The White Hole, by Joseph Hirsch

A short story by Mr. Hirsch. This story deals explicitly with race. It was controversial at the time, but the editor liked it and I think it has held up well with time. It first appeared in 3 AM Magazine in 2007. – Robert Lindsay.

The White Hole

By Joseph Hirsch

Before his death, Anton Walters III had been one of the most powerful and influential voices in the White Power movement (though he would have preferred the term ‘Separatist’). In fact, Federal sources revealed that he had taken part in a telephone conference from within the confines of his compound in Spokane, Washington, concerning the Nazi Low Riders, a notorious prison gang, and whether or not they should allow members with Latin blood into their ranks. His vote had been a predictable ‘Nay’, but it had fallen on deaf ears. The drug trade and changing times had drowned out his vote, and it was best he died when he did before having to witness any further decline within the movement he had helped build. Walters had first made his presence felt in the mid-Eighties. Before that, his writings mostly concerned big game hunting and the best methods for defense against nuclear fallout. He printed his manuals at his own expense, though the costs must have been offset or eaten by his bread and butter enterprise, which was, conveniently, running a printing press. His works frequently showed up at Gun Shows and Trade Expos, though they weren’t displayed prominently, and he didn’t begin to receive feedback until his thoughts, and his pen, turned to the question of Apartheid during the height of the tumult in South Africa. He gained his fair share of supporters, and a few critics, after calling for the assassination of Nelson Mandela. But he continued on, undeterred, until he contracted throat cancer in 1986 after a lifetime of indulging in both smoking and chew tobacco. He underwent radiation therapy and beat the disease despite his advancing years. And maybe the brush with death could explain the shift from hard-line essays to the dreamy speculation of his fantasies, which would go on to arouse the minds of his extremist readership. His flagship character made his first appearance in a book entitled, simply, The Norseman. The book concerns a put-upon farmer whose wife leaves him for a strapping young black man, taking both of their daughters with her in tow. The distraught farmer, after having lost everything, goes into his backyard, falls among the furrowed ranks of corn and beseeches Christ for mercy. The farmer’s crop turns fallow the next day, leaving him without a harvest. Embittered now, and dark of mind, the farmer turns to the Old Gods, and he summons Odin, pleading not for mercy, but for revenge. Against all logic, and told in a prose that keeps it from becoming laughable, a galleon with twenty-four oarsman rows its way onto his farm, a Viking to match the greatest of black virility at its helm. Cloaked in the pelts of fierce beasts and wearing a horned helmet, the Norseman vows to succor the poor farmer’s hatred. The Viking then goes on a tear across the plains, until he finds the wife and the ‘moor’, as the Viking refers to him. Happening upon the couple as they are in congress in a sleazy motel, the Viking proceeds to decapitate the black man and then orders the wife to fellate him, after which she joins her lover in a heap at the foot of the bed. The novel ends with the Norseman returning to the farm, the farmer’s children in tow, clinging to his strong body… The Norseman became a runaway success and went through five printings before Walters realized he would need to find a legitimate publisher to handle the demand. The first installment was followed by five sequels, all of which were equally successful and relied heavily on the same formula of a white nuclear family disrupted by an outside influence, usually in the form of a black man. All of the follow-up novels sold just as well, or close. Walters’ proudest hour came when the original installment appeared in a reversible omnibus with The Turner Diaries, the only other Separatist/ Supremacist tract to surpass his own books in sales. The success of the series allowed him to move from his single-wide trailer to a log and cedar split-level situated on ten acres of verdant wilds, with enough room for a shooting range and a small tribe of deer, each of whom was assigned an appropriately Nordic name. His favorite, was, of course, Odin…. **** Walters had a younger brother, Edgar, who lived some few-hundred miles away in Missouri. Walters the Eldest had tried to impress upon his brother the perils white womanhood would face in the coming century, but Edgar was a happily married and well-adjusted state trooper with two sons of his own whose beliefs ended at the Methodist Church he and his family attended every Sunday. He regarded his brother with some fear, and couldn’t for the life of him understand where he had gotten his ideas, as their parents had been of tolerant stock, especially considering the time and place from whence they came. Unfortunately, Edgar’s wife left him (though not for a black man, as he repeatedly assured his older brother), and he contracted the cancer which was a part of their shared heredity. When it spread to the lymph nodes, and it became clear that he wasn’t going to beat the disease as easily as his brother had, Edgar found himself with no choice but to remand his children over to his older brother’s care. John and Eric Walters came to live with their uncle in the Spring of 1995. John had been twelve at the time, Eric eight. After showing each of the boys their rooms, and making them feel at home, Anton proceeded to indoctrinate the children in such a way that Edgar, if he could hear it from within the confines of his coffin, would have probably rolled over in his grave. No one knows for certain what went on at Compound Walters, but if we were to speculate, certain shows of youthful normalcy such as hunting and sports were allowed. But the pickup basketball games and the laps swam around the lake were probably greeted with caveats from the sideline: “Good, grow strong for the white race.” And the outings with the shotgun might have been prefaced: “Pretend that deer’s a black man,” or something along those lines. The boys were home-schooled. Most of the outside world was filtered out. The one exception may have been the satellite TV, which Anton couldn’t resist, with its constant stream of damnation that fed his mind whatever thoughts of impending apocalypse or greed it needed for confirmation of Society’s collapse, everything from the spinning Wheel of Fortune to the wild fires in Arizona, Armageddon spelled out on the big-screen with closed-captions to boot. The extent of the abuse the children suffered, or even if there was abuse, is unknown. We can assume there was some form of abuse, else why would Anton Walters the Third’s body have been found tied to a chair in front of the television? As to how the children took their White Pride education, when Walters was found, dead and starved, attached to the chair in front of the TV, the screen was blaring BET, an assault of Rap Videos in surround sound, gloating in front of his incontinent body. No one could mistake this ironic finish for an accident. When you consider that the Satellite package included more than three-hundred channels, the erstwhile Walters brothers had obviously intended to send a message to whoever found the old man, his body lighter a few credit cards. The trail of the aforementioned credit cards stopped somewhere in Seattle, and no one had seen or heard from the brothers for at least a year. If they were alive, or where they were…it was all an unknown…. ….But that wasn’t the bank’s business. Their job was to foreclose on the house, and bury its history. After the injunction was waived, a crew was ordered to restore the inside, another crew to handle the grounds outside, before the log mansion was to be set on the auction block; for Walters, in the white-heat of his creativity, had neglected to give the federal government its due. The under-the-table atmosphere of the conventions where his books were sold only encouraged his dodgy behavior, and it was only after the IRS discovered that he owed eight years of back taxes that the body had been discovered. God knows the state of decomposition it might have been found in had it taken longer to uncover his fraud. As it stood, the body had been taken out of the house months ago. After they removed the SS regalia and everything else that flew in the face of the man’s repeated statements that he was merely a ‘Separatist’, the rest of the home’s contents were auctioned off. The final detail was the lawn, which still needed cutting. The two foreman, both beefy white men, stood posted on the side of the pickup where they kept all the landscaping tools. Their six-man Salvadoran work crew had undone the flatbed, pulled out the mowers and weed whackers and had gone to work. The two men shouted over the sound of their crew. Grass as fine as dust blew out from under the rusty machines, groaning out a stream of fuel that mixed with the sun and spelled Spring. “D’ ya hear they found the kid?” “Who?” The other one asked, lighting a cigarette and wondering if it was a safe thing to do with all the fuel residue around here. “The nephew. You know the story here right?” The boss looked irritated, quizzically staring his friend down and wondering if he was going to have to explain the whole fuggin’ thing again. “Yeah, yeah. I know. Crazy-ass clansman.” “No. Wasn’t no clansman. But close.” “Yeah, so anyway. The nephew.” The second one said, prompting him again. “Yeah, right.” The first one said, picking it back up. “They caught his ass in Arizona. Dumb fuck was using his uncle’s credit cards to buy himself lunch at a Burger King.” “Huh.” The other one said, leaning his elbows against the side of the truck. He noted that only one of the Salvadoran crew was wearing a mask to protect himself from the fumes. Was he some sort of foreman among them? he wondered. The hierarchy for him ended right here. He didn’t know anything about them. The Salvadorans were Mexican to him. Among these musings, the light bulb went off. “Wait.” The second one said. “What?” His boss said. His friend’s voice sounded contradictory. He didn’t know they were having an argument here. “I thought there was two of them.” “Two what?” “Nephews.” The second one, whose name was Chet, said. His boss, Harmon, wanted to argue, but knew he was right. It was his turn to say it. “Huh.” He said. Huh, it hung in the space between them. Which was alright, since it was too hot to speak anymore. The chips of grass flecked up and stung their faces, like thorns or mosquitoes, pesky inanimate insects unearthed as the ground was brought back to proper manicured form. It was too hot to even look at those Mexicans, Salvadorans, let alone do what they were doing, God bless them, working without a sound usually, except for the one now, coming toward them, the one wearing a mask. He spoke in rapid-fire Spanish. They wouldn’t have understood him even without the mask, but that only made it worse. “Good God, man, what?” The man overcame his panic enough to pull the mask from his face, let it slide down to his sweating neck. He pointed to a spot where his countrymen were gaggled together. “Aqui!” He shouted. The foreman and his underboss brought themselves up from their sticky idle alongside the pickup truck and headed over to the point where the men were gathered like mourners around their dead. “Okay. What the fuck?” The first white man said. “Aqui.” “Yeah. A key. A key to what, man?” A nuclear symbol, the black and yellow triangles, a yellow jacket warning harkening from the Cold War days, stood out on a metal bubble, protruding from the ground, a circle riveted with steel bolts, like a shield. Around the circumference of the steel bubble, were the words White Power, traced like the outlines of reflected smiles or the most primitive of fish. Both of the men exchanged glances. What the hell? With the bank’s consent, and with two of its representatives present, a welder was called in, a friend of the foreman’s. All in attendance gave him and his torch a respectful berth, the Salvadorans marking the furthest reaches of the perimeter, the foremen a little closer, the two bank reps the closest, as this promised to be of the most relevance to them. Whatever it was, it would either raise or lower the value of the property as a whole. They wouldn’t know until the man with the torch, faceless beneath the mask, had burned a hole in the bubble. The sparks reached their apex as it popped, then yielded. The welder gripped the manhole cover in his gloved hands and threw it to the side. He pulled the lid of his mask from his face, revealing sweaty eyes that could barely do more than squint. “Who’s going in?” No one had to. Someone was coming out, stooped, mistaken for a midget, since the gait was that of age, but it was the cramped space that had wizened the boy. They all stood and watched him. He visored his eyes with his hand, stared at the circle of people around him, and spun three-hundred and sixty-degrees. It overwhelmed him, and he fell in his dizzy spell onto the grass. Two of the Salvadorans ran to him. Another one went for the water in the trunk of the pickup. The boy’s chest was heaving. He was hyperventilating. One of the bank reps, the woman in her mid-thirties, stepped around the boy and the group gathered around him, and she peered inside. It was cool, a dank cave, counterpoint to the heat outside; the cool, mixed with her own curiosity, beckoned her further, and she descended within. A motion sensor triggered and brought her out of the dark. The subterranean eight by six world illuminated, and she saw what the boy had seen for…how long? The answer was there, above a shelf where a bible, a bottle of vitamins, and a 9mm Beretta semi-auto handgun were resting. Fortunately the gun (which looked loaded from here) seemed untouched. The teddy bear, on the other hand, appeared to have been snuggled until mangled, a source for the child’s fear that had endured until one of the black sequins that was its eye fell from the socket, under the wear of spit when it wasn’t wrapped around a sucked thumb. Better the teddy-bear than the gun, she thought, before marveling at the digital face which was precise down to the second…. 13:10:05:23:09 Thirteen months, ten days, five hours, twenty three minutes and nine…no ten…now eleven seconds the boy had been down here, alone. With foodstuffs, a teddy bear, vitamins, and a handgun. A pulley hung from the ceiling. She clutched the base of the square knot, and walked from one end of the six by eight cell to the other. She immediately felt a breeze as slats yielded in the ceiling, revealing a most-primitive form of cross ventilation, which sent her to the other side of the room, and the child’s only other form of entertainment: a military-issue, World War One style gas mask. Up above, the other man cradled the boy who had been forced to grow to pubescence in a space too small to even use the bathroom. The boy stared into his eyes, looking like he was about to die, more probably about to pass out. He mustered some words for the man, too faint to hear without reaching down. “What, son?” The boy repeated it. “Did the n—— take over?” The man winced and drew back, maybe because he was black, and the boy had spoken in commiserate tones, as if they were on the same team. The man fought his repulsion, looked up to make sure no one else had heard, then leaned back in. The boy didn’t know what the word meant. Or, if he had at some point, he had somehow forgotten in the intervening year. The man cradled him and knew the words meant nothing, didn’t know whether the boy’s brother or the boy’s uncle had locked him down here. But he wanted to kill somebody.

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