by Billy Roper
The Republic of Texas had plenty of gas, but horses were a lot quieter than trucks and tanks and APCs, and they could sure go places that wheeled or tracked vehicles couldn’t. Like the gully feeding into the Pecos East of Carlsbad, where Private Mike Brown sat at the moment, contemplating a horse’s life. Being quiet was a good thing, when you were seventy miles behind enemy lines. The men and the horses stared at each other in silence. With bellies full of water, it would be time to move out, soon enough. He wished for another pot of coffee, but his nerves didn’t really need it.
Mike was barely nineteen, and had been in the ninth grade when the public school closed its doors, but he was smart enough to know how to tie down his saddlebags, blanket, and machete so they didn’t jangle and interrupt any siestas. Only the creak of saddle leather and a snort from an impatient mount gave any sign of their presence. In a couple of minutes, the Lieutenant came back at a lope. He wouldn’t be moving fast enough to stir up dust unless the group of Mexicans they had hidden to avoid had passed out of sight, Mike knew. They had dodged being seen, once again. This was kind of like a big, life or death game of hide and seek, he thought.
As far as anybody in Tex as knew, there weren’t any White folks left in New Mexico at all. They’d all been ethnically cleansed. Some had run off voluntarily, some had been pushed out, and the rest had just set and died. Well, a few had put up a fight, but when the whole Mexican Army had thrown in with the Reconquistadores fighting to take Aztlan back from the gringos and set up their Latino-only Republica del Norte, it had been like the Alamo all over. New Mexico had seceded, and begun kicking out the blancos. They hadn’t stopped until they felt like it.
Those crazy Mormon cultists up in Utah, or Deseret, they called it now, had done good work in pushing the Mexes back past Flagstaff in Arizona, Mike’s dad had taught him during his last season of home-schooling, two winters ago. He knew all about them, and he agreed that anything the Mormons could do, Texicans could do a plumb sight better. They were about to prove it, too. Those Church of the New Dispensationalist wierdos, perverting scripture, were a problem for the other side of the country. The Mexicans were right up next to where he was from. Where he lived. They were within kicking range.
The Lieutenant had told them that a couple of looksee flights from Dyess and Goodfellow Air Bases hadn’t been able to see any troop concentrations or armor or anything to worry about within fifty miles of the border. The Republic of Texas Air Force checked that out, pretty regular. That made good sense to Mike. But now, B Company had gone past that mark, and further into New Mexico than anybody had in the last year. Well, since he had been in the army, at least. Way up north, around Denver, there was plenty of Mexican soldiers, still snarling at the New American Yankees protecting their missile silos in northern Colorado from the Mexes. A newspaper he’d seen, all the way from Lubbock, had said so. Maybe they’d managed to sneak in behind him, here, and could lick’em good before they knew it, and get gone. The towns of Hobbs and Lovington, practically smack dab on the border, had been in the Air Force’s no man’s land zone, and been bombed to pieces a few years ago. Nobody lived there, now. Carlsbad was bigger, and it was next in line for a whuppin’. People around these parts hadn’t forgotten the mass rapes of Whites the Mexes had used to get their own country, back around Cinco Day. Heck, they even still celebrated it every year by having raids across the border to see which of them could kidnap a White woman. Norte teens competed in the competition on their national independence day like it was just some kind of celebratory game. It was time for some payback.
Mike road beside Heath, right behind Jared and Randy, as the company cantered double file along the Pecos, sheltered from the view of anybody on the West side by the bank. Soon they could hear traffic passing by, every few minutes, on the road that ran parallel to the river. Wagons and carts pulled by mules and horses, but nothing gaspowered. Just the rhythmic rattle and clippety-clop and creak they were all used to. This was the dicey part. The looksee mission had turned into a raid as soon as the Lieutenant said the Captain figured that so long as they were there, they might as well say ‘howdy’. The only question was, how close could they get to the biggest chunk of the town, before they got heard or seen and spoiled the surprise? Any minute now, they could get caught and have to go ahead and get’er done. Heath’s horse nudged into his mount, as the trail beside the river narrowed. If Heath hadn’t been a Corporal, Mike would have slapped him with his reins, for that. If he did, Heath would make him comb and pick his mare for a week, at least. That was the benefit of rank.
The Lieutenant had told them that before Cinco Day Carlsbad had been a big city, nearly 30,000 people, and half of them White folks, too. Now they figured it was probably closer to 10,000. More manageable a size for the ninety-eight Texicans to handle on their own, Mike figured. Nobody seemed to be moving in the buildings on their right, they seemed to all be empty. Maybe the town had shrunk back to the West side of the river, past the concrete bank they were rubbing shoulders against. That would work out dandy. It wasn’t like they wanted a repeat of the bloody Battle of Lawton, where a thousand screaming Apaches had butchered about this many Texicans from the Twentieth mounted who’d galloped off into Oklahoma to try to rescue a passel of White girls the redskins had captured in raids on local towns. That had been three years ago, but it still smarted. The next winter they’d put for the Indians by burning their food stashes and starving them into surrender, but the legend of the Battle of Lawton wouldn’t be forgotten soon. Neither would those poor girls, who were all crazy as loons by the time they’d gotten them back.
In a few minutes they had reached a broader area, like a park, where the ranks could spread out. Randy ended up on one side of Mike, and Heath on the other. There was a lake or something in front of them, and they performed a wheel left maneuver to position the drawn out double rank of riders facing up the bank at the city. At a wordless command from the Lieutenant, they loosened their machetes in their sheaths, drew their M4s and checked their magazines, and chambered a round. Safeties off. Arms across saddles. Heath looked at Mike and grinned boyishly. Aside from a few skirmishes closer to home, this was going to be their first real fight. He looked at, him, grinned back, and gave the same cocky smile to Randy. Mike could hear people jabbering away in Spanish, right up there. He had an old song stuck in his head, about hotrod Lincolns. They had no idea what was coming.
There was no bugle player, here. The Captain rode forward half a length, so everybody could see him good. He drew his machete and raised it above his head, paused for a second, then twirled it around in a circle and brought it forward with a chopping motion like the thing had been made for. Ninety-seven horses leapt forward up the banks as spurs kicked back into their flanks. Ninety-seven Texican throats screamed the ancient warcry that had once been called ‘the rebel yell’. It was on.
Mike almost lost his grip when his horse skidded through some gravel coming up the hill, but they wheeled right all together without losing anybody, and crossed a street towards a boarded up Sonic. The Mexicans they saw were all screaming and running away, or throwing down their bags and crossing themselves. None of them seemed to be carrying any guns, and they all looked to be civilians. The rebel yell echoed again ‘yeeeeeeeeeeehaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwww!’ as they galloped up a broad open highway past a motel where an open air produce market was going on. Some of the Texicans stopped to turn over the tables and smash the vendor’s carts, while the others continued on. Mike had almost forgotten to shoot, until he heard other riders doing it. That embarrassed him, but in a couple of seconds he was doing his part, too. He couldn’t get Nancy, his horse, to hold still, what with all the yelling and shooting going on, but he couldn’t really blame her, he was kinda excited, too. He took aim. A fat Mexican woman carrying a basket of laundry. She couldn’t run very fast. Some old man with ten pairs of shoes strung around his arm. He sure looked funny when he fell and flopped around. A bit further away, running away from them, a group of small child
ren raced for the open doorway of an old AutoZone store. Heath knocked three of them down with a burst of 5.56. Mike just could not understand how Heath could do something like that. He always had been the best shot in the Company. It must just be a Godgiven talent, that’s all there was to it.
Four blocks further North they rode, shooting and reloading and shooting some more. A couple of Mexican men tried to rush them, and that required a little machete work. Mike sure was glad of his machete, it was the best cavalry sabre ever invented. When they got to the Wendy’s, they wheeled right as planned. From out of nowhere, a volley of poorly aimed fire smoked up in front of them from what must be a government building of some kind. A dozen Mexican federales hid behind two police cars and took potshots at them as the line reformed. There was nothing to do but charge them, instead of waiting for them to get lucky. Mike yelled out ‘follow me!’ even though his wasn’t the lead horse in the race. The federales were three blocks away as the Texicans bore down on them. They fired again. A couple of men from Company B lurched in their saddles, but kept riding. Two blocks to go now. A few riders pulled out of the charge and onto the sidewalk to raise their rifles and take more careful aim at the uniformed Mexicans.
As Mike’s world bounced up and down in a blur, he caught breath enough to scream ‘Gitim-GitimGitim!’, just in case anybody was watching or listening. When he got within a block of the police cars, he noticed that there was nobody left beside him. He had beaten them all the finish! Another federale went down under heavy fire from the flanks as they were encircled on both sides. A horse he thought was Heath’s raced past him, without its rider, and jumped the closest patrol unit, landing on top of the four or five still standing Mexicans behind it. That looked pretty cool. Mike wanted to do that, too!
Nancy, like most females, had a mind of her own. When she got to the bullet-riddled car’s front fender, she stopped. Mike, however, did not. He vaulted forward, over her head, and onto the hood, flat on his back. And his head. He couldn’t breathe, but he could feel the single-point sling still around his neck. He raised the M4 between his knees, hoping that he had put in a fresh magazine and chambered a round after his last pause. A big brown face with a droopy black moustache under a light blue cap looked down at him. The Mexican said something at him in Spanish. He stroked the trigger just as the cop raised his hands to surrender. Mike inhaled, finally. “Sorry, Pedro, no hablo.”
From the Lieutenant’s vantage point, further back, Mike’s final charge had bee n downright heroic. He told the Captain as much. Heath had gotten himself shot and trampled. He would live, but he wouldn’t ever ride, again. Those two things together made Mike the new corporal. His mom would be proud to hear that. Maybe that girl at the hardware store would be, too. Chicks dug heroes.
It took Company B five days to get back to the Republic of Texas border, a day longer than it had taken them to get to Carlsbad. Out of their ninety-eight men, seven had died in the raid, or along the trail back. Another ten were wounded, four of them badly enough to be discharged. Mike said goodbye to Heath and the other wounded as they loaded them on trucks to take them to the hospital in Midland. Randy and Jared were curry-combing Nancy when he got back to the livery tent. He calculated that they’d put paid to four or five hundred Mexes during the raid. The one that he couldn’t get out of his head, though, was a young woman who’d run down the road ahead of them with a squawling papoose over her shoulder, bawling at them. She’d taken a lot of shooting, before she fell. It wasn’t the baby under Nancy’s hooves or its screams that bothered Mike. It was that he had never seen the woman’s face. He wondered what she looked like. Oh well. Some things, you just had to forget about, and let go. That was the cowboy way. He sidled over to see if they had any bacon and beans left without too many flies in it.
Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?
The castle wall was cool and sandy against his naked back, as he sat and studied the ancient scripture. Ben Rosenfeldt kept re-reading the words of the holy prophet Ezekiel. He wished that he could reference the New Testament book of Revelations for a later insight into the end times prophecy, but that would be chol. He wasn’t a Rebbe, in fact, he had been agnostic before his job at Goldmach Sachs evaporated with the firm. He still remembered counting the upper floor executives as they had jumped and fallen past his window. Forty-four stories, down to the sidewalk in front of West Street. The same number as his age, he’d thought with black humor. He had seen it coming, once the dollar was devalued and then abandoned in the international monetary exchanges. They all had. It was meshugganah, but it was real. He had waited for the Board of Directors and Vice Presidents to stop their 1929 reenactment, before leaving the office. He had to think. He had to talk to his mother. He needed to go to Temple.
People of all faiths had re-embraced their religions during and after the collapse. It was amazing how many people found had God, or something, even a cause, bigger than themselves to believe in, when their comfort zones got violated. Ben was no different. The next two Saturdays, his synagogue had been full. Attendance was higher than it had been since 9/11. Much of the conversation after had been about the growing threat to Israel, and the rising tide of Anti-Semitism in the U.S., as hyperinflation and unemployment led to the electric grid crumbling. That evening, there was a brownout across lower Manhattan, as engineers and energy brokers struggled to reroute power from overload to under capacity secondary grids.
Beginning the next week, the riots and demonstrations over immigration amnesty spread from the SouthWest to other areas of the nation. The Mexican neighborhoods of Flatbush and Sunset Park in Brooklyn, and of Elmhurst and Jackson Heights in Queens, exploded in looting and protests that the NYPD could barely control. The next day they spread to East Elmhurst and Corona. Ben never went to either borough, anyway, but he could feel things getting more tense. Synagogues in Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago were attacked and firebombed. Two Amish men in Pennsylvania were mistaken for Jews, and shot. Then, the news stations simply stopped reporting any racial crimes, or updates on the riots and protests. It was if they weren’t happening, but Ben could see the rising smoke to the NorthEast and SouthEast from their E. 44th St. high-rise apartment in Midtown East. His twenty-eight year old wife, Connie, was unconcerned. A Shiksa trophy his banking job had made it possible to afford, she didn’t worry her pretty blonde head about much of anything except for shopping and buying clothes and shopping some more. She didn’t go to Temple with him, didn’t want to convert, and Ben didn’t ever ask, after the first time. That first time had only been under pressure from his mother. She was also disappointed, in typical Jewish mother fashion, that they hadn’t had kids. The only thing comforting her about that was that of course any children wouldn’t have been Jewish, anyway, since Connie was a Gentile.
Ben and his seventy three year old mother did go to Temple that next Saturday, and sat silently while the Rabbi made an unusual public statement that God was calling on all righteous Jews to make Aliyah to the Holy Land. He could see the point in being concerned about Neo-Nazis and other Jew haters, who had always come out of the woodwork when economic times got tough, but there was no Hitler on the horizon in America, Ben felt sure. The Rabbi was suffering from persecution complex. All Jews suffered from it from time to time, it was an identifying cultural neurosis, that was a proven scientific and medical fact. His therapist had shown him an article about it. His mother was fired up and ready to go. When he got home, he tried to discuss the possibility with Connie, and paint it as a way to increase their buying power. She flatly refused to consider it, so he dropped the subject. Ben slept on the couch that night.
The next morning, he pulled all of his remaining assets out of their bank accounts, and used them to buy as much gold as he could find at every pawn shop he
could walk to. No taxis were running for some reason, and the city buses were all parked by the curb, he noticed. Ben was unpleasantly surprised to find that all of his liquefiable assets combined only bought him enough gold to fill a small fanny pack, and most of that was in loose jewelry, several gold coins, and only a few small ounce and half ounce bars. He had been able to find enough silver to fill the bag the rest of the way up, with ingots and old silver dimes. He didn’t know how long that would last, but he’d be miserly with it.
There wasn’t a single firearm left for sale in any of the four places he looked, or so he thought. As he looked at the empty cases in the last shop, realizing that he was going to have to walk back twenty-one blocks with all that silver and gold before it got dark, he began to feel desperate. Normally, Ben wouldn’t show any vulnerability to Russians. They were even more anti-Semitic than Germans. But he had no choice. Reaching into the pocket of his pants, he had pulled out a wad of $20 dollar bills. He placed them on the counter, and told the Slav staring at him over narrow glasses that he needed some protection. The big hairy man grinned, swooped up the roll of bills, and brought up a cardboard box from under the counter. Turning it towards Ben, he flipped open the lid. It held a beaten up old .38 special revolver and a box of ammunition. Ben nodded curtly, picked up the box, and turned around to walk out of the store. At the corner he stopped to take the pistol out, load it, and put it in one pocket, now empty of the wad of bills he had walked in with. He put the rest of the box of ammunition in the other. He had never fired a gun before. By the time he was finished, he would become quite proficient.