The Chinese Beverly Hills (13 page)

“You’ll get it. It might help more if you tell me more about the drug connection.”

“No.”

A baby began to squall inside. “Yours?”

She nodded. “My dad will never forgive me unless I become the head of Microsoft. I’ll call you tonight.”

“One quick question,” he blurted before she could shut the door. Something she’d said nagged at him. “What on earth is L7?”

She smiled, then made an L with one hand in front of her face and a 7 with the other and slid her hands together to form a square. “It’s from texting, Mr. Old School. A square, a nerd.”

“Well, twenty-three skidoo.”

*

Ambition had failed her and nothing had replaced it. Megan Saxton knew she wasn’t very likable, but what could one do about that? Left alone in this nowhere for a day now, she couldn’t stop ruminating on her life. Successful at this, successful at that, blah blah. But unbearably empty inside. In the bottom of her small suitcase, fetched to Hardi’s house now, she found the Xeroxed Christmas letter from her sister in Texas that she had never opened.

Hi there, super friends,

Jus’ another greeting from lil ol’ me here in Harlingen.

Whew! What a busy life Dick and me and Bobby Joe and Beth and Jessica had this past year. I can’t believe there were only 365 days to it…

…Summer we all trekked up north to Dick’s family in his favorite state of Iowa and we had a real wacky time with them, with Dick’s dad still “beating the band” about Iowa State and the missus “cooking up a storm” for all the massed legions…

Megan Saxton’s eye skipped down the page, dreading even more moronic quotation marks.

…Down to the Galveston beaches with the “three little stooges” in tow…

…Tornado touched down across town and sadly killed little Beth’s “bosom pal” Grace from Crockett School…

A photo fell out onto the floor, and she leaned out awkwardly in an attempt to reclaim it without changing position in her chair. The husband and wife—her sister—stood on the lawn, grinning and making horn-signs behind each other’s heads. A sixteen-year-old lout clutched a football and two girls glumly posed on their knees. Susan had aged noticeably even from last year, her hips spreading fast.

But why was she grousing? Susan looked happy. Every one of the single, self-reliant women Megan Saxton knew in Manhattan and Brooklyn went through periods of despondency and doubt, lonely terror and suicidal despair.

And why didn’t she just jump into her rental car and drive away from this place of testosterone horrors? She had made the attempt twice and failed.

She tried to imagine her face in place of Susan’s in the photograph. She doubted if she could ever summon the energy to conjure that suburban ranch house out of the maelstrom. In a way she admired Susan, though utterly without envy. You are what you want to be, she thought, if only you can figure out what that is.

Do I really want to go on playing with this big hairy gorilla, probably a borderline autistic of some sort, who’s without a particle of reflection or self-doubt?

*

Sujjested Donation 10$

Jack Liffey couldn’t remember seeing an actual beer keg since his college days, but they hadn’t changed a bit. Two of the ribbed aluminum kegs sat side by side on a concrete patio. Below the patio was a wide strip of abandoned wildland under crackling high-tension power lines. At the base of the nearest power pylon, down a shallow hillside, someone had piled up sturdy milk crates and set a plywood sheet across them to make a rudimentary stage. Maybe seventy-five people swarmed the front edge of the stage, talking and drinking beer. A few big men wore torn-sheet armbands—security, of course. A boom box on the stage was thumping away. Angry black rap music, a nice irony. As far as he could see the crowd was entirely white.

Uphill the powerline easement was open to a paved road parked up with cars and motorcycles far into the adjacent neighborhoods. Jack Liffey made his way up through a hirsute sample of humanity to the crush at the kegs. The women were at least as rough-looking as the men.

A fortyish bald man in a sleeveless denim jacket pushed in line ahead of him, talking to a man with a ponytail. “They sat in that hooch all day watching the flies zapped by the bug light. Hillbilly TV.”

“Dig it.”

Jack Liffey had worn jeans and an old Pendleton shirt. They looked him over carefully. “Lookatcha, bud—your clothes scream undercover.” Maybe his jeans were too crisp.

“I’m no cop. I came to hear the border guy.”

They got their beer and dismissed his existence just as a noisy outbreak down the slope drew their attention. A lot of push-and-shove and eventually one of the shovers vomited over the other. It was not going to be a tranquil afternoon.

The music cut off and a boomy voice rolled across the hillside. “Hey, hey! Bros and gals! Listen up!”

Jack Liffey drafted himself a beer. He wouldn’t drink it, but he had to have the prop.

“Back it down!” somebody shouted.

The hubbub died down a little as order was repeatedly demanded.

A skinny speaker on the stage waved a baseball cap over his head. He wore one of the white armbands. His other fist held a ludicrously small microphone corded to the boom box. “Listen up, boozers and boozettes! America’s for Americans, right?!”

A half-hearted cheer greeted the declaration.

“Hey, lemme hear you!
America’s for Americans
!”

The roar was louder, echoing off the nearby houses. Jack Liffey guessed the crowd was over a hundred now and folks were still strolling in from the street above. Why did the police tolerate it?

“We got some interesting company today, brahs and sisses! A soldier who’s been busy stopping up our borders like a big can of Drano!”

Jack Liffey smiled at the mixed-up simile. He descended toward the stage, careful not to take a sip automatically. He’d been sober for fifteen years now on his own hook. A dry drunk, as he’d been told his teetery condition was called.

“This border hero was born overseas and, I warn you, he talks pretty funny, but he’s a real
legal
American now and he’s our brother in the fight for the white. Let’s give it up for the border guardian, Hardi Boaz.”

A stocky man leapt onto the stage to a smatter of applause. He was dressed bizarrely in a safari shirt, khaki shorts, and desert boots, straight out of a Tarzan movie.

“Mah fella ‘Murcans, I wanna thank y’all for havin’ me here at your party!”

Jack Liffey wondered if he could be hallucinating. The desert warrior was doing his best to produce a Texas drawl, but it was so overlaid with tortured vowels and glottal stops that he doubted many of the partiers could even pick out the words. Fortunately, the man quickly dropped his strange hybrid voice.

“Gather up close-like, friends and patriots. I want this to be a campfire talk, just between me an’ you. I won’t bite you like no tick on no mangy dog.”

Reluctantly the crowd compressed a bit toward the stage.

“I was born in a land far away, and when I grew up it used to be a lot like America. But it’s gone to hell, like a dollar knife tryin’ to cut rocks. We was a proud white country with a real civilization, but we got overrun by our own mud people, thieves and no-accounts who are as dumb as dirt. Okay, you can’t blame dirt for being dirt. The real problem was the white traitors, big city lib’rals, who opened the gates. The pansy college boys who don’t even know enough to piss downwind! J’yee-ziss, ma’an, they no worse traitors than traitors to their race!”

That got a bit of a boo from somewhere. Jack Liffey could hear the South African accent reclaim the man’s voice as he tried, without much success, to work up a rhythm of oratory. A burly guy was scurrying around in front of the stage taking photographs with his cell phone, also wearing an armband, but no one took much notice of him. Jack Liffey guessed most the crowd was busy trying to work out who this cartoon, fat-kneed wild man was.

“Ma’an, you got to hear the shit the city lib’rals talked when they felt they had to give account for what their fathers did to our mud people. They talk to some cowpat dirt-farmer, they say the niggers are the children of Ham and it’s gonna take them centuries to learn to walk upright without scraping their knuckles. But when they talked to the fuckin’ Brits in the cities who got all the currency, they got to make new names for things every ten minutes, like some sidesaddle sissy. They made up so many words for kissing black ass I can’t remember them all. One man one vote. Colorblind. Multicultural.”

The big man plucked at one of his buttocks, almost rammed the microphone up his ass and farted loudly into it. There was a strangled gasp from the crowd. This was an amazing moment that Jack Liffey knew he would always remember with a kind of fondness.

“There’s your multicultural! Might as well try putting socks on a duck!”

A confused titter, maybe just puzzlement, rippled through the crowd.

“I hate sissies afraid of words. Fuck the
kaffirs
and niggers and brown people and wetbacks, over there and here, too. You tell ’em, Hardi.”

People around Jack Liffey seemed ill at ease, whispering to one another, probably afraid they were being mocked in some way. He figured they might get most of the rant from the abusive epithets alone, but it would be weird beyond weird to them. And these were not folks to appreciate being made uncomfortable. They may have come for a hate-fest, but they wanted a familiar and comfy hate-fest.

“Sorry, all of you, if ol’ Hardi wanders away from the point you care about. When I get worked up I run off the rails. I’m a hundred and ten percent America now. I’m here to tell you my Border Rangers are the last chance right now for the fighting whites down there who live along the border. These good white folks are threatened every night on their own ranches by armed Mexican drug-runners and wetbacks, and we got to protect them.

“I got no wish to be no better than ol’ George Washington in building a white country. Stronger and meaner and quicker, yah, but not tidied up for no limousine lib’rals in Beverly Hills. White people built a fine country here and we gonna take it back yet. Here’s what I say to all the mud people: Touch us, you tar barrels, and we’ll lop your fuckin’ hand off! You tell it, Hardi!”

A few partiers still straggled in from the road, and the man railed on about his work along the border, the nightly armed patrols in Jeeps and on horseback to keep out the plague of mental defectives.

“We need a government that’ll do what’s necessary. What we oughta do, we just nuke that land across the border. It’s all desert anyway, and we sure got plenty extra nukes stored up. Let the Mexes walk tiptoe over on the other side, that’s what I say. We gotta break bad. We gotta send all the wetbacks home. Then we just keep nuking the borderland. In ten years nobody can cross and everything calms down and we become just like any other goddamn country, a big respectable nation with a bit of a lousy past. We got to say all that right out loud.”

Jack Liffey almost felt sorry for the man. Nothing about the tirade was working very well with this crowd. From time to time there were buzzes and local cheers, but the rant was so outlandish and so far outside their experience that the crowd had little idea how to react.

“As far as I’m concerned, I’ll do this dirty business for white America forever. I’ll shoot every one of these muddies crossing the border. I’ll personally expel Mexicans and then I’ll drive up to L.A. and soak Che Guevara t-shirts in acid and hand them out to all the Jew hippie girls demonstrating against us—let them burn their tits off. I’ll do whatever the white nation needs to do to beat off the impure. I lost one country to the mud people and I ain’t losing my new one!”

Even random hurrahs had died away.

“Listen, I’ll take the whole filthy rap on myself and my pals, and two hundred years from now we’ll be known as the George Washingtons of the new white America, the guys who took back the country, and maybe some people will think of us as those regrettable bad boys who went a little over the top but it can’t be helped. I sure as bloody hell won’t be known as that poet, that sissy, that
woman
who wept over the tulips when the mud people took our country away. Are you with me in this?”

The crowd was stunned silent, though a few decided they had to display a little enthusiasm. A faint cheer began in a couple of pockets and seeped out slowly.

Jack Liffey was interested in the sheer megalomaniac power of the man. He carried something even odder, too, but Jack Liffey hadn’t worked it out. Once in a great while he seemed to talk aloud to himself from an inner voice.

“Bang!” he shouted into the microphone, and the crowd recoiled at the reverberations and the squawk of feedback it set off.

“Listen, my fainthearted friends, do your country a favor. I know this town is full of Ching-chong yellow invaders.” He pointed all around the shallow canyon. “This is wall-to-wall slopes. Dinks, Slants, John Chinaman. My white folks, shame on you, you ain’t done your duty to scare ’em away. You got to begin the fight at home.”

Hardi Boaz tucked the microphone into his shirt pocket with another bit of squalling feedback and reached downward. The skinny man who’d introduced him dug into an olive canvas bag and handed the speaker—oh, no—an assault rifle!

Jack Liffey could see it was an over-and-under M16 with the fat tube of an M203 grenade launcher under the barrel. His first sergeant had kept one in his billet, and he’d seen plenty of them in the Tet Offensive. The sight of the weapon was as electrifying to him as to everyone else. He hoped it was just a prop.

“Listen, fainthearted friends, here’s my gift to you! Fight back! Go on, Hardi.” His voice was just audible with the microphone in his pocket. There was a flash of teeth, a rictus of a smile, and Hardi Boaz shouldered the assault rifle. A cold hand took Jack Liffey’s spine. The big man tilted it up into a high arc. An amplified
bloop
sent a grenade arcing out into the Monterey Park suburb.

“
What are you doing?!
” somebody shouted.