Anatomy of Fear

26

He lifts a Beck’s off the tray, eyes tracking the man’s wife as she makes her way around the room, lowering the tray for each of them. She disappears and returns with more beer, places it on a low Formica-topped coffee table, and her husband pats her arm the way you would a dog and she smiles.

He wishes his wife were more like this, checks out the matching sofa and club chairs, deep-pile rug, tan wood dinette set seen through an archway, shiny with Lemon Pledge.

A new man to the group, a guy in the military wearing sweats, who calls himself “Ethno,” short for “ethnoviolence,” says, “To be real masculine men you’ve got to do violence against the enemy.”

He recognizes that Ethno is quoting one of his überheroes, the current leader of the World Church.

“Tell your out-of-work friends and any kids you can to join the army, light infantry the branch of choice because the coming race war will be an infantryman’s war, remember that. The army is in desperate need for recruits, and where else can you get the fucking government to train you for free, right?”

This gets everyone’s attention, but after a few minutes the talk meanders back to cars and accounting, teaching and trivia, until the host, who calls himself Swift, after the founder of Christian Identity, interrupts. He pushes up his sleeves, exposing small blue-black tattoos, swastikas, as so many of them have. “What we say in public is a lot different than what we do in private.”

As he says this he looks right at him and he wonders if Swift knows what he’s been doing. He would like to stand up and declare it, but sits there pretending to drink, hand gripping the can so hard it’s denting, fragments of pictures flashing in his mind, coming together and breaking apart.

Swift asks for contributions to support legal defenses for two men in prison, Richard Glynn and Duane Holsten, and tells them what Holsten did: “He killed his brother’s wife and baby because God told him to.” He looks around at each of them, and asks: “Could you make that kind of sacrifice?”

He knows he could.

After that, they take turns reading aloud from Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race and Ben Klassen’s Nature’s Eternal Religion, and after that Swift leads them in the oath, though he can’t concentrate because those pictures of what he is planning next keep vibrating in his head, and after that everyone goes back to stories about their boring day jobs and he’s about to leave when Swift takes him aside and leads him into the basement.

Behind a metal door is a small cinder-block room, walls lined with guns and rifles, pistols and flame throwers still in their original boxes, a crate of hand grenades that Swift cracks open for a peek, and he feels a kind of tug in his loins and a wave of reassurance.

Swift says, “For when the time comes,” and in that moment he feels so close to the man he wants to tell him what he is doing because he knows he will understand, but decides it’s better not to.