The Devil_s Workshop

Chapter 37

Robert Vail and the Texas Madman rarely spoke; they had completely different agendas. R. V. saw Fannon Kincaid as a savior, a godlike Messiah who had divine direction. The Texas Madman saw Fannon Kincaid as a savior of a different sort. Fannon provided the Texas Madman with permission to kill, his acts of murderous "cleansing" easing the terrible ache inside him.

Now, R. V. and the Madman sat behind the Yardmaster's tower in Shreveport, Louisiana, waiting for the Engine Foreman to deposit the unused carbon sheets in the trash. The yard was huge; almost a thousand parked railcars cooked in the humid heat. Shreveport had been a scrap metal center and had grown from that into a "railhead," where train line-ups and track warrants for the East Coast originated.

The two men didn't speak, nor did they look at one another, as if even accidental eye contact would stir the contempt they naturally had for each other.

They had been sent ahead to get consist sheets on the milk trains coming out of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Harrisburg was a dairy center where the huge funnel-flow refrigerated tank cars were loaded with milk for major cities in the eastern United States. Fannon had carefully chosen the two cities he intended to attack. Detroit, he proclaimed, was the capital city of the mud races. New York, he declared, was the home of the Jew, an infested conclave of Hasidic corruption. All Fannon needed now was the consist sheets to tell him which milk tankers were going where. This was the mission he had assigned to R. V. and the Texas Madman.

They hid in the shade behind the Yardmaster's office while flies buzzed around their heads and landed in their hair.

At a little past ten in the morning the door opened and a skinny man in jeans and a T-shirt carried a cardboard box down a wooden flight of stairs and upended it into the trash. Then he turned and moved slowly in the summer heat back up to the air-conditioned coolness of the Yardmaster's office.

"Let's go," R. V. said, and the two of them moved out of a magnolia tree's shade over to the trash can. They quickly retrieved around twenty carbon sheets, then moved away from the tower.

"Hey!" a deep voice shouted.

"Huh?" R. V. answered as he turned, slack-jawed and indolent in the oppressive heat.

A heavy-set yard bull in a Southern Pacific uniform was in a doorway twenty yards away with a doughnut in his right hand. "Whatta you two fuckheads think you're doin'?" the yard bull growled, closing the door and moving toward them ominously, his leather gun belt and Sam Browne harness creaking loudly as he walked.

"Whatta we doin'?" R. V. repeated, glancing over at the Texas Madman for help. The Madman was already beginning to smile in murderous anticipation, slipping a hand inside his unbuttoned shirt. His corpulent cheeks gathered in folds at the side of his fleshy mouth as he spread a grin that showed teeth, but no humor.

"You heard me. Whatta you two dickbrains up to? You stealin' carbon sheets?" the yard bull sneered.

And now, as the bull came closer, he put the doughnut in his mouth and held it there between his teeth to free his hand as he grabbed the carbon sheets out of R. V.'s grasp. "You fucks don't get to ride my trains, no sir, not today," he slurred around the doughnut, which was still in his teeth. "You two are headin' for the lockup."

As he reached behind his back to unhook a pair of handcuffs from his Sam Browne belt, the Texas Madman pulled a gun out of his waistband and shot him between the eyes. The nine-millimeter slug punched a hole in the center of the yard bull's forehead. The man's head snapped back from the impact, but defying all laws of physics, the doughnut miraculously stayed in his mouth. The Texas Madman was treated to the orgasmic thrill of watching the light go out of the yard bull's eyes. It faded slowly, like a rheostat dimming an incandescent bulb. The yard bull fell, first to his knees and then forward, banging his destroyed forehead and uneaten sugar doughnut into the dirt at the Madman's feet.

It was silent for a moment, and then R. V. heard something that sounded like high squeaks or fingernails being scratched on a blackboard. He looked over and saw that the Madman's huge girth was shaking. It was then that he realized that his murderous companion was giggling.

The Reverend Fannon Kincaid sat in the still heat of the sleeper boxcar on the sided grain train. They were parked waiting for a "hot train" behind them to pass and for the Texas Madman and R. V. to return. The unit train they were on had been forced "into the hole" and had been waiting for almost two hours.

Randall Rader was sitting at the far end of the car, his feet dangling over the graded shoulder of the tracks, reading the Available Light Bible in a low voice to Dexter DeMille. Fannon looked at their backs and listened to the resonant tone of Randall's gravel-strewn voice.

Fannon had started out years before as a patriotic Army Lieutenant from a Southern Baptist family who had idealistically gone to Vietnam to serve his country. He had been told that he wasn't fighting North Vietnamese, he was fighting Communists. He knew that Communists were God's enemies, so he felt that his mission there was just. However, what he saw and did in that godforsaken place changed his perspective on mankind. He saw drug abuse and chemical insanity's corruption and debauchery. Still he believed in God and country, and through it all had distinguished himself under fire. He came home a combat-decorated Colonel. Once he got stateside his world shifted.

He was called "Baby Killer" and spat on when he wore his uniform, which proclaimed his victories against the godless Communists in neat rows of ribbons over his heart. There was no adequate work. Affirmative Action took jobs from him and handed them freely to protesters, Niggers, and Jews who had stayed home. As he read passages in the Old Testament over and over he now saw things he had never seen in the Good Book before. Things that had had no meaning for him as a youth now screamed out at him from the pages of Genesis and Revelation. It had all been prophesied thousands of years ago. He read and interpreted and understood how the devil had put the Levites and Mud Races on earth to defy God's will. Over the next few years he drifted to the side of the road, forgoing traditional political correctness in favor of White separatist literature. He traveled to Hayden Lake, Idaho, and to Richard Butler's Aryan Nations Church. It was there that he had met and befriended Bob Matthews. He and Matthews took a blood oath one night and swore to purge the Jewnited States of corruption and evil. Fannon became a sort of Aryan Robin Hood, holding up banks and markets and handing the money to men he saw as defenders of the White Christian cause. He asked for nothing in return, save the purity of their uncompromised convictions.

Fannon's views on religion had changed from his long-ago Southern Baptist upbringing. His new religious convictions were like plaster poured on the imperfect imprint of humanity, hardening until they bore the veins and lines of what he saw as America's moral mistakes. Welfare programs and politically correct theories rutted the surface of his beloved nation like enemy trenches. More important, Fannon had gained a new sense of his own significance. Now he saw his calling as more profound, more exalted. He wasn't just a Robin Hood, he was now the new Messiah.

A whistle ripped through the silence, shattering these ruminations. The rail that the sided grain train was sitting on began to shake as the ground trembled. Then the priority train they had been waiting for roared past, trapping air between the cars, rocking the boxcar he was standing in.

Fannon snapped his gaze up at the thousands of shiny new automobiles as they flashed by three decks high, quivering on their axle chains. A godless tribute to man's endless need for material validation. The cars were speeding madly to market, where they would eventually fulfill their commercial expectations as gaudy containers for the inflated egos of heathens. Here he was, the new Messiah, God's avenging angel, waiting on a siding while they were rushed past. But Fannon knew that like Jesus and Moses before him, when he fell on the battlefield, he would be taken to heaven and asked to sit on the Throne next to God.