Leon Uris - A God In Ruins

They all climbed into ore carts, the tracks following the narrow tunnel some two hundred yards.

And there before them burst open a humongous cave. With its sister caves, it could have held the Titanic. Weapons of all kinds and apparatus and apparel for war lined the cave walls.

At this point Wreck confided they also had a dozen Stinger missiles, purchased back from the Afghan rebels, the brand that had half destroyed the Soviet air force.

At the ranch, the basement under the cellar was a cell of megalomania for Esteemed Personage. Huge survey maps of the Four Corners region hung on the walls with troop markings to indicate a never-ending mock battle.

A computer on a rudimentary system kept in contact with a plethora of patriots: the White Aryan Christian Arrival and wooded militias. It also tracked gun sales, gun shows, gun legislation, and their inventory of hate literature.

Maud counted a dozen to two dozen men who were probably on the payroll. She distrusted Wreck’s boast that he could pull a thousand patriots onto the ranch on any given weekend; nonetheless, how many festering sore spots like White Wolf existed?

Oswald Hudson dismissed his communications people and ensconced himself behind an enormous desk decorated with phones of different colors. Behind him, a blown-up poster of Tim McVeigh.

One of the Mexican women served coffee and pastry and opened a hidden cart of booze. Red grabbed the woman’s backside as she dared brush past him flirtingly close.

Maud threw questions, trying to get past her feeling that she was in a netherworld of the impossible.

“I got me this little country to run,” Hudson went on. “My men would follow me to hell. These patriots are as good as Army Rangers, Marines, Seals. With a dozen militia ranches in the Four Corners under my command, and another hundred around the country we could coordinate an attack on the Golden Gate Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Capitol, the Superdome, the harlot film studios.”

He poured a bunch of cognac into his glass and wiped the fallen drops on his mustache with the back of his hand.

Maud was damned good at covering her disbelief. “So, tell me, Wreck, what is your target?”

“Hoover Dam,” he answered, not skipping a beat.

“How?” she asked.

Hudson cleared his throat, lowered his voice to “highly confidential.”

“I am in the process of designing a radio-controlled submarine torpedo. We will launch it, when the word comes, into Lake Meade and set it to blow up at the dam footings.”

Now to Nam. Wreck confided that he should have been made a full colonel in Vietnam. “My battalion was sent into a large gook village near Phen Dok. As we advanced up the hill for Phen Dok, can you believe it, my fucking knee gave out. Old football injury at Michigan. Some sports writers said the knee kept me from being one of the great all-Americans. This time, taking the hill, it cost me a Congressional fucking Medal of Honor. My men just broke down and cried. They’d follow me to hell.”

Maud spent the afternoon pondering mightily. She sensed a presence. Red Peterson had entered through an adjoining door and taken up the rocking chair close by.

“He’s not as crazy as he makes out,” Red said. “He does the drill because his people want it and because felons need a place to hide.”

“You knew this White Wolf would shade my thinking,” she said.

“Got a better depot and transit point? No? Then you have to deal with the mad hatter who runs this one. Besides, Miss Maud, you’ll never have to see Wreck Hudson again. Remember, I own him. Like you said—or was it me who said it to you?--it all boils down to trust between us.”

When did I last trust? Maud wondered. She’d built a firewall between her activities and the ultimate end of a gun barrel. The dirty bunch, the dusty road bunch, the busted pickup truck bunch, the beer-sucking bunch at the roadside hell saloon, the bunch who could never face their own failures.

So, what did the bunch do? They created that hovering monster, The Government, who was really responsible for their misery.

“Wasn’t it inevitable, Maud, to come to this place?” she thought. Thank God, Red Peterson was with her. Lust and all, she felt safe with him now.

“Maud, every once in a while we stop, we think, we dislike ourselves. We don’t fire these weapons. Shut us down and ten more like us will pop up. Men were butchering each other with sticks and stones till they discovered bows and arrows. War is intrinsic in the human race, driven by the most passionate of all human drives, greed.”

“Spoken like a true Jeffersonian. Have you ever looked in the mirror and spit?”

“Yeah .. . once. I got a hymie friend in Panama, a jeweler. I saw the tattoo on his arm. What we are doing by comparison is just keeping the boys amused.”

Maud spent the balance of daylight pacing her little porch in contemplation. The White Wolf Ranch was perfect. Red Peterson was some brilliant piece of personnel. She had to weigh that against the questionable mental balance of Oswald Hudson.

Furthermore, who were these people around?

She had trained herself not to be at home when moral issues came knocking at her door. This time they pounded through to her.

Moral issues cause people to think of their grandchildren and become all teary. Red had explained it perfectly. She and he were only a pair of folks servicing a human need for blood lust.

The lunch and liquor caught up to her. The sounds of her wretching brought Red into her room. On her knees over the toilet bowl, Miss Maud just wasn’t all that sexy.

“Deep and abiding love,” he said, adjusting the angle of her throw, “means holding each other’s head over the bucket. You gonna be okay?”

“Ughhh.”

“Shit,” Red thought, returning to his own room and lighting up his hash

pipe. He heard the shower going from her room. Now, that’s a good woman. She don’t want to smell bad.

Maud came to him scented in creamy, dreamy stuff. He’d have to get the name of it for Greta.

Colors!

In the courtyard Esteemed Personage gathered at the flagpole, and while the White Wolf flag was lowered, they all howled “Aaahhhhweeee! Aaaarhaweeee!” after which Wreck, damaged from cocaine, shot off a few clips. Wreck staggered .. .

“Aaaaahhhhhhhuuuuuuwwweeeeee!” his patriots answered, and began shooting off clips of their own.

From a distant place, a coyote responded.

Maud and Red excused themselves from dinner, taking a stomach-settling diet in his room. It made no never mind, because Wreck was unconscious.

“I saw the devil today,” she said, “and I’m part of him.”

“Speaking of the devil, how about a ‘lude?”

“Is that a ‘lude or a lewd proposition1?”

“Take it and find out.” Down the hatch with a back of hashish. And soon the devil was all gone. Red set her up on the high bed and kicked off his boots.

“I’ve got to say, Red, you feel good.”

“Crocodile skin and all.”

“Yeah .. . cowboy .. . yeah .. .”

“Aaaaahhhhwwweeee,” he crooned.

“Assssahhhhhweeee,” she responded.

FOUR CORNERS-LABOR DAY WEEKEND

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2007 Sun’s first rays slithered over the rocky bivouac as the hated reveille sounded from a bugler. A groan rose en masse all over the Eagle Scout encampment. Four hundred of them ran, shoeless for the most part and naked, to where Montezuma Creek trickled past under a bluff.