was a sucker trap from start to finish." Schmidt walked aimlessly down Chestnut Street. "Hall was in on it from the beginning, complete with a bullshit story about his gallant physician-father. Lies. A heap of lies have done me in. I'm the biggest patsy in the world and I've victimized my innocent wife and children because of it."
He was in agony at the thought of his children—even the baby—in Juvenile Hall, where every horror was peddled and proffered; and Gerry, his warrior woman, mother and wife, drugged and bound in a city jail amid who knew what degradation.
The clouds hung oppressively low in the sky as a light drizzle began to fall. In the gray light Schmidt searched for another pay phone ahead. In another block he found it. Taking a card from his pocket, he deposited a coin and methodically dialed a number. It rang twice before a woman's voice answered hello.
Schmidt's voice was flat, "Give me Starfire."
VII
The fluorescent lights of Juvenile Hall cast a familiar industrial pallor over the sprawling, converted gymnasium that served as the facility's sleeping quarters. Within its confines, Gretchen, Thor and Wolf clung to each other like orphans in a 100 mile-an-hour storm. Seated on the edge of their cot, they shook with convulsive fear as tears cascaded down their cheeks. They all bawled, all except Thor who had cried his heart out and had no tears left for anything.
Their mother was in jail. Their baby sister was in another ward, in the custody of a strange-looking Chinese woman with long fingernails.
At first the mob of women and children crowded together with them at the facility regarded them from a respectful distance. Eyeing them carefully and almost, shyly at first, the way villagers in Tibet might look upon their first foreign visitors. The mob was part-White and included a little White boy named Shorty with snot stuck to his upper lip and part of his ear bitten off. Another White child, perhaps his sister, stood beside him, her tangled brown hair unable to conceal the telltale signs of a bad burning—skin like dripping wax that hadn't completely melted, a wax that traveled down the V-neck of her sweater to an unknown anatomic destination. There were Afro-haired junkie mothers nursing stupefied mongel babies with buckwheat hair and green eyes. Mentally deranged prostitutes looked after six-feet-tall ten-year-olds who spoke an exotic mixture of Spanish and Anglo-negro jive.
Surveying the room, Thor sized each of them up. There were few faces that revealed any intelligence or energy, though some possessed a certain cunning. Most exhibited an unrelievedly dull expression, while a few—animated by medical or contraband drugs—moved their lips and eyebrows with a manic intensity. Zombies and animated zombies: weak, tropical hybrids in the care of Uncle Sam Frankenstein's Northern egalitarian laboratory.
Thor had no room in his heart for these people. Consciously, if asked, he would've probably referred to the ordeal of his parents and siblings as his justification, but he was naturally repelled by hybrids and mongrels and attracted to nature's true breeds—be they plants, animals, or humans.
His Nordic makeup would allow for no segmentation of response, no artificial imposition of a boundary line between nature and man. Like his parents he had noticed the inherent nobility of a pure black man, a pure American Indian, heirs of the primary seeds sown by Divine Providence on Terra. To Thor, to Schmidt, for Gerry, and so many others who must keep their deepest convictions hidden lest they face pillory and destitution at the hands of the thought police, the pure White man, the pure black man, the pure stock of all the races bore the majesty and grace of any true breed, from tigers to Tanzanians, from Polar bears to Europeans.
But these pathetic, mostly raced-mixed products of the experiments of the liberal WASP-Jewish-Academic elite had few emotions or desires left except the predatory ones, and being greater in number, would sooner or later turn on him and his brother and sisters. He groped in his mind for a plan. His Dad would have had one, he knew. "Heck," thought Thor, "Dad had a plan for going grocery shopping." Under other circumstances he would've laughed at his father's penchant for organization. Now his rage blocked his laughter as it blocked any ability to devise a scheme for protecting his family in the event of trouble.
All that Thor was now was a reflex, a trip-wire, a cannister of adrenaline waiting to explode. He knew it. He felt the electric juice in his mouth and in the stiffness in his neck and arms. It dwelled in his stomach and increased in potency as the ghetto-blaster radio on the neighboring cot increased in volume, as the gyrations of the crazy, lascivious Puerto Rican prostitute twisted ever closer to his bed.
He was among those laboratory animals who were born and bred by the System to live and die under fluorescent lights in a human warehouse. To be among them and pump adrenaline was quite appropriate. But Thor also knew that such a state of readiness could not be long maintained. After a while, he would lose his edge.
They had spent the night in the police station, sleeping on a bench among artificially friendly White cops whose only real concern was up on the wall, on the face hands of the precinct clock. But they had not been molested. Now, in this place, rape and murder, molestation and mutilation shouted from every corner and crevice as surely as if a bureaucrat had posted a sign declaring as much. Whenever Thor had to use the bathroom, he had taken Wolf with him for his brother's own protection and had demanded that the floor's only guard, a fat, lazy White social worker's aide, stay with Gretchen until he returned. Whenever he had made this request of the woman she had groaned and grumbled. Arguing in half-intelligible tones that she was "missin' ma soap, goddamit," her voice possessed that odd mimic of a negro street person's that White punks in the inner city often adopted. Of all the animals on the floor that day, Thor loathed this one the most.
Now, he had to use the bathroom again. He had thought about urinating in his pants or defecating in a nearby trashbasket. It would be unseemly, embarrassing, disgusting, but it might ensure the security of the children in his care. Yet, he couldn't. Not here. Not under these lights, not before that grinning crowd. Deep down, Thor feared for his sanity. He needed a demarcation point to separate himself from them. He wanted to be human. He would use the bathroom.
He escorted Gretchen to the office. "Not you again, White trash," the fat lady with the bleached blonde hair and black roots hollered through a mouthful of candy. Thor was about to speak when she answered her own question. "I read about yo' ass in the paper. You think you' better an' all the rest, doncha?" the bureaucrat queried him.
"No, ma'am," Thor wisely responded. "I hate my parents and I only want to be good. So please watch my sister while I go to the bathroom."
"Aw hell. Get outta my sight."
"Please ma'am," Thor pleaded.
"Alright, leave yo' sister here, but no talkin," the woman instructed Gretchen. "This is the good part, where Sally gon' git that bitch." With that Gretchen warily seated herself as Julie returned to staring into a small, portable television.
"Please don't be long, Thor," his sister said quietly.
"Don't worry, sis," Thor said, putting Wolf's hand in his and heading for the bathroom.
His destination had been anticipated. One of the hookers who did possess some cunning now had a double sawbuck, two joints and a carton of Kools under her bed, in return for the deal that had just been cut.
As soon as the Schmidt boys entered the bathroom the door was slammed shut. And locked with a key. As Thor frantically grabbed for the hand that held the key he was struck by a solid left uppercut that nearly broke his jaw and sent him hurtling to the filthy tile floor. Little Wolf screamed in horror. The punch that hit him did break his jaw as he crumpled unconscious into a small pile of arms and legs, blood and spittle. The room was spinning in Thor's head but he forced himself to his feet and made a blind tackle at the pantlegs of the male in front of him. A mop handle broke over his back and a boot met his head as he made the attempt. He was down again. Blood from a laceration on his forehead trickled into his eyes. He was losing his vision. As soon as he wiped the blood away more flowed to replace it. From the floor he saw two pairs of legs dressed in green work pants. Raising himself slightly he glimpsed what appeared to be two janitors, an older, bald White in his fifties and a thin negro of about twenty-five with a goatee and bloodshot bug-eyes.
"Whoooeee, looks like we got us some fighting lunchmeat," the negro giggled. The negro's partner didn't smile. He was panting rapidly.
"I like it when they fight me, J. T.," Harry said as he rubbed his genitals.
Thor rose off the floor like a churning Roman candle on the Fourth of July, weaving and fishtailing before exploding in a shower of sparks. He butted his head into the negro's stomach, then rolled backward like chain lightning; on his feet once again, he kicked like a mule into Harry's groin.
J. T. was doubled over in mute pain, his face a splotched purple. Harry was another story. A veteran homosexual rapist, former prison guard, ex-merchant marine, ex-wrestler, for him the reistance of a hundred-ten pound, eleven-year-old boy, however fierce and determined, only added to the "merriment." Harry would have been a match for most any adult. Thor was no match for him.
Recoiling a few inches in a strategic direction, Harry ensured that Thor's kick landed harmlessly. The powerfully-built janitor lifted Thor up by his shirt collar and threw a ham-sized fist into Thor's mouth, shattering a tooth and lacerating his tongue.
In the office, Julie had gone to take a phone call from her girlfriend who called regularly at this time in the afternoon to excitedly discuss the plot twists of the just-concluded soap opera. Gretchen slouched in her chair, trying not to look conspicuous. While Julie was out of sight, two female junkies circled her cat-like, calling out remarks about her hair and physique.
"Please," Gretchen begged them, "my Mom is sick. My baby sister is gone. I've got to help them."
"They ain't the only ones who gonna be sick if you don't do like we say, girl," a negro woman in a red polyester pantsuit told her, in a voice that made Gretchen want to run and scream. But the two women covered her mouth and dragged her into a storage room filled with mops and buckets and bottles of disinfectant. Julie did not notice Gretchen was missing when she resumed her seat before the glowing black box on her desk.
"... she has also contributed to the delinquency of a minor, your honor, and violated the civil rights of three community members." The Deputy D.A. for Monroe County finished his bill of particulars against Geraldine MacCallum Schmidt who stood, groggy and dazed, in a courtroom packed with ferret-faced lawyers, armed colored women wearing badges and a mob of reporters and spectators. The latter craned their necks in the well-appointed modern courtoom with its state-of-the-art electric heating system and ersatz oak paneling. The cozy warmth gave the room a pleasant aura of efficiency and comfort, putting the spectators in the mood of an audience at an engrossing play or circus. But at least two people in the room other than Gerry saw the matter in a different perspective.
Debbie Adams, Gerry's friend and sewing partner sat beside her, holding her hand. Toward the back, an ordinary-looking man in faded slacks and a dress shirt open at the collar sat alert and upright, observing the proceedings. He had been chosen precisely for his keen powers of observation and his remarkable ability to blend into a crowd.
Gerry only nodded yes and no when she was called before the judge to answer a series of questions he put to her.
"Let the record show that the defendant has indicated with a nod of assent that she does request a court-appointed attorney and the preliminary report to the court indicates that she does qualify for a court-appointed counsel," Judge Cohen ruled. "I schedule her pre-trial hearing for a week from today. Bail is set at $500,000. Court adjourned. Bailiff, I'm remanding her as of now in lieu of bail and—" The voice of a strong woman interrupted the judge's recital.
"I want my kids." The voice was low but surprisingly audible, perhaps because it was accompanied by an inflection of panic and anguish. "What have you done with my kids?" Gerry asked the judge, louder than before, wiping her sweat-laden hair out of her eyes as she did so. She had been denied an opportunity to bathe and straighten herself and would appear in newspaper photos and TV film as a dirt-streaked and disheveled madwoman.
"The accused is out of order. Your children are in good hands, Mrs. Schmidt, and if the report of the police and social welfare departments are correct, better hands by far than those of you and your husband." Returning to business as usual, the judge picked up his $115 gold pen and resumed writing. Without looking up from his legal pad he said in a bored voice, "Now, one more remark like that and I'll—
"Please, judge, please give me back my babies," she said with firmness and resolution. Every alarm in the armory of a mother's intuition sounded within her. "My babies, my babies, my babies," she chanted her dirge. Debbie attempted to reach her and comfort her but was shoved back by a black woman bailiff.
The gray observer in the rear kept his finger on the button of a small black box in his pants' pocket. It was specially coated with a substance that defeated metal detectors.
The diminuitive Cohen looked down on Gerry from his judicial perch. "Young woman, control yourself. This is one of the most disgraceful outbursts I have ever witnessed in my courtroom." Pointing to a U.S. flag in the corner, he asked, "Have you no respect for the law or for what our flag represents? Due process is taking its course, Mrs. Schmidt, and I can assure you that you will be given every right due you in the course of your defense. Your children are in protective custody until such time as the court is satisfied that your husband is capable of caring for them in a manner that is appropriately human and civil. I understand that an indictment will be returned against him soon so all of these protestations are moot. But I warn you, Mrs. Schmidt, the crime of racism is a grave one and more serious still is the indoctrination of children into the age-old scourge of hatred and bigotry," the judge admonished her, as she stood hunched over, trembling and sobbing quietly.
"But all we did was protect ourselves," she cried out through her tears, her lovely face distorted into a frowning, watery mask.
"I have heard that excuse before," the judge intoned knowingly. "Fifty years ago it was used to justify hauling the Jews to the gas chambers, the soap factories and the burning pits. We have not established your guilt or innocence, Mrs. Schmidt, but we have established the eternal truth that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Our society, under the rule of law, must be eternally vigilant against those who would attempt to sow the seeds of discord within our pluralistic nation, who would exploit community tensions for their own sinister ends as was done by the likes of Streicher and Goebbels fifty years ago."
"But John and I obeyed your laws, we only wanted to be left alone, to live our lives in peace and raise our children in accordance—"
"I remember it well, fifty years ago a mere paperhanger arose to lead a whole nation to madness. This sub-human monster said he only wanted to be left alone and out of his madness the flames of the Holocaust of six million arose. Should the world have left him alone, Mrs. Schmidt? If your answer is no, as any right-thinking person's must be, then can we do any less today, in these dangerous times? Of course not. We must leave no stone unturned in investigating, tracking, exposing and punishing racists and bigots wherever they raise their ugly heads. In our system of justice and humanity, where race, color and creed are no barrier to human understanding and where the principles of tolerance for those of other nations and religions not of your own ...."
The judge rambled on as the gray observer watched two medical orderlies led by Mrs. Rabinowicz take up positions near the bench. Mrs. Rabinowicz was smirking. One of the orderlies carried a restraint jacket, the other a syringe.
"I have been more than patient with you today, Mrs. Schmidt, and it now becomes necessary—"
"I must see my children, at least my baby, I must!" screamed Gerry. Some of the spectators were growing uneasy. The show suddenly did not seem so entertaining, in spite of the cozy, state-of-the-art heating and the other pleasant amenities.
"No!" Judge Cohen shouted, displaying a heretofore unseen depth of malice. "You will do no such thing. Alright bailiffs—" At his order, Gerry lunged for the heavy glass water pitcher atop the judge's bench. She grabbed it by the handle, spilling its contents onto the floor. Turning to face the orderlies, her hair stuck in her eyes, she swung it menacingly from side to side with one hand, while motioning the police officials forward with a "come hither" gesture of desperation.
Judge Cohen nestled comfortably in his outsized, high-backed leather chair, hands folded. "Now this gentile, shiksa bitch will get a real beating. It couldn't happen to a nicer goy—except maybe her husband," he thought as he suppressed a smile beneath his hand.
At that moment the gray observer's black box emitted a beeper tone. In response, he immediately pressed a button on the box. That button sounded a beeper tone in the black box carried by a man in the corridor outside, a giant of a man, six feet eight or nine with a shaved head concealed under a brown knit cap. On the signal, the giant opened an attache case in a pay phone enclosure, quickly assembling with smooth precision a Franchi Special Purpose Automatic Shotgun—the SPAS-12. It was assembled in eleven seconds. An armed bailiff challenged the giant in the hall outside the courtroom entrance. Reaching for his service revolver he was dispatched into unconsciousness with one swing from the butt of the giant's SPAS-12. The giant entered the courtroom as Order Commander Brent Bane came through the jury door, behind the judge, cradling a MAC-10 submachine gun.
The message that had been conveyed to the gray man, was that John Schmidt had finally called in.
The black youth found that patting his .32 "pocketful of fun" as he called his pistol, gave him the necessary assurance to walk where he pleased in the decaying neighborhood; a neighborhood that included the Monroe County Juvenile Hall.
"They're going to have a fight on their hands before they send this hound-dog to hell," Abu-Jihad mumbled to himself as the impeccably-attired Black Muslim walked the final one hundred yards to the building's service entrance. Tall and thin, the twenty-two-year-old janitorial-supervisor cackled at the thought of the other workers complaining about him showing up on his day off.
"Lazy bums don't like it when a man comes around to his place of work on his day off. Ha, but I like it 'cause what I catch 'em not doing today, I don't have to do extra tomorrow," he thought as he climbed the stairs two at a time. "Besides, those kids deserve cleanliness and I know that place gets to be a downright pig pen when old Abu isn't around."
Jihad unlocked the janitor's annex and proceeded toward the J-5 holding center. Stepping in he noted that it was filled with the usual smoke, noise and filth. "It's a losing battle trying to keep up with some of these people," he grumbled accusingly in deliberate earshot of one of the prostitutes. His sharp senses detected the Puerto Rican sentry pulling watch outside the boy's bathroom, trying to act casually.
"Probably sniffin' glue in there as usual, turning what brains they got into oatmeal," the Black Muslim said as he approached the door. The female lookout was smoking reefer. Spotting Jihad she balled up her fist as if to pound on the door. "Don't bang on that door, girl, or the next door you be banging on is gonna have St. Peter at the gate," he said as he drew his gun. The rinsed redhead in the chartreuse pants slinked quickly away. "I bet that loafin' J. T. is at it again with some unclean White woman. I'll fix his clock this time and that's a fact." He drew a key off of his chain and slipped it quietly in the lock. "I'll have that worthless boy fired. I won't have—" The bolt was thrown and the door opened. The scene he spied in the mirror above the sink caused him to tighten the grip on his gun. "What mischief is this?" he asked aloud as Harry was slipping Thor's pants down and J. T. was unzipping himself before Wolf, who lay barely conscious on the floor.
Jihad kept his gun on the ex-wrestler, who he knew to be a dangerous man. He waved it in Harry's face, trying to get between him and Thor. "I'll shoot you. I'll shoot you," Jihad repeated, trying to keep an eye on J. T. behind him and realizing that in his eagerness to get Harry away from Thor he had boxed himself in. Harry was moving toward the Muslim, his brown eyes fixating on Jihad's, his voice soothing, his hand near the Muslim's gun barrel.
While the head-custodian had been entering the building from the service entrance, a black Chevrolet station wagon had pulled into the employee parking lot. A woman and two men, one of whom was short and stocky and the other of medium height and build, entered an employee door on the east of the building, leaving their driver behind. The woman was an attractive lady of forty-five dressed as a nurse. She proceeded to the Juvenile Hall nursery. Based on advance intelligence, she entered the correct room, compared the infant in the crib with a composite-drawing of Freya, scooped her up and walked back to the stairwell. When she was outside, the driver pressed a button on a black box he carried.
On a signal, Order soldiers Caglietti and Litton walked briskly to the fifth floor Juvenile Hall holding center. During orientation they had been informed that the elder Schmidt children, Gretchen and Thor, might be able to handle revolvers if things got sticky. Both men hoped that they did not. Litton searched the north end of the complex, stepping among the dazed herd of humanity penned there, a 9mm automatic pistol concealed under his woolen sweater. Caglietti rushed to inspect the main dormitory and the bathrooms. In the storage room in the south wing, Litton discovered a negro, a Puerto Rican and Julie ripping Gretchen's clothes off of her. She bore scratch marks on her chest and was bleeding from a superficial wound on her throat. Unholstering his silencer-equipped pistol, Litton walked to the center of the room.
"The party's over," he announced in a baritone that sent the women into shrieks of hysteria. He fired one round into the floor in front of the most hysterical of the attackers, Julie. "That was a practice shot, but this one's got your name on it if you don't shut up," he told them as he pointed his weapon at Julie's head. The women froze. Gretchen gathered what was left of her clothing.
After turning up nothing in the dormitory, Caglietti kicked open the door of the boy's bathroom. In the mirror his combat shooter's eye spotted what appeared to be one well-dressed black executive holding a revolver on one half-naked White child and another battered and bloody one as a pair of molestors stood over them. The Black with the gun started to turn toward Caglietti. The words, "Class One" came to Caglietti's mind as he aimed his automatic at the only armed man in the room. A Class One Order operation was a mission of the gravest and riskiest sort which required split-second execution and maximum force where necessary to secure stated objectives. The lives of bystanders were important in such operations but the lives of ambiguously-identified gunmen who were on-site at violent assaults on Whites were not. Caglietti started to squeeze the trigger when the White pederast made his move. He dove at the legs of Jihad who fell into Caglietti. Caglietti did not fire. Thor shouted, "The guy in the suit tried to help us." Harry was around Jihad now and grasping Caglietti's gun hand with a vise-like grip. With the other, Harry smashed Caglietti repeatedly in the face with massive, punishing blows. What Harry saw on Caglietti's face made Harry go weak in the knees. Overcome with determination, Caglietti took punch after punch with a vicious smile which foretold a more punishing retribution. The blows from the powerful rapist had no obvious effect on Order soldier Vincenza Caglietti, ex-quarryman, ex-convict, ex-heavyweight boxing champion of southern Europe, where he had been known as "Iron Jaw" Caglietti.
Harry concentrated now on Caglietti's gun hand, smashing it against the bathroom wall, trying to shake the 9mm automatic loose. A shot was fired behind the two combatants. Caglietti ignored it. He raised his arm off the wall and smashed his gun in the rapist's face. Then he grabbed Harry by the hair and shoved his face into the concrete wall with a hollow, smacking sound. Several of Harry's teeth dislodged and bounced on his tongue. Caglietti grabbed him by the neck with one hand, lifted him off his feet and threw him against the row of sinks. Drawing a Bowie knife from a sheath in his boot the Order soldier jammed it into the rapist's belly and lifted him off the floor, impaled on the blade. "Open the door," he said to Jihad.
"With pleasure," the Muslim responded. Caglietti tossed the White rapist onto the floor of the dormitory, causing Harry's intestines to spill out like an overturned bowl of spaghetti. Pandemonium broke out on the floor. "That should cover our escape," Caglietti shouted to a bemused Litton, who was covering him from outside the bathroom door, in the dorm area, with Gretchen in tow behind him.
"You forgot the marinara sauce, Vince," Litton mock-scolded him.
Caglietti and Jihad gently lifted the boys to their feet. Caglietti slung Wolf on his shoulder in a fireman's carry. Thor could walk. "Can we get out another way?" he asked Jihad.
"What do you mean, 'we?'" Jihad asked. "I'm a Black separatist, I don't go places with White folks."
Caglietti said, "Looks like we're all compromising our principles today, Mr. —?"
"Jihad. Abu-Jihad."
"I'm a White separatist not usually seen in the company of black men, Mr. Jihad, but under the current circumstances, all I can tell you is—"
Caglietti signaled to Litton with his eyes, Litton pointed his magnum at Jihad—"that's the way the mop flops."
"Well, better the mop than me," Jihad replied philosophically, handing his gun over to Litton.
"Let him keep it. He may need it yet," Caglietti declared. Litton motioned for Jihad to retain his weapon. The Muslim smiled in bewilderment.
"If you trust me with my gun, do you trust me for a way out of here?" he called as he marched toward the janitor's annex. The Order soldiers followed with the children.
"Do we have a choice?" Litton asked skeptically.
"As one separatist to another, Mr. Abu-Jihad?" Caglietti quizzed him.
"One separatist to another," Jihad replied.
"Let's follow Mr. Jihad," Caglietti said. Running down the stairs, Caglietti asked, "Oh, by the way, what happened to the black punk that was the White rapist's partner?"
Light from the steet streamed through an outer door as they approached the exit at the bottom of the stairs. "The same thing that happened to the guy that you took care of," Jihad answered.
Caglietti grinned. Now outdoors, he briefly explained to the Muslim that he'd have to be roughed up to protect him from charges of collaboration. "I'll let Litton hit you, it'll be like gettin' tapped by a creampuff." Litton stepped foward, shaking his fist at Caglietti in feigned annoyance.
Jihad put up his hand. "I draw the line there, boys. No man lays a hand on my person under any circumstances and especially not a White man."
Caglietti glanced at Litton who shrugged his shoulders as if to say, "It's your ball game."
Jihad sensed the impasse. "Take my gun," he told them. "You took it in the bathroom and used it to shoot J. T., then used me as a hostage to get out of the building. By the way—" The Order commandos were running away with the Schmidts in tow as Abu-Jihad was speaking. "What's all this about, anyway?" Jihad shouted after them.
"We're in a war with the Jew System and their race-mixing cronies—black, White or green," Caglietti shouted over his shoulder. "We want our own separate, all-White nation, not cheap labor exploited from other races—" he was around the corner, out of earshot.
"Then Allah be with you," the Black man whispered as he re-entered the building, took a breath, punched himself once in the eye and once in the nose and laid himself down at the bottom of the stairwell.
At the courthouse a whole team of sheriff's deputies, bailiffs, orderlies and bureaucrats had surrounded Gerry, who continued to maintain her position, stooped over, swinging the pitcher low off the ground, from side to side. Judge Cohen was too absorbed in sweet anticipation of the delightful beating he expected her to receive to notice the giant in the back row—amid other spectators now standing to get a better view—carrying the Franchi six-shot. The giant nudged a bystander and as soon as he had a clear trajectory, fired once from the hip.
On impact the slug cut the judge's head in half, slapping the top part of it against the wall and leaving only the judge's mouth and jaw connected to his neck, waving uselessly as the instant corpse continued to temporarily sit upright in a macabre judicial pose. As the judge's forehead, face and brains slid slowly down the wall behind his luxuriously upholstered high-backed chair, virtually everyone in the room was on the floor, except for Gerry who was hunched at the bottom of the bench, Bane who was concealed in the jury box and Deputy Sherriff Tom Cramer who unhooked his service revolver and immediately commenced a deadly accurate stream of fire in the direction of the giant, buying time for his less intrepid fellow officers to unhook their sidearms.
Cramer was supposed to have been on highway patrol that day, according to Order intelligence. A fearless veteran of four shootouts and a champion marksman, this maverick loner was disliked by brass as well as the Lunchpail Joes and Retirement Garys in the rank and file. As punishment for an innovation he had implemented on his patrol without permission from his supervisor, he had been taken off the highway and demoted to court security for the week.
With the covering fire Cramer had put down, the giant had been unable to take time to fire clearly and cleanly. In another second, he'd be facing five revolvers instead of Cramer's now empty lone gun. "This is Class One," the Order soldier reminded himself. Rising from a position he had taken behind a wooden bench while Cramer was firing, he pumped five murderous rounds of double-ought buckshot into the mass of sheriffs and bailiffs.
Cramer was unhit, saved by the corpses of the officers who had scurried to avoid the gunfire. The officer reloaded his own weapon and stuck a revolver taken from a dead cop under his belt. As he stood to face the giant, rushing through the courtroom's main door came a phalanx of two sheriffs and a Rochester policeman. One of the sheriffs had a 12-gauge pump. The giant rolled into the seating gallery as the invading officers fired wildly, emptying their weapons in his direction.
The giant's maneuver left the field open for Bane, who had let the policemen exhaust their ammunition before sending a withering streak of fire at them from his MAC-10. Dozens of bullets flew in seconds, nailing all three to the very doors through which, only a moment before, all had come running, full of vigor and bravado.
Officer Cramer could not get a shot off at Bane from the body pile that surrounded him. He played cat and mouse with the giant while hoping a security team entering the same way Bane had—through the jury door—would eliminate Bane. On the other side of the court was the giant who was fast, but not as fast as Cramer. The big man swung his barrel at Cramer while Bane slammed another clip into his weapon. Cramer had the drop on the giant. There was a gunshot.
Officer Cramer fell stiffly to the floor, shot through the back of his head.
"Okay, big man, we're off schedule," Bane shouted as he removed a pin from three smoke grenades. The giant surveyed the room. Bane had not fired the shot, he had been reloading. Then he got his answer. Geraldine MacCallum Schmidt crouched against the bench, holding a bailiff's revolver. The giant ran to her, scooped her up with his right hand, while one-handing the SPAS-12 with his left. Bane let off the smokers. The trio exited through the judge's chambers on their hands and knees, as the chambers filled with smoke. Outside the courtroom, in the hall, they spotted a Rochester city patrolman hiding behind a pillar. Before he could stand and fire, he caught a SPAS-12 slug in his chest. The policeman's drawn and cocked pistol fell by his side. Bane scooped it up.
Fifteen minutes later a black Plymouth Gran Fury pulled into a side street, next to the Genessee Brewing Company. The three passengers and their driver walked leisurely from the vehicle two blocks to a waiting Chevy van, where they were driven to a sprawling farmhouse in the country, south of Naples.
John Schmidt stood in the semi-darkness of what used to be a smoking parlor, where the men of the nineteenth century had retired with their cigars and pipes after a handsome Sunday dinner. If the operation faltered, Schmidt had agreed to jump into the fray head first and to participate in whatever actions were necessary to free Gerry and the children. The Order would leave no wounded and no prisoners behind. Every resource was put into a mission of this nature. On direct command of the Old Man, the rescue of Schmidt's family had received the brotherhood's top priority, Class One.
Since he had made the Starfire telephone call that day, Schmidt had been picked up off the street and whisked to a safehouse where an Order medic had given him a physical and okayed him for combat. At the farm he was given a crash course to familiarize him with his weapon and with the basic small team tactics of offense, defense, evasion and escape which might afford him at least a fighting chance while maximizing the survival of those Order soldiers who would have to share combat with a greenhorn. He had also been offered formal initiation into the Order and assented without hesitation. The ceremony was scheduled for that evening.
In the back rooms of the farmhouse, soft lights illuminated the shoulders and backs of other Order commandos. Schmidt did not know how many there were at the farm. He counted eight in the house. They were an eclectic assortment. Some played cards with boisterous taunts and rough jokes. Three read the King James Bible studiously at a table near a window, one taking notes while the others discussed points of interest. Another soldier cooked. Schmidt assumed still more were asleep in the converted barns on the farm or elsewhere in the large house. Schmidt deduced that some type of communications and command post was under the house in the basement.
Bane's lieutenant, a soldier who introduced himself only as Karl and who Schmidt had hugged with more affection and gratitude than he had felt in a long time, explained that in The Order, commanders take up "hot spots" on all missions—meaning life-threatening operations such as the one they were engaged in today. Hence Brent Bane would not be here to greet Schmidt. He was on the firing line for Schmidt and his family.
Schmidt was ashamed when he learned this news. He sat in the comfortable fortress-farm while Bane faced shot and shell for Schmidt's wife and children. It was a painful lesson.
Karl hadn't told Schmidt much, but this much he knew: a team of seven soldiers consisting of three drivers and four members of the shock force, the Order's Einsatzgruppen, had been dispatched. Various assistants in support, intelligence and supply were also involved. If anything went seriously wrong, Karl told him most of the soldiers on the farm and the full force of The Order in the Northeast would be thrown into the fight, if necessary. Class One was Alamo level. If required, The Order would mount a full-scale assault on a police station or an armory under such circumstances. It had been several hours since Karl had informed him that the operation had commenced. Five minutes ago Schmidt had been told the team was about to arrive. There was no news about the mission's success or failure. Since no more troops had been called, Schmidt assumed the operation had been a terrific success.
He put out the cigarette he'd been smoking and adjusted the sling of the heavy weapon on his shoulder. And he prayed. He heard the sound of an engine easing up the long driveway to the house. Going to the front windows without permission was forbidden, so Schmidt waited, his heart beating with expectation. Slowly the noise of the engine ground its way forward, creeping up the hill to the farm in what seemed to Schmidt an eternity of slowness. Then he heard the engine idling. Doors clicked, guards left the house, the engine shut down, soft murmurs entered the alcove. Then they were before him. "Daaaady!"
"John ... dear John." The faces of Thor and Wolf were swollen and little Wolf could just barely summon a smile through a jaw wired shut by the Order's medic. But they were here, before him now, Gretchen and Freya and Gerry surprisingly whole and sturdy, clinging to him like exhausted swimmers to a lighthouse pier. They were together and here no state power could kidnap and brutalize them, forcing them into the "mercy" of a Jewish-controlled System without a fight, without the other side getting bloodied and worse. "And that is as it should be," Schmidt affirmed to himself. "That is the law of nature."
They spent the early hours of the evening alone in a lovely upstairs master bedroom. A delicious wild turkey dinner was served them in their room, on fine china. A special grain-based soup with turkey broth was prepared for Wolf along with a thick milkshake. The Schmidt family talked and smiled but mostly they just held each other and sometimes Gerry and Gretchen fought back tears.
At nine p.m., Gerry, Thor and Schmidt were summoned to the appointment Schmidt had discussed with them. An offer had been made. Did they agree? Schmidt prefaced the offer by attesting to his own overwhelming desire to go through with it. Thor and Gerry said yes without reservation.
The ceremony took place under a two century-old oak tree. Thor sat beneath it, calmly carving on some wood as the preparations were made. He had refused pain medication for his injuries, though he was in considerable physical torment. Gretchen and an Order nurse remained inside with Wolf and Freya. Gerry and Schmidt held hands and occasionally embraced under the chill night sky, well provisioned against it with a pile of woolen coats and sweaters. And then it was time. A circle was formed. The Schmidt family was at one end. At the other, all the commandos who had risked their lives that day to resuce the Schmidts from their kidnappers. Brent Bane formed the lone point in the circle. Beeswax candles in glass lanterns illuminated the scene. The battle flag of the Confederate States of America, the Stars and Bars, comprised in part of the ancient standard of Scotland, the St. Andrew's flag, was tied around the trunk of the massive oak.
"John Schmidt, Gerry Schmidt and Thor Schmidt," Bane recited.
"We are here with you," the Schmidts recited, Thor chiming in a bit late.
"Are you here of your own free will?" Bane asked. "By choice and not coercion?"
"We are," the Schmidts replied.
"Do you wish to unite the blood that flows in your veins, in the veins of the Schmidt family, to the river of blood that flows throught the sinews of the racial family of the Order of Bruder Schweigen?
"We do," the Schmidts replied. John Schmidt's reply was the most audible. His bridges were burned. No more did he turn on Hamlet's rope. Henceforth he would abandon his earlier attachment to the motto of Camus given at the end of the Second White Civil War, known commonly as World War II, "neither victims nor executioners." Now Schmidt would become an executioner in preference to being a victim. Now all his doubts and uncertainties were expunged by the ordeal through which he and his wife and children had emerged.
Bane and The Order commandos raised their right hands in the ancient, open-hand salute, the greeting bespeaking friendship and trust between Aryans.
The Order men recited from memory, "I as a free Aryan man, hereby swear—." The Schmidts recited with them, reading by the flickering candlelight from a piece of what appeared to be a very old parchment. "... an unrelenting oath, upon the green graves of our sires, upon our children born and as yet unborn, upon the throne of God Almighty, sacred be His name, beneath this mighty oak, witness to the oaths of our ancestors, the heroes of yore who bequeathed to us life and spirit, that we will faithfully perform the duty for which our Father God intends for us to accomplish in this world.
"I do join together in holy union with those brothers and sisters in this circle, to declare forthrightly that from this moment onward I will defy fear of death and I will defy fear of foe. I do affirm my sacred duty to deliver our people from the Evil Ones, who roam the earth seeking the ruination of the Aryan people. And to secure for my people a separate sovereign nation, under God, freed from the tentacles of the tyrants, parasites, liars, rapists and polluters both spiritual and physical who curse and oppress us in this hour, who murder our children in their bodies and in their souls.
"I as a holy warrior of Bruder Schweigen, swear myself to keep the secrets of this sacred Order in fulfillment of the motto I take for myself for ever after: My loyalty is my honor.
"I bear witness to you, my brothers and sister, that should one of you fall in battle, I will see to the well-being of your family. I bear witness to you, my brothers and sister, that should one of you be captured by the Enemy, I will do what is necessary to free you.
"I bear witness to you, my brothers and sister, that should a traitor harm you, I will chase him to the ends of the earth and sever his head from his body. And furthermore, I bear witness to you, my brothers and sister, that if I should violate this sacred oath, may all the curses and misfortune of history rain upon me and mine without relief or recompense, my head to be severed from my body, and my name blotted out of the book of life forever.
"We hereby invoke the blood covenant and declare that we are in a state of total war and will not lay down the Battle Axe until we have secured and guaranteed a homeland for our people, the land which was promised to our fathers and mothers of old, and through our blood and His will, shall become again the land of our children and their children to be, free and unmolested, our own star and destiny, forever. To this covenant, we pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor."
Each new warrior embraced the veterans and stood for a time under the stars and the long arms of the giant oak. And the giant himself picked up Thor and raised him onto his shoulder. Thor had his baseball bat with him, the same which he'd used to slam the hoodlums that had attacked his family. It had been specially retrieved for him by The Order. A piece of rock ore was in his other hand. He threw the ore into the air and swung his bat. It struck the rock solidly and threw a shower of sparks into the air, flashing momentarily against the night sky as Schmidt recited Von Schenkendorf's poem, which the Old Man had taught him in high school and which he now recalled:
- "When everyone is disloyal, we will stay true,
- So that there is always a standard-bearer for you on earth
- You comrades of our youth, reflections of a better age,
- Who ordained us to manly virtuousness and a patriot's death.
- Never leave our sides; always be close to us,
- True as the German oaks, as the moon and sunshine.
- One day, our brothers will see clearly again,
- And they will return to the fold in loyalty and love.
- You stars with your peaceful downward gaze, are our witnesses,
- When all our brothers are silent and trust in false idols.
- We do not wish to break our word nor turn into rogues ...."
They had all listened to him in silence. Then Brent Bane stepped forward and placed a hand on Schmidt's shoulder. "Welcome back, my brother," he said to Schmidt and they shook hands and saluted each other. Then the men returned to their duties. The Schmidts lingered under the oak, Gerry looking up at Schmidt with admiration. Thor was holding his bat. Schmidt noticed that the boy had carved a couple of words on its business end.
"Hey, wild man, what does it say on the end of your hammer, there?"
Thor turned the bat solemnly toward the candlelight. Cut deep into the wood was the name "Jim Hall."
"I'm going to kill him, Dad," the boy said with a fierce simplicity. "For Mom, for you, for my people. He's a dead man."
Schmidt looked deeply into the crystalline-green eyes of the man-boy. "I believe you, son. And I'll be with you, every step of the way." Thor returned his father's gaze with a look of resolve. There was no alienation between father and son any longer. Gerry hugged them both.
Bane had gone to the communications command center, built into a sub-basement below the cellar of the house. An Order communications technician was entering codes into a telephone connected to a suitcase filled with electronic equipment. The suitcase telephone had been refined three days before. It was the most powerful generation. As long as the speakers stayed on the line for ten minutes or less, it was unlikely that their conversation could be intercepted by any eavesdropper. The technician punched in one ace code, now spoke another. "Kappa-delta five, switching. Over." The call was being relayed through a separate long-distance transmitter and then transferred to yet another transmitter. A computer indicated the connection had been made. The tech man gave the phone to Bane and left the room.
The voice at the other end was strong yet light in tone and inflection. Bane knew the Old Man would be speaking from his quarters in a great pine forest in the Pacific Northwest. He had no idea if the location was Northern California or Oregon or even British Columbia.
"What have you got today, Brent?"
"It was a success, sir."
"Well, that's very good. Is there any reluctance now, as there was before?"
"No sir. The candidate's enthusiasm is extemely high."
"That's quite a turn-around from just a few days ago," the Old Man remarked.
"The usual factors coalesced, sir."
"Yes, our dearly beloved Zionist Occupation Government is an intolerant master. Someone like our candidate here wasn't hoping for very much, just the tiniest corner in which to be with his own kind; raise his children as he saw fit. Come and go without molestation and without the brainwash."
"He certainly had faith in the System, sir," Bane said. "And faith that the System would leave a non-violent separatist such as himself in peace."
"I take it he's not so lamb-like now."
"No sir—and you should see his dependents, sir."
"Fierce and Viking-like, I would imagine."
"They are awake to their Berserker heritage, yes sir."
"White rage is the most illegitimate of Aryan emotions in the Establishment's litany of heresy. The System has given it no quarter and no safety valve for relief," the Old Man replied.
"People have to surrender their minds and autonomy to the System, sir. The least dissent gets them labeled as potential neo-Nazi exterminators. It's all or nothing with ZOG."
"All or nothing. The ZOG won't allow a middle ground between us and it. It's very interesting how these matters develop, Brent. The System will allow no one to be free of the idolatry of this special class, this 'Chosen People' and all their attendant frauds and hoaxes, or of the pestilential racial melting pot. All people must conform to these or be broken by the media or the police, as our candidate was almost broken."
"You could almost say, sir, that ZOO does our recruiting for us."
"Indeed. That's a masterful insight, Commander Bane. And there are many more candidates."
"Yes sir, many more."
About the Author
Michael A. Hoffman II is a former reporter for the Albany, New York bureau of the Associated Press, WGVA, WEOS and a Washington D.C. weekly newspaper.