Silverkey Crossing

Blacky

Prejudice has always required three main ingredients: One, lots of people with one or more common traits. Two, other people that don't share those traits. Three, enough people upset over it.

Silverkey Crossing has always been predominantly white like any small town of the Midwest. Said whites have been mostly friendly and welcoming to anyone that wasn't of a light pink pigmentation that is nowhere near the actual color of white.

There was one pink guy who wasn't as friendly as his pink neighbors. Truth was, he was downright nasty. He was surly enough to other pink people. But being un-pink was the bleat that would summon the wolf inside of him. Vern Addison Hubal. He never looked well. Splotched with melanoma, stringy white cobweb hair, he looked like the hospital waste left from Dr. Frankenstein's attempt to transplant a human head with a moldy onion. He kept cows as gaunt and crooked as him. He kept a farm of thin, scraggly crops. He kept a large rock in his overalls to throw at people that weren't pink. The few times he loosened his pockets to hire help, he ended up throwing the rock at them because the sun exposure darkened them too much for his bad eyes to tell who they were. He eventually no longer hired due as much to stinginess as he did to lack of applicants.

Vern's lanky son was the help when nobody else was. He got the wrath of the rock more than a few times. And just enough times in the head that it didn't take much for Vern to indoctrinate him with his views of the world and the people on it.

"White is right, Russ, white is RIGHT!" He would repeat this incessantly, his dowel rod arms clubbing one knotty, bulbous palm with another. Beyond that, he didn't really reason as to why white was right. It simply was.

The declining Vern was content with being sure that anyone that came near his house or farm was pink. Paranoia, youthful restlessness, and ideals as narrow as a flat earth ministry impelled Russ to bigger things. All he needed was a spark. It came when the Ku Klux Klan started making the news. Russ never saw them. But the heavy antique radio in the splintery living room painted all the pictures Russ needed. He would sit in front of it with neck fully extended as if it were a television. Ominous. Merciless. Knights clad in white. Pa's favorite color. And the seductive glory of a uniform. It all took seed in Russ's rock-pocked skull where it would germinate for a long time.

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Silverkey Crossing

1963

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Nobody knew what Russ Hubal had in mind when he asked his Ma to teach him to sew. She always wondered if he was a hummasex-shull. Nineteen years old, no girlfriend, and this... This wasn't helping. But teach him she did. Before long, she would hear the pedal-powered sewing machine chattering away in her absence. She would lean her flabby melon head in the doorway, her toothless mouth slightly open in silent reaction to the long, white... dress? ... her son was muddling together from his stained, stiff bedsheets. That red hair. That scrawny, long neck bent over the sewing machine in laser focus. She couldn't hear what he was saying to himself. Muttered in a deep drawl that was more from being hit in the head with rocks than the local dialect. Wat is rat. Wat is RAT.

They were called "The Terrible Two's." They flew a flag of a white Roman numeral "II" on a black flag. It's significance wasn't so mysterious. For starters, there were only two of them. Russ and his highschool friend, Darryl. Second, Russel's paranoia put the Klan-based uniform to a critical question: Say The Two's became BIG. Bigger than the KKK. It wouldn't be long before non-pinks would catch on - Hey, if you want to infiltrate The Two's, just show up at their secret meetings in one of their uniforms.

He had to figure out a way to make sure that everyone under a white hood was indeed pink.

Leaving out the hood was ridiculous.