Donny didn’t remind him that he also got her freed. “It’s worth a shot,” he said. “To be honest, I don’t really have a choice.”
You could see it in their eyes, how their estimation of him suddenly dropped when they realized how desperate he really was. That it wasn’t about the client’s problems. It was about his problems.
Xelina reached for Donny’s hand.
“Remember when we thought we were going to build a better future?” said Donny.
“Yeah, well, don’t call us when you need a rescue from that,” said Clint.
19
After an afternoon at the federal courthouse calling in a favor that would help him get Heather’s jailers to the bargaining table, Donny checked his messages one last time for responses from the prospective class members he had contacted. Two bouncebacks, and a crazy-long message from a conflicted mom, the main point of which was how her late son’s treasonous politics got him the punishment he deserved.
His grandma left him a message, asking him to send more files. And so he did.
Bone-tired, before he went home he made one more stop: at the safe house where he had last seen Slider. But the mastodon was gone, and the only person there was an old black lady who said those people moved out a year ago.
That night, Donny packed light for his trip to New Orleans. Xelina was right about negotiating with the committee, but he couldn’t afford to be there more than a couple of days. With luck, by the time he got back, his grandma would have found a new plaintiff, and they would be back in business.
On the bed were two suits. One to wear on the way there, one to wear to the negotiation he had in mind. He took three shirts, four ties, and five pairs of underwear. You never knew.
He looked at his shoes. Lawyer shoes, nice ones he had bought when he raided his savings, now with rubber soles the cobbler put on when he wore holes through the original leather.
The TV in the next room was tuned to RT5, the French channel. One of their US correspondents was touring New Orleans. Nassra al-Balushi, who had reported from the region off and on through the fighting, and knew how to make rubber boots look good. Even when she was standing calf-deep in the water that flowed down what used to be a major street.
Donny went to his closet, the one by the front door where he kept his fishing gear. He pulled out his rubber boots. They were the cheap kind from the neighborhood hardware store, unstructured, mainly used by Donny to get to his car when it flooded.
He reached farther back, and found his old waders. Maybe not.
Then he remembered the other boots. But he wasn’t even sure if he still had them.
He went to the back closet. Pulled over a chair, and reached up onto the high shelf. Three boxes fell on him, full of old papers. Tax files and letters from dead friends.
He reached farther.
The next box was dusty. But you could still make out the Maschen logo.
When she bought them, Joyce explained how they were made on the French-German border. The inventor was on the German side and his factory was on the French side. Or maybe it was the other way around. The point was that the place had been on both sides. That the shoes were from a place that knew borders are a lie, even when they define your world.
No wonder they look so funny, said Donny.
They look great, she said. They work with a suit, or in the field. Try them on.
He did, and they fit perfectly. Joyce was always good that way.
It was the only time he wore them.
On TV, Nassra was in Jackson Square now. The rebel leader Gertrude Almeida was giving a speech to the gathered crowd. Donny had the sound low, and he couldn’t read the captions from that far away, but you could see Gertie was mad.
Gertie made her name by being mad, about things she had every right to be mad about. She was mad before they locked her up for talking about those things, and she was a lot madder when she got out, after the riot in the Superdome that freed all the prisoners.
You could just hear what she was saying.
First they stole our future. Then they stole our present. So now we are going to take their past.
It was a good line. She got it from Donny, at the meeting where he pitched the idea for the truth and reconciliation tribunals. An idea they had grabbed on to, and then taken in a totally different direction than he had in mind.
Donny tried on the boots. After he got the dead bugs out. Then he walked over and turned up the volume.
A group of purple-hooded paramilitaries made some middle-aged white guy in a green-and-blue golf outfit kneel in front of Gertie. They pulled a noose around his neck. Or that’s what it looked like, until they made the guy take off his clothes, and you could see the rope was a leash.
Nassra explained that the man was a real-estate developer. One who had sold off foreclosed acreages in the Midwest at a huge profit to Tripto Labs and its biofuels partners.
He did not look good naked.
They had tried him for the destruction of the habitat of the animals that had lived on those lands, and for the poisoning of the Mississippi River watershed that the fuel producers caused.
The man did not produce enough money to satisfy the judgment, which meant he had to give back to nature in accordance with the old laws. By which they meant the laws of nature.
That part of it they didn’t get from Donny.
Maybe it was the way the camera caught it, but Gertie’s accusatory finger was a powerful and scary thing, especially close-up.
She asked him one more time to pay. He just got red in the face and started accusing her right back. So the hoods pulled the leash to take him away.
Donny looked at his feet. The boots still fit.
On the TV, Gertie and the others watched the man crawl.
Nassra cut to an exterior shot. Deep swamp, cypress and black water, sounds of birds and bugs. The developer is on a little boat with three of the guards. Still naked. The boat is a shallow-water punt. One of the guards is poling.
Nassra explains how the prisoner tried to bribe his guards.
Now he is just begging.
They have a banker’s bag full of money. Cash and coins. They tie it to his leg with a length of cord.
Then they make him jump into the water.
He is screaming, spazzing, water up to his thighs. You can tell his feet are stuck in the muck of the bottom, weighed down by the money bag, which is stuck even deeper.
The camera reveals other motion in the water.
When you see the gator eyes move, you can also see the skyline of downtown New Orleans in the far background.
The man tries to grab on to the punt, but the poler pushes him back on his ass. And then he starts poling away.
The camera shows a montage of motion in water, bird silhouette, sundown. The sound of night.
They do not show the man being pulled under, but they make you think that is what happened.
Donny looked at his boots. He read once that the holes in brogues were originally made for bogs and swamps, so the water drains off more easily. Maybe time to find out if that’s really true, he thought. It sounded pretty ridiculous to him when he heard it, like the kind of thing the catalog copywriters come up with to make you think you are doing something more adventurous than going to an office.
Donny wished he could just go to his office, but then his ride called.
And while he was telling the guy where to pick him up, he continued to stare at the boots Joyce had given him, and wondered if he’d see her in New Orleans.
Seven Years Earlier
20
It was a five-hour drive from Houston to Brownsville when Donny went to save Joyce, down coastal highways that were getting more coastal every year, especially with the downpours that weird winter was delivering. Donny headed out crazy early, aided by coffee he brewed the night before and the old-school lawyers’ answering service he sometimes used as a wake-up call. His car was driving a little funny since he got it back from the feds who
had tried to forfeit it on his last case, so he just drove it harder until the noise of the rain overpowered the noise of the weird knock down in the suspension. Not getting there was not an option.
This was right after the coup, when the only things playing on the radio were the FM version of Eagle News Network and the robot tones of the Emergency Broadcast System giving citizens instructions on how to protect themselves from their neighbors. Donny was not good at taking instructions from robots or anyone else, not even clients, really, so as he tooled along in his Chinese sedan that had seen better days, he scanned the AM band until he finally picked up one of the Mexican border blasters, this one out of Reynosa, playing some punk-ass corrido that as best Donny could tell was about the coyotes who helped smuggle Americans out. The chorus recited some kind of Spanglish network code mnemonic you could apparently use to get in contact with the dudes IRL. Donny sang along, hoping it would stick.
He was singing it back into his phone when he saw the first convoy coming the other direction. Troop carriers, maybe thirty of them, and a train of those loudspeaker vans with the LRAD cannons on top. Houston, we have a crowd-control problem.
Donny remembered the last time Joyce and he had gone out to Alpine for the long weekend, not that long before the first time she dumped him. On the last night, they got high and drove through the high desert to the Marfa Lights viewing area. They almost ran over some ghostly looking animal that Donny insisted was a Chupacabra and Joyce said was a feral dog. As they sat there listening to spacey music on the station out of Presidio, they argued about the future—the future of America and the future of them as a couple, both of which sounded bleak. Donny said I need to take a leak, which was really his way of taking a break from the low-intensity argument, and when he stepped out into the dark, cloudless night he heard the rumble of a big heavy train blowing down the tracks on the other side of the highway. He watched it until his eyes adjusted and he could see what freight it had: tanks, Humvees, and light artillery, painted that new army green that was almost black, headed east, destination unknown.
After midnight is when the secret cargo rolls.
Not long after the convoy drove by he saw a school bus loaded with prisoners, headed north on the Victoria bypass, maybe to one of the big camps outside of Houston.
In a fight between a lawyer and a tank, who would win?
As the sun came up over Corpus, you could see the miles of refineries along the coastline, and the interceptors taking off from the naval air station. It took him forty minutes to get through the checkpoint there at the I-37 interchange, and when he told them where he was going and why, Donny could see the guy phoning ahead as he pulled away.
When he finally got to Brownsville, he hit the last checkpoint. The one no one was supposed to be able to cross, six short blocks from the border and the freedom it represented. Between there were the old warehouses and commercial buildings that had been taken over by the Motherland Guard. One of which, a windowless former Kmart, was where they were holding Joyce.
The story was they had a new interrogation technique they were trying out. The Blue Light Special.
Joyce had fled the country on the day they seized power. Donny was supposed to go with her. Not as lovers, but as friends. She liked the idea of a lawyer helping her get across. And maybe she wanted more, but she could be hard to pin down on such matters.
Donny had even driven to her place that morning, all packed and ready to go. But by the time he got there, he had changed his mind. Or more accurately, the world had changed it for him. He had a duty to stay back and fight the regime in court. Fight to eke out what justice he could for the regime’s enemies and victims. Lawyers in exile are useless. Joyce said you should write a book, a history of how we got here, but Donny said first we have to fix the future.
That same day, as Joyce went to cross at Brownsville, which she had been told was the safest, Donny was in court with Miles, trying to challenge the President’s increasingly brazen use of his emergency powers with the domestic deployment of military forces they called police but anyone could see were soldiers and private military contractors. She didn’t get across. She was detained at the border, even though she had one of the new passports.
The things she had written had gotten her on the list. As did some of her friends who had already been detained. Male academics, Donny later read in one of the memos that cleared the interrogation enhancements, were the easiest subjects to get to rat out their friends. The theories for why that was varied.
They had detained her three days before Donny even got the news. And that he only got because Judge Broyles let him know, in confidence. Probably the day after Broyles signed the order allowing her interrogation to proceed.
They had had her three weeks before Donny could get the order for her release. And even then, it wasn’t entirely clear her release was due to Donny’s efforts, or because they just decided they were done with her. But they said Donny could come pick her up.
Donny had told her not to try to take her pistol across with her, but Joyce was ornery that way.
“I’m here to retrieve a prisoner,” said Donny. “My client.”
He handed the guard a business card. You would be surprised how often that works.
“Wait here,” said the guard, and then he stepped out of his kiosk and walked back toward the nearby building.
The gate in front of him was a wall of steel on wheels. Some local kids had managed to tag it, with a red stencil of an armadillo holding a spray can in one hand and a hammer in the other. A guy in fatigues was on his knees trying to rub the graffiti out with some chemical that required him to wear a respirator. He wasn’t having much luck.
Standing in front of that guy was a more serious-looking dude in the blue and orange of the Guard, waiting for Donny to give him an excuse to use the South African assault rifle he had slung to his tactical vest. Donny looked to his right, and saw the K-9 officer walking the perimeter of his car, with a dog that was too short for Donny to see. In the rearview mirror were two more guards, one with the mirror on a stick they used to search the undercarriage for bombs. Behind them was an armored truck that had been pulled up to block Donny from backing out.
Donny had his arm up on the open driver’s-side window. He looked that way, and noticed for the first time the cluster of cameras and microphones there, right about where the box would be at the drive-through of a fast-food joint.
“Hey, do you all have any breakfast tacos?” said Donny, speaking to the box.
The sixth member of the detail attending to his arrival standing there in the kiosk, who had been reading whatever it was the screen said about Donny, looked at him with something more confounded than a cop stare.
“Excuse me?” he said.
“No?” said Donny. “How about a latte.”
The guy shook his head in disgust.
The dog was right there now, sniffing Donny’s quarter-panel at the end of a short leash. It wore a black vest velcroed with morale patches of urban combat service in Nicaragua, New Orleans, and Nebraska. Its handler was a young white guy with an ugly beard made uglier by his service branch’s regulations of its personnel’s facial hair. Donny imagined the actual regulation that existed in a book each of those men had been issued, there with all the other rules ensuring conformity of their grooming and hygiene.
“What kind of dog is that?” asked Donny.
The K-9 handler just looked at him, then looked back at the dog.
“What kind of dog are you, Titus?” Donny asked the dog, whose name was also patched on its vest, in GI Joe letters.
“Don’t talk to the dog,” said the handler.
Donny could see it was one of those Doberman–pit bull mixes the Secret Service had bred back in the day for its combination of nose and attack aptitudes.
That was when the lead guard returned with Donny’s business card still in his hand. He walked up to Donny and handed the card back.
“We have no record of that re
lease, and you’re not on the list.”
“What list?”
“You can turn your vehicle around, and follow Officer Sullivan here to the return path.”
“I’m not going anywhere without my client. I have an order from a federal judge.”
“Did you hear that, Sully?” said the guard. “He has an order from a federal judge.”
“All right, Burger King,” said Donny. “Have it your way.”
Donny opened his car door.
“Stay in the car,” said Burger King.
Donny disregarded that order.
As soon as his feet touched pavement, the klaxon rang. And almost as soon as he stood up to face the guards, Titus took him down, paws on suit flannel.
When he looked up at the fangs, and the three gun barrels backing them up, Donny wondered if this was really the best way to get inside.
They took all of Donny’s stuff, everything but his clothes, and put him in a holding room. It reminded him of the interrogation suite at the federal detention in Houston—painted cinder-block walls, a metal bench bolted to the concrete floor, a picture of the President on the wall next to a poster in seven languages that explained how travelers have no Fourth Amendment rights in the borderzone, no matter what passport they carry. In the middle of the steel door was a little slat to look through from the other side. In the middle of the floor was a drain, which only made you wonder what fluids they planned to spill.
At least the air conditioning was working. They had it extra cold, on purpose.
They had left Donny uncuffed. They usually went a little easier on lawyers, he had learned, because lawyers were more effective than their usual victims at whining to judges about their treatment in detention.
“Fuck you,” said Donny, to the face of the President staring at him from across the room. It was one of those official portraits where he had that almost-smile. The wily executive who will let you choose between serving him or fighting him.
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