“Well, I certainly—”
“Arthur? Can you come?”
“Well... well, what’s it for, Jase?”
“It’s for America,” Jason said.
There was a silence on the phone.
“I’m not sure I know what that means,” Fatboy said.
“I can’t say more than that on the phone.”
“Well, this... uh... this sounds pretty important,” Fatboy said.
“It is.”
“When... when did you want me to come, Jase?”
“Now. Today.”
“I’ve got a job, Jase. I can’t just—”
“Then come Friday night and stay for the weekend. We can talk about it over the weekend.”
“I’ll see if my mother—”
“I’d rather you didn’t tell her anything about this,” Jason said, and the line went silent again.
“All right,” Fatboy said at last. “I’ll come.”
In the Second Avenue apartment that Friday night, Jason outlined the plan to him. It was not a polished plan at the time; it was instead nothing more than the most rudimentary of schemes, with none of the details worked out. They would need a town, yes, that was apparent, someplace to effect the transfer, but Jason knew only that it should be somewhere in Florida; more than that he had not planned. Fatboy suggested that the Florida Keys might serve their purposes, making his suggestion even before he was completely convinced he wanted to throw in with Jason. Jason said yes, the Keys might be a good place for them, and Fatboy said they could even use one of the uninhabited Keys, hell, there were probably a dozen uninhabited Keys down there. No, Jason said, we need someplace to keep the men, you see; we can’t just have them roaming around loose in broad daylight after the transfer is made. That’s right, Fatboy said, we need a place with buildings, don’t we, someplace we can keep them, that’s right. That’s right, Jason said, but I’m sure we can find the place down there, the Keys might just be the right place for us, I’m not sure yet, it would have to be investigated. Oh, sure, it would have to be investigated, Fatboy said, still not knowing if he wanted to go along with Jason or not, liking Jason a hell of a lot, and respecting him, but not knowing if he wanted to risk, well, his life on a scheme like this one.
He decided to throw in with Jason the next night.
That Saturday night they began by talking about the old days, and the things they had done together, and then Jason started telling him what he had been doing since they had last seen each other in 1946. He had gone back to New Orleans, of course, because that was his home town and that was where Annabelle was waiting for him. He had a college degree, a bachelor of science from the University of Louisiana, well, Arthur knew that (Yes, I knew that, Fatboy said), and he was a trained mechanical engineer, but after what had happened (Well, that, Fatboy said) he didn’t much feel like taking a job working for anybody. He felt there were more important things to be done in the world — here, have some more of this bourbon. (Thanks, Fatboy said.) What he had done was join a volunteer group that called itself The Sons of American Freedom, which he later found out was a racist group, not that he much gave a damn one way or the other. The war had been over for more than a year when Jason joined the group, which was at the time agitating for death sentences for the Nazi war criminals. This was in July or thereabouts, not too long after Lieutenant General Homma, the Jap who had ordered the Bataan death march, was executed, so the group felt it had a precedent and they were running around handing out leaflets and making speeches, while also rousing out a few niggers every now and then, but that was more or less kidding around and the war criminals thing was the important issue. After the verdict came in October, the group got down to its major business, which was keeping the nigger in his place in Louisiana, and a couple of months later fighting broke out in Indochina between the French and the Reds, and it was then that Jason realized just how vast and unrelenting the Communist conspiracy was. He broke with The Sons of American Freedom and joined a group that called itself The Indochinese Assistance Committee, ICAC, which was mostly a fund-raising group, though they did put out some pamphlets that tried to explain what was behind all the fighting in Indochina. Luckily, he had managed to save a little money, plus what he could steal, huh? (and Fatboy laughed here) so he was able to devote almost all of his time to these various committees and organizations, moving from one group to another as the dangers presented themselves: the Communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia, for example, and the Russians stopping traffic between Berlin and the Western occupation zones in June of 1948, and the Russian veto of an atomic control plan in that same month, and the sentencing of Cardinal Mindszenty to life imprisonment in Hungary, and the revelation by President Truman in September of 1949 that Russia had set off an atomic explosion. That was it, that was when the danger really became clear and present, that was when the Commies were ready to clear the decks for the Korean invasion in 1950, nothing could stop them now, they had the goddamn bomb and nothing could stop them.
Fortunately for this country, there were men around who recognized the danger immediately and who tried to do something about it. In October of 1949, a month after the Russians set off their bomb, Jason organized a group called The McCarthy Men, which independently tried to assist the Wisconsin senator in his early battle against subversive forces within the United States. He went to New York with Annabelle not three months later, in early January of 1950, where he formed a new group called Americans for America, figuring he could distribute his energies more liberally without an organization name that linked him to any single person. Actually, he was ready to assume a leadership of his own at that time, and did not want to seem a follower of anyone, even someone he respected as much as McCarthy. In April of 1950, he had a run-in with the police in New York when he and his new group — there were half a dozen members at the time, including himself and Annabelle — picketed a pro-fascist play with a Japanese leading man, and he was forced to reorganize again in September of that year, with new people — well, Arthur got the picture, didn’t he? It was a constant battle, a constant effort to be heard against the complacent idiots in this country who were unwilling to recognize the fact that Russia was nibbling away at the world, piece by tiny piece, nibbling up the world while it talked of coexistence with a full mouth, swallowing countries or pieces of countries one by one, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, half the goddamn new African nations.
“Where does it end, Arthur? Where does it end?”
“I don’t know,” Fatboy said. “Where does it end, Jason?”
“Arthur,” Jason said, “I love this country. I want this country to survive.”
“I do, too.”
“What’s there in the world for men like us, Arthur?”
“What do you mean?”
“What is there for us, unless we make it ourselves?”
“Ourselves,” Fatboy repeated softly.
“Yes.” Jason paused. “Ourselves.” He paused again. “I want action, Arthur. I’m tired of leading groups of mealymouthed malcontents who think we’re agitating for free love or folk singing. We are agitating for a stronger America, the America we fought for, Arthur, the America we risked our lives for. Is all that going to go down the drain? Was all that for nothing? Arthur, I need your help. Say you’ll help me. Say you’ll join me in what can only be a glorious day for America, for our country.”
Fatboy nodded.
“I’ll join you,” he had said. “I’ll help you.”