Liberty's Last Stand (7 page)

“Yes, sir.”

He got in the back of the helicopter with Nadine; the two troopers climbed aboard after them.

Jack saw JR watching as the machine lifted off.

After the interment, Fred Hays and his wife and son shook hands with JR, got into their car, and started driving back to Dallas. Fred and JR had just inherited a twenty-two-thousand-acre ranch in a very dry corner of Texas, and now didn't seem to be the time to discuss what they were going to do with it. Fred and his wife were schoolteachers, had two kids, and needed every dollar they could get. Neither wanted to live along the Rio Grande miles from civilization—if Pumpville, Texas, was civilization. Fred had grown up on that ranch and that was precisely the place he wanted away from when he went to college. He had never come back except for brief visits. And his parents' funerals.

JR, on the other hand, had spent too many years in Iraq and Afghanistan to look at desert chaparral with affection. The ranch was a big, windy, dry place, and in August hot as the doorstep of Hell with the fire doors open. His grandfather had settled here way back when because the land was cheap. It wasn't worth much now, either. His father had stayed because he loved it, and he had gone broke there. Oilmen had drilled some exploratory wells yet never found anything. Probably never would. The place was mortgaged for the fence and exotic animals. If JR
and Fred didn't sell it, they'd need to find a way to make money to pay the bank. Hosting hunters was probably the only way.

Maybe, JR thought sardonically, he should sell it to the dope smugglers.

JR gave his father's sole employee a check worth two weeks' pay. “Take some time off. Visit your family. I'll call you when we need you. We'll probably sell the place, and while it's for sale we'll need someone to look after it and keep the fences repaired, so we don't lose the animals.”

“I don't want to get shot by them dopers,” the hired man said.

“I don't blame you. Just stay the hell out of their way and fix the fences in the daytime. You could do that, couldn't you?”

“I reckon.”

“Two weeks. See you then.”

JR went in the house and called his boss in El Paso. Quit his job on the phone. “I won't be coming back. Dad's dead and there's the ranch.”

“I understand.”

“I brought some of the company's stuff with me, and I'll bring it all back in a couple of weeks.”

“Sure. Sorry about your dad.”

JR inventoried the grub in the house and his father's meager collection of weapons. The sheriff had returned the Marlin, with its nightscope. JR looked it over. It seemed intact and should be workable if he charged the battery, but he had a much better one under the rear seat of the pickup. There was a twelve-gauge pump shotgun and an old thirty-eight revolver, a double-action Colt that his father had used to execute pigs years ago, when he kept pigs and cured his own hams and ate his own bacon.

Then JR got in his pickup and headed for Del Rio, eighty miles away. He drove fast, so he got there before the stores closed. Went into the first gun store he saw. The man behind the counter was sitting on a stool watching television. He wore a holstered pistol on his belt.

“I need to buy a couple of guns,” JR said. “And some ammo.”

The proprietor gestured toward the television. “Barry Soetoro says he is shutting down all the gun stores nationwide. We ain't supposed to sell guns and ammo anymore to anybody but law enforcement.
Fuck
that raghead commie son of a bitch. I ain't seen nothin' in writing from the ATF, and until I do I'm still open. Sell you ever'thing in the whole goddamn store if you got room on your credit card.”

“Not that much. I'll limit myself to a small fraction of your inventory.”

“Help yourself. I'm gonna sit here and watch the riots. Put what you want on the counter and we'll dicker. I'm easy, long as you're not a convict or illegal chili-picker and you've stopped beatin' your wife. Comrade Barry is gonna put me out of business pretty damn quick and I'll need some money until the welfare checks start arrivin' in the mailbox.”

“You have any black powder?”

“Six or eight cans of the stuff. It's on a shelf in the back. Help yourself.”

“I have a cannon. Need some fuses for it, too.”

“Same place. I supply the local pyro club, you know, the nutcases that make their own fireworks. Got all the stuff to make their rockets go up and pop. Take all you want. That asshole Soetoro will probably shut them down too and I can't return that stuff or eat it. I'll probably end up piling it up and setting it afire in my backyard.”

“You have a big backyard?”

“Couple hundred acres. That's where the pyro club does their thing.”

An hour later when JR Hays paid for his purchases, the proprietor tossed in a couple of NRA bumper stickers into one bag and two that said “Fuck Soetoro.”

“Classy,” JR said.

“Yeah. Kinda to the point. I'm all outta the ones that say ‘Soetoro Sucks.'”

JR Hays loaded his purchases into his pickup and visited the local hardware store. While there he purchased four five-gallon cans for gasoline, among other things. At the supermarket he stocked up on canned goods, dry beans, two cured hams, bacon, and coffee. He hit the
liquor store for two big bottles of bourbon and a case of beer. As people in this sparsely populated country normally did, he stopped at the filling station on the edge of town, topped off the truck, and filled his gas cans.

He took his time getting back to the ranch. It was after eleven o'clock when he closed and locked the gate behind him, drove the half mile over the rutted dirt road to the ranch house, a low single-story with two bedrooms and a bath, with a telephone but no TV, and got busy carrying his purchases inside. After he had his food and hardware put away, he opened one of the bottles of bourbon and poured himself a drink, neat, just the way Joe Bob used to drink it. He turned out the lights and went out on the ramada to escape the heat of the house. Sitting there sipping whiskey, he could hear the whisper of the wind in the brush. Somewhere a coyote howled.

Above him, the obsidian sky was full of stars.

When Jack Hays got home from the state capitol, a Texas flag was stirring on the flagpole in the yard. It was always there, but tonight he paused to look at it. Inside, Nadine was watching television. He flopped on the couch and watched a little in silence. The “ghetto rats,” as he called them when reporters weren't around, were burning and looting in Houston, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Screaming about the right-wing white conspiracy.

“How do they know it's whites?” he asked Nadine.

“All right-wingers are white Republicans. Ninety-eight percent of blacks are Soetoro Democrats. You know it, I know it, everybody knows it. Soetoro lit the fuse and it's burning.”

When the television people began a commercial, Nadine killed the savage beast. In the silence that followed, he told her about more of the federal government's demands. And about his talk with Ben Steiner.

Nadine listened in silence and sipped Chardonnay. When he ran out of words, he went to the bar and poured himself a drink, vodka over ice. God knows, he needed it. What a hell of a day!

Seated again near Nadine, he sipped the liquor. “I feel like I'm chained to a railroad track with locomotives coming fast from both directions. Soetoro is ripping up the American Constitution and there are a large number of people in Texas who would rather fight than submit. Lincoln must have had similar feelings when he watched the Southern states pass secession resolutions. We're headed for a smash and I haven't a clue what to do about it.”

“Maybe Ben Steiner is right. Texas should become its own country.”

Jack Hays snorted. “Texas will become a nation over Barry Soetoro's dead body. If he lets Texas go, a lot of other states will follow. Why should people who work for a living pay taxes to provide welfare to all those rats in the center cities? Explain that one to me.”

“Extortion?”

“Pay or we'll burn it down and live in the ashes. The only people who worry about that kind of logic are politicians.”

“Texas could make it as an independent nation,” Nadine said, eyeing her husband.

“Horseshit. American dollars are our currency—”

“Issue your own currency, backed by the state's full faith and credit. That's easy enough.”

“Hundreds of thousands of people rely on Social Security and federal and military retirement. We can't abandon them. Without those pensions—”

“Texas can assume those obligations.”

He stared at her.

Nadine took another sip of Chardonnay, then said, “If people paid income and Social Security taxes to Texas instead of the federal government, and if Texas didn't have the federal debt to service, I suspect that the finances would be pretty close to a wash. Dollar for dollar, in and out. Texas could guarantee U.S. government bonds held by Texas banks and pension funds. If you made welfare recipients who are able-bodied work for their check or forfeit it, that would help a bundle. And make welfare recipients take a drug test. You know, straight out of Charlie Swim's platform. No more money for single women to have kids.”

She leaned forward, pleading her case. “Texas has energy to sell to the world, a great banking system, world-class hospitals, automobile factories, cutting-edge high-tech industries, a solid agricultural base, and we're on the Gulf Coast so we can import and export. Texas has an annual GDP of 1.6 trillion dollars. That is a larger economy than the state of New York, just a little less than California. Texas generates roughly ten percent of the economic activity in the United States. Our Texas economy is a third larger than Mexico's, just ten percent behind the United Kingdom's. If Texas were an independent nation, ours would be the twelfth-largest economy on earth, a smidgen less than Canada, but more than Australia, Spain, or Switzerland. And you think Texas couldn't go it alone?”

Jack Hays eyed his wife coldly. “I didn't know you were an independence crackpot.”

“I'm not. But the people of Texas will not live in a dictatorship.
Will not
.”

“The United States won't let us go without a fight.”

“We're heading for a fight regardless,” Nadine said flatly. “Even if independence isn't your end game, it might give you leverage to demand a return to constitutional government on the federal level. Texas has a hell of a lot better hand than you think.”

Jack Hays took a swig from his drink and sat staring at his wife. “We could seal the border,” he suggested. “Demand the Mexican government stop allowing drug smugglers and illegals to cross. We could seal the border so tight a bat couldn't get across.”

Nadine put her hand on his arm. “Sure you could, but you'd need to make it clear that no one is against immigration
per se
, from Mexico or anywhere else. The problem is
illegal
immigrants; they're swarming in faster than we can absorb them in the schools or in the labor force or with social services. When illegal, unskilled laborers flood the market, it's our own low-skilled citizens—black, white, brown—who pay the price. People understand that, and they understand that it's high time someone stood up for
them
. So sure, seal the border, cut off all trade to Mexico if necessary, and force Mexico to patrol its own borders and crush the drug trade that does even more harm to Mexico than it does
to us. Make Mexico an offer it can't refuse. Not a single dollar, truck, railroad car, or immigrant, legal or illegal, crosses the border until Mexico cleans up its own house.”