A Song Called Youth (32 page)

To one side stood Colonel Watson, in a neat gray suit and trenchcoat, his face florid with the chill. On the other was Sackville-West, sitting in a pew, head bowed, hat in hands.

Over the altar was a twelve-by-eight-foot oil-painting, professionally but cornily rendered, showing Jesus sitting on his throne, his face uncharacteristically creased in a scowl of judgment. On his head was a circlet of oak-leaves. Sitting at his feet were Rick and Ellen Crandall, painted with just a little flattery, both in white robes. There was a steel cross on a blond-wood stand under the painting, and imprinted at the intersection of its bars, no bigger than a silver dollar, was an “iron cross.” To either side of the dais area were furled flags—an Old Glory, a Confederate flag, and one he didn’t recognize, its insignia folded away. White tulips stood in a silver vase on the altar, a floral benediction.

The room blushed with rosy light from the stained glass. He looked at the stained-glass figures and didn’t recognize them.

There were paintings along the walls to either side of the pews. He couldn’t make them out from here, except that they were neurotically intricate and allegorical, with figures suspended in the heavens in hallucinogenic clusters.

Swenson couldn’t move. He was transfixed there at the entrance. He told himself,
Don’t be stupid. Don’t be a child.

But he stayed where he was until Watson looked over and beckoned.

He walked down the aisle past the empty pews toward the black-coated backs of two Nazis in full, mid-twentieth century SS uniforms, kneeling at the altar in silent prayer.

Watson stepped out of the chancel, and with the exaggerated quiet of a man wary of a sacred moment, walked down the outside aisle, then gestured for Swenson to join him three pews back.

The two men sat down side by side on the hard wooden pews.

“Sackville-West wants you along,” Watson said, more a mutter than a whisper.

“Along on what?”

Watson snorted and nodded toward the two Nazis, figures from a propaganda painting. “We’re going to ‘initiate’ those two nitwits . . . ” He shrugged, and the briskness of the motion told Swenson that the colonel was irritated; irritated just short of fury. “A man named Strawling from Idaho—he attended one of our conventions out in Orange County. By some administrative mistake, this man Strawling was allowed into the SA-Initiates meetings, attended Special Services, the whole bit. Got himself all excited. Turns out he belongs to the National Socialist White People’s Party! We’d had no idea, of course. We don’t need unsubtle dunderheads among the Initiates . . . But somehow he slipped through the screenings . . . He told his pal, the one kneeling there beside him, and they came out here . . . Just drove up to the goddamn gate at dawn, told the guards they wanted to see Rick Crandall. They heard about the assassination attempt—wanted to be his bodyguards!” His voice dripped with contempt. “They were all got up like that! At the gates of Cloudy Peak Farm, dressed like
that
! Like old school twentieth century Nazis! Christ, if some reporter was hanging around . . . ” He shook his head. “Naturally we didn’t let them in to see Rick. The guards rang Sackville-West and old Sacks rang me out of a sound sleep and we went to see Rick. He said they should make their peace with God, so here they are. I don’t know why Sacks wanted you along—” Swenson felt Watson look at him. “But I think it’s a kind of initiation for you, too. Not the kind those two are getting, of course . . . ”

Swenson nodded. He sat like something carved into the wood of the pew, remembering the Second Circle, and the Services, the pageantry of it, and how he’d almost lost himself . . . 

Excerpt from a memo

From: Frank Purchase to Quincy Witcher

Thought you would be interested in the following letter from Stisky to Encendez. Father Encendez was in prison at the time of the letter’s composition. The letter was never mailed. We found it when we went through Stisky’s effects.

. . . the truth is, I never believed. When I entered the Church, I “suspended my disbelief” like you do when you’re reading a novel. You believe in the novel’s subjective world while you’re reading it, but of course you know it’s all made up. But you prefer to believe, while you’re reading, because you love the intricacy, the marvel of it, the sublime distraction of it. I feel the same way about The Church. The Church is a she, and I once fell in love with a woman, and knew that, despite all she said, she didn’t love me back, not really. The love I fantasized was unreal, and I knew it, but I made myself believe in it because it was a delicious reassurance. The Church has a thousand volumes of love letters it has written to itself, in the form of the Apologias and so forth, in all their manifestations. The Church is a beautiful lie. I saw no harm in the necessary casuistry. And it gave me a base to work from, to help the poor. I wanted to get in among the people who needed me, and it put me there. I wonder about my own underlying motives, though. The pageantry of the Church, the patina of glamour on the rituals; the pleasantly musty homeliness of a Jesuitical library; the asceticism so weighty with our self-congratulation. But most of all the pageantry, like the tarted-up garishness of a Parisian whore, the rituals, the accoutrements, all of it seduces me . . . 

As you can see, our “Swenson” has a profound psychological need for ritual. The more dramatic the ritual, the better. Again, his predilections are a double-edged sword. I worry that when he undergoes the SA’s Second Circle training program, and sees the neofascist splendor of their Services, he may fall under their spell. He denied his faith, in private, and he was rebellious, but ultimately his actions bespoke a strong loyalty to the Church, until he was defrocked. If he develops the same neurotic attachments to the rituals of the SA’s inner circle, we may lose his loyalty entirely . . . 

They were walking through the slowly dissipating mists, under the oak trees. An SAISC guard in full mask walked ahead, carrying a rifle, like a platoon patrol’s point man; then came Swenson with Watson and the two Nazis walking to Watson’s left. Behind them were two more faceless SA guardsmen.

They strolled along a trail, under a tracework of damp black twigs having the look of old electrical cords. Winter-withered ferns arced dripping to either side; there was a smell of rotting wood and mushrooms. A single blackbird trilled and warbled and trilled yet again. Swenson was cold. He zipped up his jacket and balled his hands in his pockets.

He thought he could feel the guards looking at his back.

The Nazis were wearing their shiny billed caps now. There was a young one with beetling brows and a weak chin, and an older one with a face like a knot of old tree wood. They both had Western accents; they’d come from northern Idaho. “The panhandle,” they said. They both owned businesses out that way, but they’d decided coming here was more important. A man had to choose between profit and duty sometimes, the young one had said. No matter what they said, Watson acted as if he saw the perfect rightness of it. He nodded and said, “Mm-hmm, oh, I agree,” now and then. Their dress uniforms were knife-creased, neat as a pin, complete with swastika armbands; their boots spit-polished. Swenson saw Watson wince when he looked at the armbands.

The two men didn’t seem to understand what was happening. Except that, now and then, the older one glanced nervously over his shoulder at the guards.

They came to another steel-mesh fence; the sentry let the German Shepherds tug him along between the inner and outer fences.

The trail veered left, hooking back toward the chapel, and they turned to follow it. They walked along silently for another hundred feet and stopped when they came to a small clearing. The brush had grown up thickly around the clearing. To one side was a wooden bench cut from a log. Watson smiled wearily at the Nazis and said, “Sit down, boys.” They looked dubiously at the log; the dampness would stain their uniforms. But they sat.

Suddenly the older one, licking his lips, looked up and said, “Maybe we shouldn’ta come here like this. Guess we shoulda called. But we got the runaround when I tried to write. I figured I had to go right to Reverend Crandall. But if you say we leave, well, I guess we’ll sure leave.”

“Nobody said anything about your having to leave,” Watson said neutrally. He took a neatly folded handkerchief from his coat pocket and blew his nose on it. “You see,” he went on, “we have us a problem.” His shift into rustic speech mannerisms was more friendly than mocking. “Now, it’s like this. You had access to things you weren’t supposed to have access to. Just a mix-up. Ours really. But people at your level of activity aren’t supposed to be seen in association with Reverend Crandall. It’s not good public relations. You’re not even supposed to know how to find him. I just hope and pray no one was watching when you folks drove up dressed like that: Now, we can’t take the chance that you’ll leave here and tell some more of your people where to find Rick. And then again, you represent a security risk in other ways. We don’t want people running around who might feel rejected, and become disgruntled with the Reverend. Especially not people with a bombing record.” He looked at the young man, who went pale. “You see, young man, we know all about you already. We know where your friends and family are . . . How many others did you tell?”

“Nobody else!” the older Nazi said indignantly. “I knowed it was top secret.”

Watson smiled. He glanced at Sackville-West. The old man shrugged.

“I believe you.” Watson said. “But . . . we’ll have to look into that.”

It had taken the younger one a while to get the upshot, but he burst out, “You saying we oughta be ashamed to come here dressed like this? This uniform symbolizes our martyrdom to the Aryan cause! We’re pariahs and we know it and we do it ’cause it’s right! All over the world people are interbreedin’ with animals! White women and men having congress with black animals and stinking up their blood with the blood of monkeys!”

“Very colorful way to put it.” Watson said, dabbing daintily at his nose with the handkerchief. “You know, in a way I almost agree with you.”

“Almost!” The young Nazi looked at the impassive faces around him, at the faceless helmets, and let his exasperation carry his voice into shrillness. “Hey now, I got to get this straight. Do you folks believe in the Triumph of the White Race or
not
?”

Watson looked musingly into his handkerchief. “I suppose you deserve an answer at least . . . My boy, the answer is yes and no. I believe in it, but not the way you believe in it. You see, I happen to believe that Negroes are in fact an inferior race, in a certain sense. For example, some claim they don’t pan out on the genetic scale for intelligence quotients. But you know that conclusion could be disputed, and I’d be willing to listen to evidence that maybe they’re as intelligent as we are, after all. Maybe they are. Maybe they’re not a
bit
inferior. I don’t know. Rick Crandall doesn’t know. And what’s more, we don’t care. We happen to think, first of all, that miscegenation—interbreeding—is a bad thing, leading to genetic impurity, but not because the other races are low but because it creates too many uncontrollable variables in the genetic process.”

“Genetic process! You people believe in
evolution
?” the younger one sputtered.

The older one had put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. He groaned and shook his head. “Best not get us in any deeper, Elwood.”

“Well now, we believe that genetics is God’s Tool,” Watson said. He chuckled at some private joke and went on, “Now, in the beginning, could be that God created the world in seven days. Like it says in the Book. But after that, after he sent Adam and Eve out of Eden, he used genetics to do some of his work here . . . ” He cleared his throat, and Swenson, watching him, felt sure that Watson didn’t actually believe in Creationism of any sort. Swenson felt light-headed. He almost laughed aloud.

“We in fact believe,” Watson went on, warming to his subject, “that racism, as it’s called, ought to be an instrument of administrative policy in the coming world government. And we know precisely how to use the social phenomenon that historians call ‘fascism’ to further that ambition. But you gentlemen have made the fatal error of mistaking the means for the end. And the . . . 
trappings
you’ve chosen are no longer appropriate. They are socially poisoned by the awkward people who wore them before.”

“Awkward?” the young man was shocked. “You talking about
Adolf Hitler
?”

His outrage was palpable.

The older Nazi groaned, “Dammit, Elwood, shut up. Shut the hell up.”

“Hitler?” Watson shrugged. “Hitler was a madman. Worse, he was unsubtle and inefficient—Well, you could argue that he very efficiently got rid of the six million Jews, and, of course, he did us all a favor—those people are too smart for their own good, or ours. But otherwise—”

The young man sprang up with tears in his eyes. “I ain’t gonna listen to any more of this!”

“You won’t have to,” Watson said gently. He stepped back.

Sackville-West stepped back, well out of the way. Swenson mechanically followed suit.

Not you, Swenson, you’re going where they’re going.

Swenson froze.

And then he realized he’d heard it in his mind. No one had spoken to him. The voice was a product of his suppressed terror, the twisting fear that he had been brought out here to be executed—

The two Nazis jumped to their feet and turned to run. The guards pointed their guns and opened up, and the terrible thing was, there was almost no sound.

The automatic weapons were fitted with suppressors. They made only soft, stammering hisses as the two Nazis exploded with blood under the impact of scores of rounds, as if magic made them open up with little faucets of red, made them dance and spin . . . in the quiet morning . . . 

Then they’d fallen, slumped over the log side by side.