“To the encampment?”
“Hey!” Leary shouted at him. “I’m firsty.”
“Oh, shut up!” Fletch said. “Are you a tough guy, or not?”
“Tough guy,” Leary confirmed.
“So.” Fletch sighed. “Turn around and follow us.”
“Okay.”
“Carrie …”
“What?”
“You did do what you said you were going to do, didn’t you? You did go to that intersection. I mean, you didn’t come here because you were worried about me, or anything, did you?”
“Shoot no.” She smiled. “I’ve seen too much of these villains as it is.”
“I can’t understand what happened to the sheriff.”
“Best-laid plans,” Carrie said, “often get screwed up.”
“Yeah. But I’m not sure we can take care of both of us. Bringing a woman, you, into a camp full of psychotic males … When we get there, you watch your mouth, will you?”
“Why, I’ll be as quiet as a church mouse while the collection plate is being passed.”
“Nothing you say can change these fools, you know.”
“Only thing they need,” Carrie said, “is shoo tin’.”
“Let’s not start anything, all right?”
Carrie stuck her jaw out. “I won’t if they don’t.”
Back across the road, Fletch opened the door to the front passenger seat. “You drive,” he said to Jack. “I’m not about to pass myself off as one of your merry band.”
Scooting across the seat, Jack asked, “Do you know how to get to this encampment?”
“Sure.” Fletch closed the door. “You know stupid people can’t keep secrets.”
Watching Carrie through the rearview mirror pull the truck up behind them, Jack said, “I was pretty sure you didn’t mean Carrie to meet us here.”
Fletch said nothing.
11
F
There were many strange-looking men standing around. For the most part they wore army camouflage pants and shirts. Many wore wide belts with holstered knives and handguns hanging from them. Some were overbuilt, some overly fat, many short and runty, many with their heads shaved, faces scarred by acne or cuts, several showing damage wrought by alcohol and other drugs, teeth missing, noses broken, peculiarly intense eyes, one with an ear missing. A few held semiautomatic weapons carelessly.
One shirtless citizen was as big as Leary.
“These are the racially superior?” Carrie asked.
Fletch said, “Hush your mouth, girl.”
“They look like they were scraped off a tavern floor.”
The men gathered around the back door of the station wagon.
Kriegel had waited for Jack to open the back door for him.
The Reverend Doctor Kris Kriegel stepped out of the back door of the station wagon like the Empress Catherine alighting from her golden coach.
He raised his arms. “I have come!”
Carrie muttered, “He wishes he had.”
All the men standing around raised their right arms in stiff salute, except one, who raised his left arm.
There had been three men with semiautomatic weapons at the entrance to the encampment.
In a clipped voice, Jack had identified himself to them as ‘Lieutenant Faoni,’ Kriegel as ‘Commandant Kriegel,’ and told them Carrie and Leary in the truck behind them were part of the expected party.
“Who are you?” one of the men asked Fletch.
“Siegfried,” Fletch said.
Jack said, “Code name: Siegfried.”
They drove along a dirt road twisting through a thick forest.
Halfway along the road, another man stood with a semiautomatic weapon. He gave them a hard-eyed stare as they passed.
The encampment itself was a clearing of pasture gone to seed. In the most central place was a log cabin with a field-stone chimney, roofed front porch. At odd angles to each other were structures Fletch recognized as originally designed as carports: aluminum roofs held up by black poles in uneven cement floors. A few had their tarpaulin sides lowered, to keep out sun, rain, or eyes. Also at odd angles were several house trailers which had seen better days. Tipped on uneven cement blocks, their blue, white, gray, brown sides were sun-blistered. Recreational vehicles and smaller campers were parked helter-skelter throughout the clearing. At the edge of the woods around the clearing were many Porta Potties. In the midday heat, the smell from them permeated the camp.
The place looked like a wacky seven-year-old boy’s idea of heaven.
More or less in the center of the clearing was a flagpole.
The flag hanging from it was not the flag of the United States of America.
It was not the flag of the Confederacy.
It was not the flag of the state of Alabama.
It was a flag with a red field. The black symbols on it each looked like a chicken’s footprint.
“Listen to them,” Carrie said. The men gathered around Kriegel were talking to him, to each other, in tones that sounded more tight, abrupt, angry than anything else. “There isn’t one Southerner among them.”
Fletch listened. “You’re right.”
“Why don’t these boys stay home? Why don’t they shit in their own beds?”
From the log cabin marched a middle-aged man. He was dressed in a brown uniform with patches featuring the chicken footprints on collar tabs and shoulders. His wide belt held in his sizable gut to a size forty-four. From it dangled a holstered six-shooter. In the sunlight, as he crossed the clearing, his hair was brassy.
Carrie snorted. “He must have gotten that dye job at the county fair!”
The man was followed by another similarly uniformed young man, a teenaged boy, carrying a clipboard.
“Firsty!” From his pen on the back of the truck, Leary pulled himself up on the bars. He had realized the truck had stopped moving. “Let me out!”
Fletch said to Leary: “Say ‘please.’”
“Fuck you,” Leary said.
The men parted for the neatly uniformed man. Standing before Kriegel, the man stood at attention. He tried to click the heels of his soft combat boots together. He gave the stiff-armed salute.
He introduced himself as Commandant Wolfe.
In a most languid manner, Kriegel returned the salute.
There were introductions all around. Right arms snapped up one by one.
“Can’t they go to the Porta Potties without permission?” Carrie asked.
Kriegel and Wolfe drew closer together. Everyone began to look at Carrie and Fletch. Kriegel said, “Brunnehilde! … Siegfried! … Good for us to have them here …”
Fletch said, “Oh, Thor!”
As the two commandants walked toward the log cabin, Jack approached Carrie and Fletch.
Carrie was looking at the calf bull on the back of the truck. “We have to get him in the shade, Fletch. Get him some water.”
“Yes.” The bull calf didn’t need to say ‘please.’ He had done a good morning’s work. Fletch said to Jack, “Help me lift the gate, will you? I think this bull calf has had just about enough of Leary’s company.”
Together they lifted the rear section of the pen.
