Here is a photo of the front cover of my new book, White Devils.

 

White Devils

 Chapter 1

April, six months later

 

“That’s not going to work, Larry. Your plan lacks seriousness, depth, and a genuine chance of success.”

Larry snorted, the tattoo on his left cheek rippled from the rush of air emanating from his nostrils.  “You’ve always got something better, don’t you, Blondie?” 

Connie smiled because he was used to this from Larry the Nazi. Connie studied him. Larry was significant, not just tall, but large: broad shoulders, muscular, taut. His neck was thick, melding into the trapezius muscle sitting atop his shoulders. His core was broad and hard. It wouldn't be difficult to imagine him as a professional lineman in the National Football League. Connie chortled. Larry reminded him of Bluto, the big, stupid character in the old Popeye cartoons.

“Now what, Blondie? Are you laughing at me?”

His face red, fists clenched, Larry glared at Connie.

Connie retained the smile and held his ground. He knew how to handle a person who always resorted to physical intimidation when he couldn’t contemplate other options. His experiences with a brutal stepfather had taught him plenty.

“I’m not laughing at you,” Connie said, his voice steady.

“It kind of looked that way.” Larry’s red face seemed to darken.

Connie didn’t move, but held Larry’s stare; his tone was soothing. “I know you put some thought into this, but did you research the alarm system, the number of guards inside and out, how much time we need to get the job done, getting our bodies out of there safely? I'm sorry, but we need a better plan." 

 Larry paused as comprehension seeped into his brain. He broke off the stare.

Connie watched Larry’s Adam’s apple move up then down. The large muscles in his shoulders and arms relaxed. His head drooped. 

“I just wanted to give an outline for now. I don’t have enough info to account for those other factors.” 

Larry actually sounded intelligent, but Connie could almost see the steroids leaking from his skin. He knew his brain had been compromised. In fact, it was probably one of the reasons Larry joined the white supremacist movement in the first place. The ‘roids had built gigantic muscles on the man but had partially atrophied his brain in the process.

He stepped close to Larry and placed a light touch on his shoulder.

“It’s a nice beginning. We’ll study the place inside and out, observe, and check the location of guards.” 

White Devils

 My new book, the third in a series of three Gerald Hodges stories, will be released in a month. It tells of a new beginning for Gerald Hodges, and a new identity. He starts a "help" business in Vancouver, B.C. (akin to the Equilizer movies) and gets involved with a young couple, stolen securities and bonds, white nationalists, and a black woman who lives alone in the B.C. woods. Double crosses and cut throat thugs dominate the action.

Beginning of a short story

The bus dropped him at the station in Duluth, and he hitchhiked the forty or so miles north on highway 61 to Silver Bay. A nice woman in the horseshoe-shaped business area downtown had directed him to his grandfather’s house. She told him to  start at Outer Drive, walk past Mariner Mountain Park, go two miles beyond till he came to a gravel road. Turn right on the gravel road, she told him.

 “It’s a way up the gravel road that meanders west and north,” she told him. Alex didn’t know it, but it was an excellent jumping-off point for those seeking adventure on the Superior Hiking Trail. He also didn’t expect it to go as far as it did.

Carrying all his possessions in a tan duffle bag, the walk from downtown to his grandpa’s cabin took two-and-a-half hours. 

He wore a Twins baseball cap, a Vikings shirt, no socks, too tight of tennis shoes, and gray sweat pants.

Fifteen-year-old Alex stood in front of a massive red pine door. It had been battered by something big, probably a bear, he thought. Claw marks ran inches away from the top to the middle. He’d been told by his father that his grandpa built the door from an old red pine broken in half by a windstorm nearly forty years ago.

Well, I’m here, he said to himself, slid the duffle bag from his shoulder and looked around. He didn’t know if this had been a good idea or not—to come here, but here he was, and if it didn’t work out, he’d go somewhere else, maybe Canada.

As he wandered around the property situated on the hillside and well off of the main road, he noticed that trees formed an arc around the back of the place. They seemed to go on forever, and as far as he knew, they did. He didn’t know what kind they were, but if he’d paid attention to his dad, he’d have known they were Cedar, Fir, White, Spruce, and Jack Pine,  Ash, Aspen, Birch, Maple, and a few more deciduous trees thrown in. 

Just a little exploring, he thought. Alex hiked around the back of the cabin and started into the woods. The ground was rocky and, to be honest, the thin soles of his tennis shoes transferred the hard points of the numerous rocks straight to the tender underside of his feet. 

Not good. 

He carefully picked his way back to the front of the cabin and sat on what passed for a front porch. It looked like a bunch of black railroad ties dragged up from the nearest railway line and haphazardly placed in front of the doorway. 

No one seemed to be around so he debated whether to knock on the door or just sit and wait outside. He stood back up and knocked. No answer, so he chose a tie he liked and sat. An hour later, the light was dimming and the mosquitos appeared. He slapped here and there and kept them at bay until a great swarm of them, like heat-seeking missiles, descended, intent upon satisfying their bloodlust. Launching himself in the air, he did a three-sixty while slapping and dancing around the front yard.

“Now that was entertaining,” said a voice coming from the open doorway.

“You’re home?” Alex said. 

“Been here the whole time. I thought you’d give up and go away by now, but when you started the little jig, you gave me such a fit of laughter that I couldn’t hold back anymore.” The old man paused, before quickly adding, “You get in here now before I let any more of those little devils in the house.”

Alex slapped as many mosquitos from himself as he could, plucked his duffle bag from the ground and dashed into the cabin.

Nothing was said for a while, except the old man nodded at Alex and told him to put his duffle in the corner. Then he rummaged around near the ancient stove, stocked it with wood and brought a fire to life.

“It’ll take a little while to get going the way I like, but it’ll be ready for cooking in twenty minutes or so.”

“So how come you didn’t answer the door when I knocked?”

“Told ya, I was hoping you’d just give up and leave.”

Alex’s lips scrunched a little, and he didn’t say anything, debating whether to tell the old man that he was his grandson.

“What?” the old man said.

“What, what?” Alex’s head snapped upward.

“You looked like you were going to say something, then changed your mind.”

Alex swayed his head back and forth like he was in a trance and tapped his thigh with his right hand. This was going to be tougher than he thought.

The old man continued to stare at him with increasing expectations making Alex more and more self-conscious, putting pressure on him to respond in some way.

“I’m Alex,” he blurted out.

“Well, at least I got a name out of you. I’m Alan. Looks like we got something in common. Both our names start with a.”

“Oh yeah, we do,” said Alex. That drew a curious look from the old man.

Alex twiddled his thumbs a bit before asking, “Does my name mean anything to you?” The expression on his face begged for an answer.

Alan ceased stoking the fire, looked in the air as if he was trying to recall something, until finally saying, “Nope.” Then he turned around and continued stoking the fire.

Alex’s shoulders sagged visibly before he said, “I didn’t think so.”

The old man looked at him again. This time more seriously. “What’s with you, kid? You come out here at the end of the day, no means of getting here, just walking right up, and then you wait around till I can’t stand it any longer until I let you in, and your name should mean something to me?” His words weren’t angry, but they were forceful and true. “Where you from?”

Alan noticed the kid’s foot tapping on the floor like it would never end.

“You nervous? Or you gotta piss?”

Alex stopped tapping his foot.  “You really don’t know my name and you don’t recognize me?”

Alan stood motionless, studying the kid with an intensity that alarmed Alex. There was a long pause until Alan walked near to take a closer look.

After thirty of the longest seconds Alex had ever endured, Alan said, “I don’t know any black kids and I don’t know your name. My first thought was that you came up here and maybe wanted to break in and take something. You have a little familiar look to you, but I can’t say I ever saw you in my life.” The old man stepped back, turned and examined the fire.

“Looks like it’ll be ready pretty soon. You like baked beans? I got plenty of ‘em.”’

“You have a son, name’s Pete,” Alex said.

That caught the old guy's attention. He froze for a moment before he slowly pivoted toward Alex.

A snippet from Impious

How is a Child Raised Without God?

Now that I’ve gotten those two stories off my chest, I’ll get back to the parts you may be more interested in. What was it like growing up without going to church or being taught to believe in a god?

We didn’t go to church, and the other side of the coin was that we weren’t given weekly lessons on how to be an atheist. We didn’t have a secret meeting place (or non-secret meetings for that matter), where we gathered weekly with other like-minded individuals and sang hymns to Satan or beastly characters. We didn’t listen to stories, parables, or sing the praises of any mystical figures.

Our reality was that we had a father and mother committed to discussing religion and gods, but not totally committed to advocating their personal position. They talked about right and wrong-giving examples. They served as living models of how to act like human beings in a very natural way. Now realize that I am not saying they or we were perfect, but my parents discussed the issues of a god and organized religion in a way that tried to help us find our own way. That’s probably impossible, but I think they did as fine a job as they could in their endeavor to not tip the scales. And, I am very proud of them.

I’m going to regress a little here and return to my beginning school years. My best memory of kindergarten was playing and taking naps in our half day. I’m sure we did some academic-type activities, but they were probably intertwined in our storytime and learning how to count in play activities. A couple of years after beginning my school career, I ran up against my most perplexing dilemma. I was presented with reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every day at the beginning of class. I will quote an article published on March 30, 2015, from WBRU News, which describes how In God We Trust became our national motto in the 1950s and Under God was inserted into the pledge of allegiance. Drum roll, please.

The words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and the phrase "In God, we trust" on the back of a dollar bill haven't been there as long as most Americans might think. Those references were inserted in the 1950s during the Eisenhower administration, the same decade that the National Prayer Breakfast was launched, according to writer Kevin Kruse. His new book is One Nation Under God. I’ve provided you with the article below:

In the original Pledge of Allegiance, Francis Bellamy made no mention of God, Kruse says. 

Bellamy was a Christian socialist, a Baptist who believed in the separation of church and state. "As this new religious revival is sweeping the country and taking on new political tones, the phrase 'one nation under God' seizes the national imagination," Kruse tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "It starts with a proposal by the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic lay organization, to add the phrase 'under God' to the Pledge of Allegiance. Their initial campaign doesn't go anywhere, but once Eisenhower's own pastor endorses it ... it catches fire."

Kruse's book investigates how the idea of America as a Christian nation was promoted in the 1930s and '40s when industrialists and business lobbies, chafing against the government regulations of the New Deal, recruited and funded conservative clergy to preach faith, freedom and free enterprise. He says this conflation of Christianity and capitalism moved to center stage in the '50s under Eisenhower's watch.

"According to the conventional narrative, the Soviet Union discovered the bomb and the United States rediscovered God," Kruse says. "In order to push back against the atheistic communism of the Soviet Union, Americans re-embraced a religious identity. That plays a small role here, but ... there's actually a longer arc. That Cold War consensus actually helps to paper over a couple decades of internal political struggles in the United States. If you look at the architects of this language ... the state power that they're worried most about is not the Soviet regime in Moscow, but rather the New Deal and Fair Deal administrations in Washington, D.C.

Just my luck that I was one of the first kids to have to start reciting a pledge, a significantly altered pledge, at that, which pressured me to say the words under God in front of everyone in the school. I said the words—for years—until, as a young adult in high school, I finally mustered the courage to remain silent while everyone else said those words. I always resumed where the compelled words left off and recited the remainder of the pledge.

All of the little kids in the country's public school were compelled to say these words, and this verbal arm-twisting remains in our schools, sporting events, and political events today. These words were not inserted into our constitution by our Founding Fathers. They were added to the Pledge much later in our history, and to all our coins and paper money in the 1950s amidst a cold war with the officially atheist Soviet Union, long after our nation’s founding, and nearly two-century existence.

 Many atheists may concur with the 1983 words of retired Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, that slogans such as ‘In God, We Trust' have ‘lost any true religious significance.' To the esteemed Supreme Court jurist’s assertion, I would say, tell that to a five-year-old who was not brought up to believe in a deity; and was pummeled and compelled day after day in many different settings to say the words he had not been raised to believe.

The words are there.

They mean something and are insidiously inserted into a growing child’s brain.

The dismay I felt as a child was real, and painful to a certain degree. I was compelled to say these words-the words I felt uncomfortable saying. It is something I, and many others, have endured for years—stayed silent for fear of standing out from the crowd, from being isolated. It is human nature to want to belong, and when you don't, it hurts.

Long ago I realized that I was part of a minority in this country, and to too many so-called religious people, a despised selection of the population. A 2012 Gallup poll indicated that only 54% of Americans would vote for an atheist to be President. Let that sink in for a moment. Pause, pause, pause, pause.

Final touches are being put on my new book, Impious

I'll be putting finishing touches on my latest book, Impious, growing up atheist in a Judeo-Christian culture. Look for it to be published soon!

Close to the finish line

I am getting very close to finishing my Impious book. Formatting is done and I will be rereading and rewriting whatever is necessary. I have to insert a few passages into a couple of sections as well, but I am getting more and more comfortable with the result. I look to finish it within three weeks and will submit it to some Beta readers.