Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “None taken,” replied Bobby with a laugh. Corporal Sweeney handed him a cup of black coffee. “Thanks, Mike. Actually, it’s we who do things the old way, sheriff, or the older way, I guess you could say. But you’re right. We’re not civilized, not by your standards, and we sure as hell don’t want to be. We were civilized for many generations, and it damned near killed us off. Look, I’ve spoken to both Hatcher and John both about this, and Johnny told me to mind my own business, which is his right. I’ll talk to Captain Selkirk himself next time I see him, but I can tell you this much: the Selkirk family isn’t any happier about this situation than the Tollivers, they’ve made that clear to Johnny, and beyond that there’s not much I can do. We don’t have restraining orders and lawsuits and all that crap in the Republic. They are an offense to human dignity, and one of the reasons our ancestors did the old revolution trick forty years ago.”

  “Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the law is meant to be a shield, not a sword,” Lomax reminded him.

  “Oliver Wendell Holmes lived in a stable and orderly world run by educated white men with moral principles and consciences, where niggers weren’t allowed to run wild like troops of baboons and where there were no Mexicans, no Somali warlords ruling American cities, no drugs, and no buggery,” said Bobby. “In his world that was a noble sentiment, because they still had genuine freedom to counterbalance the law. The last of that world died in 1933 when a syphilitic cripple and his bull dyke wife seized the White House. I know, backlash never replays like the original, but in the Northwest Republic we’ve tried to bring the best of that world back, and I’m not just talking about the clothes. You know our motto in the Guards? I don’t mean Custodes Libertas, the Latin one on our official seal. I mean the one in English, that hangs somewhere on the wall of every Guard station, including ours over in Basin?”

  “Yeah, McOwen told me once,” chuckled Lomax. “Something like ‘It’s not a problem until it’s a problem.’ That the one?”

  “That’s it,” said Bobby with a smile. “That’s our attitude. We’re not there primarily to enforce the law, because there’s not that much law to enforce. We are there to maintain the state in existence, which is really the purpose of every police force the world over and has been since the beginning. We’re just more honest about it than most.”

  “Okay, all these philosophical digressions aside, what are we going to do if this Johnny and Danny situation blows up on us?” asked Lomax

  “Hmmm… frankly I think it’s more likely to be a blow-up if something happens on your side of the Road, what with all your laws and all,” Bobby said. “I think we agree that the main thing is to keep Elwood Tolliver and Johnny Selkirk from having a close encounter. I gather the old man never comes over here, as a matter of principle. I know you can’t become involved in helping an adolescent girl sneak out behind her family’s back, but how’s this? I’ll talk to Selkirk and see if I can persuade him to persuade Danny in turn to do all their socializing on our side, in Basin or maybe down in Northwest Butte.”

  “I don’t think Elwood and Alice Tolliver are going to consider Danny running around in Butte with a boy four years older than she is much of a solution,” said Lomax dryly.

  “Then they can go ahead and send Danny off to school in Dakota,” said Bobby. “She’s their child. I’m just trying to avoid any bodies dropping over this. Besides, they’re young. They may decide they’re not meant to be and just break up, like kids do.”

  “And what if Danny ends up pregnant?” asked Lomax.

  “Then John will shoulder his responsibility however the two families feel is appropriate,” said Bobby. “That’s the way we do things on our side of the Road.”

  “I have to admit, that’s what I’ve heard,” said Lomax with a nod. “Well, I guess we just have to see how it plays out. Now, about these visitors you mentioned…” Lomax sighed. “Where to begin, where to begin?”

  “I know all about the Community Prosperity Zone thing,” said Bobby Three.

  “Of course you do.”

  “What I can’t understand is why in God’s name they sent a nigger, which is bad taste to say the least, and a couple of FBI agents, which is a flat-out violation of the Armistice of twenty-eight years ago, and then this merc from the New Model Army. The best I can figure is that for some reason having nothing to do with sanity, the rump U.S.A. régime has decided to spit right in the Republic’s face and see what happens.”

  “I can tell you this much,” said Lomax seriously. “We’ve had some pretty strong assurances over on our side that this whole Prosperity Zone thing is the real McCoy, and we want it, bad.”

  “So why not send some nice quiet, competent white bureaucrats to iron out the details and then start building all your factories and office buildings and fancy coffee shops and whatnot, using local contractors and labor?” asked Bobby. “East Montana’s unemployment rate has been running at a steady nine percent for years, and the only reason it’s not any higher is that all the young people leave the state as soon as they get their high school diplomas in their hands.”

  “That’s why we want all these jobs and these new people,” said Lomax.

  “Even if some of them aren’t the right kind of people from our point of view?” asked Bobby.

  Lomax scowled. “Look, let me try and explain to you how it is. Back in our parents and grandparents’ time, for the last three years or so of the Trouble, Jefferson County had a higher per capita homicide rate than Chicago or Miami, and we were only just behind Baltimore. And it wasn’t criminals or drug addicts or stick-up men or hadjis in turbans, it was men and a few women who grew up not ten or twenty miles down the road from one another, who went to the same schools and the same churches and shopped in the same Mighty Marts all their lives, whose kids went to each other’s birthday parties and who saw each other every day. Now all of a sudden these people were wiring up Semtex in their garages and putting on body armor and loading magazines with bullets so they could sneak up on one another in the dark and commit murder. And they committed a lot of damned murder. You’re not from here, Lieutenant, not even from your side of the Road, so you don’t know what that does to a small community of around ten thousand people who have intermarried so everybody’s related, and who lived together for generations with not even much in the way of a cross word.”

  Bobby decided now was not the time to interrupt. Lomax went on. “Then forty years ago we lost half the county to you lot, thanks to that air-head with the big hair who was sitting in the Oval Office at the time. Some of us lost our homes and businesses, and above all we lost friends and family to that goddamned war. To this day there are parents and children, brothers and sisters, and every kind of cousin in the book who live not ten miles from one another and who have never met or spoken to one another in their entire lives, because of that horrible time. Then there was the second war, and those of us who do remember you, remember you only as invaders who came with tanks and weapons and who we had to run and hide from. Okay, fair enough, your General Drones was a good man, he promised no one would be harmed, and he kept his word, but we both know that war has no rules and that could have changed in a heartbeat if any American forces had come rolling down the road toward Boulder.”

  “I was very young during the Seven Weeks, and I have some bad memories, but nothing as bad as being occupied,” said Bobby soberly. “Of course, I suspect that if the Americans had occupied Missoula, I would have some bad memories indeed, if I were still alive. Look, sheriff, I’m not going to argue or try to re-fight the War of Independence with you. I wasn’t even born then, and for me to try and tell you how things were would be fatuous. All I can do is tell you what my aunt, my father’s older sister Jenny and her husband Jason told me now and then down through the years on the few occasions we talked about it. They told me that they did what they did because the world had to change, that things had reached the point where that one thing was the overriding principle that had to govern every human action, if ther
e was to be anything left for anyone. The world had to change, and there simply was no other way for that to happen than to fight. Every other way had been deliberately and maliciously blocked and closed off for years, by people who would say anything, do anything, commit any crime and any breach of decency, rather than surrender their power. That’s what my aunt and her husband told me. They were there. They are both good and noble people, and I believe them. That’s all I can say.”

  “Fair enough,” said Lomax with a sigh. “It ain’t like either of us will ever convince the other. But you need to understand that this is how the people in my county feel about you. Not all of them hate you, but they’re all afraid of you and they’re very suspicious of you. You’re like a biting dog; even if it’s only once every few decades. No one knows when you’ll bite again or when someone will let you off your leash. Since the end of the second war, what’s left of Jefferson has been a kind of ghost land, a kind of limbo. It’s like we were cut off from the world. Nobody wants to live here because you people are just Across The Road and we don’t know when some stupid mess here or somewhere else in the country will start up something that brings your soldiers and your Stukas. Now we have a chance to re-join the rest of the world, and not raise children just to send them east with a diploma in their hands when they turn eighteen.”

  “Why not send them west?” broke in Bobby, unable to resist. “There is every opportunity anyone could wish for in Missoula or Seattle or Boise or anywhere between here and the Pacific. And it’s their Homeland, after all.”

  Lomax chuckled. “Who says some of them don’t go west? We just don’t talk about them.” He got serious again. “I didn’t mean to go off on a tear like that, Lieutenant, but I mean it. We want this new life for our homeland, small h, and if some of the people who come here to help us build that new life have brown or yellow or even black skins, we don’t care. You do, and I reckon that’s going to be a problem.”

  “Oh, you’ll come to care all right,” said Bobby with a sigh. “Thanks to us, these creatures of the night have stayed away from Jefferson County for two generations, and you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be around them. I suspect you’ll remember soon enough, to your cost. Anyway, at some point it’s clear these ERA people and their FBI and mercenary handmaidens intend to start something. I’m curious as to what, and as to how you think…”

  “They already have,” interrupted Lomax. “She wants to meet with you.”

  “Huh?” said Bobby. “Who wants to meet with me?”

  “Deputy ERA director Gabrielle Martine. She wants to meet with you. Get to know you. Pursue constructive engagement with you,” Lomax told him.

  “But she’s a nigger,” said Bobby, uncomprehending.

  “Yes, I know,” said Lomax. “But she feels that despite your cultural and political differences, a frank exchange of views on the basis of common interest is possible. These are her words, now, bear in mind.”

  “What the hell is she talking about?” asked Bobby, puzzled. “I’m white. She’s a nigger. We have no common interest.”

  “She evidently disagrees,” said Lomax with a straight face. Bobby Three realized that Lomax was trying his best not to burst out laughing, but he was too bemused to be offended.

  “What she agrees with or disagrees with is of no consequence to anybody or anything Over Here,” he said, shaking his head, trying to wrap his mind around the whole absurd idea. “She’s a nigger. She’s a lower primate. Anything she says or thinks has nothing to do with anything in the human world, any more than it matters what a goat or an orangutan thinks.”

  “I rather thought that would be your reaction,” said Lomax, standing up. “You guys are nothing if not consistent on racial matters. I just thought I’d mention it to give you some idea of what you’re going to be up against, is all.”

  “While we’re on the subject, who do I talk to if it comes to that?” asked Bobby Three.

  “You have the hotline phone to me, and if there’s any reason to do so I can introduce you to Mayor Gavin and to a man named Monty Sanderson who’s kind of the biggest wheel in the county, business and social-wise,” said Lomax.

  “Yes, the name is familiar to me,” said Bobby with a nod. “Anybody white in the American team who might be approachable in some kind of real emergency?”

  “Feller named Brandon Blackwell. Bureaucrat type, but not as stupid as he looks. He seems to be Gabi’s minder,” said Lomax. “For real, Lieutenant, do you have any official answer to Ms. Martine’s request for a personal meeting?”

  Bobby grinned. “Tell her my name isn’t Doctor Doolittle, and I don’t talk to the animals,” he said.

  XXXIV

  DRUNKARDS, FOOLS, AND CHILDREN

  (40 Years, ten months and 14 days after Longview)

  The good Lord looks out for drunkards, fools, and children.

  —Old Folk Saying

  Danny was now firmly in the Tolliver family doghouse. She spent an entire day being hauled around the American side of Jefferson County by her grandfather, to the site of every atrocity committed by the NVA during the War of Independence. There Elwood regaled her with explicit blood-and-gore recountings of every bullet fired, every bomb detonated, every brutal punishment beating, and every family run out of the county never to return. When they got home that night, she was confronted by both her parents. Her father Wendell seemed more concerned for her than angry, but he and Alice were of one accord that her whatever-this-was had to stop. With Elwood acting as the third member of the inquisitorial tribunal, they demanded that she foreswear ever to see, speak to, or think about John Selkirk again, on pain of boarding school in North Dakota.

  To her own surprise, she balked and refused to be browbeaten or intimidated. Rather than screaming and shouting, or otherwise engaging in teenaged girl-hysterics, she had gone stubborn and quiet and largely mute, except to say, “Mom, Dad, I’m not going to make you any promises I may not be able to keep. Yes, I lied to you about Johnny and me. That was wrong, and I’m sorry. All I can promise you is that I won’t lie to you any more, and I won’t do anything without telling you first. If you’re going to send me away, then I guess you’re going to do it, but it won’t change anything, and I think you should consider that decision very carefully, because it would be something I will never forget, or forgive. Yes, I get it, this is a problem and I may be in over my head. But it’s my problem, and punishing me won’t help.” Her calm and quiet deliberation chilled the three adults’ blood. She didn’t realize it, but there was nothing she could have done that might have frightened them more.

  The result was that Danny was permanently grounded. No outside activities except church or someplace else where she was in plain sight of a family member at all times. (Her younger brother Wade didn’t count.) Her phone and computer privileges were taken away, as well as her driving and horseback privileges. Wade’s phone was also taken away as a precaution “so your sister doesn’t talk you into doing something you shouldn’t,” which made Danielle really popular with her brother. She was not even to go out onto the property to work unless one of the three adults accompanied her to whatever field or barn required something done. “You can’t keep me under house arrest forever!” she snapped once at her grandfather, who was about to drive her out to help him run the hay-baler. “Do you think Johnny will just give up on me without a word of explanation?”

  “No,” agreed Elwood. “I wish he would. I hope he does, because then you’d see he isn’t the young Lancelot you think he is. But I’m sorry to say, no, most likely he won’t give up. When that Selkirk kid doesn’t hear from you for a while, if he’s really as stuck on you as you think, then he’s going to come sniffing around here looking for you.” Elwood opened a box he had placed on the kitchen table and drew out a gun belt and holster containing an old-fashioned custom stainless steel .357 Magnum with a five-inch barrel, Pachmayr grips and two speed-loaders Velcroed on the back of the belt, which he buckled on.

  “What, you’re
going to shoot Johnny?” she demanded incredulously.

  “Do you think I’m strapping this on as a joke, girl?” growled the old man. “Guess you didn’t learn anything at all from our little talk the other day. Guns aren’t funny, they’re not props, and they’re not for dramatic gestures. Yes, I will quite happily shoot anyone who threatens my family, especially one of those murdering beasts from Over the Road!” Elwood’s face seemed to twist with rage, but he kept a grip on himself. He drew the .357 from its holster and broke the cylinder. “I carried this gun in the PATUs, although even back then it was outdated. You know it’s almost a hundred years old? That’s the good thing about guns. You maintain ’em right, keep the rust and verdigris off them, keep the moving parts lightly oiled to seal out the air, and they’ll still work for a century or more. Killed two racist spucky bastards with this gun. I reckon I’m good for a third if need be. You still don’t understand how serious this is, do you?” He looked up at her. “I hope you don’t have to find out, honey. Now let’s go.”

  There were a few tense days wherein the details and logistics of enrolling Danielle in Fallbrook Academy were seriously examined, and the conclusion Alice and Wendell reached matched that of old Elwood. It could be done, but it would be a serious strain on the family’s finances and on the operation of the ranch that would be better avoided, if there were some way to do so without Danny being carried off over the border by her lusty Aryan swain to be used as breeding stock for the next generation of Selkirks. Finally, her father and mother told her that she would be allowed to begin her senior year at Jefferson High, but when school started she would be driven there and picked up by either themselves or her grandfather. Then, to her horror, they invoked an almost-forgotten state law from 50 years before which allowed parents to place tracking bracelets on the ankles of “problem” minors. They applied to the family court judge in American Butte for an order to that effect, and got one, but the project fell through when it turned out that no one in Montana had any of the archaic bracelets left in stock, and the sheriff’s department had long ago lost track of the necessary equipment to monitor such devices, nor did they any longer have personnel trained to operate such devices even if they could find it in the courthouse sub-basement, or wherever it had been gathering dust since before the Seven Weeks War.