by Billy Roper
President Bellefont was not what one would call a person of faith, himself, but he did understand its power to unite and inspire people to incredible collective efforts and courage. He also was politician enough to understand that since most White Americans were at least nominally Christian, any leader wanting to influence them had best learn to speak their language. He could ever understand why so many wanted to create more hurdles between themselves and the people they were supposedly trying to control than there had to be. To Perry, anything that made it more likely for Joe Blow to be standing with him tomorrow was a good thing, and anything that made him less likely to be, was a bad thing. Simple as that, pragmatically. This was politics, not a rhetorical debate, and not rocket science. It wasn’t about being right, it was about being in power to do right. They could sit in a corner by themselves and be right all alone all day long, and not get anything done, or they could do like he and Mr. Machiavelli, and get things done. ‘Choose, she croons’, as the man said. He wanted Austin back, and not just because it was the capitol. He wanted San Antonio back, and not just because of the Alamo. They were TEXAS, and symbols mattered to people. They mattered, to him.
Gen. Hampton interrupted his reflection by sticking his head in the door as he knocked. “Sir, the visitors from Australia just landed. Their flight layover in Mexico City got extended when the authorities there found out where they were coming, I guess.”
“Jesus, Scott, you scared the tar out of me, you’re like Satan’s own Jack -in-the box, always poppin’ up without warning!” the President laughed good-naturedly. The General chuckled. “Sorry, Sir, I just wanted to let you know, it’s like the monkey said when he got his tail cut off.”
“Right,” Perry said with a grin. “It won’t be long, now.”
Come Together, Right Now, Over Me
The badly rutted dirt road was punctuated by the occasional rock outcropping poking up through the weeds. It snaked on, up and down and across a couple more shallow creeks that her pickup splashed through with a thrill. Through valleys, past caves, and by some shacks where she half expected to hear ‘dueling banjos’, she drove. The teen felt like she was Daisy from ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’. “Yeeeee-haaaaaaaaaw!” Hope yelled experimentally out the rolled down window. The Spring air felt good in her hair.
She passed through the little village of Quartz, where a lot of new construction seemed to be going on, and finally was at what some folks in this part of the state had called a “compound” and others called a “church”, but all spoke of in hushed tones of awe, respect, and a tinge of fear. It had seemed like her best bet, after the night before last.
Hope had driven into town on the way through to Missouri, and been amazed at how strangely normal everything looked. A half hour later, she had finally topped the rise overlooking the state line and seen a wooden tower emblazoned with the words “Wild Bill’s” at the border. A line of Missouri National Guard vehicles and state policemen lined all four lanes and the median. Hope thought about it, sitting there, and knew that if they knew what she had done…if they knew about the cop she had killed, especially…she sat on the shoulder for a few more minutes, then pulled out into a tight U-turn, headed back south. An eye on the rear view mirror for a couple of miles verified that they didn’t pull out to follow her, and she relaxed. Passing the huge ongoing outdoor flea market in the Wal-Mart Super Center parking lot, she been caught by dusk just as a group of armed militiamen wearing a cross and blood drop patch lowered the revised New American flag, the one without any stars, for the evening. As they marched back up the Courthouse steps, Hope pulled into the darkening theatre parking spaces. The first person she had asked in the pizza parlor a couple of doors down looked at her in suspicion. A lot of outsiders were looked at that way, these days. This town looked pretty normal. They had electric lights and people walking down the sidewalks, and there were even a few vehicles chugging around, about half of them using wood gasification or recycled vegetable oil systems, so they smelled like mobile French fries and made her stomach growl. But they probably had taken just about as many outsiders as they could handle, if they were like most places.
It kind of surprised her, then, that as she walked out of the pizza place the lady who had given her the odd look followed her outside and apologized for being unfriendly. “I’m sorry to seem so rude. It’s just…We’ve had some trouble from outsiders around here, trying to mess things up”, she explained. She pointed accusingly at an older, bleached blonde woman locked up in standing stocks. She was held in a painfully stooped position with her head and hands locked into a wooden bar with holes cut just for the purpose, right beside the veteran’s memorial. “And some who have been here long enough to know better, like that one, over there.” A couple of young boys were taking turns throwing gravel rocks from a filled in pothole on the street at the shackled woman. The dirt and grass under her was churned up. It looked like that was where she lived. “No, it’s okay, I understand. I was just wondering where I might find a place to stay for the night. I’m just passing through, but I’d rather not drive at night, if I can help it.” Hope reassured her.
“Surely, child, and I don’t blame you for that, not with this evil world the way it is these days, and THOSE PEOPLE running loose everywhere, a-raping and looting. Look, keep going north, and just a couple miles outside of town on the left there’s a roadside park you can camp out in tonight, it’s been used as kind of a refugee camp over the last few months, but it’s empty now. They’ve all been assigned host families and jobs and assimilated as citizens. You could, too, if you apply for citizenship. Pastor Roberts says we’re always looking to help our people.”
“Well, I’m just travelling through, Ma’am, but I will go find a spot to camp for the night, there. It’s been a really long day”…Hope was interrupted by the loudspeakers hooked up outside the Courthouse clicking on, then broadcasting at what ‘Spinal Tap’ would have called a “level eleven”:
“ May I have your a ttention, please. It is time for curfew. Please bow your heads in a moment of silence as we play our nation’s new national anthem…”Oh Beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain….”
“Oh Lordie, child, you’d better g et a move on now, before you get picked up for being out after the curfew! Come on by in the morning and I’ll fix you up with some breakfast and give you directions out to the national office. Good night, now!” she finished, dismissively. Hope easily found the former welcome center, now equipped with a row of port-a potties, several modular cabins with bunks inside, and three larger tents, all empty, just as she had been told. She flicked the switch and was surprised to find out that the lights worked here, too. Now, to see if the showers worked. THAT would be a miracle.
They did. She seemed to have the whole picnic area to herself, but as she chose a bunk in the cabin nearest to the bathroom with the actually running water, she kept her bow and the shotgun and pistol close by. Even in a place this ordered, there might be plenty of men who, alone or in packs, would see a young girl travelling alone as an easy target. She pulled out her sketch pad and drew the face of the kind woman who had helped her find this shelter, adding detail to it until she got drowsy.
Hope was awakened by the sound of an engine, and awoke as headlights quickly shut off. A car had pulled in, driven quickly to the far corner of the parking lot, and killed its engine. She waited, listening. No door opened. That was weird. She waited a bit more. Still nothing. She decided that rather than sit here and wait for whoever was out there to sneak up on her, she was going to sneak up on them. Quietly slipping on her pants, which she had slit open from the ankle up the calf to make them easy to pull on or off without taking her boots off, Hope grabbed her bow and quiver. This would be night work, if it was called for, and needed stealth. She felt to make sure her knife was still strapped to her side, then slipped out the door, easing it shut behind her.
It would have been hard to approach the car without being spotted, if anybody had been looking. Th
ere was no cover around it to take advantage of. But, the two men were too distracted by their own business to notice anybody sneaking up on foot. Hope crept closer, her first arrow nocked, until she could hear their voices clearly in the still night.
“I don’t know, Jeb, you know, it’s illegal now, and they don’t mess around, they hang people for doing it these days, and us, they’d probably hang twice, and think it was funny.”, one said. “It’s not like it used to be back when we were swingers. Times have changed.”
“You better still call me ‘Boss’. And you better use your mouth for something better than whining like a girl, or I’ll file an anonymous report about what you’ve been doing with those two daughters of yours! You think they wouldn’t hang you for that?” the man nearer to Hope growled in return.
“Well, only if they knew, and it’s not like I don’t know about all the kids you got to come over to your office from the school and ‘intern’ there, just so you could…”came the reply.
“Hey! No need to go there. Hey, look, my liquor stores still have a good bootleg business going on. I can get you some more money to help out with your family. Just like always, you know, Pete? Just like when he picked up that little girl walking home from school last week, right? Or the tiny one the week before that? Nobody ever found out, they’re just considered runaways, just like I told you they would be. Just keep doing like I say. We’re a team. You be nice to me, and I’ll be nice to you….”
Their conversation ended as the car began to rock. It was a dark night, but Hope could still tell that the windows were fogged up in the Cadillac. She knew what was going on, she had heard the black boys crudely and cruelly joking with each other about it, to try and impress her, while she was growing up. She was disgusted. There wasn’t enough food in her stomach to throw up, but she wanted to. This had to be stopped.
Stepping forward, she felt for the door latch and pulled the passenger side door open with her left hand, keeping the arrow knocked with her right. As the dome light of the car came on, she reseated her left hand on the bow and redrew. When the older bald man on top turned his head around to see who was interrupting them, Hope sent an arrow into his back, severing his spine and pinning him to the heavier man below him. The arrow punctured through the second man’s liver, and into the seat. The man below began to shreik and try to pull himself forward to get out through the driver’s side door. The man on top was trying to say “What-whatwhat the…” as Hope drew her knife and drove the spiked point deeply into the base between his brain and spine, cutting off communication between the rest of his body and his control center. Paralyzed from the neck down and dying from asphyxiation as his lungs received no orders, the last thing he saw was a small pale hand efficiently stab a big blade under the right jaw of his former employee below him. The blade jerked savagely back, ripping out the carotid artery. A geyser of blood sprayed up into Jeb’s eyes, and then he couldn’t see anything at all.
After her second shower of the night, required after she had finished her work in the queer couple’s car, Hope slept a few hours, then repacked her kit and drove back into town. Considering what she had overheard, she doubted anybody would care too much about the mess back there. Not enough to investigate, anyway, and she would be long gone, if they did. She stopped at the pizza parlor as promised. The woman from the night before was already there, preparing the fresh dough for the day. She explained that she had just re-opened the shop because the former owner had been run out of town, and she was really busy. Wiping her hands on a towel, she stopped long enough to give the girl half a pepperoni pizza left over from the night before for free. Then she wrote down directions to the place she should go for help, around there. Hope gave her the drawing she had made of the woman, for her help, and headed out of town.
There were three other vehicles in line to get into the steep driveway on the right, before she pulled up to the gate. Another of the uniformed militiamen like she had seen on the Courthouse square the night before with the flag stood there with a clipboard. She didn’t miss the machine gun emplacement behind him to his left, aiming downhill, either. Probably, that was the point, since the two guys behind the gun looked friendly enough. Her name wasn’t on the visitor list, and she didn’t have any references, but her story that the lady in town had sent her seemed satisfactory to the guard, once she put on her ‘lost little girl’ look. She had to wait an hour and watch work crews building barracks buildings and guard towers, but she did get her interview.
Hope has kind of surprised that the person she was directed to was a grandmotherly type busily cooking in a kitchen off the church congregation hall up the hill. Kids ran everywhere under and around her legs. A couple of them called her “great-grandma”, confirming Hope’s suspicions.
“How old are you, young lady?” she asked.
“Umm, seventeen, nearly eighteen”, came the lie, unbidden.
“Uh-huh. Riiiggghhhht.” was the only reply. ‘So,… what is a seventeen, almost
eighteen, year old girl doing, on her own?”
Over the racket, the visitor told her story, leaving nothing out. For some reason, she trusted this lady. It took several minutes, even trying to be brief. At the end of her tale, eyes wide as she waited to hear condemnation or anger or pity, at best, Hope was surprised. The wizened lady smiled warmly at her, opened her arms, and gave her a big, generous, sincere hug. She couldn’t help it, she just started bawling. It had been so long since she could.
The matron insisted that Hope stay for dinner, and so she did, and ended up telling her story again to some of the other staff members of the Klan organization. Many of them seemed to live there, or nearby. They were the ones who were in control of all of the Arkansas counties bordering Missouri, and had sent the representative from the area to St. Louis. Much of the talk was centered on his discussions with an army officer there. He was working hard in town planning an election for the fall, already, and organizing the city government with the Mayor and City Council, who were also all members of their group. They all seemed excited about the future of their organization, and this new government. Apparently, this was something they had been waiting for. Almost like they had expected it to happen for a long time. Hope didn’t see how that could be true, though.
Their leader was a preacher, a very kind, grandfatherly type. He blessed the food. It turned out that his wife had been the lady she had talked to in the kitchen. After dinner, he talked with Hope and some of the other teenagers there about some religious ideas that she didn’t have time to really think about until a lot later. At the moment, she was too busy secretly looking at a couple of the hot guys in the group. She had never been around so many White guys her own age, before!
That night, they let her sleep in the women’s dormitory up the hill. Before she went to sleep, the preacher’s wife asked her to consider staying. They could keep her busy and out of trouble, she said with a wink. Hope said that she was really tempted to, for a lot of different reasons, but she had a dream she had to follow.
“What dream is that, missy?” The lady had asked.
“I want to be an artist. I want to learn how to draw and paint better. I have to find a place where people still do that kind of stuff.”
‘Well, you sleep on it, and we can talk about it some more in the morning.” The lady of the freehold said good-night, and left Hope to her thoughts and dreams.
By the time she had finished up her breakfast, she was sure of it. The fact that there were still good and decent people in the world, and places like this, made her want to create, to make something beautiful and stunning, even more. The world was more worth it, now, if that made any sense. She had made up her mind. She told the lady and the Pastor what she wanted to do.
“Well, if that’s what you really want, then I might know just what you should do. Here’s an idea. Jason has told me that there’s a really good school for people your age called the “Grand Center Arts Academy” in downtown St. Louis. If I were you, and I’m ju
st offering this as a suggestion, but if I were you, I’d think about going there for a year or two, and then you can see about going to the Art Institute in St. Louis. Or, by then, they might even have the Art Institute in Chicago running, again. A lot of people are moving back in, there, too. But both the schools are all White, of course, now, and it will be, too.”
This was a big moment for Hope, and she knew it. It was kind of scary.
“But, I mean, I don’t have much money, how would I pay for it? And how would I join it? ‘Cause, really, I’m not exactly seventeen. Yet.”
“Well, you let me talk to Jason. We have trusted people, members and associates, who travel from here to St. Louis every other day. People who work for us, and for Jason, and for the new government. Stay here again today, and rest, and I’ll let you know what Jason says tomorrow. Probably, we can get you a safe ride up there, find somebody to help you get enrolled in school, and find a good family to live with. Would that be okay?”
Hope hesitated. It was a lot to commit to, all at once, even with no other options, and nothing better imaginable. It almost seemed too good to be true. She was wary.
“Okay. I’ll stay another day, and we’ll see. If it can be done…I guess I’ll go. It can’t be any worse than where I’ve been.” She said, trying to sound tough.
That day she helped the ladies in the kitchen, and watched the kids while some of the moms took a break. One of the women in charge was the mother of the boy she was most fascinated by. She was the daughter of the grandmotherly lady. They had a HUGE family. In fact, it seemed like most of the people there were all related, by blood or by marriage. Hope then watched a group of the men working constantly on the new buildings. The food was SO good here, all homemade. She would get fat if she stayed here for very long. She made sure not to eat too much when any of the cute boys were looking at her. Towards dark, some of them drilled in marching formation, and there was a class on field-stripping and cleaning their rifles, for militia training. They looked like fun, to Hope. Then there was a Bible study class, and afterwards she found her bunk. None of them had said a word to her about the deputy or the hunter or the two gays in the car, she realized. The teenaged girl on the cusp of something big slept deeper than ever, without dreaming.