Son of Fletch Read online

  Cross-legged, Leary sat near them in the shade. He was scooping chili from a huge plastic bowl with his fingers. Most of it made it into his mouth.

  From his sharing the cattle pen on the back of the truck with a bull calf all the way down from the farm, his mouth—lips beaten, missing teeth—should have been too sore to take in food. The areas around his eyes were swollen and purple. The gash on his shoulder had not been cleaned any more than the rest of him. The manure on his overalls and in his hair had dried.

  Still shirtless in the split overalls, his skin looked painfully red from sunburn. He was covered with festering tick bites.

  “We sure have been nice to him,” Fletch drawled. “We surely have.”

  “I guess he thinks so. Nicer than anybody else, I guess. For the rest of the afternoon he has stayed within three or four meters of me. I swanee, I’m safer here than at a Daughters of the American Revolution convention!”

  Fletch said, “Glad he appreciates all we’ve done for him.”

  “There’s something else I must tell you.”

  “Isn’t attempted gang rape enough?”

  “I snuck over for a peek at the license plate of that forest-green Saturn.”

  Fletch shrugged. “Oh?”

  “Fletch, the license plate is from our county.”

  Even without having tasted the chili, Fletch felt a very unpleasant sensation in his belly. “Carrie, you and I both know Sheriff Joe Rogers. I’ve been huntin’ and fishin’ with him. He’s been to the farm more often than the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Never by word or deed has he expressed anything racist I’ve noticed.”

  “Only an ignoramus would, in front of you.”

  Again, Fletch said, “It must be a coincidence. There must be more than one green Saturn in the county.”

  Carrie said, “I’m pretty sure it’s Francie’s car.”

  Quietly, Fletch said, “I sincerely hope it isn’t.”

  Carrie said, “That makes two of us, bubba.”

  “Carrie, why don’t you climb into the truck and take yourself home?”

  “What are you doin’ here?”

  “Watching. Listening. Thinking.”

  “You think you’re at a railroad crossing, or something?”

  “We know this young man is a liar.”

  “We do?”

  “While you and Jack were shopping I stayed in the car and used the phone.”

  “I guessed as much.”

  Fletch said, “There was no inmate in the federal penitentiary at Tomaston, Kentucky, or in any federal penitentiary, named Faoni. Never has been.”

  Carrie swallowed the last spoonful of chili out of her bowl. “Faoni was stenciled on his shirt. So were the words ‘Federal Penitentiary Tomaston.’”

  “I know. Anybody can stencil anything on clothes.”

  “So this kid wasn’t in prison?”

  “This kid must have been. How else would he know and have the trust of Kriegel, Leary…. But if he was in prison, his name isn’t Faoni.”

  “So this kid isn’t your son.”

  “The question remains on the floor, as the parliamentarian said, considering the chair.”

  “Is there a John Fletcher Faoni? You think he may have just known Crystal, and he’s making this whole thing up?”

  “There is a John Fletcher Faoni. Son of Crystal Faoni. And he did go to school in Bloomington, Chicago, and Boston.”

  “So?”

  “According to his mother’s secretary, John Fletcher Faoni is spending the summer in Greece.”

  “In Greece,” Carrie repeated. “Well, this surely isn’t Greece.”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  “It’s not even on the way to Greece, from anywhere much.”

  “No. So we know this kid lies. If he lies about one thing, why not lie about everything? There’s no point in asking a liar for the truth, is there? I just have to cool it. Watch, wait, and listen. Why is he lying? Who is he? What’s his purpose?”

  “You didn’t speak to Crystal herself?”

  “No. She’s out of pocket. Incommunicado on some sort of a fat farm. Well, it’s more than that: I guess it’s a place for people with serious food addictions. Andy Cyst did not succeed in getting through to her.”

  Carrie said, “We’re all addicted to food.”

  “There is a food addiction that is life-threatening.”

  “Wow. Humans sure go awry easy. I was addicted to ice, once.”

  “You needed iron. This young man said he shot at a cop. Is it true? This young man said he was in prison for attempted murder. Is it true? This young man says his name is John Fletcher Faoni. Not all of the above can be true.”

  “This kid could be as crazy as a groundhog on ice.”

  “True.”

  “It’s a fact that he’s hanging’ out with these racists.”

  “That’s why we’re here. Who is he? What is he? What does he want from me?”

  “He’s the self-styled ‘lieutenant’ of the murdering self-styled leader of a self-styled international hate group.”

  “As some journalists would put it, ‘He sure appears to be goin’ with this particular flow.’”

  “I suspect it’s not every man’s dream to discover his son is a cop-killing, escaped convict, racist, hate-group organizer.”

  “It’s not a dream that has ever occurred to me.”

  “So if he’s such a jerk, even if he is your kid, why should you care enough to stay here?”

  “If I leave now I might lose track of him forever. Then I’ll never know the truth.”

  “Maybe you won’t want to know the truth.”

  “I always want to know the truth.”

  “The truth can make you a prisoner, Fletch.”

  “Carrie, I want you to go home.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “‘Cause if I go I’ll be worried to death about you.”

  “I’ve been in worse situations.”

  “If I stay, I’m pretty sure you’ll get us both out in time.”

  “In time for what?”

  Carrie was looking at the dark hills surrounding the encampment. “This is a foreboding place.”

  Fletch said, “Speak of the specter.”

  Jack was under the trees coming toward them. From one hand dangled headphones on short wires.

  “Don’t speak of ghosts to me.” Carrie leaned forward in her car seat and watched Jack approach. “The kid walks like you.”

  “Yeah. He puts one foot in front of the other. Don’t see just what you want to see, miss.”

  “His hips and shoulders don’t move when he walks. Just his legs.”

  “Sure,” Fletch muttered. “As evidence, that’s not exactly equal to a DNA test, is it?”

  The station wagon’s front doors were open.

  “Enjoyin’ yourselves?” Jack asked.

  “Yes,” Fletch answered. “But nothing else.”

  “Don’t like your chili?” He looked at the untouched chili in Fletch’s bowl.

  “You can have it.” Fletch handed it to him.

  Jack put the earphones on Fletch’s lap.

  “What did your cook season it with?” Carrie asked. “Dried ragweed?”

  Jack tasted it. “Yuck!”

  Carrie said to Fletch, “The boy knows bad chili when he tastes it. Must have some sense.”

  “What are the earphones for?” Fletch asked.

  “You.” Jack was eating the chili. “You all.” He took two sets of earplugs from the pocket of his shorts and put them in Fletch’s hand. “Put these in your ears. When you see me put my headphones on, you both put yours on. And leave them on until I take mine off. Earplugs and headphones.”

  “Why?”

  “Kriegel’s about to give a speech.”

  “Give me those ear-stoppers,” Carrie said.

  Jack said, “I fixed the sound system.”

  Fletch said, “I don’t get it.”

  Commandant Wolfe
was striding toward them.

  Jack said, “Wear your ear-stoppers.”

  Wolfe stood at attention near the open car door. Jack backed up. He continued to eat his chili. “I am Commandant Wolfe!”

  “I’m Shalom Aleichem.” Fletch stuck his thumb toward Carrie. “This is Golda Meir, as a girl.”

  “Doctor Kriegel has warned me of your sense of humor, Mister Fletcher.”

  Fletch said, “It is tolerable.”

  “You may make these jokes, Mister Fletcher, but you and your lady are what you are and you can be nothing else.”

  “Come again?”

  “You will see. Those of you who believe in one world, the brotherhood of races, miscegenation, quickly will change your minds when there is only one deer left in the forest. Quickly you will learn with which pack of dogs you run.”

  Carrie and Fletch looked at each other.

  The Afro-American civil rights leader who recently had discussed matters with Fletch on the terrace behind the farmhouse at one point had burst into laughter and said, “Ah, Fletch! You’re not going to give me that one-world crap, are you?”

  In the car, Carrie lowered her head so Wolfe could see her. She barked. “Aarrf!”

  Softly, Fletch said, “Since the beginning of time, a few have taken the fact of economic competition, no matter how great the resources, and used it to create hatred and violence to satisfy their own greed.”

  “Aarrf!” Carrie nodded in agreement.

  Fletch looked into Wolfe’s eyes. “And that’s no joke.”

  “Aarrf! Aarrf!” Carrie sat back. “Fletch, did I hear right? Did he call me a bitch?”

  “So far, I don’t think he’s actually spoken to you. Or looked at you.”

  “Notify him I’m fixin’ to bite his ankle.”

  Wolfe handed Jack a six-pack of condoms.

  He also handed one to Fletch.

  “I beg your pardon?” Fletch asked.

  “Once used, please turn them in at headquarters. A clerk will label them properly.”

  “Our semen,” Jack said to Fletch, “will be stored. And used.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Fletch asked.

  “By artificial insemination,” Jack said. “To continue and improve our race.”

  “Mister Fletcher.” Commandant Wolfe still stood at attention. “You must agree all the wrong people are having children!”

  “About your parents,” Fletch said, “indeed I do agree.”

  Wolfe’s cheeks colored. “Do this! It is your duty!”

  He did a military about-face. Chin high, shoulders back, he marched away, up the slope, over rough ground.

  “Well, I’ll be Adam’s uncle,” Carrie said. “Did you ever?”

  “No,” Fletch answered.

  Jack was watching Fletch.

  “Here.” Fletch handed the condoms to Carrie. “Give these to your friend Leary. Save the world a lot of trouble.”

  Empty chili bowl in one hand, with his other hand Jack tossed the pack of condoms into the air and caught it. “How can I object?” Jack said. “I am a result of selective breeding. Aren’t I?”

  14

  There were between fifty and sixty men gathered in the middle of the encampment.

  It was clear from their faces, the way they stood, talked, that many of these happy campers had ingested one form of intoxicant or another, or more than one form.

  They were primed for firing.

  Brush and old wood had been piled high at the other end of the central clearing. So there was to be a bonfire, Fletch surmised.

  Among them stood a fat, bald man in a dirty white apron. He carried a metal ladle.

  “That must be the chef,” Carrie said. “I must ask him where he gets his ragweed.”

  A few women stood together at a distance from the men. Babies and girl children were with them. Boy children stood among the men.

  A microphone, speakers at a distance each side of it, had been placed at the top of the three steps on the porch of the log cabin.

  Fletch and Carrie stood well away from the crowd of men, to the side, where they could see almost everything well.

  At the front of the men, Jack was adjusting a camcorder on a tripod.

  “My, my,” Fletch said to Carrie. “This is being taped.”

  “‘Vanity, vanity,’” Carrie said. “‘All is vanity.’”

  “More than that,” Fletch said. “Like their predecessors, they are carefully documenting their own history.”

  “So later they can deny it, right?”

  Commandant Wolfe came through the door of the log cabin onto the porch. He was followed by Commandant The Reverend Doctor Kris Kriegel. He was still dressed in the ill-fitting slacks and shirt Carrie had found in one of the farm’s closets. The uniformed young man, still carrying the clipboard, was the last through the door.

  Three times the men standing before the cabin raised their right arms in the stiff salute. Three times they shouted “Heil!”

  Wolfe raised his eyes to the flag on the pole behind the men, raised his right arm, and said, “Heil!” only once, not loudly.

  Fletch noticed that in this moment of concentrated rapture, Jack had taken the camcorder off the tripod. Crouched, he was videotaping the audience, moving back and forth.

  Jack was recording every face.

  At the microphone, Wolfe began to speak. There were a few sentences of greeting. He referred to his audience as real men, real American men. There was a joke about how surprised, upset their Jewish employers would be if they knew where these men were this night. Their Jewish employers wouldn’t know whether to give their jobs to the ass-licking niggers or just sell out to those yellow, slanty-eyed, Asian, pocket-sized, battery-operated calculators.

  Fletch watched Carrie.

  Her mouth dropped open. Beneath her tan, her face drained of blood, turned white. Even her freckles receded, like stars when the moon appears. Her eyes widened and blazed blue.

  She turned her face toward him. “Fletch…”

  The skin around her eyes began to wrinkle.

  “Don’t say anything,” Fletch said. “Don’t cry.”

  As if in a nearly fainting condition, as if appealing to him, her fingertips brushed Fletch’s forearm. “I can’t stand this.”

  “I know.”

  “Why do they come here to do this, say these horrid things? The license plates on the vehicles … they’re not from around here.”

  “They’re everywhere now,” Fletch said. “North, south, east, west.” At last reckoning there were 346 groups such as this in the United States of America, up twenty-seven percent from the year before. “Great Britain, France, Germany, Poland, the Balkans, Russia. The Middle East. Africa. Ethnic cleansing. Separatism.” Fletch had guessed Kriegel had come to the United States to draw these groups together, and strengthen their ties with similar movements abroad.

  Having been caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced for that “irrelevancy” in Washington surely must have frustrated him.

  “The children.” Carrie’s eyes were wet with tears. “The babies.”

  “I know.”

  Carrie listened another minute.

  Not hiding at all what she was doing, she then put the earplugs in her ears.

  Encouraged by applause, whistles, shouts of White rights! Wolfe spoke on, and on, and on. There were references to those of African descent as the mud people. To those of Jewish descent as the children of Satan. To the United States government as Z. O. G., just another Zionist organization.

  Not hearing much of anything of what Wolfe was saying, Carrie’s shoulders relaxed somewhat. She folded her arms across her chest. She stared at the ground in front of her.

  Her face remained pale.

  Clearly Wolfe had studied the newsreels of Mussolini. He folded his arms high across his chest. Lips in a downward crescent, he nodded his head violently in affirmation of everything he said, every noise of approbation from his audience. He strutted back and forth to the mi
crophone between each utterance, raising his feet like a rooster on a gossip bench.

  Fletch remembered the overwhelming sadness he had felt once in East Africa when his friend Juma had brought him and Fletch’s then wife, Barbara, to Shimoni, a huge cave at the edge of the Indian Ocean….

  … Fletch and Barbara did not know what they were seeing. To them, Shimoni was a hard-backed mud descent into darkness. Something, not a sound, not a smell, something palpable emanated from the cave.

  “Do you wish to enter?” Juma asked.

  Fletch glanced at Barbara. “Why not?”

  “Going down is slippery.” Juma looked at the knapsack on Fletch’s back.

  Fletch put the pack on the ground.

  “There are bats.” Juma looked at Barbara’s hair.

  “It’s a cave,” Fletch said.

  “Is it a big cave?” Barbara asked.

  “It goes along underground about twelve miles, “Juma said.

  “What am I feeling?” Fletch asked.

  Juma nodded.

  He led the way down the slippery slope.

  They stood in an enormous underground room, partly lit by the light from the entrance. Barbara remarked on the stalactites, then giggled at the hollow sound of her voice.

  Fletch noticed that all the rock, every square centimeter of floor, all along the walls two meters high, had been worn smooth. Even in imperfect light, much of the stone looked polished.

  “What was this place used for?” Fletch asked.

  A bat flew overhead.

  “A warehouse,” Juma said simply. “For human beings. A human warehouse. People who had been sold as slaves were jammed in here, to await the ships that took them away.”

  Only the slow drip of water somewhere in the cave punctuated the long, stunned silence.