“This is delicious, Rhoda,” Omar said. He had some more of the casserole, then held up his plastic fork. “What’s in it?”
Rhoda, a plump woman whose shoulders, toughened to leather by the sun, were revealed by an incongruous, frilly fiesta dress, simpered and smiled.
“Oh, it’s easy,” she said. “Green beans with cream of mushroom soup, fried onion rings, and Velveeta.”
“It’s delicious,” Omar repeated. He leaned a little closer to speak above the sound of the band. “You wouldn’t mind sending the recipe to Wilona, would you?”
“Oh no, not at all.”
“This casserole is purely wonderful. I’d love it if Wilona knew how to make it.”
Another vote guaranteed for yours truly, he thought as he left a pleased-looking constituent in his wake.
He wasn’t planning on staying sheriff forever. He had his machine together. He had his people. The state house beckoned. Maybe even Congress.
How long had it been since a Klan leader was in Congress? A real Klan leader, too, not someone like that wimp David Duke, who claimed he wasn’t Klan anymore.
Omar waved at D.R. Thompson, the owner of the Commissary, who was talking earnestly with Merle in the corner by the door to the men’s room. D.R. nodded back at him.
Ozie’s was jammed. The tin-roofed, clapboard bar past the Shelburne City corp limit had been hired for Omar’s victory party, and it looked as if half the parish had turned out for the shrimp boil and dance.
The white half, Omar thought.
Omar sidled up to the bar. Ozie Welks, the owner, passed him a fresh beer without even pausing in his conversation with Sorrel Ellen, who was the editor and publisher of the Spottswood Chronicle, the local weekly newspaper.
“So this Yankee reporter started asking me about all this race stuff,” Ozie said. “I mean it was Klan this and militia that and slavery this other thing. And I told him straight out, listen, you’ve got it wrong, the South isn’t about race. The South has its own culture, its own way of life. All everybody outside the South knows is the race issue, and the South is about a lot more than that.”
“Like what, for instance?” Sorrel asked.
“Well,” Ozie said, a bit defensive now that he had to think about it. “There’s football.”
Sorrel giggled. For a grown man, he had a strange, high-pitched giggle, a sound that cut the air like a knife. Being too close to Sorrel Ellen when he giggled could make your ears hurt.
“That’s right,” he said. “You got it right there, Ozie.” He turned to gaze at Omar with his watery blue eyes. “I think Ozie has a point, don’t you?”
“I think so,” Omar agreed. He turned to Ozie and said, “Hey, I just wanted to say thanks. This is a great party, and I just wanted to thank you for your help, and for your support during the election. Everybody around here knows that there’s nothing like an Ozie Welks shrimp boil.”
“I just want you to do right by us now you’ve got yourself elected,” Ozie said. He was a powerful man, with a lumberjack’s arms and shoulders, and the USMC eagle-and-globe tattooed on one bicep and “Semper Fidelis” on the other. His customers cut up rough sometimes— pretty often, to tell the truth— but he never needed to employ a man at the door. He could fling a man out of his bar so efficiently that the drunk was usually bouncing in the parking lot before the other customers even had time to blink.
“I’ll do as much as I can,” Omar said. “But you know, with all these damn Jew reporters in town, it’s going to be hard.”
“I hear you,” Ozie said.
Sorrel touched Omar’s arm. “I’m going to be running an editorial this Saturday on welfare dependency,” he said. “It should please you.”
Omar looked at the newspaperman. “Welfare dependency, huh?” he said.
“Yeah. You know, how we’ve been subsidizing bad behaviors all these years.”
“Uh-huh.” Omar nodded. “You mean like if we stop giving money to niggers, they’ll go someplace else? Something like that?”
“Well, not in so many words.” Sorrel winked as if he were confiding a state secret. “You’re going to like it.”
“So I’m going to like it, as opposed to all the editorials you’ve been running which I didn’t like.”
Sorrel made a face. “Sorry, Omar. But you know a paper’s gotta please its advertisers. And the folks who pay my bills weren’t betting on you winning the election.”
Omar looked at the publisher. “You betting on me now, Sorrel?”
Sorrel gave his high-pitched giggle. “I reckon I know a winner when I see one,” he said.
“Well,” Omar said. “God bless the press.”
He tipped his beer toward Ozie in salute, then made his way toward the back of the crowded bar. Sorrel, he had discovered, was not untypical. People who had despised him, or spoken against him, were now clustering around pretending they’d been his secret friends all along. A couple of the sheriff’s deputies, and one of the jailers, standoffish till now, had asked him for information about joining the Klan. Miz LaGrande was more discreet about it, with her hand-written invitation on her special stationery, but Omar could tell what she was up to. People were beginning to realize that the old centers of power in the parish were just about played out, and that there was a new force in the parish. They were beginning to cluster around the new power, partly because they smelled advantage, partly because everyone liked a winner.
Omar was perfectly willing to use these people, but he figured he knew just how far to trust them.
He stepped out the back door into the dusk. People had spilled out of the crowded bar and onto the grass behind, clustered into the circle of light cast by a yard light set high on a power pole. Wild shadows flickered over the crowd as bats dove again and again at the insects clustered around the light. The day’s heat was still powerful, but with the setting of the sun it had lost its anger.
Omar paused on the grass to sip his beer, and Merle caught up to him, “I spoke to D.R. about that camp meeting matter,” he said. “I squared it.”
“Thanks,” Omar said. “I don’t want people scared of losing their incomes just ’cause I got elected.”
“Not our people, anyway.”
“No.”
“And I think I calmed Jedthus down. Though it’s hard to tell with Jedthus.”
Omar frowned. “I know.”
Merle grinned. “Hey, wasn’t it nice of the Grand Wizard to turn up?”
“Yep.” Omar tipped his beer back, let the cool drink slide down his throat.
“He said he wanted to speak with you privately, if you can get away.”
“Yeah, sure.” Omar wiped his mouth. “Do you know where he is?”
“Talking to some folks over in the parking lot.”
“Right.” He put a hand on Merle’s shoulder and grinned. “We’re doin’ good, ain’t we?”
Merle grinned back. “You bet, boss.”
Omar crossed to the gravel parking lot and found the Grand Wizard perched on the tailgate of his camper pickup, talking to some of the locals. He was a small man, balding, who dressed neatly and wore rimless spectacles. He was not much of a public speaker, and even the white satins he wore on formal occasions did little more than make him look like a grocery clerk decked out for Halloween. He had risen to his position as head of the Klan— this particular Klan anyhow— by virtue of being a tireless organizer. He ran things because it was clear that nobody else would do it as well, or as energetically.
In his civilian life, he ran a bail bond agency in Meridian, Mississippi.
“Hi, Earl,” Omar said.
The Grand Wizard looked up and smiled. “Damn if it ain’t a fine day,” he said. “I was tellin’ the boys here how good you looked on television.”
“Knowing how to use the media,” Omar said, “that’s half the battle right there.”
“That’s right.” The Grand Wizard looked down at the ice in his plastic go-cup and gave it a meditative shake. “That’s where the Klan’s always been strong, you know. The uniforms. The burning crosses. The flags. They strike the eye and the heart. They makes you feel something.”
“That’s why I took the oath in front of the statue,” Omar said.
The Grand Wizard gave a sage nod. “That’s right,” he said. “Give everyone something to see and think about. The Mourning Confederate. The Cause that our people fought and died for. The Cause that still lives in our hearts. It speaks to everyone here.”
“Amen,” one of the boys said.
“We send signals to our people,” Omar said. “The media and the others read it however they like, but our people know the message we’re sending.”
“That’s right.” The Grand Wizard nodded.
“Merle said you wanted to talk to me or something?” Omar said.
“Oh, yeah.” The Grand Wizard slid off his tailgate to the ground. “Now if you gentlemen will excuse us .. .”
Omar and the Grand Wizard walked off to the side of the parking lot, where rusty barb wire drooped under the glossy weight of Virginia creeper. The sound of “Diggy Diggy Low” grated up from Ozie’s, where the fiddler was kicking up a storm.
“I was wondering if you could address our big Klanvention on Labor Day,” the Grand Wizard began.
“Sure,” Omar said.
For years, white supremacists had a big Labor Day meeting in Stone Mountain, Georgia. But the Grand Wizard had quarreled with the Stone Mountain organizers, and he’d started his own Labor Day meeting in Mississippi. He was always working hard to get more of the troops to turn out to his Klanvention than to the other meeting.
The Grand Wizard did not march to anyone else’s drum. He was the leader, and that was that. And if other people didn’t like it, they could just go to Stone Mountain.
Which brought to mind another problem, Omar thought. Whenever anyone in the Klan had challenged the Grand Wizard’s authority, the Grand Wizard had succeeded in cutting them off or driving them out of the organization.
Omar was now a good deal more famous than the Grand Wizard would ever be. If he wanted to take control of the entire Klan, Omar could probably do it.
But he didn’t want to become the new Grand Wizard. King Kleagle of Louisiana, as far as Omar was concerned, was quite enough work. Earl could stay in his office in Meridian and organize and speechify and push papers forever, and with Omar’s blessing.
Omar wondered if the Grand Wizard understood this. He should find the moment, he told himself, and reassure the man.
“You come to the Klanvention,” the Grand Wizard was saying, “we’ll get our message on TV. And every time we get media attention, we get more members.” The Grand Wizard grinned out into the night. His teeth were small, like a child’s, and perfectly formed. “The liberal media do us a favor every time they run a story on us. It’s only when they ignore us that people lose interest.”
Omar nodded. “I noticed that there were a lot of people in this parish that didn’t care to know me till I got on television. It’s like being on TV makes you more real somehow.”
“It’s that symbol thing, like I said earlier. They see you standing up for something.”
Omar suspected there was more to it than that, that maybe television had changed people’s ideas of what was real, but he was more interested in what the Grand Wizard was getting to. There wasn’t any reason to take Omar aside just to be talking about speaking engagements.
“I’ve got some other requests for you to speak, but they’re not from our people, so I can’t judge.”
“Just forward ’em to me,” Omar said.
“I’ll do that.”
The Grand Wizard paused, hands in his pockets, and glanced around.
“I met a fella the other day you might want to talk to,” he said. “His name’s Knox. Micah Knox. You ever heard of him?”
“Can’t say as I have.”
The Grand Wizard’s foot toyed with the butt-end of an old brown beer bottle half hidden in the creeper. “He belongs to a group called the Crusaders National of the Tabernacle of Christ. He’s got some interesting views about, you know, the situation. Very well informed. He’s on a sort of tour of the country, and you might want to have him give a talk to your boys here.”
Omar vaguely remembered hearing about the Tabernacle of Christ— they were some kind of Western group, he thought— but there were so many little groups on his end of the political spectrum that he had trouble sorting one out from another. It was hard enough just keeping track of the sixty-odd groups that called themselves the Klan.
“He doesn’t charge or anything,” the Grand Wizard added, misinterpreting Omar’s hesitation. “He’s just trying to make contacts.”
“He can come by if he wants, I guess,” Omar said.
“This isn’t a matter for an open meeting or anything,” the Grand Wizard said. “No cameras, no reporters. Just you and Knox and Merle and a few of the boys you best trust.”
Omar gave him a sharp look. “Earl, is there a reason this Knox is under cover?”
The Grand Wizard gave a little shake of his head as he rolled the old beer bottle under his sole. “No, no. What I’m saying is that this boy is radical. People who haven’t already given their lives completely to the Cause might misunderstand his message. We wouldn’t want that. That’s all.”
“Okay, then,” Omar said. “He can say whatever he likes, as long as he’s not planning on doing anything radical while he’s here.”
The Grand Wizard kicked the beer bottle. Restrained by the creeper, it hopped about three inches, then came to a stop, edge-side up. The Grand Wizard sighed, then began to amble back toward Ozie’s. “I’ll be in touch about him,” he said. “I don’t know what his schedule is, exactly.”
“Fine.”
“By the way,” the Grand Wizard said, “I saw that new sign— Hess-Meier Plantation Farm.”
“Inc.,” Omar added. Then, “Jews. Swiss Jews.”
“They buy the gin, too?”
“Of course,” Omar said. “If they took their cotton to someone else’s gin, they wouldn’t make so many sheckels.” Omar shrugged. “Well, at least there’s another gin in the parish, down to Hardee, and that one’s American.”
The Grand Wizard shook his head. “Wrightson couldn’t at least sell out to Americans?”
“Hess-Meier was top bidder. Now half the agricultural land in the parish is owned by the fuckin’ Swiss.”
“It isn’t our country anymore.” The Grand Wizard sighed.
It never was, Omar wanted to tell him. It’s always been owned by the wrong people, who traded land and money back and forth within their circle, and the people who lived on the land and worked it never figured in their calculations.
Omar and the Grand Wizard walked up to Ozie’s back door. Wilona was there, a plate in her hand. She was talking to Deb Drury, whose husband ran the towing service. “This fruit salad is so special,” she said. “I can taste something different in it.”
“Black cherry Jell-O,” Deb said. “Fruit and pecans, and Co-Cola.”
Wilona leaned close to Deb and lowered her voice. “I don’t want to impose,” she said, “but could you send me the recipe?”
Omar looked at his wife and gave her a wink.
Just treat the people like they actually exist, he thought, and next thing you know, they put you in charge.