A DISTANT THUNDER Read online

  That’s how Dummy-Dummy Sorels got his first leg up as the establishment’s chief head-knocker in our part of Lewis County. Sorels was a young Dundee cop at the time, a big muscleman with mighty bulging biceps and pecs and a tiny waist so he looked top-heavy and overbalanced. When the steroids he took made his hair thin our Sorels shaved his head, and I swear to God there was a kind of point on it. His skull looked almost pear-shaped and it was so noticeable he wore his hat all the time. We used to see Sorels beating on the homeless people on the street and making their faces bleed. But because the library was technically county and not city property, Miss Haines banned Sorels and told him if he came in and beat any of them she would call her friends in the ACLU and sue the department, and even Sorels had sense enough to be afraid of lawyers. Miss Haines didn’t want the homeless people in there, not really, but she hated Sorels and I think she took a bit of pleasure in shielding them from him. She had been Leon Sorels’ teacher in elementary school, and I think it was her who told everybody his name back then had been Dummy-Dummy. He never forgot or forgave that. By the time of 10/22 Miss Haines was retired. Her house burned down one night and her body was found shot to death in the charred ruins. Sorels veryloudly blamed the NVA for it, but we knew different.

  * * *

  I guess the next thing I should talk about is Dundee High School. When I entered DHS our family was in our last apartment we lived in before we finally sank below the last middle class social bar and went into the trailers. As to myself, I was a skinny geek with acne, my academic record was remarkable for its mediocrity, the possibility of college was so remote for anyone with my record of Fernandez-beating and homophobia that it never even figured into anything, and I was voted most likely to end up pumping gas. That pretty much says it all. But my high school experience wasn’t about me.

  Somebody once said the Northwest War of Independence was a revolution won by pagan men and Christian women. That’s a pretty big over-simplification. Actually, it’s a damned big oversimplification. But there’s a goodly kernel of truth in it. That pagan man/Christian woman combination could be very lethal to Zion, and I speak from experience.

  Her name was Rooney.

  I honestly can’t remember when was the first time I noticed Rooney Wingfield in the corridors of Dundee High School. Washington used the old middle school system back then and so I went into Dundee High at the age of fourteen. The Wingfield kids had gone to West Harbor middle school and I went to Broad Street, so I didn’t know her before then. By the middle of the tenth grade at DHS she was definitely on my radar screen. Rooney was one of those kids you knew by sight but you never seemed to know her name. She was this big, tall, gawky but strong girl with long hair who always wore homespun clothing that wasn’t chic or fashionable. It was genuinely homespun, as in made at home by herself and her mother. Her ensemble always included ankle-length dresses so she looked like a Sixties hippie chick wearing a maxi-skirt, or else some kind of ghost from the nineteenth century. She marched up and down the corridors like she was doing a power walk, and she would shoulder people out of her way if you didn’t step aside fast enough. Somehow I learned by the kind of kid-osmosis grapevine that operates in school that she was a freak, her family were religious nuts and that was why she wore those funny long skirts, that they were trailer trash who worked as mechanics but it wasn’t a good idea to mess with her because she’d just as soon punch you in the face as look at you, and she also had two older brothers on the football team who were the size of oxen and who plowed through every defensive line in the state high school conference like tanks, and so bullying was high on the not recommended list, at least not until the brothers graduated. This much I knew about Rooney before she and I ever even so much as exchanged eye contact.

  Mmm, this is going to take some explaining.

  Now, I was Rooney Wingfield’s biggest fan in life. Still am. But even today I have to be honest. By no stretch of anyone’s imagination could Rooney ever be called beautiful. We’re talking Sarah Plain and Tall on her best day. But dammit, her face was alive, expressive, if you can understand what I am saying, in a way that was true of no other girl in that school. You looked in that homely face and there was life. There was a mind, not just an appetite. There was something there besides some ditz yearning to hit the mall with a credit card. You’d need to have been there to understand what completely brainless whores most white girls were. You ever see a Madonna video from the old days? Well, that was what white girls wanted to be, Material Girls. What they mostly turned out to be was just junkie sluts who sold themselves to niggers and spics for drugs and money when they were young, and turned into evil castrating bitches who made their mens’ lives hell as they grew into adulthood. Not that us guys were any better, lest I be accused of misogyny. There was plenty of blame to go around for that whole crappy situation, believe me, and no one was exempt. As far as white boys were concerned, white girls or for that matter girls of any color were just notches to be racked up on your dork and displayed like trophies. The very idea of trying to talk to one on an intelligent basis as a fellow human being simply didn’t figure into the white boy subculture of the time, and that’s assuming that the white boys had anything intelligent to say, which we didn’t. Total, complete materialism. Total, complete selfishness. Total, complete absence of anything like racial pride or respect for anyone of the opposite sex or even for oneself. Get it while you can, take it and run, and screw the whole rest of the world. If you were lucky you got to live life like you saw on the DVDs for a while and then you died.

  Rooney was different. You could just tell that she actually had a brain, and among white women that was rare indeed. You have no idea how that fascinated me.

  She was tall, a good inch taller than me actually, and the maxiskirts she always wore made her look even taller. I believe the cliché term would be raw-boned, and it wouldn’t be too far off. But she was never fat. I’ve mentioned this obesity business before; it started early. Because of that horrible junk food diet combined with mass Scandinavian immigration a century before, here in the Northwest we tended to get a lot of these Tugboat Annie types. Really tall and big-boned Norska-descended women, who would have looked really fine if they’d spent their lives doing farm work like their foremothers, but now they were bloated and distorted out of shape by a lifetime of tacos and Toblerones, 150 pounds or more overweight with dangling dewlaps of fat on their upper arms, a mighty buffalo butt with thunder thighs and a blue-chinned five o’clock shadow. A lot of these fat gals I recall actually had to shave, you know. Shave their faces and shave their backs. Some kind of weird hormone thing due to the rotten diet, maybe the climate, who the hell knows? But it was a fact. Rooney wasn’t one of those. She never ballooned up to 300 pounds and became a La Gorda and that was one reason you just kind of knew she was from somewhere else. (South Carolina, actually.) Rooney wasn’t petite by any means. She was a big girl with broad strong shoulders, but she was nobly built. She damned sure never had to shave anything. She was a big, tall, strong woman and by God she was all woman. She was stacked like a seam of grapes and if the face wasn’t cover girl, she had a body any Valkyrie would envy. Her best feature was her hair. It was long, down to her shoulders when we first met and later on it was down to her waist. Not exactly blond, not exactly red, not exactly brown. I suppose honey might do in a pinch, but it wasn’t exactly that either. Whatever it was, it was soft and rippling like a running river. You wanted to drown in it.

  Wait. I’m getting ahead of myself. I’d better tell how Rooney and I met.

  The town square in Dundee was, and still is, very large and green, all very Norman Rockwell-ish, anchored on one side by the library and with this neat big white-painted gazebo, park benches, so forth and so on. In the center was the monument to our town’s famous shootout on Christmas Day of 1889, when the town marshall Frenchy Delacroix was killed in a big gunfight with Laughing Jack Culhane’s gang, all very Gary Cooper-ish. The first and the last time anything interest
ing ever happened in Dundee, Washington, at least until us evildoers came along. Since even the worst students at one point or another were forced to use the library, the square became a minor hangout, at least during the months when the weather was nice. I was going into the library one cold and clear Sunday afternoon just before Christmas break to try and find a book for a report on Native American Culture. That’s Indians. Politically Correct Washington was always big on Indians. Noble savages, my ass. At the time Indians ran all the casinos and it seemed every twenty miles there was some little “tribe” with a fifty-acre “reservation” just big enough to build a casino on so Joe Blow could come in and gamble away his children’s college money in a single evening. I have a certain amount of time for the Comanche and Lakota and Abenaki and even the Pueblo-builders. They were interesting people even if they weren’t white, and fair enough, the Aztecs and Mayas could build in stone and they had some spot-on calendars even if they did cut people’s hearts out as sacrifices to their gods, and the Mayas used to have these sacred wells where they’d tie up young girls after the Maya priests raped them and drop them in to drown. They also raised chihuahuas like we raise chickens, for food. Eating dog isn’t something I’d care to do, but it is a break from the humdrum. But our Northwest tribes were just crappy little nobodies who never cut anybody’s hearts out, except for up in Alaska there was some tribes who were cannibals. They made interesting totem poles, though.

  I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m doing it again. Right. Rooney.

  On that Sunday afternoon in January of my tenth grade year, I was going into the library when I looked over towards the gazebo and I saw a gaggle of so-called popular girls from Dundee High and their dumb-ass jock boyfriends milling around, at the center of which was Bo Decker, our prize negro and damned near our only negro. Bo was the bakketbawl star. No, not basketball. Bakketbawl. The ultimate nigger game. We don’t play it any more here in the Republic because somebody finally figured out it doesn’t take any particular athletic ability besides being able to bounce a ball up and down on a wooden floor and jump and swing from the hoop like a monkey and gibber about how Ah Gots More Moves Than Ex-Lax. It doesn’t even make you run any great distances like baseball and football do. We still play baseball because it requires teamwork and hand-eye coordination and disciplined upper body strength, and we still play football because it requires the combined use of strength and strategy and endurance, a good military training game. We still play hockey for the speed and the stick-fighting, rugby for the contact, and for the past fifty years we have been at war with every hurling team in Ireland’s Gaelic Athletic Association and every footie team in Australia. Basketball is a game for tall, skinny monkeys and is probably the most boring thing on the face of the earth to watch, coming in just after watching paint dry. But we all worshipped bakketbawl back in those days to a point that seems completely insane today. Why? Because it was the one and only thing on this earth, from that day until this, that blacks have ever been able to do better than whites, and so the media hyped it to a religion. A cult of nigger-worship.

  Anyway, Bo Decker was Dundee High’s bakketbawl star. Being our school’s Official Blackfella With the Ball, he also had his official white girl friend. The head cheerleader, needless to say, a long leggy California-style blonde Valley Girl with a tan named Jill Malloy. It still pisses me off that slut had an Irish name. Her father was vice president of one of the local banks and ran a real estate development company on the side with interests in all the local shopping malls and those damned Indian casinos. Village upper-crud of ZOG. Plenty of money and zero of anything else, including any sense of human decency. What the hell do you think happened to her, ma’am? After the Longview treaty she was put on the List by more than one of us who remembered. During the Cleanup Jill Malloy was tracked down by Force 101, she was tried for racial treason and convicted, and she was hanged.

  Anyway, I heard the ruckus and so I wandered over and I infiltrated the little crowd of high school kids, all of whom were watching the central drama, and none of whom took any notice of me whatsoever. I was after all only Shane the trailer trash geek, that yutz who’d gone nuts and attacked Bobby Fernandez back in third grade (everybody remembered that) but who hadn’t done anything of note since, and who was by now pretty much consigned to perpetual nonentity. I saw that the crux of the matter before the gazebo was that Jill the cheerleader was having a shouting, screaming, knock-down-drag-out with that weird girl in the long skirts I’d seen around school for about a year and whom I’d always had this hankering to meet. Those long skirts just seemed kind of sexy somehow. Everyone was yelling, but I could tell the weirdo girl was outnumbered and that Jill and her little clique of SUV Barbie dolls and the Barbie dolls’ dumb-ass Kens were all piling on her, working themselves up to break bad, and things were getting pretty strident. Jill was yelling at Rooney, “Racist bitch! You say you’re a Christian, but God made black men as well as white men!”

  “God also made goats!” yelled back Rooney in exasperated fury. “That don’t mean you got to fuck one!”

  “Oh, dat’s it, you redneck cracker ho’!” bellowed big nigger Bo in a fit of rage. He raised his huge black fist like a hammer to slam it down on Rooney’s head. It would have done a lot of damage if he’d connected. We’re talking a big buck here, King Kong with steroid muscles.

  Now, if this babble of mine properly followed assorted heroic tales of revolutionary derring-do that some of my, uh, former comrades have published in their memoirs subsequent to those times, or even an NBA movie script, here is where I should have gone for the nigger, called him out with a speech full of National Socialist or else Christian Identity fervor depending in who was telling the story, then fought an epic hand-to-hand combat and emerged triumphant with my foot on his monkoid chest before carrying the Aryan maiden off to some secluded bower for a night of passion or maybe reading Bible verses, again depending on who’s doing the telling. But things didn’t work like that in real life. I was still in the stunned and gaping mode that white people went into back then whenever they actually saw a white person standing up to Political Correctness, especially in a loud and public way. It didn’t compute. White people didn’t act like that. They weren’t supposed to, anyway. When a black man raised his hand to strike, white people were supposed to fall to their knees and cringe and thump their tails between their legs and piss on the ground.

  But as it happened, Rooney didn’t need any help. She just turned to Bo in irritation and snarled at him, “Hey, monkey meat, if I want to hear from you I’ll pull your chain!” Then she ignored him and went back to cussing Jill something fierce, reading her the riot act with Biblical chapter and verse. To her the monkoid wasn’t even there; the white slut was the real problem. Which was of course the case. Even at age fifteen, the girl had an ideological grasp of the essentials. I didn’t hear what she was saying. I was watching Bo of the Bubble Lip, measuring how long a leap it would take me to be on him if he hit her. I knew I couldn’t beat him in a fight and I didn’t have a concrete block, so I pulled out my Swiss army knife and opened it surreptitiously against my body. I figured I’d try to stick it through the nigger’s eye into his brain, but it wasn’t necessary. Big bad-ass Bo hesitated, and then he kind of shrank, then he suddenly said to Jill “Fuck this!” and then he dragged her away by force across the square and tossed her into his big shiny new SUV. That was the signal. Showtime was over. The entourage having lost their Baron Samedi, they muttered and babbled and faded away like zombies melting down into the earth at cockcrow. Within a minute that square was empty except for me and Rooney. The show was over once Big Nig was gone. Michael Jordan has left the building.

  Instinctively, without even the words to explain it to myself, I understood what had happened. A black man had met a white person who was not afraid of him. A white person he couldn’t Mau Mau. Gender didn’t matter. A black meets a real white man or woman, he understands Ole Massa or in this case De Missy is back. He folds. That’s the way it w
orks. Have you ever noticed that an animal can never look a man in the eye? That was Rooney Wingfield. She whupped that buck’s ass without raising a finger or even raising her voice. She sent him slinking off the court like a whipped dog through the sheer strength of her mighty spirit. Oh, yeah. That was Rooney. Always.

  I looked at the weirdo girl with the long skirt. She was flushed red and shaking and brushing back her beautiful, beautiful hair with her fluttering fingers. I picked up on something. “You were scared,” I said.

  “Of course I was,” she said matter-of-factly. “Mobs tend to have that effect on a person. You ever get twenty of them blasphemers around you trying to work themselves up to attack, you’ll be scared, too.”

  “God, you’re a hell of a woman!” I told her, with every ounce of admiration in whatever soul a fifteen year-old can have.

  She looked at me, unsmiling. “And you’re a hell of man,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, genuinely puzzled. “I didn’t do anything.” Without thinking I folded the knife and put it back in my pocket, and she saw it.

  “Yes, you did,” said Rooney. “You’re a white male, right?”

  “Uh, last time I took off my underwear and checked, yeah,” I said.

  “And when you saw there was trouble, racial trouble with yelling and screaming, you didn’t run away,” she said. “You didn’t look the other way and whistle a bit and walk into the library pretending you didn’t see or hear anything. Like I saw four other white guys from Dundee High School do, all the while that whole stupid mess was going on just now. Instead, you came towards me. You came over here. You marched to the sound of the guns. That’s what white men do. The old kind, anyway. I guess you’re one of the old kind.”