Indian Country

by Kurt A Schlichter

  “I’m a CPA,” Turnbull replied.

  “And why are you here in Jasper?”

  “I’m CPAing,” Turnbull replied innocently. He decided that if the detective asked him to stand he would shoot the detective first, then kill the two PSF. After all, you always had to be prepared to change a plan as the situation developed.

  “He’s doing accounting for my insurance agency,” Dale said. “The new reparations taxes, you know.”

  “He’s one sixteenth Chippewa,” Turnbull said. “So, we have to factor that in and it’s complicated.”

  “You’re telling me you’re an Indigenous Person?” the detective said to Dale.

  “Well, yes,” said Dale, snippy. “You know, I resent you questioning my First Peoples identity. President Warren suffers from that same kind of racist hate doubt too. We might as well be in the United States again!”

  “Are you heritage shaming my client?” asked Turnbull, furrowing his brows with all the intensity he could muster. Now the other diners were starting to stare and the two PSF officers began to look uncomfortable.

  The detective handed them back their identification. “I didn’t mean to say you weren’t an Indian,” he said.

  “Indian?” Becky the waitress exclaimed from across the diner. “Did you just call him an ‘Indian’?”

  “Are you profiling him?” said Turnbull to the stricken detective. “What next, are you going to call him a wagon burner?”

  “No, I never –” stuttered the PBI detective. The PSF officers visibly stepped back from him, as if they thought him contagious. He turned around and walked fast out the door. The PSF officers followed at a distance, bringing along the Mayor.

  “Wagon burner?” asked Dale.

  Turnbull shrugged. “We had some stupid diversity session back in basic training and they encouraged us to share all the epithets we’d ever heard. That was supposed to build bridges or something. A guy from Oklahoma shared that one. And we had an Apache who called him a ‘cousinfucker’ right back. Then they started kicking each other’s asses. So, it was memorable.”

  “The protest is almost ready to start,” Dale said.

  “We don’t want to miss that,” Turnbull said. “You got it all squared away?”

  “I think so.”

  They walked out front on the sidewalk. Across the street, a pair of workers were desperately trying to scrub something off of the brick face of the old hardware store. Via the medium of white spray paint, someone had rendered the crude image of a large penis next to the words “PSF SUCK THIS.”

  Main Street was crowded, not only with PSF but with regular citizens too. The local businesses had been ordered to have their workers attend and observe the “Voluntary Youth March Against Terrorist Hate Criminals and Intolerance.” To make sure everyone did, the PSF had blocked off not only the streets for the march but also the key roads out of town lest anyone try to sneak away home.

  There were a lot of people milling about near the front of the diner, mostly grumbling. A woman with long, straight hair and a purple crystal around her neck was there too, smiling and yapping about how, “This is so wonderful to see youth spontaneously reject hate crimes!” She checked her watch. Only a few more minutes until the spontaneous protest was scheduled to begin.

  The children from all the local schools were gathered at the north end of Main Street where it intersected 15th. Their teachers were busy attempting to wrangle them into something like order. The PSF had forced the town’s only licensed print shop owner to open up the prior evening after the principal had received a special permit to print up a variety of placards and banners. The eager principal was shouting in her bullhorn, having her subordinates herd the high school kids up front and the elementary school kids to the back.

  Carl Hyatt was a senior, and his pockets were full of rocks. Like everyone else, he was wearing jeans and the white school sweatshirt – on the front in red letters it said “Jasper High School” and on the back it read “Our Most Important Subject Is Diversity And Inclusion.” The sweatshirts had been distributed at the beginning of the year, and none of the teachers had yet noticed the plural problem.

  At seventeen, Carl’s prospects were unpromising. He got good grades – very good grades, in fact – but his guidance counselor was very clear. This son of a single mom who worked as a bookkeeper for the grain storage co-op was much too privileged for his dream school, the newly-nationalized Notre Dame, since his great-great-great grandfather had immigrated to Indiana from Dusseldorf and not from some more favored locale.

  “Maybe you could start identifying as trans,” the counselor helpfully suggested. Carl just walked out.

  And maybe he could go spin his wheels in the community college system and then go on assistance and collect a weekly pittance. Without a degree from one of the prestigious colleges – and the connections he could make there – he was never going to gain admittance to the People’s Republic’s elite. The door was shut to him. It would be a life of taking the scraps the masters chose to toss him from their table. His friends didn’t see that, but Carl was smart enough that he did so with crystal clarity.

  And it gnawed at him.

  Since then, his grades had declined and he had received several warnings from the principal for “lack of commitment to progressive change” and “incorrect thinking.” Ms. Marfull took seriously her task of providing the People’s Republic with thoroughly committed participants in the struggle for change. Without intervention, privileged youths like Carl Hyatt would embrace and perpetuate the racist and sexist paradigms that unconsciously formed their worldviews. It was up to her to help them in their battle against their original sin; she could at least neutralize the contagion, though the carrier himself was a lost cause.

  She paid Carl special attention, especially lately as the local hate criminals turned violent. His kind was potentially dangerous.

  “Let the voices of the children demand justice!” Marfull shouted through her bullhorn as her subordinates continued to try to form up the kids for the march. She checked her watch. They needed to start in just eight minutes.

  Carl Hyatt had gotten the news of Turnbull’s confrontation with the PVs just like everyone else – from fellow townspeople. Some were delighted, others frightened, for they feared the repercussions. They wanted to hunker down and hope the bad times would just pass them by.

  And some locals had been horrified – these were mostly the people who dutifully flew whatever the current People’s Republic flag was and berated their neighbors for carbon insensitivity for grilling hamburgers. Now those people were called “Tories” – Carl recognized the term from the American Revolution, but not from his school, which taught “people’s history,” not history history. Instead, he got it from books he secretly borrowed from neighbors – well before Turnbull arrived, there had been secret clubs that covertly passed around books that were no longer available to buy.

  The Tories were PR loyalists, and they were a threat to people like Carl.

  The news of the PVs being run out of town had thrilled him, and a number of his pals who likewise had packed their pockets with rocks before the march. Word spread that something more was happening, that people were organizing, that folks were going out in the woods and digging up their rifles, that they would finally be standing up to the PR.

  Carl wanted in.

  “You’re too young,” Dale Chalmers had told him. Carl had shown up at the office after school and demanded to talk to him alone. Dale had no idea how the kid had figured out that he was part of the resistance, but the fact Carl did was impressive. Still, at seventeen, the kid was too young to be running and gunning, as Turnbull had put it. But there were other things teens could do that would hopefully keep them out of the literal line of fire.

  Carl selected several friends with similar sympathies – and he avoided the suck-ups and go-along types who the administration allowed to run the student government or who joined the Obama Youth Club and monitored fellow st
udents for improper thoughts and attitudes. With their blue sashes, they wandered the halls and reported their findings to the administration at the end of each day. Carl had been tagged a number of times for “after school reeducation” – luckily, the teacher who got stuck running it, because of his own bad attitude, was an old PE teacher. The guy had been in the Navy before the Split and didn’t hide the US flag tattoo on his right bicep. Instead of haranguing the imprisoned students about their thought crimes, he would lock the door, shut the curtains, and burn up the time screening forbidden films like Dirty Harry and Animal House on an ancient DVD player.

  Carl was in the church in a back pew when the PVs opened fire. He and his mother were unharmed, but he was splattered with blood from an elderly woman they had shot in the face.

  Carl asked Dale for a weapon. Turnbull, who would not meet with Carl personally due to security concerns, directed Dale to exploit the young people’s greatest assets. Teens appeared harmless and with their bikes – driving was forbidden until 23 in the PR because of climate change – they had exceptional mobility within town and could easily avoid check points and roadblocks without drawing attention.

  Soon, Carl was organizing his friends to spy on and report PSF and PBI personnel movements and deployments. He would then take the information his cell gathered, compile it, and report back to Dale. Carl was aware there were other cells out there – obviously someone was responsible for the shot-up PSF cruisers his people were reporting being towed back into town – but he did not know who they were. He just knew he’d rather be doing that than spying.

  But just gathering information was not enough for him. He and his pals started by using a sharpened screwdriver to poke holes in the tire sidewalls of PSF cruisers left unattended. After disabling three cars the first night, the PSF took to leaving an officer to guard the vehicle when the others got out. They could do so since they had now taken to traveling with four to a vehicle for safety.

  Carl remembered some spray cans that had been left in the garage by the family down the street that had picked up and left in the middle of the night. He liberated them, and his cell began tagging walls around town with graffiti of increasingly profane and insulting intensity. They had created a very special one for just this march, but Carl was disappointed to see some government workers actually working and trying to remove it. Too bad – he was pretty proud of his phallocentric masterpiece.

  Well, he thought, then they’d have to do something else to liven up the protest.

  Ms. Marfull was shouting through her bullhorn, and while the Obama Youth were eager to obey, filling the front ranks of the march in their blue sashes, the rest of the students moved sluggishly and passive aggressively. As they failed to comply with all deliberate speed, the principal’s amplified hectoring increased, and the kids – sensing her growing frustration – only moved more slowly as they fell into order.

  The march began twelve minutes late, with the high school Obama Youth Club at the head holding a long banner across the front rank that read “JASPER YOUTH IN PROGRESSIVE SOLIDARITY WITH PSF.” Behind the beaming blue true believers were the regular students, many half-heartedly holding signs with slogans like “PEOPLE’S JUSTICE AGAINST TERRORISTS NOW!” and “PR AND PALESTINE: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES.”

  Another placard read “YOUR GENDER IS YOUR CHOICE!” while a few feet away, a kid used his “SOCIALISM IS SCIENTIFIC” sign, which featured a picture of President Warren for some reason, to poke another boy, who shouted “Stop it, racist!” and started crying. Following them were the junior high and elementary school kids, several of whom ran out of the ranks to pet some stray dogs that had come over to bark at the spectacle.

  At the end of the procession came the high school band, which struck up “We Dedicate Ourselves To Inclusiveness,” the song that had been the national anthem of the People’s Republic until it itself had recently been declared insufficiently inclusive – specifically, because it “ignores and denies the existence of differently-sized, abled and gendered beings.” There had been a lot of controversy about trying to write a new national anthem, so they finally settled on an instrumental. Unfortunately, the band did not know the new tune yet, so they stuck with the old tune and hoped no one would notice. Only the blue-sashed Obama Youth Club kids even attempted to sing along, most forgetting the majority of the lyrics except for the chorus. The chorus concluded, “And every village/rejects white privilege!”

  The march began its slow progress south on Main Street past perpendicular east-west streets blocked off with sawhorses. The ranks, except for the first ones in which the blue sashes tried to keep in some semblance of order, soon disintegrated into a mass cluster of uniformed students. Carl and his friends, about a half-dozen of them, maneuvered themselves into the middle of the pack, hidden from the view of the teachers marching along the flanks in order to keep the group moving forward.

  There were a lot of PSF deployed along the route, including what appeared to be the head of the local station – she was surrounded by a half-dozen officers. And they all carried long weapons.

  The people of Jasper were largely indifferent to the march. They sort of stood there, their attendance noted, but offering no more enthusiasm than the minimum they could get away with. There were exceptions – a few Tories applauded a bit too loudly and shouted encouragement.

  “Fight hate criminals and denialists!”

  “Progressive youth is our future!”

  “There’s no need to fear expressing your chosen gender identities!”

  Jasper was a small town, so Carl recognized most of the collaborators – and made a mental note of them.

  The march moved at a leisurely pace toward the center of town and the old courthouse, with teachers shouting and gesturing for their charges to stay in line. The band was playing something no one could hear over the chattering students.

  There were a lot more people in Courthouse Square. Except for a few Tories waving and cheering, must townspeople just stared in sullen silence.

  Carl slipped the pre-knotted bandana he was carrying around his neck and reached into his pocket.

  “Get ready,” he told his friends as they did the same.

  “What exactly are they going to do?” Turnbull said to Dale as the protest march entered the square.

  “Not sure,” Dale replied. “He told me not to worry about it, that no one was going to get hurt – he said ‘really hurt’ but he wouldn’t say anything more. Said I didn’t need to know.”

  “I like the OPSEC,” Turnbull replied. “But this is the downside of decentralization. Sometimes it’s just too damned decentralized.”

  “I got folks getting video though,” Dale said. “So I hope it’s at least entertaining.”

  When Turnbull had seen the news report promising the march, he knew the resistance had to react somehow. The whole purpose of the march – and of forcing the populace to watch – was to rub the power of the State in their faces. The message – we have your children, and we have you – was loud and clear.

  It could not go unanswered.

  Turnbull had quickly dismissed any thought of an attack on the PSF guarding route. That was an invitation to a bloodbath. A fair chunk of the town was actively supporting the resistance, and there were the Tories supporting the PR, but most of the townspeople – while to some extent supportive of the goals of the resistance – were still uncommitted. The killings at the church were sad, but they were also out of sight – what wasn’t on video simply wasn’t. And the tragedy could be (and was) blamed on overzealous People’s Volunteers, who were supposed to be simply some concerned citizens spontaneously acting outside of the government’s control to protect progressive change from haters, denialists, racists, and anyone else the PR declared bad.

  But if the resistance recklessly sparked a massacre involving these kids in the middle of town in broad daylight, the guerrillas would alienate the populace and that would mean their demise. The insurgency could continue if the majority of
people simply averted their eyes; if the PR won back their hearts and minds, then the guerrillas would die like fish trapped in a dried up pond.

  “I could walk out and shoot that principal,” Langer had suggested the prior evening. “I don’t have to kill her, just put one in her leg. As an example.”

  Turnbull shook his head. “Same problem. If we start shooting, we buy every kid who gets killed.”

  “What if they start shooting?” Langer said.

  “Then they do.”

  Now, as the march approached, Turnbull and Dale moved north to get a better view.

  “Those kids don’t have any guns, right?” asked Turnbull.

  “Nope,” Dale said.

  “How about anything that sounds like guns, like firecrackers?”

  “No, those are way illegal and hard to get too. Don’t worry, Carl’s not stupid.”

  “I’m not worried about Carl being stupid,” Turnbull said, pausing to glance at a PSF officer standing guard in the street, AK slung over his back, eating from a bag of the generic potato chips they got as part of their additional food allotment.

  The gaggle of students was now nearly all inside of Courthouse Square. Ms. Marfull had led the blue sashes with their long banner around the east side of the courthouse intending to circle back and march the students back up to the northern assembly area again.

  In the midst of the mass of white sweatshirts, Carl and his friends each drew a rock from their pockets. They would have used eggs if they could, but eggs were hard to carry and besides, they were very expensive. You didn’t just throw away perfectly good food like in the old days.

  They weren’t big rocks, but they weren’t small rocks either. They were just the right size to get the right reaction. Together, the students pulled up their bandanas to cover their faces.

  “Now!” shouted Carl, and he threw his rock over the heads of the other students into the packed ranks of blue-sashed Obama Youth Club members. A volley of a half-dozen more stones followed, then another volley, and another.