Snapper (6 page)

Dart and Loretta had been in Indiana for a month when a scandal erupted. An all-black high school basketball team was traveling by bus from Evansville to Indianapolis to compete in the state championship. They won, too. But just as their bus came off the interstate to join Route 42 through Box County, they saw by the side of the road an immense and upright wooden cross in flames.

“This would not happen in Texas,” said Loretta over the morning paper. “Not anymore.”

“A lot of work just to scare some kids,” said Dart.

This was in 1994. To my knowledge there have been no crosses burned in Indiana since then—not publicly at least. Uncle Dart’s sign would today be classed as a hate crime, and people have been arrested for similar signs recently in other states.

It is my impression that other places were changing then. Loretta once took me to a vast Dallas amphitheater where thousands of cowboys in ten-gallon hats sat on the grass sharing wine with their women, while Prospero bickered with Caliban onstage in accents a mile wide. It wasn’t the Texas she grew up in. She loved it, though, and kept season tickets for the opera.

There were plenty of men like Dart down there who bridled at change. But they were policed to some extent by family and friends and neighbors. Loretta reined Dart in hard when she had to. In Indiana there was no such broad solidarity, no Southern cultural cohesion. There were just loners in the trees with guns.

“Take that damn sign down this instant,” said Loretta.

“It was a joke,” said Dart. “A relic of my childhood.” He took it down, and it’s the only time I ever saw him look sheepish.

The cross-burning culprits were never identified. A spokesman for the Ku Klux Klan went on television to deny all involvement.

That part of Indiana is mostly forested hills with scattered settlements called “townships,” an administrative dodge for a place not big enough to warrant a real name. The forest is heavily protected, so the townships will never grow. Within an area of twenty miles deep and thirty wide there are two or three trading posts—townships with a gas station and a convenience store. There is one incorporated town with a little more to it, called Boxville.

Boxville, where the Klan spokesman lived, was infamous for an unsolved murder in 1974. A twenty-two-year-old black woman selling encyclopedias door to door had been hauled into a car and stabbed with a screwdriver several times. Down South they would have hidden the body but in central Indiana that was an unnecessary precaution. National reporters on the scene said the whole town seemed to clam up. The case went cold and was forgotten elsewhere, but it was still talked about locally. Most people wanted to know what she was doing there in the first place. It wasn’t an obvious market for encyclopedias. It was a sundown town, which you might
describe as a white community that expects its domestic help to find some other place to sleep. Sundown policies were outlawed in 1982, when they were obsolete and irrelevant in most places anyway. Boxville may not have had the policy, but it retained the reputation. Still does.

When the Klan denied involvement in the cross burning, people tended to believe them: the fact that they had a national spokesman showed they were changing tactics. But out in the hills of Box County there were a lot of other people nostalgic for the days when the Klan controlled half the general assembly and the governor’s office, too.

As Loretta pointed out, that wouldn’t happen in Texas, either. Though the Texas legislature was so infested with Democrats it might be almost as bad.

They couldn’t be sure which neighbor or neighbors had seen the sign. Probably all of them. Every household in the area had sent a welcome delegation in that first week or so. There was no telling who kicked off the recruitment drive.

At first it was newsletters in the mailbox, hand-delivered in the middle of the night. They had titles like
The Liberator
and
The Klansman’s Voice
, and comprised a lot of dense, obfuscatory prose on political topics. They presented specious statistics about “Negroes” and contained articles about “Catholic power,” a phrase you probably wouldn’t encounter anywhere else.

Dart and Loretta had opinions about these things, of course, and they were the same as Texans everywhere. Pay your taxes and be damn sure to vote, in a word. By which they meant Republican. But that is not how they think in Box County. Even Republicans are part of a federal government that must be dismantled by force.

There were items about ethnic minorities, Jews and Muslims—even in 1994—none of which lived within thirty miles of their house. What was most disturbing to me about these leaflets was that they contained almost no trace of humor, however off-color—they were not the work of casual jokers and Yankee-baiters like Dart, but of serious cross-burning white supremacists.

There was one joke among them. What’s the same between a wife, a dog, and a slave? one leaflet asked. The more you beat them, the more they behave, read the punch line.

Dart repeated that approvingly.

These leaflets were followed by invitations. There was nothing suspicious about the invitations themselves, so they were hard to decline. A retired judge who lived two miles away asked Dart if he would like to hunt some white-tailed deer. Dart accepted. He didn’t have an Indiana hunting license, but the judge told him not to worry about it. Dart thought nothing of it until the morning arrived. He drove to the agreed rendezvous—not far from where I worked, but I didn’t know about it—where he found the judge and seven other men.

Eight men together stand no chance whatever of getting close to a deer.

I don’t know what it was like for Dart to find himself in an Indiana forest surrounded by rifle-bearing Klansmen—men who had taken him and his sign seriously. He never talked about it to me. Yet I can picture it. The fog rolls heavy at that hour, and you can’t see more than a few feet. I picture seven disembodied blank white faces—men you might find at the bank or the barbershop talking about football. They hover in the mist around Dart like a supernatural jury. I hear their hushed bland voices talking in code: emphasizing patriotism and heritage, for which Dart’s sign was a direct translation.
They refer to each other as Exalted Cyclops and Night Hawk and Imperial Dragon. Perhaps they delineate the long dark history of the Invisible Empire: defenders of a defeated realm, protectors of white womanhood, soldiers in the service of a white Christian culture besieged on every side.

Perhaps one of them cracks a joke about niggers and is sternly rebuked by his superiors. This is not a laughing matter. It is only the Knights who can through discipline and dedication halt the decline of the entire white race. Dart probably thinks it’s a good nigger joke and he tries to remember it for later, when Loretta is not around. Maybe he’ll tell it to me, because that would surely get my sanctimonious Yankee goat. Perhaps he hung that sign up for that very reason.

Perhaps they regale him with tales of D. C. Stephenson, the Klansman who controlled the whole state and was a presidential contender until his conviction for the murder of a white Indianapolis schoolteacher. (Perhaps
he
tells
them
that Stephenson was born in Texas but found insufficient support for his views there and set up shop in Evansville). Perhaps they tell him the details of that unsolved case of the encyclopedia girl stabbed with a screwdriver.

I can only speculate. I suppose they propositioned him, offered him some office and responsibility. Perhaps they just sounded him out to confirm that his views were in line with theirs. Perhaps the subject didn’t even come up—yet—though it was hard to see why eight men would gather at five in the morning miles from anywhere, unless it was illicit.

Whatever he told them, they didn’t like it much.

That became clear the next day when Loretta was invited for tea by a couple on the brow of a furry hill a mile from where I worked. She arrived to find half the women of Box County already assembled. They didn’t talk about politics.
They talked about Texas recipes and Audubon’s beautiful birds, prints of which were framed throughout the living room and represented just outside the window, too, in lesser numbers than they used to be.

Loretta told them what I did.

They discussed whether it was better to shop in Boxville, which had limited supplies of everything, or to make the long drive to Bloomington or even the Indianapolis outskirts to buy everything in bulk.

The lady hosting this tea party was about Loretta’s age and had come originally from Louisiana, so there was a sketchy bond between them.

“I understand,” she announced to the room, “that you have some family in Indianapolis.”

Loretta had been free with this information when they had first met, and could not understand why the woman was bringing it up in this labored fashion.

“Yes,” she said from across the room, which had fallen silent. “My son and his wife and their new baby.”

“And I understand they live in Broad Ripple,” said the woman from Louisiana.

Loretta had not told her that.

“He’s a software engineer, is that right?”

Loretta hadn’t said that, either. Someone had clearly been doing some homework, and they wanted her to know it.

She stayed long enough to be polite, and then she drove angrily home to give Dart a new hiding about that sign.

I don’t know what they wanted from Dart: I suppose after that first encounter he knew who they were, and they feared him. In an earlier age I think they would have shown him a
noose in a tree and told him to make his choice. That, after all, is how they came to dominate state politics half a century before. Tactics had changed, though, and their intimidations had become more subtle and discreet.

They paid a personal visit to Dave when he was having his lunch in a Broad Ripple café. A stubbled young man in a leather jacket squeezed into his booth unasked.

“Your old man lives in Box County, right?”

“How the hell do you know that?” said Dave through his bagel.

“We want to know what he’s doing there,” said the man.

“Who’s we?”

“Me and some friends.”

“I’d like to know why you’re asking,” said Dave.

“Neighborhood Watch,” said the man, and got up as suddenly as he had sat down. His point was already made.

Despite their diligence, they seemed to miss Elia’s nationality. They never mentioned it, even obliquely, and it would have been a sure sign that Dart was not one of them. I assume they staked out Dave’s home, but I suppose Elia must have stayed in.

I was the next natural target. The stickers on the back of my pickup for Amnesty International, the World Wildlife Fund, and Charles Darwin probably didn’t do me any favors.

It wasn’t unusual for me to encounter hunters in the forest. They made me very nervous and I made them nervous too. I couldn’t wear bright colors—in case the birds try to mate with you, said Dart. In the eyes of those hunters I was an accident waiting to happen, not to mention a fool—even when, or especially when, I explained what I did for a living. The last thing a serious hunter wants in his woods is an invisible human being. I usually told them I had seen deer in this direction or that, though I was lying to get them off my patch.

The park rangers knew who and where I was, and they advised hunters to avoid me, too. Not everyone asked them, though.

I was visiting a wood thrush family twenty feet up in a sugar maple when I noticed a man in full camouflage creeping along a dry creek bed thirty yards away. Luckily for me the wood thrush is a pretty mellow bird.

Full camouflage is not recommended. It’s also not very effective compared to the mud and tree sap you accumulate studying birds. He was crouching with a gun held across his thighs. Dart or Loretta could have told me it was a shotgun, but I found that out later. He moved slowly, silently, as if he had some quarry in sight, but I couldn’t imagine what.

Gradually it became clear that he was stalking one of my nest flags.

Near every nest I tied an orange tape with a reference number on it—in this case AF12 for Acadian flycatcher 12. The flag was directly under the nest. The female stayed put, and the male began circling the intruder quietly.

He turned the tape over as if he hoped to find a
BACK IN FIVE MINUTES
message on the other side. Then he fetched a bowie knife from his belt, cut the tape, and pocketed it.

He had my attention.

I was sure he was a competent woodsman adept at tracking all kinds of game. But I was adept at tracking small
birds
, which put me in a league he had never even heard of. Moreover, there wasn’t a square inch of ground in that square mile that didn’t have recent boot prints of mine; tracking me would be like chasing a mob wearing identical shoes.

He crept around a corner of the creek bed and out of sight, which was good, in case he felt me watching him. Sixty feet over his head was a scarlet tanager I called Rory. Spend enough time out there and you start naming things. Rory
flew a reliable mid-morning triangle between two red maples and an enormous tulip poplar I called the Devil’s Toothbrush. He’d land on the outside of a branch and sing a few notes, then move on. When he spied an intruder—usually me—Rory kept still at the base of a branch and watched carefully for the duration. It took me a long time to learn to sneak up on Rory, even though he’s the most conspicuous thing out there himself—a splash of neon red against the canopy green. I could see him eyeballing the camouflage man below.

I got out of my tree and kept an eye on Rory while I moved parallel to the creek bed along a small ridge, quietly and well below the crest. Another twenty yards from where he stood he should see another nest flag—RV4, for a red-eyed vireo I called Pedro. Ten feet from that was a hollow log containing a fox den. Between five and six in the morning I sometimes watched the kits playing on top of that log, and they would let me get as close as I liked. Their mother—I never named the foxes for some reason—put them to bed at sunrise and slept lightly herself near the entrance during the day. Whenever there was a disturbance—that is, whenever I checked RV4—her face would emerge from the log tentatively, nose quivering. She never got used to me.