A Death in Wichita by Stephen Singular Read Free Book Online Page B

set loose within the nation and was spreading throughout schools, churches, and other public institutions. Evil was a tangible force—embodied by gay men and women, by those on spiritual paths different from fundamentalist Christianity, by people embracing liberal or progressive politics, and by abortion doctors or women who wanted to control their own reproduction. Because evil was a concrete thing and some individuals so clearly represented it, they should be removed by any means necessary.
    None of this, of course, was entirely new. Coming of age in rural Kansas in the 1950s and ’60s, I remember the prevailing racism: the unwritten law in our small town was “No niggers inside the city limits after sundown.” At fifteen, I worked at my father’s lumberyard alongside truckers, carpenters, farmers, and hired hands. One summer afternoon, an older employee and I made a delivery out into the countryside and detoured to a large white farmhouse at the base of a valley, surrounded by cottonwood trees. A rough-looking, uneducated man thirty years my senior, he went into the house and came back half an hour later, explaining to me that he’d been meeting with other “Minutemen,” a white supremacist vigilante group on alert in case of a race riot or some other uprising in Kansas City or Topeka. His group was well armed and prepared for battle.
    My father had been a bombardier pilot in World War Two a few years before I was born. His plane was shot down over Europe, instantly killing three of the nine crew members, but he parachuted out, was picked up by German soldiers, and was transported in a wheelbarrow to a prison camp. For about a year in 1944–45, he was a POW under the Nazis. As a boy, I tried asking him questions about the war, things like “Why would a whole country go crazy and act the way Germany did? How could the Nazis do those things to Jews? Why didn’t somebody stop them?” He wouldn’t respond, but just get up and leave the room. World War Two was over for him and should be left in the past—a very Midwestern response to painful memories—yet parts of the war were still visible in our home. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking, he couldn’t sleep, and he was constantly hungry and claustrophobic, flailing his arms in the backseat of a car hard enough to hurt another passenger.
    He’d never hated regular German citizens, he once told me, and hadn’t taken any pleasure in dropping bombs on them. It was a brutal job that had to be done to put down a worldwide scourge, and once it was finished he wanted it behind him. My father refused to talk about his POW experience, so I stopped probing him, but that only made me more curious.
    For my part, I tried to keep at bay the racism and religious bigotry around me, and to escape my father’s highly visible anxiety, by burying myself in music, specifically black music, the soundtrack of my life. The jazz and blues of Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Ray Charles, Etta James, Howlin’ Wolf, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown convinced me that the “Minutemen” were wrong, when almost nothing else in my environment did. Blacks may not have been allowed in town after sunset, but nighttime radio signals reached into my bedroom from Chicago and Denver, from Canada and New Orleans, and those blue notes hinted at a much larger world not so shaped by anger and fear. That essential conflict—between love for family and shame for the sins of my culture—couldn’t be reconciled, but the music was a window into something that offered hope.
    In my twenties, I moved to New York City, where I became a journalist and an avid student of the conditions that had created the Third Reich. At age thirty, I moved from New York to Denver, and on the day I arrived in September 1981, the week of Yom Kippur, I heard a Jewish radio talk show host demanding on the air that listeners call in and talk about their hidden, or