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Occasionally, the curtains of a window would twitch back as someone inside a house peered out for a better look. “Not very exciting though, huh? I must be the most interesting thing to come along in a while.”
    â€œYou see these streets?” Andre said, pointing at the wide patches of dust between the houses, crisscrossed with old vehicle tracks that had baked to terra-­cotta in the sun. “You see any litter there?”
    â€œNo,” Chapel admitted.
    â€œYou see any needles in the gutters, any of those little plastic bags they sell crack cocaine in? No, you don’t,” Andre said. “You don’t see any gambling going on, no dice games on those porches. No criminals hiding underneath.”
    â€œNo, I don’t see anything like that.”
    Andre nodded. “I’ll take boring any day over the exciting life of a ghetto. I been to Denver,” he confided. “I know what a mixed town looks like.”
    Mixed as in mixed race, of course. Chapel had been to Denver as well, and he wondered if Andre had seen the same city he had. Chapel had thought Denver was a pretty nice place—­quiet and low-­key. Though not nearly so quiet as Kendred. “So this is what separatism looks like,” he said.
    â€œThat’s right.”
    Belcher’s group, the Separatist Allied Front, was not technically a white-­supremacist or white-­power group though the distinction was academic as far as Chapel was concerned. He’d read a little of the SAF’s literature, as much as he could stomach, and gleaned the basic philosophy. The SAF claimed it was not a hate group, that its members didn’t hate anyone. They just didn’t want to live near any minority or ethnic groups or anyone practicing a religion they didn’t agree with—­basically anyone but other white separatists. They advocated for repeal of equal-­opportunity laws, so they could build their supposed paradise out West: towns just like Kendred, where every face was white, and they didn’t have to see a black or a Jew or a Latino all day long.
    â€œHow do you get around the laws?” Chapel asked. “The law says you can’t discriminate on basis of skin color when you sell houses.”
    â€œNone of these were sold,” Andre explained. “Every parcel of land here was a gift, direct from Mr. Belcher. The community came together to build the houses out of materials he donated. No money changed hands.”
    â€œClever,” Chapel said. “And awfully generous of him, to just give you everything.”
    â€œWe work for it, don’t you mistake me,” Andre told him. “We work in the factories over there, every day, like men. Not like moochers.”
    â€œMaking machine parts, right,” Chapel said. “And I suppose there’s some way you get around hiring anybody who doesn’t live here?”
    â€œWe’re not employees,” Andre pointed out. “Every man here is a shareholder in the company. When you come here, and he accepts you, he gives you a certificate worth exactly one share.”
    â€œSo you own the means of production,” Chapel said, not able to repress a small smile. Belcher had built something dangerously close to a communist society out here. Karl Marx might have loved it. Well, except Marx wouldn’t have been welcome in Kendred since he was the grandson of a rabbi. “You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?”
    â€œWe will abide by the laws of the United States until such day those laws are abolished,” Andre said, and now he definitely sounded like he was quoting someone. “We pay our taxes. If there were a draft, we would serve gladly in the military. And we vote.”
    â€œOh, I bet you do,” Chapel said. “What’s that building?” he asked, pointing at a large, ranch-­style building in the middle of town. It was the only large building this side of the