Yuri washed out the bowl. Even so, he vowed never to use it again. In fact after the evening was over he intended to throw it and the fork away.

After washing his hands carefully, Yuri got out a spoon. Then he picked up both the ice cream container and the pepperoni pizza box and headed for Connie’s room.

“It took long enough,” Connie commented when Yuri opened her door.

“Where do you want it?” Yuri asked.

“Over here on the floor,” Connie said without taking her eyes off the TV.

Yuri bent down and put the food on the rug. He placed the spoon on top of the ice cream container and straightened up.

That was when Connie glanced over to see what he’d done.

“Hey, I don’t want the ice cream,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Yuri said with consternation.

“I mean I want you to put it in the goddamn refrigerator,” Connie said. “I’ll eat it after my pizza. I don’t want it to melt.”

“Fine,” Yuri said with some relief. He picked up the ice cream and the spoon and backed to the door. “Give a yell when you want it, okay?”

Connie’s head flopped to the side, and she regarded Yuri beneath knotted brows. “What’s wrong with you, boy? You’ve never been this nice.”

“I told you,” Yuri said. “I feel guilty.”

“I wish you’d feel guilty more often,” Connie said.

Yuri went back out to the kitchen. Mumbling a few choice epithets about Connie, he put the ice cream in the freezer. His pulse was hammering in his temples. He needed a vodka. As he’d suspected, it was going to be a long night.

“Okay, everybody shut the hell up!” Curt yelled out over the unruly group. He’d called a meeting of the People’s Aryan Army, and they’d gathered in the back pool room of the White Pride bar. The owner of the bar was Jeff Connolly, an old acquaintance of Curt’s. Jeff wasn’t an official member of the group, although he was entirely sympathetic to the PAA’s positions: namely anti-government, anti-black, anti-Semitic, anti-Hispanic, anti-immigration, anti-feminist, anti-NAFTA, anti-abortion, and anti-gay. He was more than happy to clear out the pool room whenever the PAA needed to assemble.

On Curt’s insistence the organization of his group was entirely clandestine. There were no membership cards or even membership memorabilia. He urged people never to use the name, although he and Steve did when they communicated to other militias via the Internet. Otherwise, all communication was by word of mouth, person to person. To call the meeting that night, there’d been no phone calls and no written messages. People had to seek each other out. What made it easy was that most members came to the White Pride at some time during each and every night.