Atop the Tallest Sand Dunes in North America

The Jewess, Otis, and I are driving down I-84 towards the tallest sand dunes in North America. Otis hit his mid-morning nap as we pulled out of Boise and now we’ve got the radio off. The silence is really nice, a contemplative peaceful silence. I’m thinking about the Jewess and how she is going to be a short roundtrip ferry ride out of the safe harbor of monogamy and back again. As she stares out the window, up into the velvety brown foothills, the air hazy with yellow summer dust, and sees the pronghorns grazing on the shocks of blue-green sage, she whispers, “Those antelope, I’ve never seen them before… I didn’t know anything like them existed in America.”

The steering wheel pulls a bit beneath my hands. It might be the desert wind. It might be the Lord trying to turn us around. He knows He has His reasons: I’ll be getting two for one with this: my first extramarital affair and my first non-Caucasian.

Below Mountain Home, in the slightly greener land that surrounds the Snake River, we spot a few of the regal Aryan deer grazing. They live behind the fences of the Air Force practice range. As any animal that doesn’t blend in and lives where bombs are routinely dropped, they’re skittish. They stick together and move through the black chokeberrys and pockets of bitterbush like schools of glowing fish. Environmentalists say the deer have been shocked white after twenty years of jet blasts and marker charges landing around them. The government has never released its take, but conspiracy theorists claim the albino deer were purposely bred so pilots could have fun cherry-picking.

We pull into the Bruneau Dunes State Park picnic area. A few wiggers are standing around unloading their cars, messing with fishing poles, sipping Miller Lights. But the dunes are right there. Impressive, rising above the thick green tract of Utah juniper that surrounds the parking lot like two massive piles of slag, five-stories high, backstopping the shallow methane-green lake.

Before moving to the geographic center of what will soon become, once the Tribulations begin, Aryan Nation (i.e. the general area encompassing Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah with a few satellite colonies in Cincinnati, lower Pennsylvania, and the German state of Saxony), I had always thought the Brotherhood and other hate groups were simply convenient cover for psychopathic violence, or, at best, clumsy tax shelters through religious status. So at first it felt funny: downloading the literature: Nobama, the Racist; cartoons where fat Jews in crowns instruct a bunch of gorillas to go have sex with Aryan women; survival scenario games you can play with your children. But when I began emailing the secretary of the local Grand Dragon, her replies were so wonderfully cheery and unsuspicious. The pleasure is all mine! Then I started shyly showing up at meetings in the basement of the Our Christ, Our Savior, Our Lord up in Garden Valley, listening to sermons on the responsibilities of being a proud White Man (i.e. namely protect White Women). To her credit, Stephanie didn’t know the full extent of it. Most of this was online during Otis’s naps. She thought I was just curious, that I was laughing at these people. Which isn’t totally false: StormFront.org is a pathetic example of web design, all frames and untemplated, hierarchal-less navigation that gets you there, but then gives you no way to get back; and before his recent death Richard Butler looked more like a comically fat haggard Robert Mitchum than someone you’d want to call your race’s leader. But what Stephanie didn’t understand, until I sent the check, is that I was going into this with an open-mind. I was going to really shut up and listen to Yahweh. And listen with a slight degree of sympathy for people who’ve felt what I’ve felt as a white in a society under the rule of ZOWG. That something is going on. Maybe Jews are Satan’s children who have been slyly taking over the world’s financial institutions and pitting the Mud People against the White Race for the past 6000 years? How can it hurt to think a little outside the box? Why does my wife have a job and I don’t? Why aren’t there ‘race problems’ in places that don’t mix race, like China and Africa? Why did we need to rely on her credit to buy this house? Why do all the leaders of all the other countries look so Jewish?

One elder told me hate gets a bad rap. In truth, hate has gotten us a long way, he said. Our history is nothing but a series of struggle and invention fueled by hate. If everyone had always loved one another, we never would have made it out of the caves. We’d have been saber-tooth feed. But no, we got sick of each other. We hated our neighbors enough to move across the river. We hated raw wooly mammoth enough to rub two sticks together. We’ve hated our way to the moon.

As we’re starting up the dunes, I smell something. Sweet Otis has taken a carrot-orange poop. I balance him on the bumper and do one of my Olympic-speed changings. I can tell the Jewess is impressed. And when I am done, he starts moaning and sucking on the back of his wrist, which Stephanie and I think he thinks is the universal sign for “I’m starving to death.” I mix up an Enfamil and nurse him as we began up walking around the lake toward the first dune. I try to cover his head with my sweatshirt so the little guy doesn’t come home all pink from wind and sun burn.

He finishes the bottle as we hit the base of the dune. I put him back up in the Kelty and we begin to climb.

We moved to Idaho four years ago when Stephanie was recruited by HP. All my East Coast and San Francisco friends were like Dude, Aryan Nation? Why? I would kid: No more mud people, no more race traitors, real plural wifery, just clean living. So the irony of the Osofsky’s moving in next door just as I started getting pretty Pro-White is not lost on me. But then again, which story in the Holy Bible isn’t about God testing His children?

Truth: they’re about as Jewish as I am Catholic. Still it’s my big joke: they’re driving down property values; they smell; they make noise when they eat. Stephanie had an emergency at work one Saturday afternoon while I was out playing basketball and she left Otis with the Jewess. I pretended to be furious. You left him alone with them? Have you lost it? They’re going to think we owe them something.

Brett, the Jew guy, seems pretty cool for one of Satan’s Children although he talks about Frisbee sports too much. He was here a week and already on a Folf and Ultimate team. He looks more Jewish than she does. He’s big, and kind of round and umphy. He’s got one of those serious Middle Eastern noses that start in the middle of his forehead.

The Jewess was in-between employment as well. She was home. I was home. I was parenting Otis, trying to position myself as a freelance web designer, and studying scripture and some writings that the ZOWG has censored from mainstream readers, basically trying to get serious about my soul. The Jewess, as far as I could tell, was on her knees screwing around in their garden, wearing old jeans and a tank top and green sleeveless smock, full-time.

For the first few months after Otis’s birth, Stephanie and I weren’t doing it because Stephanie’s who-ha was a little messed up and she’d wince with pain every time I entered her. After the hormone injections, and everything got back in working order, we weren’t doing it because we were too exhausted. Even when we planned weekend sex around the baby’s naps, it was half-hearted. We’d sheepishly make out, terrified of waking Otis, then I’d unenthusiastically go down on her, until she got off or my neck cramped. Then I’d head into the bathroom, saying I needed to pee, and I’d filch one of her Lortab. Recently I can’t even masturbate in the morning shower. I get in there, tug on it a few times, and am then seized by a glacial wet sadness. Like cold damp sheets are being draped on me and slowly sliding off. And masturbating while crying your eyes out is a lot different than having sex while crying your eyes out.

Last Thursday morning I leaned over the Jewess’ fence and said hi. She looked up and wiped her brow. She was dewy with a light sweat. A few hairs stuck to her flushed cheeks. She smiled. Her brown-green eyes. Awesome breasts. Huge brown freckles, the size of brook trout spots, running down into her cleavage—they looked painted on.

“What are you planting?” I asked.

“A little bit of everything. We’ve never lived anywhere this dry. I’m just throwing the dice.”

Always making excuses, aren’t they? But I held my tongue. “Yeah,” I said. “Not many people know Boise’s a high desert.”

At around 2:30 last night, I was wondering why she agreed to come with me, when Otis let out a lone cry. Stephanie didn’t fully awaken but she rolled over away from me and in her half-asleep parched voice said, “Has anyone seen my husband? He’s got small hands. He’s about 5’2.” I’m an easy 6’0. And although I don’t even read poetry, never mind want to write it, a Kierkegaard line occurred to me: Have you ever heard of the man who was made a poet through his wife?

Up here in the sun, with a light breeze coming from the north, I want to kiss the Jewess. But the incline is pretty serious. The thin path that traverses the peak of the dune is only about a foot-wide. If you step off to either side, you chance rolling down a few hundred feet of hot sand.

So what do we do? What do you do at the top of anything? We look for inspiration. To the south, the snow-covered Owhyhees waver in the heat. To the north, the foothills of the Sawtooths look like dark panthers poised to lurch. She has fresh jeans on. They make her ass and legs look more athletic than I think she probably really is. And jeans, what a weird choice for sand dunes? It brings to mind that women’s makeup ad I saw years ago in magazines. The tall Mud Woman, Iman, in a golden robe with gold glitter in her hair and on her cheekbones walked across the ripples of sand. She was married to David Bowie, a race traitor, but also a married man. He would understand me. And I decide jeans are a great choice for sand dunes. Then I think about what my friend Chad says about marriage: it’s a euphemism for “will never have slept with an Asian.” I reach for her hand.

She looks at her hand in mine, rolls her eyes, and yanks it loose. But then she looks me in the eye and slowly reaches back and touches my forearm. She looks away and, after a moment of silence, asked if I had ever been to Crater Lake in Oregon.

I haven’t.

“It’s a lake,” she says. “Inside a volcano. Brett and I camped there last summer.”

“It’s cool?” I ask. Otis is being good up in the pack, gently whap-whapping my head like a drum.

“Yeah, very cool. Definitely feels like a volcano, like it could erupt any second, but at the same time it’s this beautiful deep blue lake. They’ve never found the bottom. There are fish in it that don’t exist anywhere else on earth, alien-looking like those deep-sea fish, but it’s fresh water.”

“Wild.”

“Yeah,” she says. “And Spencer, this guy.” She smiles, recollecting. “This was so crazy… we hiked around the lake and then over the face of the volcano rim into these gorgeous woods. At least ten miles or so. It took all day. And then while setting up our tents, we heard someone yelling. Mom. Mom. Help. Mom.” She starts cracking up.

“We followed the voice and, way back in the woods, pretty far off the trail, like through crazy thick brush and trees, there was this guy, Spencer. He had Down’s, but he was an adult. And he was all alone, and totally scratched up. And he had written MOM on the floor of a clearing, with stones. Perfectly symmetrical letters, and they were like huge, like twenty-feet long, big enough for helicopters or planes to see. It was the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“What’d you do?”

“We took him back to our campsite, but it was too late to leave. So we just kind of hung out with him, got him warm, and tried to keep him calm.

“It was a long night,” she says. “We sat around the fire. None of us could sleep. Spencer wouldn’t drink water but he downed like a gallon of Tang.”

“I used to live off that stuff,” I say.

“And first thing in the morning we headed out and, when we got to the parking lot, there was a group of people there, a search party. Spencer was from the town below the lake and had somehow wandered off. And everyone had gone out looking for him. And now that he was found, they threw a huge party. I’m not kidding. It was so great. They wouldn’t let us leave. They shut down Main Street and had a small parade and a barbeque. People kept getting up on stage thanking us. They had one of those bouncehouse things for kids. And all these weird scatological games… poop games. One where you throw mooseballs onto a board that was covered in numbered squares and if the mooseball landed on the number you picked, you won; and another called Chicken Hit. It was the same kind of game, except it was in a cage and they gave a chicken Exlax and if the chicken pooped on your number, you won. And they had five-year-old fiddlers and Miss Oregon from 1964 got up and sang country songs. All just because Spencer came home. It was so great. And the stone MOM, just out there in the middle of nowhere, something our ancestors will find in a hundred years. It was just one of those incredibly cool things, you know?”

I’m nodding and I reach for her hand again. She lets me hold it for a second, then shyly pulls it away. I grab her forearm.

“I’ll be sacrificing Eternal Heaven for you,” I say. “I don’t care that you’re Jewish.”

She looks me in the eyes. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that and you need to let go of my arm before I scream.”

I take a deep breath and let go. One of the biggest problems with liberals is that you can’t talk about what we all know. Finally I say, “My friends think I moved to Iowa.” Just to break the silence.

“I told Brett I’d be back by one,” she says, lying. “We need to get going.” She starts along the path. We’re returning via the other side of the lake. Then after a few feet she says, “Ohio” over her shoulder, “My mother thinks I moved to Ohio. My dad calls it I Don’t Know.”

There’s a Dairy Queen and a Motel 8 a half mile before the on-ramp to I-84. A small band of freckles has appeared across her nose and her cheeks are rose-colored from the sun.

At night I’ll want to have sex with Stephanie. I’ll do some push-ups. I’ll go out on the back porch under the thin sparkling veil of the Milky Way and ask the Lord for help. When the He talks to you, it’s the most amazing thing. It’s like someone is clearing out your soul with an ear cleaner. The air shimmers like it’s specked with galena and there’s a beautiful humming noise and all earthly concerns just wash away. Your body fills with warmth and your jaw starts to hurt from grinning so much, like the first time you kissed someone you’ve always wanted to kiss. And He’s personal, not above telling you the most seemingly inconsequential things. Casey, your rain coat in the basement, next to the VCR box. And then it rains the next day for the first time in months. Casey, go to your lovely wife, Stephanie. Be proud and passionate. Plow into her, spill your pure seed deep within. I’ll brush my teeth and washcloth my underarms. I’ll throw some water on my face. But then what? He never says ‘the how’? I can be the proudest most passionate Aryan in all of Idaho. But what if she doesn’t want to? Why does God only tell one of us? Getting rejected by your wife isn’t like getting rejected by a girlfriend. It’s forever. You live with it until she or you die. It’s intense. And the rejection makes you a) want to plow into her that much harder next time and b) that much harder to do so. So how exactly do you do it? Unmarried people think the rings come with little super powers that keep you both begging. But the rest of us know. You don’t nudge your wife awake, especially if she has to be up at 6 for her commute. You certainly don’t attack her when she comes back from taking a 3 AM pee. Lightly hump her leg while she’s reading the New Yorker? Tell her the Lord recommends it? Getting some from your wife has to be this perfect combination of chardonnay, the weather, and the family bank account being emptied on $1600 worth of plane tickets to Honolulu that day. But even then, here’s what you’ve got to look forward to: You’ll be doing your wife, desperately, and she’ll be sitting there pretending to enjoy herself, silently listing the shit she has to do tomorrow, and as soon as you come there will be a blank pause, then she’ll kind of half-sigh/half-cry-out orgasmicly, and the pause will be the most noticeable thing, the beat she missed because she was deciding whether to humiliate me one more time by asking me to drop off her shirts or to do it herself, and in that slight pause, you’ll immediately realize she just faked it. Your wife threw you a charity fuck. And going forward every time you have sex it will be undermined by the suspicion that it’s an act of sympathy rather than passion.

“Aren’t there nights in the Jewish religion when it’s an obligation to make love?” I ask nodding toward the motel.

“Shabbos, a double mitzah. You’re supposed to oblige your husband. We’re not that type of Jewish though.”

“Sucks for Brett.”

“He does fine.”

There’s a brown van with orange and yellow stripes in the motel parking lot. I let off the gas a little. We’re going around twenty.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Tell me this isn’t what you want.”

“This isn’t what I want.”

“Otis’s going to fall asleep again. We could stop.”

She puts her hands on the dash and staring straight ahead says, “I have my cell-phone, Brett totally knows where I am.”

“All right, all right,” I finally say. “I just want you to know I like you. I thought you liked me.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“But tell me: is it because I’m Christian?”

“Are you for real?” she says, shaking her head.

“Well why did you want to come out here then?” You know when you’re crossing lines, but the cool thing about the Lord is that when He speaks to you, and you follow His Word, everything people, soul or no soul, say sounds like pointless squeaky noise. “You didn’t hear someone tell you to come with me? You didn’t feel a benevolent force push you toward this trip?”

“Nope.” She reaches into her purse.

“OK, OK,” I say. “I just thought you might have thought this way too. I mean you we are alone, which is weird. And we’re both home all day.”

She shakes her head, still staring at the road.

“The baby. Stephanie works so much,” I finally say after a few minutes.

“Not interested.”

The car seems to be drifting by itself. I feel I could just let my hands float from the steering wheel and leave it all to fate. We’ve gone along for twenty minutes, up through Mountain Home. The rejection has me feeling distrustful of the Lord and then ashamed of this distrust, and I distract myself with a driving version of prayer, counting out silently how long I can go without holding the wheel.

“Listen,” she finally says, startling me. “I know babies are hard. I don’t know what all that Jewish stuff is about, but I’m sorry if I gave you any ideas.”

“I’m just in a weird place,” I answer. “This wasn’t how I saw my life. I’m just thinking too much.”

Then she says, “It’s difficult, isn’t it? The baby.”

“We haven’t slept-in for months.”

“You give yourself up, huh?”

“I don’t remember what I used to do with my time, how I spent my Saturdays. The concept ‘my time’ doesn’t really exist anymore.”

“I just read magazines and futz in the garden. I don’t know what I do.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s it. That’s what I miss: futzing.”

“It’s cool that you’re doing it though. Not many men could. It’s cool.”

We drop down into the Boise valley with its groves of black cottonwood and the big blue river winding through and I feel immense relief. We’ve made it out of the desert, back to my safe harbor of Le Boise. Quaking aspen, chestnut, elm. Improbable, miraculous trees holding back the dry scrubby countryside. Up in the cappuccino-colored foothills, centered in emerald lawns, adobe mansions shimmered in the summer afternoon.

Stephanie shouldn’t be out on our stoop. She should be at work. I wave to her from the car, thinking, Keep going. But my foot lifts from the gas and I watch my hands turn the wheel, and we’re here in the driveway, parked. The Jewess opens her door and gets out. She says hi to Stephanie and walks across our lawn, like her being in the car with me was completely normal. Stephanie says hi back, but leaves her mouth open a bit. Something whizzes around in my chest and ends up in my ear and whispers, If you can do this, you can do anything. The Jewess is up her stairs and inside their house. Not even a good-bye. I get out and get Otis from his seat. I carry him over to Stephanie, hand him to her, and go back to the car to get the rest of our stuff.

Stephanie has two kinds of pissed-offs: one, where she yells and throws shoes and small pictures frames; the other, she won’t look me in the eye. Her eyes dart about like our eyes are magnets getting to close. She was neither tonight. She hasn’t said anything about anything yet, but she won’t stop staring at me. I’m acting cool, just hoping it will all go away. I make spaghetti squash with a corn salsa. I give Otis a bath and read to him for half an hour before putting him down. I’m going out of my way to be Mr. Helpful. Stephanie and I just kind of walk around each other. Whenever there’s too long of a silence, she mercifully picks up the newspaper.

She’s in bed and I’m undressing. I take my shirt off and she looks up over her book, “Have you given up jogging for good?” she asks. Three years and twenty-five pounds ago I ran The City of Trees Marathon.

“No,” I say. “That babyjogger just bites. The handle is too short. But fuck you for asking.”

“Well maybe you should cut back on the beer if you aren’t running?”

“Maybe you should cut back on being a complete bitch.”

She doesn’t answer. Her mouth almost hints a smirk.

“I’ve given up my life for you,” I finally say. “My friends, my job, my health. I’ve given you everything. You give me nothing.”

We sit there, staring at each other. My mind racing with cruel and unusual things I can say to my wife while listening futilely for the Lord to advise.

But it’s just a bunch of static white noise.

Finally, I take the National Geographic off her bureau and go out to the couch.

Twenty minutes later I turn off the light. Almost immediately she walks out into the living room. She’s standing here in the dark near the foot of the couch. I can hear her weeping. I start to pray, Please Lord, please. Make me fourteen. She comes over and pushes my legs aside and sits down. I feel her hand on my knee.

“Casey, I don’t know what that was today, but I’m not impressed.”

“We didn’t do anything,” I say. “We just drove around.”

“I don’t care. I don’t care about that woman. You’re not getting it. That’s just a symptom. It’s both of ours problem. This is our life. You really think something like that woman could mess up my life?”

“It was my fault, not hers.”

“And this white supremacy thing has got to end. There’s nothing at all funny about it. Nothing.”

“It’s not up to me anymore,” I say. “It’s up to Him.” And I point to the ceiling.

“Oh, my god!” she says, lifting her hand from my leg. “What is wrong with you? What is going on?”

“You might want to ask yourself that?”

“I don’t want to leave you. I don’t. I’m not a quitter. But you’ve got to stop this. You have to. We’ve got a deal here. I’ll help you. I’ll cut back at work. You can go back to school. We can do anything. Join the Peace Corps. But you’ve got to stop this. It’s so stupid.”

“It’s a cool thing,” I finally answer. “Why can’t you just let me have it? What do you care anyway? I’m not trying to make you Pro-White. This is just for me. It makes me feel good. Makes me feel like we haven’t completely sold out yet. Just let me have this one thing. Everything else in our life is about you and the baby. I have nothing.”

Her hand moves up the sleeping bag to the zipper and pulled it down.

“Please,” she says. “Please.” She’s crying pretty hard now.

The Lord has told me that in a Holy Marriage, all parties must be ready to completely reveal their soul. If you’re not ready to make public every inch of who you are, you’re not ready. She must have heard this too because she reaches in and take me from my boxers and pulled herself on top. Her wet cheek against my face and neck, and the back of her thighs on my hips.

“Come on,” she says. “You’re here. I know you’re here. Please.”

The Native Americans, who live in the Duck Valley Reservation, which abuts the south end of the range, say the land is sacred and that the albino deer are their ancestors who will haunt the scrub and dunes until the jets stop dropping bombs groaning and screaming into the earth. The Indians contend that any new deer introduced into the practice range will become inhabited by a ghost and turn white after forty days. And in this moment, with my wife pressing into me, with something like hate, I feel my skin fading until I’m grey and colorless, like a guppy’s tail, and I hear successions of booming and dirt showering around us. But we don’t run as it empties out of me; I pull her closer and closer, so that in the morning, we’ll still move together, phantoms of the brush, with only the dim echoes of the roar in the air.