A DISTANT THUNDER Page 12

  A sudden inspiration hit me. All of a sudden I thought I understood. “You’re from there, aren’t you!” I said, suddenly impressed.

  “From where?” asked Mandelbaum, caught off balance.

  “The cackle box!” I replied enthusiastically. “I saw this video once where one of the guys in the cackle box was trying to eggscape, and he took off his clothes and got into this place where he was nekkid and a doctor came in a white coat and the guy knocked him out on the head and took his white coat and his stessascope and his car keys and the guy stole the doctor’s car and went to this town and got this girl and told her he was a doctor and then he went to her house and they got nekkid and did stuff and then some other guy came and he knew the first one wasn’t really a doctor and they had a big fight and the one who was pretending to be the doctor stabbed the other guy and the girl ran outside all nekkid with her boobs bouncing and she was yelling help help and the cops came but the guy who was pretending to be the doctor ran off and hid in the woods and then he went to this old house and he found this mast and a ole chain saw and he put the mast on his face and he got some gas from a can and he started up the chain saw and then he goes looking for the girl again to chop her up with the chain saw.”

  Doctor Mandelbaum stood up and slapped my face. He looked at me with freezing contempt and anger. “Freud was right. You people are beyond all help. No matter how sincerely one tries, it is impossible to treat a sociopath.” He wheeled and threw open the office door. “Jefferson!” he shouted out, like our principal was his errand boy. “Get this little fascist son of a bitch out of here! Make sure he has no contact with any other students!” The janitor, Mr. Gray, came and took me down to his little office and let me watch an old Judge Judy re-run on his little TV, and he also gave me a soda and a bag of Doritos.

  They called my parents. I think Mandelbaum was serious. He was about to invoke It Takes A Village. The law that allowed the state to take healthy white children away from “racist” homes and place them for adoption with politically correct people who could afford to pay the six and sometimes seven-figure adoption bonds. For some reason It Takes A Village never seemed to take an interest in “unsuitable home environments” where the kids concerned were black or brown. There were, after all, plenty of those available for normal adoption. Only white children were sufficiently rare to merit being kidnapped at gunpoint by the United States. My mom was either out physically at work (she always made it to work, I’ll give her that) or else she was out on the floor, and since Dad was now out of work again he was home and reasonably sober when they called, so it was my father who came down to deal with the latest crisis of the problem child who had just accused his Jewish shrink of being an escaped mental patient.

  Now comes a mystery.

  My dad went into that office with Mr. Jefferson and Doctor Mandelbaum at about three in the afternoon and he came out at about four. He came down to Mr. Gray’s little room and without a word the janitor opened his drawer and handed my father a bottle in a brown paper bag, from which he took a long pull. They stepped outside into the corridor and talked for a couple of minutes in low tones, and then Dad came over and said to me “Come on, sport. Let’s go home.”

  Mr. Gray looked at him. “I’ll try to warn you if I hear anything, Bill,” he told my father. “And Bill, if things go bad, I’ll take care of it.”

  “Don’t, Jeff,” my father said to him. “Don’t jam yourself up for me. We were never all that buddy-buddy back in the old days, you know.”

  “It won’t be for you,” said Mr. Gray. “It’ll be for me, and for Shane, and for this great little town of Dundee, Washington. There are still a few of us who remember the old way, Bill, and there are still a few red lines. If they cross this one, then I’m taking care of it.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” said my father.

  “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way,” said the janitor.

  “From your first cigarette, to your dying day,” responded my father. By then I had my jacket on and we left. In the car I asked him, “When were you in a jet?”

  “When I was a very young man, Shane, before the Mexicans came and when our whole town was white people, our high school football team was called the Dundee Jets,” said Dad. “We were one tight and righteous crew. Oh, yeah.”

  “I guess they’re going to kick me out of school because of what I did to Bobby, huh?” I asked.

  “Son, I don’t know for sure, but somehow I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Doctor Mandelbaum is a psychiatrist. He makes his living by evaluating the state of mind of other people,” said Dad in a neutral voice. “Whether or not you can go to school again depends on whether or not Doctor Mandelbaum is a good psychiatrist. On whether or not he can tell when a man means what he says, even a man whom he personally holds in pure contempt. It depends on whether Doctor Mandelbaum is capable of understanding that even for someone like himself, decisions can still on occasion have consequences.” Then my father and I went home and he made me spaghetti-o’s before he got drunk.

  My mom came to my bedside that night I met Doctor Mandelbaum in the principal’s office. She must have knocked back at least a whole half-gallon plastic jug of Jim Beam, because she was really soppy drunk, and that was rare for her. She was all over me, stroking my hair and crying, reeking of the booze. “My poor little boy! What kind of world have we brought you into? My poor little brave boy!” I didn’t understand it at the time, but even in her maudlin drunkenness Mom could not bring herself to call me her poor brave little white boy. Even when she was three sheets to the wind, the taboo against any mention of race, at least our own race, was overriding. “Oh Shanie, Shanie, you mustn’t ever be so brave again!” she moaned. “Because they look for brave little boys and they mark them forever, and one day they will destroy you. Please, Shanie, you must promise me, you won’t ever try to be brave again. You mustn’t try and fight, Shanie, because they will destroy you in a thousand ways you can’t understand. You must learn to just be quiet and think your own thoughts, in silence, and in your silence be proud that you are among the last. Shanie, you mustn’t ever be brave again. Promise Mommy you won’t ever try to be brave again!” I didn’t say anything and after a while she passed out and fell onto the floor.

  But Dad was right. I stayed out of school the next day, a Friday, and the next Monday I took the bus to school and went to class like nothing had happened. From then on, Bobby Fernandez and the other bullies stayed the hell away from me. I never saw Rabbi Jacob Mandelbaum again or heard anything at all of him, until one morning during the war when he left his Tudor mansion on Bainbridge Island, got into his car, turned the ignition and got raptured. I recognized his name from the newspaper report. This was a dozen years after I broke bad at MLK Elementary; his rapture had nothing whatsoever to do with me and much to do with the fact that he was an arrogant Jewish asshole who had not only pissed off many, many people in the Northwest Homeland but who, for all his rabbinical training, did not recall enough Hebrew to read Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin when it was written on the wall in front of him. So how did my father save me from It Takes A Village? To this very day, I have no idea. I didn’t understand what happened at the time and Dad and I never discussed it again. Mr. Gray, who knew, was long gone by the time I was ever in a position to come and ask him.

  Well, there went my only chance to get out of Lewis County, Washington, and grow up in some rich liberal family of yuppies. Instead, I stayed in the land of my birth. The cold land, the hard land, the land where the winter was chill and wet and the jobs were scarce, where the woodchucks ate from tin cans in trailers and drank from rotgut forties of Rainier Ale and cursed the Mexicans who swarmed over us like fire ants and stripped us bare. The Northwest Homeland. My wallet was always light, but when I came to manhood the gun in my hand was heavy and real and strong, and even with my pockets empty, I always stood tall and no enemy ever saw my back. Whatever you did for me on tha
t afternoon so long ago.. .thanks, Dad. You left me nothing but a man’s burden to carry, but there are a hell of a lot worse legacies to leave a son.

  * * *

  Not that I escaped unscathed. By no means. At age eight, that whole episode went into my lifelong permanent record and never left me until we finally won the revolution. At my last job interview under the old ZOG system, when I was working temp in a warehouse but was looking for something that had at least some kind of rudimentary medical insurance, I was denied employment as a janitor in an office building, because in third grade I had displayed “racist and anti-social tendencies” and the poor middle-aged white woman who interviewed me was scared to hire me because she “might get in trouble with the government.”

  At least the Northwest Republic found me worthy to guard their cranberries.

  After the Bobby Fernandez contretemps in the third grade there isn’t much to tell for a while, except our family kept on going downhill economically and socially and everything around us kept getting worse and worse. But there was one development I suppose I should mention, about me. Maybe it was that arrogant old fart Mandelbaum telling me I didn’t need to know who Shakespeare was, maybe I was just so desperate to escape the crappy world and home life I was growing up in that I grabbed onto any straw, maybe because we couldn’t afford a computer and the stuff on TV was such stupid banal crap that even as a child it bored me and repulsed me, but about that time of my life I really turned inward, so to speak. I discovered books.

  I discovered that it was possible to find things in books, to get things out of books, knowledge and images and thoughts that you never saw on TV. What happened was that I was in the library one day soon after the Fernandez thing, and for some reason I pulled out an ancient, crumbling copy of Booth Tarkington’s Penrod, His Complete Story from the shelves, and I started reading about a boy who grew up in Indiana before World War One. I saw a childhood that I understood might have been mine, and that later on I understood should have been mine. I took the form home that night and got Mom to sign it before she got too drunk, I got a library card, and the first book I checked out was Penrod so I could finish it. I pretty much stopped talking to people, and I started reading. Most kids my age who wanted to escape fled into the cyber-world where they could play games and blow up virtual monsters and lose themselves in unreality, but not me. I don’t know why—who knows how these things work?—but television and computer games simply lost their appeal for me. All of a sudden I discovered my own unreality of escape in the world of books. The Rochambeau Memorial Library in Dundee had been founded in 1899 by a woman named Margarita Rochambeau who was the first editor of the Dundee Advertiser, evidently a very cultured lady who had made sure it was stocked with all the classics of the time, and thanks to a long succession of very dedicated librarians who took pride in their work and kept their stock in repair, many of those books were still around and still readable over a century later. There were several more Booth Tarkingtons in first editions, like Seventeen and Gentle Julia and The Magnificent Ambersons. From there it was straight to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, (this was before it was proscribed.) Then I got into Jules Verne and went around the moon with Barbicane and Captain Nicholl and Michael Arden, and then I read H. G. Wells’ First Men In The Moon and went all the way and saw the Selenites. Later I fought Martians in The War of the Worlds. I noticed that it was always the older fiction I liked, Wells and Tarkington, Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle, the mysteries by John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie, the science fiction from the 1940s and 1950s. There is a now forgotten writer named Edison Marshall who made me a Viking, a Southern planter dancing cotillons in Charleston, a sailor on a Yankee clipper ship, and an English peasant lad who fought his way up to become lord of the manor and marry milady as well. Thanks to George Shipway I sailed with Agamemnon against Troy, swung a sword in King Stephen’s wars in medieval England and fought for the Raj on the searing plains of Punjab. There were some childrens’ books by a woman named Eleanor Cameron about kids making a space ship and flying off to the Mushroom Planet that I used to dream about, getting in a space ship and flying away from Dundee. These books took me back to a time when white men ruled the world and there was no political correctness, no Bobby Fernandezes wanting me to suck dick, and when people had jobs and homes and families where nobody got drunk all the time.

  I discovered that I liked non-fiction even more, and I was drawn irresistably to history. Not the fake history we were taught in school that was always about how great and wonderful women and Indians and Africans and Polynesians were, and how superior any non-white civilization was, and where white men never figured except as villains who always came along and killed off and exploited all the noble savages. I read all the older books I could find in the library, about ancient Rome, Charlemagne, the Middle Ages when knighthood was in flower, everything from the story of Gothic architecture to Zeppelins of World War One. By a process I still don’t understand I became a history junkie, desperately thirsty for any knowledge of times past. Better times and places when everyone who mattered had my color skin. Anything about the Civil War thrilled me, on the Confederate side of course. I went through a brief and very silly period in fifth grade where I spoke with what I thought was a Southern accent and I told people I was really born in Tennessee and adopted. But above all there were the books about the Führer Adolf Hitler, National Socialism, and the Third Reich. I would have pretended to be a German if it hadn’t been completely beyond me. I didn’t dare draw a swastika anywhere it might be seen or traced back to me. I had that much sense anyway. But I used to find places to hide in the woods or sometimes in school, with a pencil and pieces of paper, and I’d practice drawing swastika after swastika, and I’d also draw SS runes and Confederate flags, and German soldiers and Klansmen in robes, and sometimes knights in armor, and of course the obligatory Vikings. I always made sure I tore all the drawings up and flushed them down the toilet or burned them after I had to go back out into the real world.

  I guess some people are simply born out of step with their time, and I was one of those. I was coming to understand that things around me weren’t right somehow, that this was not the way life is supposed to be. The books showed me what my life should have been like, in infinite variations. I became haunted, obsessed by a vision of a world very different than the one which I grew up in, an all-white world with very different standards and priorities. A world of strength and valor and glory, full of all the qualities and virtues and experiences which seemed to have vanished completely from the earth. I had an idealized view of the past, all white faces, of course, and all the more thrilling because I understood that this vision was forbidden and that if I were noticed reading too many books about European and Confederate and especially Third Reich topics, I would get into trouble again. I became a master hand at sneaking my library books to school and reading them when I should have been watching videos or working on the computer in class. I wanted to somehow bring the vision to life again, make the world as it once was, but I had no idea of what such a brave new world should be like in the future. But there was something out there. Something different. Something better. There had to be. I had to find it, or I knew at some point I would go mad and die. I had to find it!

  From third grade on, I started spending as much time as I could in the library, alongside all the winos and homeless that used to crowd in on winter days to keep warm, pretending to read the magazines. I found a study carrel hidden away at the back of one of the stacks, and I used to stay hunched over it reading until I had to go home. I learned to tune out the ravings of the homeless lunatics in the library and my drunken parents at home, and in the pages of books I would immerse myself in whole different worlds I never knew existed. What were homeless, ma’am? You’re supposed to be a historian and you don’t know? Just what the name says. People with no homes. Why did they have no homes? Because they didn’t have any money. I told you, everything was about money in them days. No money, you lived on t
he street or in the woods. No, I’m not kidding. Swear to God, ma’am, it really happened. Whole families in those days sometimes lived in state parks in caves like Neanderthals. Yes, even children, although to be sure whenever the law found white children homeless they were usually kidnapped by It Takes A Village, unless the kid had some kind of serious medical problem and none of the rich yuppies wanted them. A lot of times It Takes A Village would do sweeps through the parks and the homeless jungles and grab up all the kids and.

  Why did America let children live in caves and the woods and below underpasses? I told you, they had no money. Ah.. .yes ma’am, it was terrible and evil. Why else do you think we revolted? What did you think it was all about? That we fought and killed The Beast for something to do? I’m sorry, that sounds mean and crotchety and I shouldn’t talk to you like that. I know you don’t understand, and that’s how it should be. You shouldn’t have to understand such things. You all right, ma’am? We can start again tomorrow if you want. You sure?

  The library was one of the few public places where there was heat that the homeless couldn’t be run off from as long as they stayed fairly quiet. They stank up the place and muttered to themselves and were sometimes drunk or doped, but they always shut up when the librarian Miss Haines shushed them, because they knew it was one of the few places in Dundee where they were safe from Leon Sorels and some of the other cops who beat them and set them on fire in order to encourage them to move on. There were thousands of homeless in those days, alcoholics and junkies a lot of them, true, but also a lot of middle-aged white men who just couldn’t get jobs. Once you got past forty-five or so in them days, you’d better not lose your job, because most likely you’d never work again. My dad was a case in point. The only reason we never ended up homeless was that my mom was a woman and she was always straight enough to hold down a job of some kind and one way or another we at least made the rent even if we had nothing but a can or two of beans in the cupboard. The local Chamber of Commerce types in the silk suits and Gucci shoes and hundred dollar haircuts who ran our town, like ten thousand others across the United States, didn’t like having homeless everywhere. They were bad for business, one of ZOG’s many dirty little secrets that had to be hidden away so as not to upset the beautiful people at play.