Small Great Things(28)

Who knew there didn’t have to be a reason?

I left Brit sleeping off a sedative, which was an improvement over the way she was this morning at the hospital. I’d thought nothing could be worse than the crying that wouldn’t stop, the sound of her breaking into pieces. But then, at about 4:00 A.M., all of that stopped. Brit didn’t make a sound. She just stared, blank, at the wall. She wouldn’t answer when I called her name; she wouldn’t even look at me. The doctors gave her medicine to make her sleep. Sleep, they told me, was the best way for a body to heal.

Me, I hadn’t slept, not a wink. But I knew it wasn’t sleep that was going to make me feel better. That was going to take some wilding, a moment of destruction. I needed to pound out the pain inside me, give it a home someplace else.

With one last turn of the wrench, the crib collapses, the heavy mattress landing on my chest. Francis turns at the sound of the crash. “You all right there?”

“Yeah,” I say, the wind knocked out of me. It hurts, but this is a kind of hurt I understand. I’ll have a bruise; it will fade. I slide myself out from the tangle of wood and kick at it with my boot. “Probably a piece of crap anyway.”

Francis frowns. “What are you going to do with it?”

I can’t keep it. I know that Brit and I might have another baby one day, if we’re lucky, but putting this crib back into a nursery would be like making our new child sleep with a ghost.

When I don’t answer, Francis wipes his hands clean with a rag and begins to gather up the pieces of wood. “The Aryan Women’s League will take it,” he says. Brit had gone to a few of their meetings. They were a bunch of former skinchicks who went to WIC with fake IDs and got baby formula for free, bilking the system to bring formula to women whose men were serving time for fighting for the cause.

Francis isn’t much to look at now. He runs the drywall crew I work for, has a decent rating on Angie’s List, and votes Tea Party. (Old skinheads don’t die. They used to join the KKK, but now they join the Tea Party. Don’t believe me? Go listen to an old Klan speaker and compare it to a speech by a Tea Party Patriot. Instead of saying Jew, they now say Federal government. Instead of saying Fags, they say Social ilk of our country. Instead of saying Nigger, they say Welfare.) But in the eighties and nineties, he was a legend. His White Alliance Army had as much clout as Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance, Matt Hale’s World Church of the Creator, William Luther Pierce’s National Alliance, and Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations. Back then he was raising Brit on his own, and his terror squad would roam the streets of New Haven with tack hammers, broken hockey sticks, blackjacks, lead pipes—beating up niggers and faggots and Jews while Brit, still a baby, napped in the car.

But when things began to change in the mid-nineties—when the government cracked down on skinhead crews—leaders like Francis found themselves strung up by their own brass balls, headed to prison. Francis understood that if you don’t want to break, you have to bend. He was the guy who changed the structure of the White Power Movement from an organization to small cells of friends with common political leanings. He told us to grow our hair out. To go to college. To join the military. To blend in. With my help, he created and ran a website and message board. We aren’t crews anymore, he’d tell me over and over. We are pockets of discontent within the system.

And as it turned out, it was even more terrifying to people to know we walked and lived among them unseen.

I think about the Aryan Women’s League taking the crib. The changing table that I got at a garage sale and sanded down. The baby clothes that Brit picked through at Goodwill, that are folded up in the dresser. The baby powder and shampoo and bottles. I think about some other baby, some live baby, using it.

I stand up so fast I get dizzy, and find myself staring into a mirror with little balloons painted on its frame. I’d come home from work to find Brit at the table with a brush in her hand, and I teased her about becoming Martha Stewart. She said the only thing she had in common with Martha Stewart was a record, but she was laughing. She painted a balloon on my cheek and then I kissed her, and for that one moment, holding her in my arms with the unborn baby balanced between us, everything was perfect.

Now my eyes are ringed with dark circles; my beard’s started to grow in; my hair is matted. I look like I’m on the run from something.

“Fuck this,” I whisper, and I slam out of the nursery into the bathroom.

There, I find my electric razor. I plug it in and in one clean swoop mow a clear trail down the center of my head. I buzz each side, letting tufts of hair fall on my shoulders and into the sink. Like magic, as the hair falls away, a picture is revealed right on the crown of my head, just above the hairline: a thick black swastika, with my initials and Brit’s forming its knotted center.

I’d gotten it when she said yes, she’d marry me.

I had been twenty-one, and pretty shitfaced at the time.

When I came to show Brit this testament to my love, she didn’t even have a chance to comment before Francis walked up and smacked me hard on the back of the head. “Are you as stupid as you look?” he asked. “What part of undercover don’t you understand?”

“It’s my secret,” I told him, and I smiled at Brit. “Our secret. When my hair grows in no one will know it’s there, but us.”

“And what if you go bald?” Francis asked.