Don Winslow - Way Down on the High Lonely

Even from my position groveling at your feet, you look stupid, Neal thought. He didn’t say that, though. Instead he said, “Well, you owe me new underwear, Cal.”

That seemed to mollify him, judging by the lupine grin that parted his mustache and beard. Then he got all man-to-man earnest. “You’ll thank me for this when it saves your life one day during the End Time.”

The End Time-the period foretold in Revelations that would see the final battle between good and evil, the last struggle between the chosen people and the hordes of Jews, niggers, and race traitors.

“Boy, for a second there I thought it was the End Time,” Neal said.

Neal got to his feet and offered his hand to shake. Strekker took it. Neal clamped his left hand over Cal’s wrist, lifted his arm up, spun underneath it, and pivoted, which locked Cal’s elbow up around his ear and going in the wrong direction. Neal took two long steps forward and pushed on Cal’s wrist, which took the bigger man off his feet and slammed him hard down on his back. Neal threw a punch that stopped a millimeter from Cal’s nose.

“We’re always in training, Cal, huh?”

He let go of Cal’s wrist and backed away. “You taught me that throw, Cal.”

Yeah, you taught me all right, Cal, Neal remembered. You threw me to the ground about five hundred times, always a lot harder than you had to, always giving my wrist that extra little twist. You always picked me as the “kike” in your hand-to-hand demonstrations. The choke holds, the elbow locks, the hip throws. You’ve been a good teacher. But I know seventy-year-old, five-feet-three, one hundred-pound Chinese monks who would dust your ass without looking up from their rice bowls.

“I’m going to take you to school, boy,” Cal growled. He got to his feet, drew his knife, and went into his combat stance.

Neal picked up his rifle and cocked a round into the chamber. “We’re all in our places, with bright shiny faces,” he said.

Cal started to circle him, passing the knife from hand to hand, making feinting jabs.

Neal braced the rifle stock against his cheek and focused on placing the bead right on Strekker’s alleged heart.

He almost did shit his pants when the sound of the gun exploded in his ears. He whirled around to see Bob Hansen standing there, his smoking rifle held at high port, a group of about ten men forming behind him.

“That’ll be enough, you two,” Hansen said sternly.

“Yes, sir!” Cal shouted.

“Yes, sir,” Neal croaked, his head still rushing from the thought that he had accidentally killed Cal Strekker.

Then Hansen’s face broke into a delighted smile.

“Do we have us some tigers here?” he asked the group. “They’re just spoiling to fight. I almost pity the ZOG race traitor who has to fight one of these fine men! Well, almost.”

The men behind him began to chuckle obediently. Cal looked like a German shepherd having his chest scratched. Then Hansen got stern again and frowned.

“But good white men can’t afford to fight each other, men. That’s what the enemy wants us to do. Let’s save that hatred for ZOG, all right?”

ZOG-Neal always thought it sounded like the monster in a low-budget Japanese horror movie, sort of a poor man’s Godzilla, but actually it was an acronym for Zionist Occupation Government, the white supremacist name for the federal government in Washington, manipulated by the Jews for the suppression of the true chosen people.

“Now shake hands,” Hansen ordered.

Neal gave Cal an ironic smile and stuck his hand out like he was Mickey Rooney coming back to Boys’ Town. Cal took it, gave it a hard tug, and stared into Neal’s eyes with an unmistakable this-is-a-long-way-from-being-over look.

Hansen stepped back into the center of the group. He wore plain khakis with cuffed slacks and a black baseball hat. He had a webbed belt with a holstered. 45 Colt.

Neal had come to know the rest of the men during the past few weeks. There was Strekker, of course. Levine had pulled the file on him-sergeant in the army, ranger certified, dishonorable discharge for beating up a trainee. Served two years in the Washington State pen for knifing a man in a bar fight. Member of the Aryan Brotherhood in prison.

His cell mate had been Randy Carlisle. Rape. About five-six, black hair, mustache. A perpetual expression of feral cunning, the kind of twisted leer that your mother was talking about when she asked you if you wanted your face to freeze that way. A coyote to Cal’s wolf.

There was Dave Bekke, the chunky, bearded man Neal had met in his first encounter with Hansen back on the ridge. Part-time mine worker, part-time ranch hand, full-time loser. He had a fat wife he was scared of so rarely saw. He was a follower looking for something to follow, and he found it in the white supremacist movement. No prison but some jail time for DUI and petty theft.

Bill McCurdy was a cowboy first and a cretin second, but it was a close race. He was a runty, bowlegged little bastard with a giggle that could have made Gandhi slap him in the mouth. Neal had never seen him without his cowboy hat, which was a mercy, because the brown hair that hung below his ears hadn’t been washed since Jimmy Carter was popular. But the boy was transformed on a horse. On horseback he became a centaur, an idiot savant of the saddle.

Craig Vetter was something else again. A tree with clothes. Six-five with broad shoulders, sinewy legs, and muscles that wouldn’t quit. Short blond hair and blue eyes and a face as open as a Bible on Sunday. Guiltless, guileless, fearless. Didn’t drink, smoke, cuss, or chase women. There was a wife and five kids back in St. George, Utah, and Craig would still be with them if he didn’t feel duty bound to fight for God and the white race. He sent his pay home, though.

And then there was John Finley, tall, skinny, with sandy hair and shit for brains. Finley was a California surf boy who had his cocaine jones and his ass busted in the LA County jail. He’d found religion for comfort and the Aryan Brotherhood for protection and joined the True Christian Identity Church shortly after his release. Carter had shipped him out to Hansen’s ranch to keep his nose clean.

The Johnson brothers were bespectacled, benighted behemoths. Neal supposed they had first names other than Big and Little, but he never heard them. And Jory was Hitler’s poster boy.

There were a couple of others Neal didn’t have a line on yet, but they were pretty much the same type-men who saw an America that never existed slipping away from them, whose childhood horrors, or adult disappointments, or desperate need for pride had been transformed into a hatred for ethnic scapegoats.

Neal had all sorts of cheap psychoanalysis and snotty Freudian concepts to attach to his new playmates, but basically he thought they were scum. These were the men Bob Hansen had brought in to work his place, to turn a model ranch into a survivalist hovel.

Well, that’s his problem, Neal thought. I have my own. Come on, Bob, it’s dark enough. Let’s get going.

It was a night training exercise, because, as Bob Hansen had joked, “that’s when night fighters fight.”

“One technique you can use,” Hansen said, “is to leave out some fried chicken, and when the nigger smells it, he’ll smile. Don’t fire until you see the whites of his teeth.”

The small group gathered at the base of the spur chuckled. Neal joined in the laughter, but his stomach was fluttering.

Enough with the jokes, he thought. Let’s get on with it.

“Seriously,” Hansen continued, sounding like a fascist nightclub comic, “we’re very likely to do a lot of night fighting during the End Time. And even sooner, when we begin the shooting war against ZOG, which should be soon now, we’ll favor night attacks to make up for our lack of numbers. We must learn to be swift, silent, and lethal. So no firearms tonight, gentlemen. Just hand-to-hand combat.”