Then she picks him up.
Brit and I are so shocked that she just took our baby away—just over to the warmer for a bath, but still—that for a beat neither of us can speak.
I take a step toward her, where she’s bent over my boy, but Brit grabs the tail of my shirt. Don’t make a scene.
Am I supposed to just stand here?
Do you want her to know you’re pissed off and take it out on him?
I want Lucille back. What happened to Lucille?
I don’t know. Maybe she left.
How can she do that, when her patient is still here?
I have no idea, Turk, I don’t run this hospital.
I watch the black nurse like a hawk while she wipes Davis down and washes his hair and wraps him up in a blanket again. She puts a little electronic bracelet on his ankle—like the ones you sometimes see on prisoners who’ve been released on probation. As if he’s already being punished by the system.
I am staring so hard at the black nurse that I wouldn’t be surprised if she goes up in flames. She smiles at me, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Clean as a whistle,” she announces. “Now, let’s see if we can get him to nurse.”
She goes to pull aside the neck of Brit’s hospital johnny, and I’m done. “Get away from her,” I say, my voice low and true as an arrow. “I want to talk to your boss.”
—
A YEAR AFTER I went to Invisible Empire camp, Raine asked me if I’d like to be part of the North American Death Squad. It was not enough to just believe what Raine believed in, about Whites being a master race. It was not enough to have read Mein Kampf three times. To be one of them, truly, I had to prove myself, and Raine promised me I’d know where and when the right moment came to pass.
One night when I was staying at my dad’s, I woke up to hear banging on my bedroom window. I wasn’t really worried about them waking up the household; my father was out at a business dinner in Boston, not due back till after midnight. As soon as I threw up the sash, Raine and two of the guys spilled inside, dressed in ninja black. Raine immediately tackled me onto the floor, forearm against my throat. “Rule number one,” he said, “don’t open the door if you don’t know who’s going to come inside.” He waited until I was seeing stars and then let me go. “Rule number two: take no prisoners.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Tonight, Turk,” he told me, “we are custodians. We are going to clean Vermont of its filth.”
I found a pair of black sweats and a screen-printed sweatshirt I wore inside out, so that it was black, too. Since I didn’t have a black knit cap, Raine let me wear his, and he pulled his hair back in a ponytail. We drove in Raine’s car, passing a bottle of J?germeister back and forth and blasting punk through the speakers, to Dummerston.
I hadn’t heard of the Rainbow Cattle Company, but as soon as we got there, I understood what kind of place this was. There were men holding hands as they walked from the parking lot into the bar, and every time the door opened there was a flash of a brightly lit stage and a drag queen lip-synching. “Whatever you do, don’t bend down,” Raine told me and snickered.
“What are we doing here?” I asked, not sure why he’d dragged me to a gay bar.
Just then two men walked out, their arms slung around each other. “This,” Raine said, and he jumped on one of the guys, slamming his head against the ground. His date started to run in the other direction but was tackled by one of Raine’s friends.
The door opened again, and another pair of men stumbled out into the night. Their heads were pressed together as they laughed at some private joke. One reached into his pocket for a set of keys, and as he turned toward the parking lot, his face was lit by the glow of a passing car.
I should have put the pieces together earlier—the electric razor in the medicine cabinet, when my dad always used a blade; the detour my father made to stop for coffee every day to and from work at Greg’s store; the way he had left my mother all those years ago without explanation; the fact that my grandfather had never liked him. I tugged my black cap down lower and yanked up the fleece neck warmer Raine had given me, so that I wouldn’t be recognized.