Book of Secrets (14 page)

  It being a weeknight, and with no one on the bill, I was able to find a parking spot just out front with no problems. Pulling a fresh pack of cigarettes from the glove compartment, I locked up the car and headed inside.

  It was exactly as it had always been, though the management was always trying to keep things new and fresh. They could move the bar from one side of the room to another all they wanted, bring in disco balls and strobe lights, but it wouldn't make any difference. It still always smelled of rotting wood and spilt beer, not that anyone in the place seemed to mind. Without a hot new act to bring in all the college kids, it was only the career alcoholics in attendance tonight. People with nowhere else to go and in no hurry to get there.

  I found a stool at the bar and waited for the mound of flesh with the shaved head and the goofy grin to come my way. I didn't have to wait long; he was mopping up the bar in front of me and taking my order before I knew it.

  "What'll it be?" he asked in perfect bartenderese.

  "I want to accept Odin as my personal lord and savior," I answered.

  The round head shot up, eyes locking onto mine.

  "Spencer!" he roared. "How are you, my friend?"

  "Never better, Brother Royce." I leaned in and eyed the chalk board with the evening's specials. "How 'bout a pint of Bock?"

  "Done," he answered, then produced a glass as if from nowhere and proceeded to fill it. He slammed it down in front of me, and then rested both hands on the bar. "You know, you shouldn't make fun of my beliefs, Spencer. It's unkind."

  "I know, I know," I answered, shrugging. "I can't help it."

  Royce shook his head slowly at me, frowning.

  "Your cynicism keeps you from seeing the truth," he said. "You know that. You're afraid of what you could find yourself believing."

  "Of that I have no doubt."

  A pair of UPS drivers appeared at the far end of the bar and motioned for the round head to come over to them. Royce turned to me, apologetically.

  "I'll be right back," he said.

  "Take your time," I answered. "I've got some questions to ask you when you get a chance."

  "Questions?" Royce answered, pausing in midturn. "About?"

  "About the northern mysteries."

  The round face split into an enormous grin, lighting up his dark eyes. He thumped an open palm on the bar top and laughed.

  "Finally!" he near shouted, and then hurried to get the drivers' orders.

Royce Crayton, to be charitable, was the oddest duck in the entire lunatic flock I'd collected over the years. Of all the unhinged and borderline individuals I'd encountered, he had the clearest, most air-tight claim on true insanity I'd found. And yet, he was pleasant, sociable and able to keep a job and maintain relative normal relations. When you got down to it, he seemed all in all a normal guy – big boned and bald, but a normal guy. Until, that is, he started talking about his divine charge. Royce Crayton was on a mission. A mission from Odin.

  It always begins with Royce innocently enough. Over beers, or a meal, he'll begin talking about his life. His time in jail, the crowd he ran with as a kid. To the untrained ear he's just a normal guy sharing a hard luck story. Then, without warning, the story starts to change. He starts talking about his moment of clarity, his "epiphany" he calls it, when the heavens opened up their gates and he beheld the face of God. By this point most newcomers begin to lean back in their chairs, shifting uncomfortably and making eyes towards the doors. But it's too late. Royce is in full swing by this point, telling you exactly what God wants, and what he has in store for you if you only live by his simple precepts, and then you know. He's not talking. He's proselytizing.

  I had the unique fortune to experience this rare pleasure first hand on two separate occasions. The first was soon after moving to Austin, when I'd met Michelle and her then current flame Janet, the owner of Moon & Son. Janet had given me an open tab at the bar and invited me to come by whenever I wanted. I'm sure to her that meant a beer now and again, maybe once or twice a week. What she didn't know was that I was at that time out of a job, with nothing to do and no money to do it with. My meager cupboards were bare, and my entertainment consisted entirely of watching geckos scale the outside of my screen door. I was always there, and
always
had a drink in hand.

  It was there that I met Royce Crayton, who had only recently begun tending bar. He and I got to be pretty familiar over the first weeks, and since I was there almost as much as he was we fell to talking whenever things were slow. The first time he started in on his mission, I was at the end of an eight hour spree, and I wasn't listening to much of anything. The next day, when things cleared up for me, I remembered bits and pieces of our conversation the previous night, and thought for sure Royce was fucking with me. He simply had to be. So, after hosing off, I headed up to Moon & Son, figuring we'd both get a big kick out of the line of bull he'd laid on me.

  I knew, as soon as I mentioned the mission to him, that I'd made a mistake. I could see in his eyes that particular zeal, that total lack of irony, that blind passionate sincerity that only the truly devoted or the truly insane possess. He was dead serious, and he meant every word. Then, without warning, he told me the whole story again, worried I might have missed something the first time around.

  Royce was born a cracker, poor white trash and everything that it entailed. His father, from everything I've heard about him, was a walking stereotype: beer gut and wife-beater shirt and a mean left hook. His mother was bad hair dyes and fat ankles, a cigarette always hanging from the corner of her mouth. Neither ever had anything resembling a kind word for their only son, and Royce learned early to look for acceptance elsewhere. Unfortunately, in the poorest neighborhood in the poorest part of south Dallas, an area the rest of the city seemed to want to shut away until it atrophied and dropped off, Royce rarely saw anything but the worst in people. There was all the expected misery and depression one has come to expect after hundreds of movies of the week and after-school specials, all the deprivations that prey on men and women who have had everything taken away by the system and never once gotten anything back. All that shit.

  Royce didn't know any better, didn't know anywhere was any different. He only knew what he saw around him, and that was a simple lesson. Obey the law of the jungle. Like stays to like, and anyone else is an enemy. By the age of twelve he'd fallen in with a group of white punks who delighted in roaming the neighborhood throwing rocks through windows and tagging every flat surface they could find. Inevitably someone saw a movie, or read a book, and it was bomber jackets, combat boots and shaved heads all around. The swastikas came out, and suddenly they were skinheads.

  It's best not to dignify the skinhead with anything approaching a philosophy, but if they could be said to have a motto it is that White Is Right, and Everything Else Gets Stomped In The Face. By the time Royce was fifteen, he had gotten four chapters into
Mein Kampf
, and had a triskelion tattooed on his forearm. By the time he was sixteen he had moved out of his parents' house all together, and was squatting in an abandoned tenement near the Trinity with a half-dozen of his friends. By the time he was seventeen, he had killed a man.

  The way Royce tells it, the murder was just a spur of the moment thing. He looks back on it with profound regret, but even now can't begin to explain why it happened. Like a scene out of a bad movie, he and a few of his bald pals had gone into a convenience store to cause some trouble; it all ended when Royce produced a gun and emptied it into the Korean clerk. When it was done, the gun warm in his hand and blood pooling at his feet, Royce had just frozen in place, unable to move. The cops had shown up a few minutes later, on their way to a topless place down the street, and hauled him off without any trouble at all.

  Royce was tried as an adult, and by his eighteenth birthday had moved to Huntsville. He shared a cell with an enormous Samoan, and the two didn't exactly become the best of friends. Those first weeks were the roughest on him, I think, all alone and mixed in with every enemy of the white man he could imagine, and all of them coming after him. Then he met another skinhead in the yard and was invited to join the Church of Odin. It was all downhill from there.

  As near as I've been able to tell from reading between the lines of Royce's story, groups like the Church of Odin are not all that uncommon. Some enterprising convict at some point in the recent past realized that religious groups are afforded rights and privileges not given the mass of prisoners. The simplest thing in the world, then, would be to start a religion. Soon it was all the rage. There was the Church of Wicca, the Moorish Science Temple, the Sons of Aztlan and New Nation of Islam. And there was the Church of Odin.

  All these jokers would do, as Royce tells it, was to "conduct gang activity". What that means I don't know, unless it is to tattoo each other and plan how to beat other gangs senseless. Nevertheless, I guess the color television wasn't enough to hold the skinheads' interest, so it was church time and pagan prayer meetings instead.

  Royce was approached like every other inmate of suitable ethnic makeup. A member of the Church came up to him in the exercise yard and told him that his white brothers had formed a church, and that if he alerted the guards he would be escorted from his cell and to meetings at designated times. The word "Odin" was mentioned, Royce remembered, and that was about it. Young, bruised and impressionable, Royce agreed.

  What happened next is, I believe, the thing that slowly turned Royce from a rather dull-minded thug to an intellectually eager lunatic. When next his cell block was taken to the library to select reading material, while the others all gravitated to lawbooks to help them bolster up their flagging appeals, Royce hit the card catalogue and looked up "ODIN". He came up with a children's book,
The Children of Odin
by Padraic Colum, which he took back to his cell and read straight through, cover to cover, over the next three days. Then he read it again. And again. And when it came time to go back to the library the following week, he checked it out again, along with a copy of
Myths of
the Norsemen
, one of
The Lives of the Norse Kings
, a large picture book called
D'Aulaires' Book of Norse
Myths
, and a collection of Norse Eddas. Slowly his reading speed increased, as did his comprehension, and as they did he would go back and read the books again and again.

  Meanwhile the Church of Odin continued their meetings. While the guards were in ear shot, they called upon their Viking god to grant them strength, to protect them in times of torment, and to strike down their enemies, but when the guards wandered away it was back to how to smash the Mexican Mafia, or stick it to the Crips, all in hoarse, whispered tones. Royce sat quietly in the back, the Colum book in his lap, and became increasingly confused. He was starting to understand something, was stepping up to a precipice of belief, and he was beginning to feel like he was all alone.

  Finally, he couldn't take it any more. When one of the more experienced Church members was instructing a newbie on the proper manufacture and care of a shiv, Royce leapt from his folding chair and held his book high in the air.

  "Blasphemy," he shouted, his voice breaking. "This is blasphemy."

  Slowly, as one, the others turned to look at him.

  "What the fuck?" the shiv coach muttered, his eyes narrowing.

  "You call yourselves sons of Odin, but you don't understand
anything
about him! Odin didn't just come for us, for the Aryan." Royce took a deep breath, and plowed on. "Odin hung himself from the World Ash for the sake of all mankind, and the runes he won were given to all the children of man. If this is really Odin's church, we should let anyone in…. We should invite them in: Mexican, black, Chinese…"

  The air in the room seemed to drop ten degrees as he spoke, and the others started to climb slowly out of their chairs.

  "What the fuck?" the skinhead at the front repeated.

  "Odin is the All Father of All," Royce went on. "You… you're just a bunch of bigots."

  There was a long pause, as Royce tells it, when they all just looked at him, over a dozen of them, their eyes wide, their mouths hanging open. Then, without a signal or sign, they all rushed forward and proceeded to beat the living shit out of him.

  His remaining years in prison, Royce kept apart from the other skinheads as much as possible. Everyone else, for the most part, kept pretty much apart from him, too. They learned early on that the chance to knock his face in wasn't nearly worth having to listen to him talk about the glory of Odin while they did it. Through it all, Royce's strength in his new-found religion grew stronger and stronger, and became in the end unbreakable.

  Finally, the parole board agreed that Royce had met the terms set for his early release. They glossed over his occasional outburst on the Norse gods, choosing instead to note simply that he had "undergone a religious conversion" while incarcerated. Royce Crayton was released back into society, his only possessions a battered bomber jacket, a key to a house that had burned to the ground years before, and a battered copy of
The Children of Odin
that had been given to him by the prison librarian when the cover had finally fallen off.

  Older, wiser, and without a doubt nuttier than a fruitcake, Royce began his mission: to bring to the world the Good News of Odin.

The evening wore on, and all but the most committed drinkers filtered out in ones and twos, leaving in the end only a half-dozen of us in the place. After seeing that everyone's beverage needs had been seen to, Royce came around to the front of the bar and found a seat next to me. Resting his elbows on the counter-top, he fingered a little necklace he wore, a four-armed cross banded by a circle that seemed somehow familiar.