Mud Woman Gets Busy, Part II

By Michael Shay

It was mid-morning and Christian and Ellen had worked their way into Room 327. Christian had cringed when he knocked on the door but Ellen had come up behind him in the outside corridor and rapped loudly on the door.

"Housekeeping" she shouted in that insistent voice of hers.

"Don't be shy," Ellen said over her shoulder. Knock three times, yell loudly, and give ‘em five seconds to get to the door before you put your key in the lock and go in."

Christian barely had time to acknowledge her advice before she was in the room. He followed. She told him to get the bathroom and he did what he was told. It was a mess, with towels draped over the shower and toilet and heaped on the wet floor. The morning paper was lodged between the toilet and the tub. He pulled out the paper and pushed it into the trash bag he held in his left hand. He spied a magazine on the floor and was picking it up when an ancient symbol caught his eye. The swastika, on the magazine's cover. "Aryan Pride" was the name of the magazine, printed in block letters at the top of the cover page and flanked by a pair of National Socialist swastikas. Under that, in smaller type was the slogan, "Aryan warriors fighting for Aryan pride!" Christian was shocked to see those forbidden symbols -- forbidden in Germany, anyway -- on the cover of an American magazine. In the ‘90s, swastikas and National Socialist slogans had cropped up as graffiti in Frankfurt and other German cities. There had been incidents of violence against Auslanderinnen, especially the Turks. Young men his age played at being jack-booted storm troopers, which still shocked most Germans. Still, in all his 23 years, he had never seen a Nazi magazine. He felt as he did when, as a young boy, he and his friends leafed through copies of Der Stern and to find topless models.

He turned through the thin pages of the newspaper. He stopped at the center spread. It was a crude editorial cartoon entitled "Miss Liberty Gets It In the End." It showed the Statue of Liberty -- Miss Liberty, he knew some Americans called her -- bent over with her skirt hiked to her waist; behind her was a naked black man obviously raping her. Miss Liberty seemed to be crying out in horror or pain or maybe both. The black man's lips were drawn wide in a grotesque leer.

"Reading on the job, Mr. Christian?" He jumped and dropped the magazine on the floor, it fell open to the cartoon. They looked down in unison. Ellen was silent; Christian could hear the hum of the heater going on in the other room. Slowly, Ellen picked up the magazine and turned it over in her hand. "Where'd you get this!" she yelled, shoving the magazine under his nose. It had the same beer and sweat smell of the room. Christian pointed at the floor.

Ellen's knuckles turned pale as she ripped the magazine in half, then in half again. She squeezed it into a ball and shoved it into the trash bag on the floor.

"What are you doing, Ellen," Christian said.

"What do you mean, what am I doing Ellen?" she said in a rush. "I'm throwing the trash away."

He sputtered, pointing at the trash bag. "The authorities must be notified."

"Authorities!" she said, her one hand on her hip, the other on the trash bag. "What authorities?"

"The police."

"It ain't no crime," she said, already backing from the room.

"Of course it's a crime. In Germany..."

"This ain't Germany, Mr. Christian." They were both back in the main room. Ellen tossed the half-full trash bag on the floor and moved to the beds. Christian helped as she stripped off the sheets. "How can they publish such things?"

"Free speech," she said. "You can hate anybody you want to -- openly and in print." To Christian, her words sounded bitter. "Besides," she said, bundling the sheets in her big arms, "we could get our asses fired for messing around in a guest's room." She stopped and looked at him. "I could be fired." She paused. "I got three kids to support."

"Let me tell someone then."

"No," she said. "It'll come back to me somehow." Her eyes narrowed on him. "Now get on to the next room -- we got a schedule."

He shrugged and left the room, leaving her to replace the bed's smooth white sheets, to spray disinfectant into the room's many musty corners. He knew he had to tell someone. But who?

"Don't get involved in Ellen's business," said Gwen the next morning. She and Christian sat together at a table in The Hole. It was Ellen's day off so Christian would be working with Gwen who set a much different pace than Ellen. Gwen worked with a quiet, plodding efficiency, while Ellen was brisk and flashy. It was no secret that both Ellen and Gwen were up for a supervisor's job. Most of the housekeeping staff believed that Ellen would get it because she was more dynamic and had once been featured in a newspaper article. "Welfare Moms Make Good" read the headline, and Ellen was shown making one of Markbright's many beds. The yellowing clipping still clung to The Hole's bulletin board. In it, Ellen was referred to as " a thirty-something single mother of three boys." It also noted that she had been on welfare four years before joining the state's Welfare-to-Work program and becoming one of its first graduates.

"She's a private person," Gwen said.

All that day, Christian mulled over The Case of the Men in Room 327. He was dynamic too, he knew, and he vowed to say something to the guests with the nasty magazine and racist views. He just needed the right time.

That night, he was halfway across the parking lot when he heard the dull rumble of a big engine behind him. He jumped aside; a huge black pickup truck passed within a foot, splashing gray snowmelt on his jeans. The truck squealed to a stop at one of the few remaining parking spaces. He thought he recognized the man who got out of the passenger side, the one with the beard from Room 327. He wore a dark suit and carried a briefcase; the other man, also in a suit, held what looked like a laptop computer. They didn't speak as they walked up the stairs to their room and disappeared inside.

A cold wind swept down from the mountains and made him shiver in his light coat. He paused at the rear of the men's truck. The license plate read "Idaho: Famous Potatoes." Christian memorized the plate's combination of letters and numbers, just in case he needed it for evidence. On the bumper was a sticker. On the left corner was an American flag. It read: "WORK -- IT'S THE WHITE THING TO DO." As he pass the front of the truck, he could hear the engine tick as it cooled; snowflakes turned to steam as they landed on the truck's hood. He was up the stairs and knocking on the door to Room 327 and still didn't know what he was going to say.

The bearded man answered. But he'd altered his appearance slightly. The beard was trimmed and he wore a well-tailored dark suit. Christian noticed again the man's eyes, blue as the Tyrolean sky, edged by a web of red veins. The man frowned at Christian.

"Guten Abend!" said Christian nervously.

The man laughed. "The German kid."

A snowflake landed in Christian's left eye. It stung, and he blinked it away.

"Who is it?" asked another voice from inside the room.

"The Kraut kid who cleans the rooms."

The bearded man swung the door wide. "Come on in," he said, moving his bulky frame aside so Christian could get in. The bearded man slammed the door. Christian noticed that the room still smelled of sweat and beer.

"What can we do for you?" asked the bearded man, who sat on the edge of the bed. The other man, his suit coat draped over the back of the chair, sat at the room's tiny table tapping on a laptop computer.

Christian cleared his throat, then hurriedly reeled off the list of transgressions: calling Ellen a Mud Woman; the racist magazine; bad attitude. When he finished, he looked expectantly at the bearded man. The man looked coldly back at him. "What's your name?" he said, his voice flat.

"Christian Schweigert."

"Christian," the man said. "Solid name. A good Christian name. You like it?" he asked his partner.

"Dumkopf!" he muttered, never taking his eyes off the glowing screen.

"You are so stupid," said the bearded man, rising and pacing the room. "Don't you know who we are?"

"Neo-nazis," he said.

"Well, you don't know shit, even if you are German, Mr. Schweigert," he said, his rough face up against his.

Please," he said, not knowing if he was pleading for his life or something else.

"Please, he says," mocked the bearded man. "Jake has a gun," he said, nodding at his partner. "Want him to shoot you?"

"No."

"I have lots of guns," Jake said, "but I only use ‘em against bad guys."

"You're lucky, son. We're G-Men." The bearded man nodded at Jake; Jake turned his head and smiled.

"G-men?"

"FBI?"

Christian nodded briskly. "Of course."

"We're after those neo-Nazi creeps," said the bearded man with a slim smile. "That magazine you saw was theirs. It's just a prop -- we have to act like they do. They're here in town at the WAKE UP AMERICA Expo. You heard of it?"

Christian nodded.

"The place is crawling with 'em. Aryan Nations, Christian Identity, Michigan Militia. Can you think of a better place to keep an eye on 'em?"

Christian relaxed momentarily. "You're trying to catch and punish them?"

"You can't tell a soul," the man said. "Our lives would be at risk."

"Why tell me?" asked Christian, suddenly realizing that these men could be lying.

The man backed off; paced the room again. He stopped and pointed his long, thin finger at Christian. "You're a concerned citizen, am I right?" he said.

"That magazine offended Ellen -- my work partner."

"See what we're up against? That filth has to stop and we're the ones to put an end to it. Right, Jake?" Jake snorted his approval. "Keep this on the Q-T," he mumbled.

"Q-T?" Christian asked.

"Quiet. Q-T. Get it?" The bearded man raised his index finger to his lips, pursed his lips and said, "Shhhh!" in a long exhalation that sounded like a steam leak.

"Q-T," said Christian, rolling the letters around on his tongue. "Quiet."

Before Christian realized what was happening, the bearded man had him firmly by the arm and ushered him outside into the cold night. He stood in the outside corridor for a few seconds to get his bearings. It still was snowing. The traffic whooshed by on North Temple Street. And, just for a second, when there was a lull in the traffic, he thought he heard laughter coming from Room 327.