Right To Die

20

I HADN'T MUCH ENJOYED THE SESSION WITH WALTER STROCK. I figured to enjoy the next one even less.

Most of Dorchester has never been upscale. The streets have terrific names; just the A's include Armandine, Aspinwall, and Athewold. The structures, however, reflect the culture a little more exactly. Peeling three-deckers with decayed porches, burned-out storefronts boarded over with warping plywood, vacant lots full of rubble but free of hope. Working class launching welfare class, generations of experience greasing the skids.

The clubhouse for the American Trust was just off Gallivan Boulevard. From the outside it looked like it might once have been a laundry. Now there were reinforced metal shutters instead of plate glass and professional signs. The two hand-lettered messages on the shutters read: ATTACK DOGS ON PREMMISES and DONT FUCK WITH US.

I got out of the Prelude and locked it. Approaching the door, I could hear the rumble of a loud stereo. I knocked politely twice. Then I banged on the door until I heard the music stop.

A "Joe-sent-me" slot opened on the other side of the door and one of the kids from the library looked out. "Yeah?"

His eyes were bleary from being high, and he didn't place me.

"I'd like to talk to Gunther Yary."

"Ain't here." The slot closed with authority.

I started banging again. The music came back on. I kept hammering away until it stopped.

The slot reopened. The same kid said, "Get the fuck out of my face, awright?"

"I want to talk with somebody about Yary."

"I said he ain't here. You deaf or what?"

"You can let me in, or I can camp out here and talk to the first one of you leaves or comes. Your choice."

"Aw, fuck. Just a second."

The slot closed again. I waited. The music didn't come back on. Then the sounds of bolts and maybe a crossbar from the other side of the door before it swung open. A bit too inviting to be credible. The kid I'd been talking with was smiling. "Come on in, man."

I took a step with my right foot, then drove off it to the left, barging my left shoulder as hard as I could into the door. The metal hit something that gave, then crunched a little as the door wouldn't go any farther.

I jumped to the right as my greeter came at me. I grabbed him by the left arm and spun him around and over my outstretched left leg.

Something sagged behind the door. Something else heavy and metallic clattered to the floor as the door itself swung back. I drew the Chief's Special from the holster over my right hip.

Rick, the guy who'd been feeding Yary set-up lines at the library, slumped forward, scrabbling for the Colt.45 Automatic that was between his legs. Blood was flowing pretty freely from his nose and maybe a lip too. There was enough blood that it was tough to tell.

"Don't," I said.

Rick didn't look up at me. He moved his hand toward where he thought the gun would be.

I cocked mine. At the sound, the guy stopped, weighing things. He wasn't deciding for peace yet.

I said, "This thing makes only one more noise."

Convinced, Rick sat back.

I moved toward him and edged the automatic away. My greeter was just about to his elbows on the floor. I slid the Colt into the pocket of my raincoat. Then I went back to the door, slamming it shut, but using only one dead bolt to secure it.

Rick was gingerly touching his nose and cringing. My greeter was up to his knees, but wobbly.

I took in the room. Hung ceiling with some panels missing, the rest stained. Posters on the walls of scabrous guys with long hair or no hair, done up in leather and gripping heavy-metal guitars like tommy guns. Two flags, a small Confederate war banner, and an even smaller Nazi swastika. The stereo system on sturdy plastic milk crates, incongruously scrubbed-looking in red, white, and blue. A blue crate held stacks of audiocassette tapes. The ones with printed labels were mostly Def Leppard, Motley Crue, and Aerosmith. The knockoffs were Skrewdriver, No Remorse, and Immoral Discipline. The floor, once nicely carpeted, was now burned and torn, smelling like stale beer. There were enough cans of Coors around the base of the walls to build an Airstream trailer. Two sets of bunk beds met head to toe at one corner, a cluttered desk to one side. I said, "The photo team from Better Homes and Gardens been here yet?"

"Fuck you," said Rick, burbling a little through the blood.

I moved to the desk and started rooting around.

"Hey," said my greeter, "you can't do that."

"Constitution's suspended for a while, boys."

Most of the paperwork was in the form of leaflets, newsletters, and requests for contributions. White Aryan Resistance and some kind of affiliated group called the Aryan Youth Movement, both from Southern California; The American Front from Northern California; White Heritage from the Midwest. Some newspaper and magazine clippings, but of whole articles. About white supremacy groups like the Klan, the Order, and the Posse Comitatus. One long story from the Boston Globe on skinheads in New England. A poor Xerox copy of a report from the Antidefamation League of the B'nai B'rith, defaced with predictable remarks. Even an ad from a British magazine for steel-toed Dr Martens workboots, which seemed to match what the skinheads were wearing.

No mutilated headlines, though.

I walked over to my greeter. "Let me explain the drill."

He looked at me sideways, the way you might watch a kid who steals ice cream from your cafeteria tray.

I patted the pocket with the automatic. "I'm betting this isn't registered, at least not to you clowns. I'm also betting I can get one of you a year the hard way for having it. Who wants to cover my bet?"

Rick said, "Don't say nothing, Tone."

"Tone? Tony, right?"

Greeter who might be Tony didn't say anything.

I said, "Tony, let me spell it out for you, no big words. You guys were stupid, going hand to hand with the cops back at the library."

Tony looked me in the eye now, memory dawning.

"But the piece, the piece is beyond stupid. The piece is getting to play drop the soap in a communal shower. Am I getting through to you?"

Tony was definitely sensing the drift of the conversation. "I wasn't anywheres near the gun."

"You fucking shithead."

I ignored Rick and said, "Where's Gunther Yary?"

Tony worked his mouth.

I said, "Twelve months is fifty-two weeks, three hundred sixty-five – "

Tony said, "He's out on the bridge."

"You yellow fucking – "

"What bridge'?"

"The Granite Ave bridge. The judge, the judge gave him public service."

"You're a fuckhead, Tone."

I pointed to Rick. "The guy with the broken nose thinks you're a yellow fuckhead, Tony. The guy who's supposed to be standing next to you, standing up for you. Think about that."

I left the place. In the car I unloaded the automatic. Two blocks later I dumped the gun down one storm drain and the bullets down another.

There were four men working on the surface of the bridge, a couple of orange barrels and a bunch of orange traffic cones keeping the passing cars at least three inches away from arms, hips, and legs. I walked up to the closest man, the only guy who didn't have a tarbrush in his hands.

He was wearing an orange safety vest with yellow X's front and back. Below the vest, patched corduroy pants and sneakers. Above the vest, a green, battered hardhat. He held a filterless cigarette between a thumb and forefinger, the thumb missing its nail.

I said, "John Cuddy. I'd like to talk with one of your men there."

"What's it about?"

"Case I'm working on." I showed him my ID.

"Lemme guess. The Nazi."

"Gifted, isn't he."

"Sonofabitch. Fucking judge don't got the balls to put a guy away so close to Christmas, that I can understand. But putting him on my gang, for chrissakes, don't they even think about that? Judge's got a criminal, what does he do, he sends him out to do my job.

How do you figure that makes me feel?"

"Yary been any trouble?"

"Nothing but. Guy opened his mouth about the Jews and the look, I'm not carrying the torch for anybody, get me? But I had to send this guy, Roosevelt Barnes, off with another crew. My best worker, and I had to send him off. You know why?"

"Yary?"

"Called Rosey a nigger. To his face. I mean, forget Rosey's about three hundred pounds, you don't say that to a black guy, not anymore. Took two a us to hold Rosey back. I'm not about to let a good guy like Rosey, got seventeen fucking years in, get bounced for dropping a piece a Nazi shit off a bridge abutment just because some fucking judge's got his head up his ass. So I send Rosey off for a few days while I get squat outta the Nazi. Go figure."

"I can't. Mind if I talk to him?"

He lowered his voice. "You gonna rough him up any?"

"Not planning to."

He shook his head, disappointed. "Hey. Yary. Yary."

One of the orange vests looked over at us as the other two stopped with their brushes.

My friend motioned him over with two jerks of his cupped hand. To me, he said, "Stay here and talk to him. I wanna spend some time with my guys."

"Right. Thanks."

Yary drew even with the foreman about forty feet from me and tried to ask him a question. The foreman just stayed in stride and walked on by.

Yary continued to me, the hardhat jiggling askew on the shaved head. He slowed before stopping about five feet away and reflexively touched a hand to his ear. "I don't have to talk to you."

"Monday night you sounded like all you wanted to do is talk."

"I would have. Till you and the nigger cops and kike money-changers – "

"Tell you what, Yary. You stop the slurs, and I won't fracture your skull. What do you say?"

He kept his distance. "Go ahead."

"What brought you to the library?"

"A bus. It was real big, see? With seats and windows and everything. "

I shook my head and sighed. "The foreman said he'd look the other way if I needed to get rough with you."

"You can't do that. You'd lose your license or whatever."

I sidled a little closer to Yary. He thought about backing off before deciding he couldn't and keep face.

"Just had a talk with a couple of the boys at the clubhouse."

Yary didn't reply.

"You know, Gun. Rick and Tone? They said to give you their best."

"How do you…" Yary squinted, then jammed his hands in his pockets, suddenly looking very young.

"They told me where you were, Gun. After a while."

"Look, I don't want no trouble from you."

"Little late for that."

"You don't understand. None of you understand us, the Trust, the Movement. We're just trying to get back what's ours, that's all. What the race mixers… what the government's let the others take away. One thing I learned from that, from Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson and their kind. You can win in this country if you just keep talking, just keep in people's faces so they can't believe that you're still around, bothering them, making them face what the truth is. About how everything's been taken away from people who earned it by people who didn't. Once I chased this big nig-once I purified the crew here, one of them started listening to me.

Hearing what I was saying."

"Why did you go to the debate?"

"To get some publicity, man. Free publicity. But even the TV and radio don't care about Andrus and her 'friends.' They're shoveling all this shit about the right to die. That's not the point, don't you see it? It ain't the right to die we got to worry about. It's the right to live, to take back what's ours from them that took it from us."

"You don't see Andrus and her crowd as a threat, then."

"Threat? Threat, shit no. Those assholes are just a distraction, get it? They're just being used to get attention for issues that don't mean shit so the real issues, the raping of our people by the others, don't get settled."

Watching Yary talk, become animated and sincere, I decided he scared me more than Rick with his automatic.

Finally, Yary said, "So what do you think?"

"What do I think?"

"Yeah. About the Trust, the Movement."

"I think from your rap sheet that you're not as nonviolent as you make out."

"That was then, man. This is now, you know? I learned my lesson, learned it real good. Now I'm into friendly persuasion."

"I think Rick and the others are thinking about taking the Trust in a different direction."

Yary clouded over. "The fuck you telling me?"

"When I visited the old clubhouse today, I got an armed response."

"Armed? With what?"

"A Colt forty-five."

"I don't believe it. I don't fucking believe it."

"Yes you do. You just don't want to admit it."

"They wouldn't do that. They're not that stupid."

"They're that stupid, Gun. Stupid and impatient. Not everybody's interested in waiting out the revolution."

Yary started to tell me how it wasn't a revolution, but just the people taking back what was theirs. I cut him off by walking over to the foreman, who had started toward us.

The foreman said hopefully, "He giving you any trouble?"

"Sorry. Model prisoner."

"Shit."

"Thanks for letting me take him for a while."

"Take him forever, you want to."

Yary walked by us, eyes straight ahead. As he rejoined the crew, he said something and laughed. One guy paid no attention, but the other laughed too. With Yary, not at him.

The foreman said to me, "Fucking judges, make me feel like shit," and spat over the railing.