Small Great Things Read online

  "White kid got body-slammed by two niggers at school," I say. "They broke his back, but they didn't get charged. You can bet if it were the other way around, the White kids would have been charged with assault."

  Francis points the remote at the television and grunts. "That's because Cincinnati is in the ninety-ninth percentile of shit schools," he adds. "It's an all-black administration. What do we really want for our kids?"

  "That's good," I say, typing in his words. "I'm gonna end with that."

  Francis flips through the cable stations. "How come there's Black Entertainment TV but no White Entertainment TV?" he asks. "And people say there's no reverse racism." He turns off the television and stands up. "I'm headed to bed."

  He kisses Brit on the forehead and leaves for the night, headed to his side of the duplex. I expect her to get up, too, but she makes no move to leave.

  "Doesn't it kill you?" Brit asks. "The waiting?"

  I glance up. "How do you mean?"

  "It's like there's nothing immediate anymore. You don't know who's reading the stuff you post." She pivots to face me, sitting cross-legged. "Things used to be so much clearer. I learned my colors by looking at the shoelaces of the guys my dad was meeting up with. White Power and neo-Nazis had red or white laces. SHARPs were blue or green."

  I smirk. "I have a hard time imagining your father meeting with SHARPs." Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice are the biggest race traitors you'll ever meet; they target those of us who are fighting the good fight by trying to get rid of lesser races. They think they're fucking Batman, every one of them.

  "I didn't say it was a...friendly meeting," Brit replies. "But actually, sometimes he did. You did what you had to do--even if it seemed to go against all reason--because you were seeing the big picture." She glances up at me. "You know Uncle Richard?"

  Not personally, but Brit did. He was Richard Butler, the head of Aryan Nations. He died when Brit was about seventeen.

  "Uncle Richard was friends with Louis Farrakhan."

  The leader of the Nation of Islam? This was news to me. "But...he's..."

  "Black? Yeah. But he hates Jews and the federal government as much as we do. Daddy always says the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Brit shrugs. "It was kind of an unspoken understanding: after we worked together to bring down the system, then we'd fight each other."

  We'd win, of that I have no doubt.

  She looks at me carefully. "What do we really want for our kids?" Brit says, repeating Francis's earlier comment. "I know what I want for my kid. I want him to be remembered."

  "Baby, you know we won't forget him."

  "Not us," Brit says, her words suddenly hard. "Everyone."

  I look at her. I know what she's saying: that typing a blog may indeed crumble foundations, but it's far more dramatic--and faster--to blow the building up from the top down.

  To some extent I'd been too late for the Skinhead Movement, which had its heyday ten years before I was born. I imagined a world where when people saw me coming, they ran away. I thought about how Francis and I had spent the past two years trying to convince crews that anonymity was more insidious--and terrifying--than overt threats. "Your father won't go along with this," I say.

  Brit leans down and kisses me, softly, pulling away so I am left wanting more. God, I've missed this. I missed her.

  "What my father doesn't know can't hurt him," she answers.

  --

  RAINE IS PUMPED to get my phone call. It's been two years since I've seen him; he didn't make it to my wedding, because his wife had just had their second baby. When I tell him I'm in Brattleboro for the day, he invites me to his house for lunch. He's moved, so I jot the address down on a napkin.

  At first I'm sure I'm in the wrong place. It's a little ranch on a cul-de-sac, with a mailbox that is shaped like a cat. There's a bright red plastic slide on the front lawn and a ticky-tacky wooden snowman hanging near the front door. The welcome mat says HI! WE'RE THE TESCOS!

  Then a slow grin spreads over my face. The smart bastard. He's taking hiding in plain sight to a whole new level. I mean, who would ever expect that the dad living next door who power-washes his porch and lets his kid ride a bike with training wheels up and down the driveway is actually a White Supremacist?

  Raine opens the door before I even get a chance to knock. He's holding a chunky toddler in his arms, and poking out from between the towers of his legs is a shy little girl wearing a tutu and a princess crown. He grins, reaching out to embrace me. I can't help but notice he is wearing sparkling pink nail polish.

  "Bro," I say, glancing at his fingers. "Nice fashion statement."

  "You should see how good I am at tea parties. Come in! Man, it's good to see you."

  I walk inside, and the little girl ducks behind Raine's legs. "Mira," he says, crouching down, "this is Turk, Daddy's friend."

  She sticks her thumb into her mouth, like she's sizing me up.

  "She's not great with strangers," Raine says. He juggles the baby in his arms. "This bruiser here is Isaac."

  I follow him inside, past toys that are littered like confetti, and into the living room. Raine gets me a cold one, but he doesn't take a beer for himself. "I'm drinking alone?"

  He shrugs. "Sal doesn't like when I drink in front of the kids. Doesn't think it sets a great example, and some crap like that."

  "Where is Sally?" I ask.

  "At work! She does radiology at the VA. I'm kind of in between jobs, so I'm home with the hobbits."

  "Cool," I say, taking a long pull from the bottle.

  Raine sets Isaac on the floor. He starts stumbling around like a very tiny drunk. Mira runs down the hallway into her bedroom, her feet pounding like a round of artillery. "So what's up with you, man?" Raine asks. "You good?"

  I rest my elbows on my knees. "I could be better. It's kind of what brought me here."

  "Trouble in paradise?"

  I realize that Raine has no idea Brit and I had a baby. That we lost that baby. I start to tell him the whole story--from that nigger nurse to the moment Davis stopped breathing. "I'm calling on all the squads. From the Vermont NADS all the way down to the Maryland State Skinheads. I want a day of vengeance to honor my son."

  When Raine doesn't respond, I lean forward. "I'm talking vandalism. Good old-fashioned fights. Firebombs. Anything short of a casualty, I figure. It's up to the individual squads and their leaders. But something visible that gets us noticed. And I know it goes against what we've been working toward by blending in, but maybe it's time for a little reminder of our power, you know? There's strength in numbers. If we make a statement that's big enough, they can't arrest us all." I look him in the eye. "We deserve this. Davis deserves this."

  Just then Mira dances down the hallway and drops a crown on her father's head. He pulls it off, looking soberly at the cheap foil circle. "Baby, can you go draw me a picture? That's a good girl." He follows her with his eyes as she goes back to her room. "I'm guessing you didn't hear," Raine says to me.

  "Hear what?"

  "I'm out, man. I'm not with the Movement anymore."

  I stare at him, shocked. Raine was the one who had gotten me into White Power in the first place. Once I had joined NADS, we were brothers for life. It wasn't like this was a job you could just walk away from. It was a calling.

  Suddenly I remember the line of swastika tattoos Raine had up and down his arm. I look at his shoulders, his biceps. The swastikas have been repurposed into a sleeve of vines. You can't even tell the symbols were there in the first place.

  "It happened a couple years ago. Sal and I had gone to a rally that summer, like you and me and the boys used to, and everything was great except there were guys waiting in line to screw a skinchick in her tent. It freaked Sal out, taking our baby to a place where that was happening. So I started going to the rallies by myself, leaving Sal with the baby. Then we got called into preschool because Mira tried to bury some Chinese kid in the sandbox, because she said she was playing kitty and that's