“Pinkertons,” said Donny, looking at Trey and Lou. “For ‘protection.’”
“A convenient rewrite of what was really very common back then, and one we are right to be reviving. Lincoln would admire what we have done in the last four years.”
“Including the last ten days,” said Donny.
“Exactly,” said Broyles, ignoring the irony in Donny’s voice. “This habeas business. He was the one who set the precedent, rounding up half the officials in the state of Maryland to keep the supply lines from the North open. Martial law is underrated as a tool to make democracy stronger. The trick is getting enough people excited about its exercise.”
“Who can argue with arresting politicians?” said Trey.
“Seems to be working pretty well for our Governor,” said Lou. “I think he’s the one who gave the President the idea.”
“That doesn’t make it constitutional,” said Donny.
“It does if no one stops him,” said Broyles, making it deliberately unclear if he was talking about then or now.
Donny knew the story, and he was annoyed the judge was right. They both knew how the country really worked. The difference was how they thought it should work.
“They did,” said Donny.
“And he went ahead anyway, pushing them to exercise a power they had, by exercising it for them until they finally papered it over. Do you know why?”
“Yes,” said Donny, without elaborating. He knew Broyles liked to deliver the lesson.
“Because it was necessary to protect the security and integrity of the Union, and everybody knew it.”
“You understand we’re talking about a political campaign here,” said Donny. “An election, not a civil war.”
“Said the last dumbass in America naïve enough to believe there’s any difference left,” said Trey, taking the judge’s side and then some, as usual. “We have foreign powers dictating how we run our country, and so-called Americans trying to tear what’s left into pieces and taking up arms against our own government. We need a leader who is going to make people earn their citizenship, and make that citizenship worth what it should be again. And you should be happy about it, Donny, because we are going to keep you a very busy man.”
“Let’s play golf, guys,” said Lou. “There’s another foursome coming up behind us. Your shot, Donny.”
Donny set up while the others stowed their clubs and got in the carts. As he shoved his tee into the turf, he wondered if it had really always been this way, and he was just starting to see it clearly for the first time. Then he saw an egret flying through the frame of the wide green fairway, tinted orange from the morning light. And just as he got ready to swing, the judge broke protocol, and character, and talked.
“You do know we are talking about the future of the country here,” he said, in the tone of a pissed-off dad. “These people are like the early Christians. They seem like a fringe movement now, but they are the seeds of something much bigger. We need to be lions. Or watch our whole way of life collapse into ruin.”
Donny sliced the shit out of it, and watched the ball land way off in the trees, almost at the fence along the road. He remembered the time when country clubs didn’t need razor wire or armed guards at the perimeter.
It wasn’t until Jerome’s sentencing, which no one saw coming, that he really appreciated what the judge meant.
19
The jailers let Donny call Miles, and they let Miles come pick him up, after a few hours of questioning. Miles offered him a ride to the courthouse, after saying I should make you ride the damn bus.
“You’re a mess, Donny. You want to swing by your place on the way, get a change of clothes?”
“We don’t have time, Miles. This will have to do.”
He looked himself over sitting there in the front passenger seat. There was a grass stain on his white shirt, which he tried to rub out with his handkerchief. Then he noticed the rip in his left pant leg. He reached into his litigation bag, which they had returned to him upon release, and looked for the Scotch tape.
“You should get a postponement,” said Miles. “Broyles would give you that, under the circumstances.”
“Broyles is probably the one who did this to me, Miles. Things are getting crazier faster than I ever thought possible. I need to just show up.”
“I think you’d have better luck with a safety pin,” said Miles, watching Donny fumble to suture the rip.
“You always know better than me, don’t you,” said Donny. It had been a while since he had experienced the shame of detention, a shame you felt no matter how unjust the arrest.
He pulled down the sun visor and looked at his face in the little mirror. He straightened his hair, assessed his whiskers, noted the little scrapes and nicks, and then used his finger to try to clean his teeth.
“Some days it’s hard to convince yourself you’re not an animal,” he said.
Miles just glanced at him and kept driving.
“Did I see you won in Austin?” asked Donny.
“Yeah,” he said. “It was good. She invalidated the martial law decree, other than the areas that are still too contaminated. And the Governor has ten days to provide updated testing data to back up those.”
“Well done,” said Donny. “Maybe this really is going to go the right way.”
“If we keep fighting them every day, it will,” said Miles. “Sooner or later.”
Even though he had just suggested it, Donny wasn’t sure he agreed. A few hours in a cell had a way of changing your outlook.
“Do you have a copy of the judge’s order? I think I can use that this morning. Might be just what I need to get this kid home.”
“Absolutely,” said Miles.
“Thanks,” said Donny, noticing Miles was still looking at him, like he was trying to decide if he should take him to the mental hospital instead of the courthouse. “You should watch the road.”
“It’s not far,” said Miles, reaching for the radio. “Let’s hear what’s in the news.”
“How about let’s not,” said Donny. “The real story is never on the news. And that’s the one we need to figure out. Figure out and tell.”
Miles nodded. They sat there at the light quietly for a minute in the clog of morning rush hour, watching the slow flow of a fat and sclerotic society about to learn the bill has come due.
“You ever wonder if the Indians will come back?” asked Donny.
“Can’t say that I have,” said Miles. “Maybe their ghosts.”
“The ghosts are everywhere,” said Donny. “Wait till the Comanches ride in from Dallas and raid the Galleria.”
“I don’t know if the Comanches came down here much,” said Miles.
“They will when they have pickups and Harleys,” said Donny.
Miles smiled. Then he turned right onto Rusk Street.
“What happened, Donny?”
Donny was unbuttoning his shirt to inspect the pained spot on his ribs he had just noticed. He looked over at Miles.
“Xelina Rocafuerte happened. You never met with her, before Broyles transferred the case to me?”
Miles shook his head.
“You really want in on this?” said Donny. “Because I could use the help, but I don’t want to pull you into my mess.”
“Just tell me.”
“She says she saw them kill Gregorio.”
“Oh.”
“Says she got it on film.”
“Wow. Who did it?”
“She’s not sure. They weren’t in uniforms. Plainclothes, street wear, masks.”
“Have you seen the footage?”
“No. Not sure anyone has. She blocked her devices, and won’t give up the code.”
“If she gave it up she could go back to her life.”
“I told her that. She doesn’t want to rat out her friends, Miles. She wants to rat out the ones who killed Gregorio.”
“Good luck with that.”
“She’s right. That it’s th
e right thing to do.”
“Is she a bona fide insurgent?”
“I don’t know. Maybe? Probably? Does it matter?”
“It matters, Donny. Violence is not the answer.”
“No,” said Donny. “But I can’t even remember what’s the fucking question anymore.”
“What happened last night, Donny?”
“They burned her goddam house down, Miles. I went there looking for backups she said she had, stuff that would make our case. And they knew. Maybe didn’t know what I was there for, because I honestly don’t think they know she has footage of the deed—they just want to find and lock up all the witnesses. But whatever she had is gone now. Torched.”
“You’re lucky they didn’t burn it with you in it.”
“Right,” said Donny. “End up like old Njal.”
“Who’s Neal?”
“Njal. Viking lawyer.”
“Oh, right, that Icelandic saga. Never read it.”
“Great book. I wonder what he’d do in this situation? Some arcane procedural gotcha, I bet.”
“He probably wouldn’t leave psychotic threats on the White House switchboard.”
Donny shrugged. “Everybody should do that once in a while. It’s cathartic. And cheaper than therapy.”
“Not at my hourly rate.”
“You’re billing me?”
“I should be, the way you’re pulling me away from the case that needs all my attention. Don’t you understand what’s at stake? I swear you’d give the whole country away just to save one client. Or your own ass.”
“I’m doing my job, Miles. Sorry if I can’t do it to your standards.”
Miles just sighed, and pulled up by the concrete bollards that blocked the road leading to the courthouse.
“So what are you going to do?” he asked, looking at the courthouse looming over the barricades. There were some words about justice chiseled into the frieze across the top of the building, but you couldn’t make them out through the barbed wire.
“Don’t you mean we?” said Donny.
“I have my hands full with bigger fights, but we’ll see.”
“Well, if you’re right, I just need to keep her from being denaturalized before the election makes all that insanity moot.”
“I hope so,” said Miles. “I think so.”
“So this morning I’m going to use that decision you got to attack the whole thing from a legal angle.”
“It’s worth a shot. If nothing else, it could create a good basis for reversal on appeal.”
“And for delay in the meantime. Beyond that, I have to work with what I’ve got.”
He held up his scuffed hands for Miles to see, like a magician showing he has nothing up his sleeves.
“You know there’s Listerine in the men’s room by the judge’s chambers,” said Miles, thinking that would help.
But nothing was going to get the bad taste out of Donny’s mouth about where this case was going. This case, and everything else in his world.
20
Bridget didn’t make Donny’s morning any easier.
She started with the confession, which would have been enough by itself. She then offered excerpts from Xelina’s communications with her friends, in which she expressed her desire for a change in government and some of the more imaginative ways in which she thought that could be achieved, a couple of which made Donny’s White House voicemail sound tame. The logs evidenced discussions of various “infiltrations” people in her network had planned under the cover of the storms—some groups breaching the border fortifications while others broke into industrial and government facilities with big talk of the damage they could do to “the Machine.” Most of these were pulled from chats Percy had also found for Donny, and when you had the full context they all showed Xelina wanting merely to tag along with her camera as a documentarian. Donny was sure he could use that material to counter Bridget’s characterization of Xelina’s conduct and intent. That was before Bridget got around to showing what was on the videos Xelina had made while tagging along.
Donny had managed to get there on time for the hearing, but not with enough time to prep, or to meet with Xelina. He was stuck telling her the bad news when they brought her in right before Broyles. He hoped his appearance conveyed how hard he’d tried, but he also knew coming close was the same as not even trying. Before she could vent her anger and disappointment, he told her he thought he had another way he could get a copy, which was mostly true. But first, he said, we need to get through this morning. He also told her it wasn’t too late to try to make a deal with the prosecutors—give them some names of the people in your network and they will let you walk on little more than a trespassing charge. Xelina thought about that for a long minute. Then she asked if he would get a copy of what they said in court that day. He told her yes, a transcript. I guess that’ll have to do, said Xelina. And then she made Donny promise her he would publish it.
He promised, even though doing that would be a crime.
I guess that means you want to testify, he said. And then he told her how risky that would be.
So as the opening frame appeared in the wall-mounted monitor opposite the jury box and Bridget’s assistant went to press play, Donny wasn’t surprised that Xelina looked like she was eager for Broyles to watch her show.
Donny objected to the way the prosecution had cut the videos, knowing, as with his objections to the selective declassification of Xelina’s communications with her friends, that it would not do him much good today, even if it was important to build the record for subsequent appeal.
As he saw Xelina’s work through the government’s eyes, he got a better understanding of why they wanted to silence her.
The way they cut their montage, they were trying to show people taking up arms against their government. And there was some of that, of the so-called self-defense clubs and people’s militias. Armed patrols asserting the sovereignty of bombed-out neighborhoods. Footage from the occupation of the refuge that Gregorio had led. The clip they called the recruiting video, with the kids learning to blow up cars and aim for the head. But even when they showed the girls field stripping their machine guns blindfolded, they couldn’t keep the scenes from being through Xelina’s lens. And what that showed, if you paid attention, wasn’t people fighting back. It was nature fighting back.
Mostly, it was in the backgrounds, or in little interstitial cuts:
A burning-down sun silhouetting the petrochemical arcade of industrial Houston.
Light and ozone, machines pumping, traffic jamming, toxins leaching.
A deformed pigeon eating trash. A nest of parakeets in a cell phone tower. An osprey fishing in a flooded river of trash.
Montage in silence at first, then the sound of Shatter beat slowly coming up. A mix that riffed the sounds of the city and the sounds of the field, ambient dissonance.
Scenes of the Tropic, the drought-blighted North, from a car in motion. Highway through dead brown going to grey, a thousand acres of dust.
Scenes of the Evac Zone, from an intrepid traveler on foot, right after the storms. A freeway underwater. A huge tanker, capsized in the Ship Channel, bleeding its contents out. A well on fire, half contained, half rogue, looking like it will burn forever, or until everything in the earth below is gone.
A butterfly on a prairie flower, smokestacks in the background.
A factory robot, lured out from its post and decapitated by a primitive axe that looks designed for that purpose.
A raccoon crawling under a fence, followed by a refugee white boy with a rifle.
Vines and fungi growing up along the side of a petroleum storage tank. Camera eye climbs to the top edge. Inside, soil and new foliage flowering, like some secret valley in the world’s biggest accidental planter.
A huge sinkhole, devouring the business end of a polystyrene plant.
Buffalo, a big herd, coming down the interstate, eating the median as they go.
An old Chevy sinking s
lowly into the bog of a wetland, tall grasses growing up through the busted windshield. A fox moves through the background.
A map of Texas, dissolving into green.
Pan out to the whole nation, then the continent, then the hemisphere, lines of political demarcation coming to animated life, then disappearing, replaced with topography.
Broyles looked less impressed than Donny. “Mr. Kimoe,” he said. “Do you still wish to challenge the authenticity of this footage?”
“I don’t dispute that the videos are real,” said Donny. “But the connection to my client has not been established. Unless we are allowed to review and challenge the classified foundation that has been provided, this material should be excluded.”
Bridget started to respond, but Xelina beat her to it. “I made them,” she said. “And I’m proud of it.”
Donny looked at her, but she didn’t look back.
“I’m going to suggest you let your lawyer do the talking,” said Broyles. “Unless I ask you the question.”
In a normal court, the judges rarely asked the witnesses or the parties any questions. But this wasn’t a normal court. It was a civilian version of a military tribunal, where the presiding officers often acted more like inquisitors. It suited Broyles.
“Ms. Kelly, do you have anything else for us this morning?”
“No, Your Honor. Just summation.”
“Let’s save that until we hear what Mr. Kimoe has to say.”
“Your Honor,” said Donny. “I’d like to make a motion to dismiss the government’s case.”
“I was afraid you would say that.”
“The evidence they have provided this morning is insufficient to meet the standard in the statute and rules for the classification of Ms. Rocafuerte as an insurgent combatant.”
“The standard for this initial determination is a reasonable belief that the accused has engaged in or advocated armed hostilities against the United States or any state or subdivision, or the secession of any territory. I’d say we have more than enough.”
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