Liberty's Last Stand

by Stephen Coonts

  The sheriff, his deputies, the mayor and county commissioners lined up to shake hands with Governor Jack Hays. Funerals aren’t normally places to talk politics, but they were very worried about terrorism and martial law and asked Hays what it meant.

  “Washington hasn’t said much. We’ll know more soon,” was his stock answer. Actually, he was lying. Washington had sent him a directive that ran over a hundred pages. He had scanned it and turned it over to the attorney general for comment. His aides had run off some copies. He gave a copy to Ben Steiner and one to Charlie Swim, and told them to keep their mouths shut. He had taken another copy home and he and Nadine had read it.

  As he stood listening to the preacher drone on, he was thinking of some of the major points in the directive. In effect, Soetoro and his administration were deputizing the state government to enforce their orders in Texas. That was Nadine’s verdict as she read the thing. She was an archaeology professor at the University of Texas and considered herself middle of the road politically. In Texas, that put her a little left of center, but not much. At the university, that made her a conservative oddity among the faculty, most of whom didn’t think much of her husband either.

  Hays glanced around. Against the back wall stood two Texas state troopers in uniform who had flown out to Sanderson in the helicopter with him. They were now his official bodyguards. This morning he asked them point-blank: “What will you do if federal agents try to arrest me?”

  “They better come a-shootin’,” the little one said. He was the senior man. The other man merely nodded.

  “I doubt if it will come to that,” Jack Hays told them, “but it might.”

  “You’re our elected governor. Ain’t nobody in Washington gonna drag you outta the state house. Period.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Them guys and gals at the FBI office in Austin, some of them are Texans too. If they get orders to come and get you, they’ll call us first. They promised.”

  After the service, Jack and Nadine stood on the lawn and watched the funeral home personnel load Joe Bob’s coffin in a hearse. JR and Fred and his wife were going to follow the hearse to the ranch, where Joe Bob would be interred beside his wife, who had died of cancer ten or eleven years ago. No, Jack Hays thought. Twelve years ago. Damn, but time slides right along.

  Before they closed the rear door of the hearse, he went over to the coffin and touched it. “Goodbye, Uncle Joe Bob.” He started to say more but choked up. “Goodbye,” he whispered and walked away.

  “Drug smugglers,” Nadine said as they walked to the helicopter, which was a block away in the courthouse square. Texas flags hung everywhere, from windows and poles mounted on buildings. “They killed him,” she said, “and now their poison is ready for consumption all over.”

  “Ready to supply the addicts and recreational users who don’t give a damn about violating the law or who gets killed,” Jack Hays muttered, “as long as they are having a good time.”

  “Why haven’t we sealed that border?” Nadine asked.

  “We tried,” he shot back. Nadine knew that. He had tried and the federal government sued and the judges said only the feds could control the border. We have to leave it open so the illegals can get in, Jack Hays told himself. Can’t take a chance on pissing off the Latino voters. And all those illegals who Soetoro wants to turn into voters. Hays was in a foul mood. Drug smugglers, now Soetoro and his martial law. It’s a hell of a world we live in.

  His cell phone rang. He looked at the number. His aide.

  The engine on the helicopter began to make noise.

  “Yes.”

  “The Houston police got troubles. A riot broke out several hours ago in the projects. They are burning cars and building barricades. Doing some looting. Some black congresswoman is shouting into microphones about the racist right-wing conspiracy trying to keep people of color down.”

  He was tempted to order her arrested for inciting a riot, but that would only pour gasoline on a fire. “I’ll be back in Austin as soon as I can,” he told the aide. “Get out the riot plan and act on it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He got in the back of the helicopter with Nadine; the two troopers climbed aboard after them.

  Jack saw JR watching as the machine lifted off.

  After the interment, Fred Hays and his wife and son shook hands with JR, got into their car, and started driving back to Dallas. Fred and JR had just inherited a twenty-two-thousand-acre ranch in a very dry corner of Texas, and now didn’t seem to be the time to discuss what they were going to do with it. Fred and his wife were schoolteachers, had two kids, and needed every dollar they could get. Neither wanted to live along the Rio Grande miles from civilization—if Pumpville, Texas, was civilization. Fred had grown up on that ranch and that was precisely the place he wanted away from when he went to college. He had never come back except for brief visits. And his parents’ funerals.

  JR, on the other hand, had spent too many years in Iraq and Afghanistan to look at desert chaparral with affection. The ranch was a big, windy, dry place, and in August hot as the doorstep of Hell with the fire doors open. His grandfather had settled here way back when because the land was cheap. It wasn’t worth much now, either. His father had stayed because he loved it, and he had gone broke there. Oilmen had drilled some exploratory wells yet never found anything. Probably never would. The place was mortgaged for the fence and exotic animals. If JR and Fred didn’t sell it, they’d need to find a way to make money to pay the bank. Hosting hunters was probably the only way.

  Maybe, JR thought sardonically, he should sell it to the dope smugglers.

  JR gave his father’s sole employee a check worth two weeks’ pay. “Take some time off. Visit your family. I’ll call you when we need you. We’ll probably sell the place, and while it’s for sale we’ll need someone to look after it and keep the fences repaired, so we don’t lose the animals.”

  “I don’t want to get shot by them dopers,” the hired man said.

  “I don’t blame you. Just stay the hell out of their way and fix the fences in the daytime. You could do that, couldn’t you?”

  “I reckon.”

  “Two weeks. See you then.”

  JR went in the house and called his boss in El Paso. Quit his job on the phone. “I won’t be coming back. Dad’s dead and there’s the ranch.”

  “I understand.”

  “I brought some of the company’s stuff with me, and I’ll bring it all back in a couple of weeks.”

  “Sure. Sorry about your dad.”

  JR inventoried the grub in the house and his father’s meager collection of weapons. The sheriff had returned the Marlin, with its nightscope. JR looked it over. It seemed intact and should be workable if he charged the battery, but he had a much better one under the rear seat of the pickup. There was a twelve-gauge pump shotgun and an old thirty-eight revolver, a double-action Colt that his father had used to execute pigs years ago, when he kept pigs and cured his own hams and ate his own bacon.

  Then JR got in his pickup and headed for Del Rio, eighty miles away. He drove fast, so he got there before the stores closed. Went into the first gun store he saw. The man behind the counter was sitting on a stool watching television. He wore a holstered pistol on his belt.

  “I need to buy a couple of guns,” JR said. “And some ammo.”

  The proprietor gestured toward the television. “Barry Soetoro says he is shutting down all the gun stores nationwide. We ain’t supposed to sell guns and ammo anymore to anybody but law enforcement. Fuck that raghead commie son of a bitch. I ain’t seen nothin’ in writing from the ATF, and until I do I’m still open. Sell you ever’thing in the whole goddamn store if you got room on your credit card.”

  “Not that much. I’ll limit myself to a small fraction of your inventory.”

  “Help yourself. I’m gonna sit here and watch the riots. Put what you want on the counter and we’ll dicker. I’m easy, long as you’re not a convict or illegal chili-
picker and you’ve stopped beatin’ your wife. Comrade Barry is gonna put me out of business pretty damn quick and I’ll need some money until the welfare checks start arrivin’ in the mailbox.”

  “You have any black powder?”

  “Six or eight cans of the stuff. It’s on a shelf in the back. Help yourself.”

  “I have a cannon. Need some fuses for it, too.”

  “Same place. I supply the local pyro club, you know, the nutcases that make their own fireworks. Got all the stuff to make their rockets go up and pop. Take all you want. That asshole Soetoro will probably shut them down too and I can’t return that stuff or eat it. I’ll probably end up piling it up and setting it afire in my backyard.”

  “You have a big backyard?”

  “Couple hundred acres. That’s where the pyro club does their thing.”

  An hour later when JR Hays paid for his purchases, the proprietor tossed in a couple of NRA bumper stickers into one bag and two that said “Fuck Soetoro.”

  “Classy,” JR said.

  “Yeah. Kinda to the point. I’m all outta the ones that say ‘Soetoro Sucks.’”

  JR Hays loaded his purchases into his pickup and visited the local hardware store. While there he purchased four five-gallon cans for gasoline, among other things. At the supermarket he stocked up on canned goods, dry beans, two cured hams, bacon, and coffee. He hit the liquor store for two big bottles of bourbon and a case of beer. As people in this sparsely populated country normally did, he stopped at the filling station on the edge of town, topped off the truck, and filled his gas cans.

  He took his time getting back to the ranch. It was after eleven o’clock when he closed and locked the gate behind him, drove the half mile over the rutted dirt road to the ranch house, a low single-story with two bedrooms and a bath, with a telephone but no TV, and got busy carrying his purchases inside. After he had his food and hardware put away, he opened one of the bottles of bourbon and poured himself a drink, neat, just the way Joe Bob used to drink it. He turned out the lights and went out on the ramada to escape the heat of the house. Sitting there sipping whiskey, he could hear the whisper of the wind in the brush. Somewhere a coyote howled.

  Above him, the obsidian sky was full of stars.

  When Jack Hays got home from the state capitol, a Texas flag was stirring on the flagpole in the yard. It was always there, but tonight he paused to look at it. Inside, Nadine was watching television. He flopped on the couch and watched a little in silence. The “ghetto rats,” as he called them when reporters weren’t around, were burning and looting in Houston, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Screaming about the right-wing white conspiracy.

  “How do they know it’s whites?” he asked Nadine.

  “All right-wingers are white Republicans. Ninety-eight percent of blacks are Soetoro Democrats. You know it, I know it, everybody knows it. Soetoro lit the fuse and it’s burning.”

  When the television people began a commercial, Nadine killed the savage beast. In the silence that followed, he told her about more of the federal government’s demands. And about his talk with Ben Steiner.

  Nadine listened in silence and sipped Chardonnay. When he ran out of words, he went to the bar and poured himself a drink, vodka over ice. God knows, he needed it. What a hell of a day!

  Seated again near Nadine, he sipped the liquor. “I feel like I’m chained to a railroad track with locomotives coming fast from both directions. Soetoro is ripping up the American Constitution and there are a large number of people in Texas who would rather fight than submit. Lincoln must have had similar feelings when he watched the Southern states pass secession resolutions. We’re headed for a smash and I haven’t a clue what to do about it.”

  “Maybe Ben Steiner is right. Texas should become its own country.”

  Jack Hays snorted. “Texas will become a nation over Barry Soetoro’s dead body. If he lets Texas go, a lot of other states will follow. Why should people who work for a living pay taxes to provide welfare to all those rats in the center cities? Explain that one to me.”

  “Extortion?”

  “Pay or we’ll burn it down and live in the ashes. The only people who worry about that kind of logic are politicians.”

  “Texas could make it as an independent nation,” Nadine said, eyeing her husband.

  “Horseshit. American dollars are our currency—”

  “Issue your own currency, backed by the state’s full faith and credit. That’s easy enough.”

  “Hundreds of thousands of people rely on Social Security and federal and military retirement. We can’t abandon them. Without those pensions—”

  “Texas can assume those obligations.”

  He stared at her.

  Nadine took another sip of Chardonnay, then said, “If people paid income and Social Security taxes to Texas instead of the federal government, and if Texas didn’t have the federal debt to service, I suspect that the finances would be pretty close to a wash. Dollar for dollar, in and out. Texas could guarantee U.S. government bonds held by Texas banks and pension funds. If you made welfare recipients who are able-bodied work for their check or forfeit it, that would help a bundle. And make welfare recipients take a drug test. You know, straight out of Charlie Swim’s platform. No more money for single women to have kids.”

  She leaned forward, pleading her case. “Texas has energy to sell to the world, a great banking system, world-class hospitals, automobile factories, cutting-edge high-tech industries, a solid agricultural base, and we’re on the Gulf Coast so we can import and export. Texas has an annual GDP of 1.6 trillion dollars. That is a larger economy than the state of New York, just a little less than California. Texas generates roughly ten percent of the economic activity in the United States. Our Texas economy is a third larger than Mexico’s, just ten percent behind the United Kingdom’s. If Texas were an independent nation, ours would be the twelfth-largest economy on earth, a smidgen less than Canada, but more than Australia, Spain, or Switzerland. And you think Texas couldn’t go it alone?”

  Jack Hays eyed his wife coldly. “I didn’t know you were an independence crackpot.”

  “I’m not. But the people of Texas will not live in a dictatorship. Will not.”

  “The United States won’t let us go without a fight.”

  “We’re heading for a fight regardless,” Nadine said flatly. “Even if independence isn’t your end game, it might give you leverage to demand a return to constitutional government on the federal level. Texas has a hell of a lot better hand than you think.”

  Jack Hays took a swig from his drink and sat staring at his wife. “We could seal the border,” he suggested. “Demand the Mexican government stop allowing drug smugglers and illegals to cross. We could seal the border so tight a bat couldn’t get across.”

  Nadine put her hand on his arm. “Sure you could, but you’d need to make it clear that no one is against immigration per se, from Mexico or anywhere else. The problem is illegal immigrants; they’re swarming in faster than we can absorb them in the schools or in the labor force or with social services. When illegal, unskilled laborers flood the market, it’s our own low-skilled citizens—black, white, brown—who pay the price. People understand that, and they understand that it’s high time someone stood up for them. So sure, seal the border, cut off all trade to Mexico if necessary, and force Mexico to patrol its own borders and crush the drug trade that does even more harm to Mexico than it does to us. Make Mexico an offer it can’t refuse. Not a single dollar, truck, railroad car, or immigrant, legal or illegal, crosses the border until Mexico cleans up its own house.”

  “That might precipitate a revolution in Mexico,” Jack Hays said. “Or Mexico might declare war on us.”

  “Another Mexican revolution or another Mexican-Texas war, let it come,” Nadine shot back. She had steel in her.

  Jack Hays wasn’t sure he bought all that. And yet, “We’ve been Mexico’s safety valve for a long, long time,” he admitted.<
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  “Think about it,” Nadine said, and finished her wine. “I’m sorry about your uncle. His was a needless, useless death. And as long as we leave that border open to drug gangs and criminals, we’ll have more needless, useless deaths. I’m going to bed. I’ve had all I can take today.”

  Jack Hays was tired too, but he sat in the silent house thinking. About his uncle. About the possibilities of a free Texas, out from under the yoke of Barry Soetoro, Washington bureaucrats, and a feckless Congress stymied by cries of racism. Was freedom worth all the blood it would take to reap the benefits? No one but God knew how much blood freedom would cost.

  His thoughts drifted back to the American Revolution. The revolutionaries then knew the British would fight. Great Britain had the finest navy in the world and a solid, although small, professional army. All the colonists had were farmers and a dream.

  And yet, who today would argue that the lives of American patriots killed during the revolution had been squandered? Or the lives of the Texans who fought at the Alamo and at San Jacinto? Sometimes those half-seen, fog-shrouded dreams of national destiny and the unpredictable future must be anointed with blood to make them reality. Not someone else’s blood, but yours. Or your son’s or daughter’s. Your blood is your gift to future generations.

  He was thinking of the Texans at the Alamo who knew they were doomed but fought to the last man. Then the telephone rang. He looked at the number before he answered it. A 301 area code. The Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. There was no one in Washington he wanted to talk to at that hour of the night. After ten rings the phone fell silent.

  Perhaps he should think of independence as a maneuver, not an end in itself. The name of the game is bettering the lot of your constituents. Nadine was right: in politics there is always an end game. You say you want A, the opposition offers E or F, and all of you settle for C. Or B or D. Something in the middle. The real problem, as Jack Hays saw it from Austin, was that Barry Soetoro refused to settle for anything less than the whole enchilada, everything he wanted, which in a democratic republic is simply impossible. He was the prophet, the messiah, and he was driving a stake through the heart of the Great Republic.