“That medical insurance didn’t help your leg when you got shot, Grandpa,” said Danny, pointing to her grandfather’s knee and cane.
“No, it didn’t,” said the old man sadly. “They said they was out of money by the time I got hurt. Well, government promises never were much.”
“So, why did we have to come all the way out here for you to talk about this?” asked Danny, gesturing to the empty wash.
“Don’t worry, honey, I ain’t gone senile on you, I’m getting to it. Anyway, the months and the years went on and nobody ever could seem to get a grip on the goots. They were always a jump or two ahead of us. In the early part of the Trouble our PATU unit spent a lot of time down around Missoula and we even used to go up to north Idaho, doing sweeps, trying to catch that son-of-a-bitch Oglevy. We never got near him, which I suppose is a good thing, since most of those who did never came back to tell about it. But things were quiet here in Jefferson for the first couple of years. We knew some of the local people were involved in it. They’d been reading bad books and getting emails and looking at websites they shouldn’t have been for a long time. Mostly no-goods, trailer trash, thieving redneck drunks like the Selkirks, plus some of our home-grown right-wing kooks who should have known better. FEMA came in and sent some of them down to Nevada and New Mexico, and made them live in secure facilities where they could be watched and they’d stay out of trouble. That might have been a bad public relations move, because it pissed off a lot of people. But finally the Trouble itself came to Jefferson County. Right here.” Elwood pointed to the dry wash.
“What happened?” asked Danny, intrigued.
“The local farmers and ranchers who employed Hispanic people weren’t fools, and there had been enough incidents elsewhere around the Northwest for them to understand that their workers were at risk,” the old man told her. “So they started up all kinds of security procedures, fortifying the migrant worker camps with razor wire and sandbags and closed-circuit TV cameras, posting armed guards selected from among the Mex like a kind of militia, moving them from site to site in convoys or at least armored buses, that kind of thing.”
“But why not just send them home, or at least out of the danger zone?” asked Danny.
“Because we needed their labor still, and because at that time it was the proudest boast of the United States of America that we never negotiated with or gave in to terrorists,” replied the old man. “At least it was until that bubble-headed bimbo Chelsea Clinton got in,” he added bitterly. “Anyway, one day in September, it would be—yeah, be forty-three years ago next month—a big busload of Mexican migrant workers was coming down this highway, from that direction.” He pointed to the wooded hill. “They were coming from the Salter Mackintosh spread where they’d been picking late apples and maize, heading over to the Whyo Ranch where they were going to cut and bale the last of the year’s hay for Bubba Whyo’s horses. That’s what he raised, horses for Hollywood movies. There was a PATU escort, two Humvees, one in front and one in back. The one in front had an M-60, that’s a machine gun, mounted on it, and the one in back had a fifty-cal, that’s a bigger machine gun, but it wasn’t much of an escort. Just two PATU deputies in each Humvee and a fifth man on the bus. You need to understand that there’d been a few minor incidents but no actual flat-out NVA activity in Jefferson County, Montana up until that time.”
“Were you one of the deputies, Grandpa?” asked Danny.
“No, I was not, to my eternal regret,” replied Elwood with a sigh. “I knew them all, though. Especially Jerry Parsley. Known him since kindergarten. Anyway, the convoy had just come around that hill over there when an old junker car guided by a remote control device that had been sitting on the side of the road revved up and rammed into the lead Humvee. Then it must have been at least twenty NVA gunmen opened up on them. We had no idea there was a unit that size operating anywhere nearer than Missoula. Well, our intelligence in that war always was shit,” he growled. “The goots killed all four of the PATU men in the Humvees, blew the door of the bus open with C-4, and threatened to set it on fire if the Mexicans didn’t come out. They did, and so did Jerry Parsley, the one PATU man on the bus. They cuffed Jerry and shoved him down in the dirt alongside the road, set a guard on him, then they used plastic ties to bind all the Mexicans’ hands behind their backs. There were twenty-six of them, men and women, some as old as their sixties, my age, and some as young as you, fifteen or sixteen. They marched them over here to this wash, right down along in there,” he said, pointing. “Then they made them get down on their knees, and one by one, they shot every one of those people in the head, and left them there for the buzzards.
“They murdered twenty-six people, Danielle, right here where you’re looking at, for the crime of having a dark skin and speaking a different language. The NVA called that kind of thing a Gofer, from G.O. Four, General Order Four. That’s about two sentences they put up on a web site which they used as their official excuse for murdering anybody they didn’t like, or anybody who got in their way. You know, I’ve always been amazed that when you listen to discussion shows or watch documentaries on the Plate or anything allegedly historical about all this, if you’re not careful you’d think it was only white people involved. You know those famous rebel songs their folk singer groups do with all the fiddles and guitars and banjos and flutes and whatnot, the ones you sometimes hear on the radio and netfeed from Over The Road? The ones I hear some of you ignorant kids over here on our side who don’t know any better secretly playing on your laptops and handpacks, with the buds in your ears you think us old folks can’t hear if we’re close enough? Maybe some songs you and your boyfriend have heard when you’re sampling all the fine cuisine over at that honky-tonk in Basin?”
“I’ve heard some of them, yes,” admitted Danielle cautiously.
“Those songs are lies, Danny. They don’t tell the truth, not all of it, not by a long shot, and with something like the Trouble, not to tell the whole truth is sometimes the worst lie of all. Those stupid songs with their infantile boasting are all about the white heroes and the white dead on both sides. The black and brown dead are just animals to them, so they don’t bother to remember, and to us they’re a source of shame, because an American president abandoned them and made all their death and suffering for nothing, so we don’t remember them either. I think maybe some of those old liberal assholes must have got it right. Racism really is ingrained deep into white people’s bones. Okay, come on, get back in the truck.”
As they were rolling down the road, the old man chuckled. “I can hear you thinking to yourself now, Well, that wasn’t so bad. The old fart told me an atrocity story from before I was born, which has nothing at all to do with me, and now maybe he’ll be satisfied and quit pestering me about my bonnie Nazi laddie. Am I right about that?”
“Uh, is that it?” asked Danny.
“And what did you think of my little anecdote from days of yore?” asked the old man with a tight smile.
“Grandpa, look, it’s horrible, and I know you were there and I wasn’t…”
Elwood chuckled. “But you can’t wrap your mind around it, as we used to say back in my day. Or what else was it? Oh, yeah, you can’t get your arms around it. Danny, that’s great. You shouldn’t have to deal with something like that in your mind. Racial mass murder should be something completely unimaginable to you at age sixteen, and I’m glad it is. You’ve never met a Mexican, although I hear that may change soon, and I might as well be telling you a fairy tale. Now comes the hard part. I am going to have to try and make you understand what that one horrible act and everything that proceeded from it did to this community and to every one of us who lived through it. Although maybe it won’t be the hard part. This has to do with people. People you know.”
“I know what John’s grandfather did to you, Grandpa,” said Danny quietly. “I’ve known for a long time who did it, and every day I see you limping with that cane I’m reminded of it. Johnny…” She bit her lip.
“Don’t tell me. He says he’s sorry,” replied Elwood with a harrumph.
“No. He just says he wishes it never happened, but it did, and I had to decide if I could live with it.”
“Obviously you’ve decided that you can,” said Elwood in a neutral tone.
“Johnny didn’t shoot you, Grandpa. The Captain did.”
“Captain?” asked Elwood. “I heard Ray worked his way up to colonel in the Seven Weeks?”
“That was… that was his Volunteer rank,” said Danny, squirming. “He prefers that one.”
“Yeah, that’s Ray Selkirk, all right,” growled the old man. “A lot more proud of himself for shooting unarmed people in the head than fighting against people who shoot back.”
“Wars have to stop sometime, Grandpa,” she went on doggedly. “When? Where? Am I supposed to still hate the British for the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812? Am I supposed to still hate the Germans for World War Two? Am I still supposed to hate Muslims for Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran?”
“Actually, yeah, you are on those last two, but that’s another story,” replied Elwood with a sigh. “Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. The human side of their glorious War of Independence. You remember I mentioned Jerry Parsley, who was on that bus Ray and his boys ambushed?”
“What did they do to him?” asked Danielle anxiously.
“They left him lying by the side of the road hog-tied, smelling the burning flesh of his own men in the Humvees and hearing the shots and the screams and pleas for mercy of the dying people he was supposed to protect, a sound he never was able to get out of his mind. Ray Selkirk even gave him a little pep talk about how the NVA didn’t like killing their fellow white men and maybe he needed to wake up his ideas and get on the right side. That’s how we found him. He was cleared in the official investigation and he came back to the unit, but he warn’t no good after that. Fell apart, became a drunk, and after a couple of months he got re-assigned to desk duty at the station. Eight months after the ambush back there Jerry went home one night and stuck his own gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You have no need to be,” said her grandfather, shaking his head. “You never knew the man and all this happened before you were born. But a lot of bad came from that day’s work. For one thing, virtually every Hispanic in the county, legal or illegal, packed their bags and ran like hell, so Ray and his crew accomplished their mission. Within a very short time this part of the world was nice and lily white again, just like they wanted it. That left most of the businesses and damned near all the farms and ranches deadly short on workers. Crops rotted in the fields, cattle never made it to market because they broke the unmended fences and wandered off into the hills. Horses out on the range ran wild or died without winter fodder. Hogs and chickens had to be slaughtered early because there was no one to feed and maintain hundreds of them at a time and so egg production went as well. The turkey farm out on Highway 91 closed down. The meat-packing plant and sausage factory in Boulder and the smelting plant in Basin closed down for lack of anybody to run the line or the casting mill. Retail businesses that had depended on their Mexican customers closed down and, so more people lost their jobs. You get the idea. Okay, maybe part of that was our fault because white people got too high and mighty to work out in the hot sun on a farm or a ranch and get their hands dirty. But it was the way it was, and for Jefferson County the Trouble was an unmitigated disaster.
“In order to save anything at all, our young people had to start coming back to help out, back from college, back from the cities, back from their jobs and careers and the lives they’d made for themselves, giving up their own American dream to make sure their parents and their friends back here didn’t lose everything. Farms and ranches and homes were foreclosed or else simply abandoned because there was nobody to work them. Almost everybody in the county had their lives changed forever because of a small handful of half-insane people who decided that they were going to re-order everything to suit themselves, that they alone were right and everybody else was wrong, that nothing mattered but their own desires, and that any other person who disagreed with them or tried to resist them was just an obstacle to be clubbed down or shot out of the way.”
“But was it such a bad thing for those people to have to come back home?” argued Danny. “From what happened to America’s cities since then, I’d say they were lucky in the long run.”
“Maybe, but it was their decision to make!” snapped Elwood. “It wasn’t up to the goddamned NVA to make it for them! Pardon my language. Your mother is right, I cuss too much, but so did everybody when I was growing up. And because we were too morally squeamish to keep on fighting for the right when the going got too tough, because we were foolish enough to elect a weak and silly woman as president just because of her family name and because her mother decided she wanted to pass on her job to her daughter, because of our own failure to stand up against evil, that evil has now taken root in three new generations of those vicious bastards, and we may never again see our country united and plain human decency in charge again!”
“Grandpa, Johnny is not evil!” cried Danny. “I’m sorry if that makes you mad, but he’s not!”
“Okay, fair enough. I’ve never met the boy, after all. He doesn’t seem to mind breaking the law, our law, but of course their great pride and boast is that they have won the right not to obey our laws by shooting a lot of tied-up people through the head and blowing a lot of other people up with Semtex. And there’s no law to break over on his side, so maybe the smuggling thing has nothing to do with money and it’s just high spirits. Or something.” Tolliver sighed. “Right. Maybe he’s not evil, Danny, maybe not in the sense I mean. Is a tiger evil when he stalks and kills and eats a human child? True, the tiger can’t change what he is, and no doubt God in His infinite wisdom has some reason for making tigers, but the fact remains that what the tiger is cannot be tolerated in any civilized society, and he has to be hunted down and killed or caged. Look, John Selkirk is a lot older than you, am I right?”
“He’s twenty,” said Danny. “And yeah, I could understand you and Mom and Dad objecting to him on those grounds, but they do things differently Across The Road. A lot of girls my age over there get married…” She suddenly fell silent.
“Gone that far has it?” asked Elwood with a weary sigh.
“He hasn’t asked me,” said Danny.
“And what will you say if he does?” asked her grandfather.
“I don’t know,” she said softly.
“Look, will you at least come to us and talk to us before you do anything?” he asked urgently. “Don’t just disappear out of your room one night and the next thing we hear you’re Over The Road and married into that… family!”
“I wouldn’t do that to you,” said Danny.
“Glad to hear it. Anyway, what I was getting at, is that your beau has done his mandatory military training over there, right?”
“Yes,” she told him.
“So he’s part of the killing machine now, no matter how un-evil you think he is. He is a soldier in what I must in all honesty admit to be the most professional, dangerous, and brutally efficient military force on the planet. They pride themselves on being a nation of soldiers, and to give the devils their due, it paid off for them twenty-eight years ago. Have you thought about what will happen if there’s another war?”
“No,” she admitted.
“You know if you go over there before you’re married and get knocked up, you’ll have to do national service in their Labor thingie? Why do you think all those girls on their side who get married at sixteen do so? They don’t feel like getting sent to work in a tuna cannery in Alaska. Not to mention the moral aspect. Would you be willing to actively support a nation that is responsible for forty years of untold bloodshed and horror?” he pressed her. “You need to think about these things, Danny. A man is known by the company he keeps, and so is a woman. And the company you w
ill be keeping is evil, make no mistake.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that!” said Danny, on the verge of tears.
“God gives men free will because He wants us to choose good, Danny. Every one of us has to try, and heaven knows, many of us fail. But these people Across The Road don’t even try to choose the light and the good any more. They’re not only comfortable with their demons, they’ve taken them into partnership. They have systemized their inhumanity, and they have created an entire society based on a moral inversion. Forty-five years ago they were confronted with the manifest will of God, and they refused to accept it.”
“Huh?” asked Danny, confused.
“Their ideology is absolutely right about one thing, honey,” her grandfather said. “The white race really was on the verge of extinction back then, the only race on earth that was. Fifty years ago, us palefaces were only eight percent of the world’s population, and white women of child-bearing age were only about three percent. If these people hadn’t done what they did, it is entirely possible, indeed likely, that I would be one of the youngest remaining Caucasians on the planet, and that if you existed at all you would be the color of my morning coffee. The simple fact was that for whatever inscrutable reason, it was clear that God or Nature or whatever cosmic force is applicable had made the decision. White people were on their way out. But that fat old swine and his computer said no. Somehow, God knows how, he managed to get some people to listen to him. I recall reading somewhere that even he himself never understood how he did it, he just kept on hammering and hammering away, and one day it just kind of came together. Collectively this little bunch of misfits and gangsters and white trash decided that they knew better than God or destiny how the world was to proceed. Our race had a chance to die with dignity back then, and perhaps those who inherited the earth might eventually have remembered us gratefully and even a little fondly for all the good things Western civilization left them. But those sons of bitches like Ray Selkirk weren’t having any. They refused to lose with gentlemanly good grace. They chose to shed blood rather than lose. And once white men started shedding blood again, they discovered that we’re quite good at it. Too damn good at it, in fact. The rest, as they say, is history. I’m sorry, kiddo,” he sighed in conclusion. “I shouldn’t have ranted on and on like that. I don’t talk about these things much.”
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