A Changed Man Read Free Page B

they didn’t hate anyone. It was just that they loved the white race. Which was also a problem for Nolan. Loving a race is a lot to ask. It’s hard enough loving a person. He’d thought he’d loved Margaret, right up until and including the morning when she’d patiently waited till he’d finished moving out of their place, loading the last of his stuff into his truck, and then she got in her UPS van and drove off, smiling and waving.
    Mostly, Vincent got into ARM because its take on the government was so dead-on. ARM said things that no one else had the brains or the balls to say about those greedy slobs in Washington, figuring out how to turn a dime by taking away Nolan’s freedoms. Clinton, Bush, it was all the same shit. What sensible person would give a rat’s ass who was in the White House? Those twenty-one babies in Waco weren’t old enough to vote. That stuff was pretty persuasive, Waco and Ruby Ridge, the shock of finding out that the government you paid taxes and pledged allegiance to could massacre women and children just for trying to live the way the Constitution guaranteed. Also, being in ARM had a certain…entertainment value. Sometimes the ARM guys could be funny, especially when they got loaded.
    Raymond would never have been so hospitable if Nolan hadn’t pretended to go along with the entire ARM program, and probably Nolan would never have joined ARM if not for Raymond’s hospitality. Not that Nolan would ever admit that. Becoming a white supremacist for the free lunch seems even sleazier than joining because you believe that the white race is an endangered species, or because you like wearing the camouflage gear and the boots.
    Nolan wasn’t a racist, in the sense that he didn’t believe in hating people unless you knew them personally. But look, it wasn’t lost on him that the Jewish swimming pool owners who contracted with Skip thought nothing of calling Vincent at dawn, ordering him to hustle over to Woodstock just because they’d found a mouse floating at the deep end. Let the Jew get a net and drag the mouse out himself. Or better yet, let the Jew share his wealth and give poor bastards like Nolan a shot at the weekend house and the pool.
    The absolute low point was the incident with Mrs. Regina Browner, a Jewish woman, as it happened, an old Jewish woman, as it happened, but with plenty of energy left for being a pain in the ass. She kept insisting that frog died in her pool because Nolan had overdosed it with chemicals, when obviously the frog had drowned without any chemical help. She said frogs didn’t drown. What did she want Nolan to do? Autopsy the slimy fucker?
    She’d been at him, bitching and carrying on. When she threatened to complain to Skip, Nolan lifted all starved-down, nipped and tucked ninety pounds of her in his arms. He’d never done anything like that. He felt awful the minute he picked her up and saw how light she was, like those balsa-wood model planes he used to make as a kid. But by then he’d set something in motion and couldn’t put her down until he’d gently deposited her in the shallow end of the pool.
    Of course he’d jumped in and fished her out, apologizing the whole time, because he was sorry and also because he knew that, if she pressed charges, she could do some damage. He was glad she didn’t drown. That’s what he said in the letter he wrote her that night. He wrote that he’d meant her no harm. He’d been having a miserable summer. He said his doctor thought he might have an allergy to algaecides, which made him act weird around pools. That was the only lie he told. It was true that he was sorry. If only she had stopped yelling at him five minutes sooner. He couldn’t believe he’d become a guy who could drop old ladies in pools. He was glad—he deserved it—when Skip let him go.
    After a hairy couple of weeks, Mrs. Browner agreed not to press charges if Nolan took twenty hours of anger management class.
    Bonnie and Maslow are staring