Republican Party Reptile(64)

There was nothing to do but flee, so I sought sanctuary at the home of my mother’s brother, the Duke of Evanston, Illinois.

This was not a happy time of my life. I was among strangers whose customs and manner of dress were unfamiliar to me. And it was a cliquish high school. I didn’t fit in. Then the duke, my uncle, had a massive coronary. I had hoped that he and his son, my cousin Eddie, would help me raise an army. Perhaps, also, Reverend Stevens at Evanston United Methodist would declare a crusade, and I could return to Sandusky and topple Uncle Bob from the throne. Cousin Ed was a bully and I had never liked him, but he had powerful friends on the football team. But my hopes were dashed, and instead of raising an army, I was caught in a quarrel between my cousin, the new duke, and his mother, who still held the purse strings of the ducal treasury at the local branch bank and would not let Duke Eddie have even his own checking account. And Lady Sue, Eddie’s sister, was contemplating a totally unsuitable marriage to a commoner, a bread-truck driver. And, worse, this man was a heretic, a Seventh Day Adventist whose family had been slaughtered in the general massacre of Adventists the year before. He had escaped only because he had been out in the garage trying to fix a lawnmower when it happened. But he lived in fear for his life and planned to emigrate to the colonies in Wisconsin, where he hoped religious toleration would be found. And he planned to take Lady Sue with him. No one had time for me, and I never did make many friends in school.

Before my senior year, I decided to return alone to Sandusky. I knew I faced likely death or imprisonment in my bedroom on some slight pretext. Nor did I have any plan. Uncle Sam tried to convince me to become a railroad monk. But I must have a life of action, and if I could not find some way to succeed in Sandusky, then perhaps I would become a brigand and live in the forest and rob picnickers.

Once I was home, however, a streak of good fortune came my way. My high school was in the wealthiest part of town, but our athletic teams were not very good and in the various skirmishes and battles with the other schools in the parking lots after football games we had lost many dead and wounded. We had no archers, our single troop of lancers was decimated, and our infantry was a rabble of kids whose parents were not very well off. Because I was still, in name at least, crown prince, it was easy to get elected to Student Council. And since no one else wanted the job, I became chairman of the Battle and Pillage Committee. I knew there was no way that I could form our high school’s dispirited and disorganized army into an effective fighting force, not even against other high schools, let alone against my uncle, the king, and my stepfather and his Royal Guards—especially since my stepfather had grounded me for a month for getting a speeding ticket. Still, with even a few troops I had some options open. You see, of the six high schools in the Sandusky area there was one, Scott High, which was nearly all colored. We were at peace with them, just then. And, in fact, since they were in an isolated part of town, they were at war with no one but some eastside rednecks who were high school dropouts anyway. But what I did was bully our Student Council President—a little bespeckled fellow and a great coward—into making belligerent noises toward Scott High on the pretext of a Negro family or two moving into our school district. We could not beat them in a set-piece battle. I knew that. But their school was far enough away from ours that it would not come to outright war for a while, I felt sure. Then, one night, I took a dozen of my best and most trusted swordsmen and we dressed ourselves as colored people, wearing gauntlets and keeping our visors down so that no one could see the true color of our skin. Then I led a small raid on some houses in a nice neighborhood near our school. We burned the places to the ground and killed the families, being sure to perform the worst mutilations on the bodies. It got a lot of coverage on television, and the first result was a much larger military budget for my army. We took, in fact, all the money from the Prom decorations fund—everything that had been made from car washes and bake sales for a whole year. I purchased arms and horses and even a siege engine or two, which did much to raise morale.

The kids at Scott High denied they’d done the killings, of course, and, of course, we called them liars and threatened war. But threats were as far as I let it go just then. Instead of attacking Scott High, my little band of raiders and I made another attack pretending to be colored. This time we attacked houses near Libby High School. My school and Libby had been at war for years, and I thought, rightly, that a “colored” outrage would give us cause to unite with them against the Negros. I won’t go on with all the details, but in such a way I eventually brought all five of the white high schools, even the Catholic ones, into a unified force. We made terrible war on the Negros and they, vastly outnumbered, were beaten in battle after battle and driven back into the center of the slum where they lived.