Yours, Mine, and Ours by MaryJanice Davidson

boyfriend let us in.”
    “We’re not faggots,” Behrman snapped. Then, pointing to Emma Jan: “We gonna have trouble with her again?”
    “What ‘we’? My partner fixed everything while you hid behind the couch.”
    “That’s a fuckin’ lie!”
    “Oh, there’s no shame in it,” Emma Jan piped up. “The whole thing was scary and dangerous and surreal.”
    Yes: those three words summed up my life.
    “We didn’t get your name, big guy,” George said.
    “Philip Loun.”
    “L-O-O-N?”
    “No, like ‘loud’ without the D. After you’ve added an N. Me and Behrman go to the same AA meetings.”
    “You do know that lying to cops isn’t one of the twelve steps, right?”
    “Nobody’s lying.” Behrman reluctantly shut the door and went to sit in the chair opposite Loun.
    “Wrong yet again, Mr. Behrman. You were lying. Which sucks for you, because now we’re at least ten times more interested in you than we were yesterday.”
    “What the hell are you talking about?”
    “The movie, Mr. Behrman. The one you didn’t go to.”
    “Don’t look at the mirror,” I whispered to Emma Jan, who’d been staring, wide-eyed, at the living room.
    “I don’t know where I can look.”
    I understood, sure. A small Confederate flag had been tacked up over the television. And posters were all over exhorting how swell the Third Reich was.
    There were also quite a few old mug shots that had been printed out, framed, and hung for some reason. All the subjects, except for one, were black males … the stereotypical Bad Guy pic showing a brooding African American male with features exaggerated to make him look meaner, wearing the hey-look-at-me-in-standard-prison-issue striped shirt.
    The exception was a white female, wearing a long dark skirt and nice blouse, buttoned to her chin. She looked like she’d come straight from Central Casting for Stereotypical School Marm.
    I wasn’t close enough to read any of the names, but the pictures were old, early-to-mid twentieth century old.
    Finally, Behrman’s big gurgling aquarium—it was half as long as the entire living room wall—was so green, I could barely make out the fish that were in it … and they didn’t look like fish. Turtles? Body parts?
    “You can see ’em when they swim close to the glass,” Behrman offered.
    “Hey, don’t worry about a thing, Officer,” Loun told Emma Jan. “You’ve got nothing to worry about from The Good Citizens.”
    “It’s ‘agent,’ actually. And I don’t?”
    I wanted to ask, but had low interest in displaying my ignorance. Fortunately, George knew I was clueless, and could never resist a chance to show off. “ The Good Citizen was a monthly ‘yay, facism!’ rag that quit printing around 1933.”
    “Well, there was other stuff going in on 1933,” Emma Jan offered. “Their to-do lists probably got hard to manage after a while. ‘Hmm, shall we stop earning money to pay the mortgage, or should we stop our malicious hate-mongering which we’re hoping will spread to the next generation?’ You see how it is.”
    “We took that name for our militia,” Loun confirmed.
    Outstanding. Serial murder and white supremacists. It was shaping into a lovely week.
    “You said I shouldn’t worry, but now I’m extremely worried,” Emma Jan said. “You recall Waco, right? Didn’t work out so good for you guys. Right?”
    “The Good Citizens follow the teachings of Edith Overman. We’re all about women’s equality.”
    “All women?” she asked. “Or just white women?”
    Both men shrugged.
    “I see. Can’t win them all, I suppose.”
    “Edith Overman?” I asked. Because of two bad things, I had to ask. Bad thing one, Edith Overman was obviously a mover and shaker in the booming business of bigotry and racism and I should’ve known who she was. Bad thing two, there are so many of them, so many zealots and racists and warlords-in-training, no matter how much I read I can never keep up with them. And they always found