Land of Entrapment (6 page)

She kicked me lightly under the table. “Speaking of siblings, how are your sisters?” Chris looked at me expectantly after swallowing a bite of her burrito.

“Kara’s probably sitting in another tree in northern California to protest logging and Joely is probably running guns in Estonia.”

“Kara’s still working for that wilderness group?”

Chris grinned at my eyeroll.

“Yeah. She seems to like it, so I should probably quit making fun of it. And I’m kidding about Joely.

She likes Germany and she enjoys teaching, so it’s all good.”

“Oh? When will she be back in the States?”

“She decided May, last we heard. She’s doing a full year of teaching at the university there.”

“Sounds cool.”

“She’d like to end up teaching at some small liberal arts college in the States, and it’ll be a professor package deal, her and the hubby.” I took a chip out of the basket. “And Abuelita? Did you tell her I was going to be in town?”

“Of course. And she’s ornery but funny as ever,”

Chris said dryly though she was grinning again.

“She’s told me to tell you to come by. She’s got some damn herbs she’ll give you to help deal with your demons.”

“I’m sure it’s a delightful powder I’m supposed to mix in some freaky tea.”

Chris laughed. “Hey, that shit’s worked on you in the past. It helped get you focused after Melissa. She’s good with everybody’s aches and pains in the ’hood, mental and physical. Still driving Mom crazy, who throws up her hands in dramatic Mexican fashion and demands to know how she ever came to be born of esa loca. ” Chris smiled. “I’m actually going over this weekend to put some more shelves up in her pantry.

When I told her you were coming she said, and I repeat, ‘¿ Cuando volve mi K.C. para siempre?’”

I laughed. “She thinks I should move back for good, huh?”

Chris raised one shoulder in a shrug. “She misses you. Maybe almost as much as I do.” She regarded me with an expression in her dark eyes I knew very well.

“It’s good to see you, esa. I have really missed you.”

“Oh? In what sense?” I baited her, my beer bottle poised at my lips.

“All.” She flashed me a smile and picked up her glass. “Since you went to Texas, I don’t see you or talk to you enough.” She pretended to pout.

She had a point. Since I’d moved, we talked maybe once every two weeks or so. Sometimes less.

“You’re right,” I agreed. “And as of right now, I don’t like that. So let’s talk more often.”

“I have a better idea.” She took a sip from her glass.

“And that would be?”

“Move back.”

I sighed and started fiddling with my fork. “I don’t know.”

“C’mon,” she coaxed. “You know Texas isn’t you.

Nuevomexico, that’s you.”

“High compliment from you, mujer.” I nudged her leg under the table with my foot.

“It’s true. You know you miss it. For the chile, if nothing else.” She focused on her burrito again.

“I do,” I conceded. “A lot. And I miss you. But I have another two semesters on this post-doc.”

“So? This fall you’re researching and writing and then you teach in the spring and then you could be back here in May. Or June.” She took another bite, watching me hopefully.

“Tempting.” I smiled as she gave me her “pretty please?” grin. “I’m leaving my options open. I have to think about gainful employment, you know.”

“You can live with me until you find it.”

“We’d get sick of each other. I love you, but I think I’d drive you crazy in your house.”

Chris tossed another chip at me. “The offer stands.

We’ve been friends for ten years. If you haven’t driven me crazy yet, you probably won’t. Speaking of—are you okay at Megan’s?”

I slumped. “Yeah. It is a little weird, though.”

“I thought it might be.” Chris kept her tone neutral.

“Melissa wants to talk.” I stared at the tabletop then lifted my gaze to Chris’s.

“Oh?”

“I don’t know how I feel about that.”

Chris didn’t respond, giving me space to continue.

“I think I probably will but I’m not ready right now.”

“It might help.”

I shrugged and Chris regarded me for a long moment, assessing. She changed the subject, as I knew she would when she saw I wasn’t ready to talk about it. “All right. So how are you since I saw you last year? Anybody new and exciting down there in Texas, whose identity you’re hiding from me? Though somehow I doubt it.”

“No. Not seeing anyone. I’m actually enjoying being single. Besides, I can’t keep stuff like that from you.”

“True.” The server dropped a beer off and Chris poured it into the fresh glass. She squeezed the lime into the beer and dropped it in. Bubbles caressed it as it sank. “I’m surprised you don’t have the entire lesbian population after you there, as good as you still look.” She offered me one of her slow grins and a familiar heat coursed through my abdomen.

“You’re one to talk,” I shot back as I studied her face. The years I’d known her had enhanced her physically. Her angular features had softened only slightly, and though a few streaks of grey showed in her black hair, which she allowed to fall around her shoulders now, she was still the Chris I remembered at that house party near the University of New Mexico where we’d met, grinning at me from across the room, brown eyes sparkling then as now. We’d been in our mid-twenties then, and neither of us had any idea the kind of friendship we’d be able to build.

“I can do a lot more than that,” she coaxed. “So if you have any time this trip, maybe we could...” The thought settled on the table.

“I think you might be able to persuade me.” I picked up my beer bottle and clinked it against her glass.

She took a sip, regarded me with a certain expression. “So how much persuasion would it take to get you to follow me home tonight?”

I laughed, flattered. “You always did move fast.”

“I miss you, Kase. I miss our talks. The phone just doesn’t do it justice.” She sighed. “I miss hanging out.

And I miss the other part of our relationship. It’s been a year, after all.” She had a “woe is me” tone in her voice that I knew was part of how she teased me.

“That is a while.” I considered my energy level after the drive and decided I was more than up to a romp with Chris.

“A long while.” She took another swallow of beer and then finished her burrito. I watched her, let my gaze linger on her strong hands. What I liked most about Chris was her easy demeanor and the frank way she approached life. A week after I had met her, she asked me to dinner and told me she thought I was sexy and she’d sure like to find out how much. She also said she wasn’t interested in a commitment along those lines, but if we could be friends, it would be great. I wasn’t seeing anyone at the time and neither was she so I took her up on her offer and discovered that sex between us was a lot of fun. There were never any strings attached to that part of our friendship on the occasions it happened. Sometimes the sex was rebound-oriented. Sometimes it was comfort sex.

Sometimes it wasn’t about anything except sex.

Tonight, I knew, it was about reconnecting. “Not much persuasion at all because that sounds really good. You want me to bring anything?”

“Hell, no,” she said, laughing at my inner hostess.

“Just your libido.”

“Not a problem,” I answered, feeling a comfortable pleasure in my gut as I met her eyes. We finished dinner and I picked up the check. A few minutes after that, I followed her home.

Chapter Four

I ARRIVED AT Megan’s place around eight the next morning, needing a shower and breakfast before dealing with the “situation,” as I dubbed it.

Fortunately, her house seemed to stay fairly cool inside, a much-appreciated quality, as the Albuquerque heat would be at full strength in a couple of hours. I stripped my clothes off on the way to the shower and stood under the water, feeling relaxed.

Chris had cut loose on me the night before and we had been up late. A delicious chill lingered between my thighs thinking about it. She was as free and easygoing in bed as out. She knew what she wanted and she gave me what I needed. Last night was no exception and as I was leaving that morning, she hugged me for a long time and told me again she had really missed me and please, would I at least think about moving back. Then she sent me to Megan’s with a large mug of coffee.

The water coursed over my shoulders and down my back. Maybe I should really think about returning to Albuquerque. I turned off the water and opened the shower stall door so I could grab the towel off the sink. I smiled to myself. Commitment-phobic Chris.

We’d never be girlfriends, but that was okay. More than okay. I liked the friendship we had and the occasional forays we took into more intimate physical territory when neither of us was seeing anyone.

Instead of making things weird between us, it served somehow to strengthen the other aspects of our bond.

I finished drying off and hung my towel on the hook on the back of the door before padding into the bedroom to rummage in one of my duffle bags for clean clothes. Another pair of cargo shorts, faded tee, and Birkenstocks. I’d grab something to eat at the Flying Star and then I’d be ready, at least physically, to see what Megan might be into.

An hour later I was sitting at Megan’s desk looking through the stack of flyers and pamphlets Melissa had found. Sinking into research mode, I set my legal pad next to the monitor, prepared to take my plethora of notes and to log times and dates in addition to complete citations of things I examined, whether online or in real life.

What Melissa had found was pretty standard racist stuff. I read a flyer apparently downloaded from the National Alliance Web site and started writing notes, mostly in case Melissa wanted to read through them, but also to help me remember things.

Writing something down cemented details in my head. “National Alliance, based in West Virginia, chapters all over country.” I tapped the butt of my pen against my teeth and wrote some more.

“Organized 1970, slick and professional.” Another flyer honored the group’s founder, a former Oregon physics professor. “Founder William Pierce, died 2002, wrote The Turner Diaries, under name Andrew MacDonald.”

Did Megan have a copy of it on her shelves? After fifteen minutes, I hadn’t found one and for that, I was grateful. Underneath my “Pierce” entry, I added a few sentences about how Turner allegedly served as a blueprint for Timothy McVeigh, the man who blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. I sat back, pondering. There were rumors that McVeigh used to carry multiple copies of the book and sell them for five bucks each at gun shows. I imagined him, pockets of his camouflage pants stuffed with books, trolling the aisles, surreptitiously trying to sell the damn thing with dark whispers about how the government was coming to get us all, and take our guns, too.

I wrote “NA, recruitment” on my legal pad and scribbled a few notations. Even after Pierce’s death, the NA still actively recruited young people, appealing to them with a classy Web site, easy downloads, and an online bookstore. I checked in with them probably once a month, to see what issues were pissing them off. Like other right-wing extremist groups, the NA had tried to downplay the more violent rhetoric that characterized it during the 1980s and 1990s. The leadership started using phrases like

“be proud of your heritage” and “we don’t hate non-whites. We just love the white race.” Not very catchy for T-shirts, I thought as I read over another sheet of paper Megan had downloaded.

The other flyers called on Aryan warriors to take a stand against “mud people,” a term I wrote down along with its definition, “non-white people.” Some flyers also mentioned “ZOG”—“Zionist Occupied Government”—part of the anti-Semitism that riddled the white supremacist right. Those in the movement believed that a secret cabal of Jews had been running world events for thousands of years and that this group controlled global finances and all major governments on the planet. I shook my head at the next paragraph, which said that Jews weren’t really God’s chosen people. Rather, the white race was actually the chosen people and Jews had spent hundreds of years keeping this fact secret from European and later American whites. Zog. Sounds like something off a PlayStation game.

I stood up and stretched. Though it was nothing new for me, I was having a difficult time reading through this stuff knowing that Megan might believe it, especially since she had known me for six years prior to the break-up and she knew what I researched.

What were you thinking? I silently asked her, wishing she’d just come home and that this was just a mistake she’d made on relationship road and that she’d be okay and still clean and would just go back to school and finish up her degree and get on with her life.

My eyes fell on a reference to “Identity.” I sighed heavily and picked the paper up so I could read it more thoroughly. I added some notes about

“Christian Identity” to my legal pad: “belief forms core of white supremacist groups, based on obscure school of thought that claims that one of the ten lost tribes of Israel was progenitor of white English people, who eventually ended up in U.S.” I thought about that for a bit, too. Eventually, in the hands of a core of racist preachers just before and then after World War II, “Identity” took on anti-Semitic overtones. I set the paper aside and studied another National Alliance flyer, my brow furrowing. All it takes is some guy with an audience and an axe to grind. It makes it a lot easier to hate people if you think they’d been purposefully hiding shit from you since Biblical times.

I started dividing the piles into categories on Megan’s couch, recognizing all of the groups. Klan chapters, some neo-Nazi stuff out of Pennsylvania, National Alliance, Aryan Nations. Somebody had underlined certain phrases on some of the pamphlets, especially references to the role of white women in the coming race war—referred to as “RAHOWA,” or Racial Holy War—and how to prepare for doomsday, which for these people generally meant a government takeover. Oh, look. A handy diagram showing you what kind of bomb shelter to build. I turned the pamphlet over. Nothing to indicate what group it came from.