Peter Leonard - Quiver

He typed out a suicide note, printed it and read it. Sounded pretty good, thinking, he nailed it.

Brethren:

I feel myself sliding into the abyss, so heinous are my sins.

I do not believe Jesus can forgive me for what I’ve done: smoking marijuana and fornicating with young women.

I’ve betrayed my wife. I’ve betrayed my congregation.

And most of all, I’ve betrayed my Lord and Savior.

I can no longer live with myself.

May God forgive me.

DeJuan liked starting it with the word brethren. Like Marty writing it to all the Mormon brothers, the whole congregation. He also liked the words abyss and heinous and sins of fornication — man, like they right out the Book of Mormon. Only thing looked strange, he didn’t have the man’s signature. He found it in Marty’s transfer folder, Marty in fancy script, saved in different sizes. Picked one and dropped it on the bottom of the letter. Right fucking there. Perfecto.

Teddy was waiting out front in the muscle car when he got back to his crib. Had a two-bedroom townhouse in Royal Oak. Walking distance to bars and restaurants. No gangbangers. No drive-bys. Nice easygoing ’hood.

Teddy came in with a six-pack-dude drank more beer than anyone he’d ever seen-and his girlfriend Celeste who didn’t seem to go with him. Teddy with his Canadian haircut and BO and this nice piece of trim.

Teddy telling him about Jack and the rich lady-woman inherit her husband’s NASCAR fortune and seeing opportunity for all concerned. Teddy said the man’s name was Owen McCall. He finished his beer and popped another one, green longneck bottles of Rolling Rock.

DeJuan Googled Owen McCall and found out he’d built a NASCAR empire and had a fortune estimated at thirty million when he’d died in a bizarre hunting accident. Killed by the sixteen-year-old son. DeJuan decided that maybe there was something to what Teddy was telling him. He looked over at Celeste. She seemed bored, sitting on the couch staring out the window, not really paying attention to what they were talking about. Or was she? He wondered what she saw in Teddy, this fine-looking girl with the creamy white skin. He said, “Yo, Celeste, what do you think?”

She turned and looked at him. “I’d fish where the fish are.”

Teddy said, “What the hell you been smoking?”

DeJuan thought about what she was saying. Get money where the money’s at. Uh-huh. Her brain a couple car lengths ahead of Teddy’s and pulling away fast. Fish where the fish are at-going after Jack’s rich lady. One thing was clear: if it was going to happen, DeJuan was going to have to do it. Teddy left him the rich lady’s address: 95 °Cranbrook Road, Bloomfield Hills. That was some high-class living. Now, how was he going to go to Bloomfield Hills, do what he had to do and not stand out, not get noticed?

They got back in the Camaro and Teddy said, “What’d you think of him?”

“First black person I ever met in my life,” Celeste said. “And I liked him.” She was thinking about what her dad, Bob Byrnes, would’ve said if he’d seen her. He’d have said something like, “Don’t tell me you were in a jig’s house, setting on a jig’s couch. That the way you was brought up?”

No. She’d been brought up to hate everyone who didn’t have a hundred percent pure Aryan blood, which, as Celeste discovered, was a whole lot of people. It didn’t make a lot of sense to her then and even less now.

She told Teddy her dad used to take the family to Haden Lake, Idaho, every summer to Richard Butler’s Aryan Compound. Her dad said it was the international headquarters of the white race, and we Aryans are the biblical “chosen people.”

Teddy said, “Chosen for what?”

“To lead the less fortunate.”

“Lead ’em where?”

“It’s a figure of speech,” Celeste said.

“Oh,” Teddy said.

Like he knew what a figure of speech was.

Teddy stopped for a red light at Nine Mile. She could hear the throaty rumble of the high-performance engine as he tweaked the accelerator with the toe of his boot.

“Me and my sister spent our time in the Aryan Youth Corps.”

“What’d you do?”

“Learned how to burn crosses and demand excellence and reject all forms of pettiness and decadence-things like rap music, effeminate hair styles, sloppy clothes and vulgar verbiage. You wouldn’t last too long with that mouth you got.”

Teddy said, “Think I’d join a stupid fucking organization like that?”

“If I had to guess,” Celeste said, “I’d say no.”

“That why you got all them weird tats on your body?”

She was going to tell him the tats were her idea of personal artistic expression, but would he get that?

The light changed and they took off. Teddy finished his beer and asked for another one. She reached in the cooler at her feet and took a longneck Rolling Rock out of the ice, twisted off the cap and handed it to Teddy. He held the Z28 steady, passing through Ferndale.

He said, “Who’s this Richard Butler character?”

He was a character, too. Like a demented uncle who always had a smile on his face. Celeste said, “He was the founder of the Aryan Nations. People called him Pastor Butler ’cause he was also head of a church called the Church of Jesus Christ Christian. I remember one time he pinched my cheeks and said with my beautiful blue eyes and white skin, I was a quintessential example of Aryan womanhood.”

“Quina… what?”

Teddy’s face had a look of pure stupidity on it.

“Quintessential. Like, the best.”

“Oh.”

“In his sermons, he’d talk about how white people everywhere had to develop a sense of racial identity, racial worth. No one has more to be proud of than we do, he’d say. We’re the descendants of Magellan and Lindbergh, the kin of Plato, Napoleon and Sophocles, the folk of Dante, Wagner, Galileo and Newton.”

“Who’re you talking about?”

“Famous people,” Celeste said, “you know, like philosophers and scientists and explorers from past history. Didn’t you go to school?”

“Yeah, I went to school.”

“Didn’t you learn nothing?”

“I guess I’ve heard of some of them.”

“My biggest problem with the Aryans,” Celeste said, “nobody had a sense of humor. They were all so serious and uptight. Although my dad used to say, ‘Know what the world’s shortest book is?’ And he’d go, ‘ Nigger Yachting Captains I Have Known ’ and start laughing. He thought that was pretty damn funny.”

Teddy looked confused.

“I wanted to tell him I had a book even shorter than that called A Hundred Years of Aryan Humor. It only had one page.”

“How could a book only have one page?” Teddy said.

Did he get anything?

She also told him Aryans believed in the existence of a supra-human being called the cosmic being. “I’d go to my dad, ‘What’s all this cosmic being stuff have to do with us?’ And he’d go, ‘The Aryan race has been given a special mission by the cosmic being, who has endowed us with a character that’s like the divine Being itself.’”

“You just lost me,” Teddy said.

That wasn’t tough, Celeste was thinking. “Let me put it another way. Aryans are warriors and warriors have a special destiny. By living like a warrior, we’re undertaking the will of nature and the will of the cosmic being. Got any questions?”

“Yeah,” Teddy said pointing to the cooler. “Got another cold one in there?”

Delayna said, “I went to my doctor, who’s a GP, for a physical. The nurse said do you want a gynecology exam, too, while you’re here? I thought, why not? Get the full checkup.”

Kate was leaning back with her head on the edge of a sink at the Bardha Salon, Delayna washing her hair. Kate was barely listening, thinking about Luke, worried about him. She had a strange feeling that something was going to happen. Just like she’d had the morning Owen and Luke walked out of the lodge to go hunting. She was anxious, agitated, couldn’t relax.