“Not to mention they’re offering guaranteed buyers for every steer and every bushel of wheat and every gallon of milk, price-supported so we don’t have to worry about hard times,” put in Roland Hoy. “And now that Montana beef will no longer officially be a sin, we can even go back to cattle ranching if we want! It’s like a farmer’s dream come true! No government state or federal has supported agricultural prices for almost sixty years now! There just hasn’t been the money for it. It’s something our grandfathers knew! The way that character from Billings and the one from the ERA was talking, we’re headed for Wonderland, and there are a lot of folks in this country who will be buying into it and who won’t take kindly to us raining on the parade.”
“If something looks too good to be true, it probably is,” said Sanderson. “Yeah, I heard what they said, but I never did quite catch the part explaining why they want to create this so-called Prosperity Zone here, of all places on earth, where we’ve got thousands of heavily-armed bandits sitting not ten and twenty miles away from it all,” he went on, growling like a dog with a bone he refused to release. “That’s like dangling raw meat in front of a starving coyote! These people aren’t fools, they have to know what will happen once they start changing things around on this side of the Road and importing people that bunch Across The Road considers to be their mortal enemies! No wonder they’re talking about bringing in New Model Army bases as well! They’ll damned well need ’em, to protect those new residents and the fancy homes and businesses we’ll be building for them!”
“Exactly,” said Sheriff Lomax calmly. He was a nondescript-looking man of average height and brown hair, wearing a khaki uniform with a sheriff’s star pinned on it. He had one eccentricity: on his hip he carried as a sidearm not a standard plastic police automatic, but an ivory-handled Colt .45 Peacemaker. He had been sheriff for ten years, and during that time he had used the weapon three times when all else had failed, with results that had earned him respect on both sides of the border.
Now Lomax paused to light his pipe. When the iron heel of One Nation Indivisible had been yanked off people’s necks, the American tobacco ban had become a dead letter in any part of the country that declined to play any more, along with so much else. Montana decided to let people smoke, and a long series of near-hysterical decrees and orders from D.C. and later from Burlington had simply been tossed in the wastebasket. With the bones and burned-out vehicles of the 101st Airborne and the U.S. Marines rusting and blowing away in the Northwest wind after the Seven Weeks, the United States had no more muscle to back up its authority. The result was that rather than shouting orders, the remains of the old régime had grown much more subtle and diplomatic, governing necessarily by consensus with whatever carrot they could muster and almost no stick, almost like the pre-1861 federal governments had done. Anti-tobacco laws had figuratively gone up in smoke.
“I agree, they’re trying to start something,” Lomax went on. “Monty’s right. The Economic Recovery Administration is not bringing all this new industry and commerce right up to the edge of a volatile Western frontier just out of the goodness of their hearts, and certainly not just for profit. If profit was all they wanted they’d keep it close. They’d put all these new projects in the Berkshires or the Boston suburbs where they can regiment the labor force and control production. They’re deliberately constructing an attractive nuisance for our friends Over The Road in order to justify the subsequent need to protect it. They’re building a coop full of nice fat chickens that they know damned well will draw foxes, in order to have an excuse to put up a fence around the coop and break out the farmer’s shotgun. To add insult to injury they’re making sure some of the chickens will be black and brown and maybe have big noses. They’re deliberately creating a demand for goods and services and highly skilled labor in this area that they know we can’t supply locally, and which can only be filled these days from certain places that are still stable and functional enough to produce skilled workers. Like the remaining eastern universities, like East Canada, and certain parts of what’s left of Europe, the last breeding grounds of the old Political Correctness. They’ve targeted the Montana border counties, ours among them, for a deliberate political and demographic change of the kind they used to carry out all the time back in the old days before the Trouble broke out and reversed the process, at least here in the Northwest. They’re planning to turn Boulder and some other places along our side of the Road into what our granddaddies used to call latté towns. Old-timey term that, not even sure what it means, seems to me it was something to do with coffee, but basically these towns were left-wing liberal hippie-dippie colonies deliberately created in the middle of a lot of normal people, to buy them off and skew the electoral map, to break up white voting blocs and sometimes even turn red districts blue.”
“Red, blue, what are you talking about?” asked Shep Akins.
“Oh, I remember that shit,” said Monty Sanderson. “Just some TV crap from when I was a kid, back when we are all one country and we used to have these big elections with all fifty of the old states. Before your time, I think, Shep. Never mind. Go on, Ben.”
Lomax nodded. “Burlington knows damned well that once money and people of a certain social and ideological persuasion start coming in here, they are going to start poking and throwing sticks at the border like dummy kids teasing a big mean chained-up dog, only our dog Over The Road ain’t tied up very secure at all. There will be first one incident, then two, then four, and before long they will have all the excuse they need to bring back the McCurtain and start putting up all the wire and laying the minefields again. Plus a lot of black and brown thugs in body armor who will take over the town, push us aside, and start bullying and raping girls and lording it over us like they used to in President Wallace’s time.”
“The first obvious thing I would be worried about is the fact that bringing in soldiers would be a violation of the Armistice,” said Gavin. “I know that technically the NMA are not United States military, they’re private security contractors, which is an interesting legal hair-split, but our friends Across The Road aren’t going to buy it for a second. All of a sudden the American government will have armed men sitting on this side, and that means Those Guys are going to start moving all their own heavies right up to the Road, and all that new prosperity of ours is going to be sitting in the middle of a potential war zone that might explode at any moment when some kid on one side of the Road decides to take a pot-shot at some other kid on the other side flipping him the bird or something. Lord help us, they might actually invade again and start another war! And maybe this time Jefferson County won’t come off so well.”
“That may be the intention,” remarked Lomax dryly.
“Jesus, Ben, why?” asked Shep Akins in horror. “Why the hell would Burlington do a damned fool thing like that? If we couldn’t beat them twenty-eight years ago with the United States military at its full power, how can a handful of rent-a-cops do it now?
“I got no idea, Shep,” said Lomax, shaking his head with a frown, puffing on his pipe. “I get the feeling that this whole thing is part of some bigger game they’re playing. My guess would be that the Ottawa crowd is involved. East Canada might as well change its name to New Israel and be done with it. Who knows what goes on in the minds of these people? They just don’t think like us. If I had to guess, I reckon Burlington has decided it’s time to start re-colonizing as much of the Northwest as they can with liberals and re-establishing control over the land and the people here. Could be we’ve got another Hunter Wallace working his way up the ladder back there on Lake Champlain, and maybe he’s getting his ducks in a row ready for another war a few years down the pike. With us in the line of fire!”
Roland Hoy spoke up stubbornly. “Ben, I still say most of the folks around here won’t see it that way. You may be a little too young to remember how it was before the war, when everybody in Jefferson County who didn’t farm or ranch pretty much worked for the government in one way or an
other.”
“No, I’m not old enough to remember, but I know a lot of people who do,” said Ben Lomax sharply. “My dad worked in the Developmental Center with the dummies, teaching them how to make baskets and not drool all over themselves or cut their fingers off with their leather-working tools. My mama was a guard at the young bitches’ prison, where she got her face slashed by a teenaged mami with a nail she’d pulled out of the wall. I saw that scar on her face every day of my life until she passed! My uncle was a so-called counselor at the tough love camp. He used to counsel those spoiled brats with a blackjack upside the head, which I gather is pretty much why all those rich parents back east paid so much money to send their little darlings there, because they didn’t have the balls to knock some sense into those drugged-up trashed-out punks’ heads themselves. That’s the kind of government work America gave Jefferson County, Montana, Rolly. They used us as a human garbage dump and paid us a pittance to keep the garbage locked in the dumpster out here in the piney woods. We may be poor now, and a lot of us may be on state welfare in the winter, but I swear to God, I think we’ve got more pride and our consciences can rest a lot easier now we’re not doing the dirty work for rich people who consider us lower than the shit they scrape off their Gucci shoes!”
Mayor Jay Gavin laughed out loud. “Ben, you know, back in the day, if you’d made a little speech like that and an ONI microphone had picked it up, you’d be headed for your own jail right about now.”
“Now that I am old enough to remember,” replied Lomax, unsmiling. “And I am damned if I want those days to come again. If we take these people’s money and their jobs and rent them homes when they come, and build them more homes so more of them can come, then they start voting Green. We get a new council and new commissioners, and all of a sudden we’re no longer in charge of our own community. And once the yuppies and the New Model mercenaries come, how long before the microphones are in place and men of our skin color are getting hauled away to prison for uttering a forbidden word? Remember, technically speaking we’re still part of the United States of America, and all those goddamned hatecrime and hatespeech laws are still on the books, somewhere.”
“You sure you’re on the right side of the Road, Ben?” chortled Roland Hoy. Then he suddenly stopped, and the others fell silent. Another unwritten law in Jefferson County, Montana, was that one never, ever spoke lightly or facetiously on the subject of concealed or divided loyalties. There were too many skeletons in too many closets from the Trouble to do so safely. Forty years ago men and women had died, and families had been ripped apart for all time over such things, and the scar tissue over the deep and terrible wound was thin.
Ben gave him a wintry smile. “I’m forty-five years old, Rolly, lived here all my life. I could have taken a walk up Second Avenue and stayed there any time in all those years. Haven’t done it yet.”
“I’m still not convinced the state and the ERA aren’t on the level,” said Shep Akins, shaking his head in a quick change of subject. “What they said made sense. This actually would be a pretty good place to build a research and manufacturing super-park, from a purely business point of view. Cheap land, lots of ready and willing local labor, economic diversification away from the DUZs which is a polite way of saying they want to make sure that valuable people and resources don’t get overrun and slaughtered if one or more of the cities boils over and gets out of control—why do we have to assume they have some hidden agenda to start trouble?”
“Because before we came in here I went online and looked up this Gabi Martine woman who will be arriving here as the ERA’s project head in a few days,” said Lomax flatly, throwing down a few sheets of paper from a file folder beside him. “Take a look. She’s black as the ace of spades!”
* * *
Danielle Tolliver pulled into the yard of her family’s ranch house just off Montana Highway 69 after ten o’clock that night. The sun had set, but the rolling hills and trees of the Deer Lodge National Forest still loomed visible in the twilight overhead, looking almost as if they would fall and crush the house. Danny was driving one of the family’s pickup trucks that day, an ancient electric-powered vehicle that had been around for decades. The maintenance of that truck was a Tolliver family tradition handed down from father to son; no one had made parts for the thing for almost forty years, and yet it still ran. Danielle quickly lugged the charging cable out to the truck from the generator in the carport and plugged it in; she didn’t want to draw even more attention to her late arrival by allowing her father or grandfather to find a dead battery the next morning. Then she grabbed her book bag containing her Bible and all her other church-related books and computer discs out of the front seat, and she bounced on into the house.
Danny was a petite but voluptuous girl dressed simply in jeans and a blue knit sleeveless top, with long cornsilk hair which tonight she wore in a single braid down her back. The dining room was empty, but a slice of apple cobbler sat on a place mat on the table, along with a fork for her. She was supposed to have eaten supper at the Young Life fellowship meeting at the Assemblies of God church, and she had in fact done so before slipping out early to meet Johnny Selkirk at one of their spots on Hanson Creek Road. But since Danny worked outdoors on a ranch, and therefore had none of the usual American teenager’s problem with incipient obesity, she could afford to be a normal sixteen-year-old who never turned down an extra dessert.
She grabbed up the plate and fork and went into the living room where her family was watching a show on the wallplate, the huge screen that filled one wall of the room and served as television, computer monitor, telephone, and general connection to the outside world. Her fourteen-year-old brother Wade was wearing the red headphones and playing a desultory video game in the lower right hand corner of the screen, while her mother Alice was watching a nature show with the blue headphones. Wade was just beginning a major growth spurt and was already taller than Danny or their mother. Her grandfather, Elwood Tolliver, a massive white-haired man of 65 with a seamed face, was sitting in an armchair by the empty fireplace, reading a newspod on his 14” X 9” clear plastic tablet, which he had downloaded from the wallplate earlier. Elwood’s cane, which he needed because of his old kneecapping injury, was by the chair. Danny could see her grandfather was reading the venerable USA Today, which hadn’t printed a paper copy in over a generation. Elwood subscribed because of all the major news sites, USA Today was the most rabidly anti-NAR, and still defiantly ran a silhouette of the old 50-state America on its homepage.
“Hi!” Danny said cheerily, stuffing her mouth with cobbler. “Where’s Dad?”
“Not back from Bozeman yet,” said her brother.
Many years before, when ONI had banned beef production on the grounds that meat was murder and bad for people’s health, and that bovine flatulence was a major cause of global warming, Elwood Tolliver had switched the ranch over from beef to dairy cattle. For some reason their flatulence was apparently environmentally friendly and the cholesterol in their dairy products positively benign, according to politically correct science. This was largely a testament to the dexterity of the dairy industry’s lobby in Washington, as well as their generosity to Hunter Wallace’s campaign war chest. The Tollivers now ran almost forty head of cows, which they milked twice per day with the aid of the whole family, three herd dogs, intermittent help from local kids as they could afford it, and two ageing agricultural robots. Danny had heard that Elwood had at one stage employed some Mexicans, but they somehow became targeted for some kind of trouble from Over The Road, and the beaners had vanished. She didn’t know the story; it had happened before she was born. The milk was saved in special refrigerated and sanitized tanker trailers provided by the Montana State Dairy Board, and once a week Wendell Tolliver hitched up the tanker to his old diesel truck and drove the tanker down to Bozeman, where he dropped it off at the pasteurizing plant and picked up another to bring home.
“You better finish that and get to bed, Danny,” her brother
told her. “You missed evening milking for church and so you’re up at four-thirty and I get to set my alarm for six-thirty, yeaaah! So you need to get to bed. Now.” He was looking at his sister strangely, his mouth working like a fish. She realized Wade was silently mouthing the words “Get outta here now!” at her. But it was too late.
Her mother switched off the show, calmly took off her headphones, and looked at Danielle. “How was Fellowship?” she asked.
“Fine!” said Danny. “We put together kits for Bible outreach, and Reverend Newlin played the Wonder Of His Love concert on the hall’s wallplate for us after supper. That’s the one with the Assemblies choir and JC’s Crew. It was cool.”
“How could you see it from under the table?” inquired her mother.
“Huh?”
“Your phone kept going to voice mail, so I drove to the church at seven-thirty. I went into the Fellowship Hall and you were nowhere to be found, so I guess you must have been under the dining room table. Oh, and the electro truck was gone from the parking lot,” said Alice Tolliver. She stared at her daughter. “Well? Do you at least have enough decency not to lie or try to involve your friends in your lies any more? I suppose I should mention that I’ve spoken to Sherry Applewhite’s mother and to Sherry herself, so that escape route is closed.”
Danny had known she couldn’t keep it up for too much longer, Farm families were tight-knit, their schedules for the day generally allocated before breakfast, gaps in that timeline were hard to conceal, and adolescent deception was generally more difficult than for city kids with only one parent who was working most of the day in someplace other than the home or on the property. Danny had a rudimentary grasp of one of the first principles of intrigue: when suspected, always try to make the evidence point to a lesser offense. Human nature being what it is, there was more chance of being believed. “Okay, Mom, fine, I cut Fellowship!” she said, feigning faux exasperation. She was about to come up with a tale of an evening of ice cream debauchery and flying around in Keith Bellinger’s home-souped convertible, which had limited levitation capability, and in which Keith sometimes buzzed cattle and isolated houses, but her mother cut her off.
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