Rule of Capture

by Christopher Brown

  “There’s a big difference between generalized political advocacy and bona fide calls to action,” said Donny.

  “There is a difference,” said Broyles. “But not one we can afford to quibble over in a time of insurrection. At least not at this preliminary determination. You’ll have time to argue those nuances at the denaturalization proceeding.”

  “What if we could establish that the real reason the government has detained Ms. Rocafuerte is to silence her as a witness to the murder of an opposition politician?”

  Broyles perked up. “That would be a different matter,” he said. He looked like he meant it. “If you could provide solid evidence to support that.”

  “I need more time to do that, Your Honor.”

  “Then you’ll have to save that for trial as well.”

  “How about I let my client tell you about it?”

  “You want to put her on?” said Broyles, in a way that suggested he thought it was a bad idea.

  Donny was pretty sure he agreed.

  * * *

  As they swore Xelina in, looking almost too small for the witness box, Donny glanced back at the gallery to see who was watching. It wasn’t too crowded that morning, but there were two suits sitting together in the back row taking copious notes, a bald man and a dark-haired woman. Donny recognized the woman as someone he had seen in there often, but never known who she was. They were always watching.

  Court Security Officer Walton was watching, too. Sitting there at his station below Broyles, with his hand on the button. So Donny decided to start out far away from anything that had anything to do with the government. He might even catch Walton off guard.

  “Ms. Rocafuerte,” Donny asked, after laying out the basics. “Where were you born?”

  “Here in Houston.”

  “In a hospital?”

  “Memorial.”

  “How about your parents?”

  “My dad was born in Mexico, and then lived in Honduras on and off. But my mom is from here.”

  “And her parents?”

  “Same. Not Houston, but Texas. Corpus Christi.”

  “How far back does that go?”

  “Forever, just about.”

  “Do you know how many generations?”

  “My grandpa says nine generations on paper, but it goes back further. Because we were here before there was paper. Before people had to write their names and birthdays down in books to be tracked by the government.”

  “Before the Americans.”

  “Before the Anglos, you mean. Yeah. Before even the Mexicans, really. Just like a lot of people that so-called Americans call Mexicans.”

  “You’re saying your family was here long before European settlement.”

  “Yeah, on both sides. On Mom’s side, Grandpa says we were Penatekas. The Honey Eaters.”

  “The honey eaters.”

  “Yeah. Tougher than that sounds. We were the ones who came down from the north and pushed the Lipan across the border.”

  “‘Indians.’”

  “Yeah. I guess they called them Apache. I just learned about it when I was in middle school, and I’m still studying it. But when you realize you are an ‘Indian’ and you are not extinct, you see things differently.”

  Percy had flagged correspondence between Xelina and her friends talking about these subjects, giving him the idea to lay this foundation as a left-handed way to invert the government’s narrative. Actually hearing it in person was different than he expected. And you could see Broyles was surprised. Maybe in a good way.

  “Did your family have to go live on a reservation?”

  “Some probably went to Oklahoma. Some to Mexico. But there weren’t really any reservations here, in Texas.”

  “They took it all?”

  “Grandpa said the family had to adapt when Mirabeau Lamar took over as President of Texas from Sam Houston and said he was going to bury every last Indian in the ground.”

  “President Lamar, the one the street a couple blocks over is named after.”

  “He didn’t know we are seeds, said Grandpa.”

  That raised Broyles’s eyebrows. Donny wondered if it was a bad idea, but he was already in the water.

  “Is this part of what your work is about?”

  “Yes, exactly. Once you understand that everything that you thought had been erased by the conquest is actually still here, waiting to grow back, it changes how you feel about the future.”

  “Growing, not fighting.”

  “That’s all I’m trying to show in my videos,” she continued. “Show the parts of that future that are already here, hiding in plain sight. Help us nurture it. Maybe if I was better at what I do, there would be less confusion about what I stand for.”

  “You’re young, and these are confusing times. Am I correct that most of your videos are nature documentaries?”

  “Yeah. I mean, most of them are too short to call ‘documentaries,’ more like just cool shots. But they try to show the remnants of the way this place was before, remnants that are still here, waiting to reclaim what was taken.”

  “My vision must be worse than I thought,” said Broyles. “I thought those were bullets I saw, but they must have been butterflies.”

  “Banana clips, maybe,” said Xelina. “If you mean the clips the prosecutor called the recruiting videos, that was a joke. Like a hoax.”

  “A hoax?” said Broyles.

  “Yeah. You know how all those militia groups used to make their videos, back when they were calling for people to get rid of President Green, take our country back, all that stuff?”

  “Like the People’s Border Patrol?” said Donny.

  “Exactly,” said Xelina. “The Brownsville Boys, the Bellaire Rifles, all those dudes showing off their guns, helping round up refugees, police the border. I was just like, how would they like it if we did that?”

  “Who do you mean by ‘we’?” said Broyles.

  “People like me, I guess,” said Xelina, not falling for the trap. “People who aren’t like them. Brown people. Black people. Poor white people, like those kids from the camps, the farmers and workers who lost it all to the drought. We’re all ‘Indians’ now, and we’re tired of being colonized.”

  “Then the guns weren’t a hoax, were they?” said Broyles.

  “They were real guns, but the people holding them weren’t soldiers, or guerrillas. Not yet, at least.”

  “Were they ‘Free Rovers’?”

  “Some of them were Rovers, for sure.”

  “So you don’t believe in countries, am I right?”

  “Right. We don’t believe in borders, or property lines.”

  “You just go where you please.”

  “When we can. It’s more important that the animals get to go where they need to go. But we reject the legitimacy of boundaries in the land made by men.”

  “And all you did is make films trying to illustrate these ideas, right?” said Donny.

  “I did that. And to do that, I went where I wanted.”

  “With your leader Gregorio.”

  “We don’t do ‘leaders.’ And I don’t follow any man. I go where I want to go.”

  “Tell us about Gregorio, Xelina,” said Donny. “Tell the court what happened to him.”

  And then suddenly her voice sounded like she was talking backwards, inside a barrel, underwater.

  Donny looked over at CSO Walton. The red light was on.

  “Your Honor,” said Donny, waving at Walton. “You already agreed this is relevant.”

  “I did,” said Broyles. “But I don’t get to decide what’s secret. Mr. Walton?”

  “Judge,” said Walton. “This subject matter is off-limits. Top Secret, Grade Alpha.”

  “Oh,” said Broyles, looking surprised at the designation. Grade Alpha was as high as it got for domestic operations. Donny had never seen anything at that level in this court. Maybe Broyles hadn’t, either.

  “Are you going to let them cover up a political
murder, Judge?” He looked down at his cheat sheet, shorthand for the court’s rules on classified evidence. “Why don’t you have Mr. Walton give you the in camera review you’re entitled to under 9.2? Then you can decide for yourself who has the facts on their side.”

  “Good idea,” said Broyles. “Mr. Walton? I’d like to know what you have on this topic.”

  Walton looked at Broyles. Then he looked down at his notes. Then he looked at Donny. Or so Donny thought, until he realized Walton was looking at the suits in the gallery, behind Donny.

  When Donny looked at them, only one looked back. The guy. He had the eyes of a predator, one that was controlled by machines.

  “I’m sorry, Your Honor,” said Walton. “You are not cleared for that.”

  Broyles raised his eyebrows. “Would you repeat that?”

  “It’s in the rules,” said Walton.

  Broyles didn’t like that. No judge would.

  “Turn on your noisemaker and get over here,” ordered Broyles. “Or I will let this woman walk right now.”

  Walton looked at the back of the room again. Then the red light went on, and he got up and approached the bench from the side.

  Broyles leaned over as Walton spoke to him, hand cupped over the judge’s ear so you couldn’t even see his lips. Donny tried to read Broyles’s expression. He kept a poker face. But then he looked at the man in the back of the room, and noticeably whitened.

  “Very well,” said Broyles. He cleared his throat. “Mr. Kimoe, I’m afraid you are going to have to try a different line of questioning.”

  “You know I’m right,” Donny persisted. “What happened to Gregorio Zarate-Taylor is the real reason the government is keeping her.”

  “You have no idea what the government knows,” said Broyles.

  “They know how to pull your strings,” said Donny.

  Broyles reddened as he looked down at Donny. “Look at you, Kimoe. Seriously. You’re an embarrassment.”

  Xelina was looking at him, too. It looked like she agreed. She was the one sitting atop the trapdoor, while Donny showed what happens when you think you can outsmart the referees who’ve already rigged the whole game.

  “What happened to Gregorio is also the reason the government kidnapped me last night,” said Donny.

  Broyles shook his head. “No, it’s not. Everyone but you seems to know why that is. They sent me a copy of your recording to listen to on my way into work this morning. You’re lucky I allowed you to appear.”

  “It wasn’t the way they make it sound,” said Donny.

  “I think it was,” said Broyles, taking the face he usually saved for sentencing. “I can see as much looking at your disheveled and half-drugged mien here before me right now. A desperate man. Maybe even a bit deranged.”

  “Does this mean you’re going to give me a new lawyer?” said Xelina. “Because I kind of agree.”

  “Not today,” said Broyles. “Because you will be happy to hear I am satisfied, thanks to Mr. Kimoe’s surprisingly and probably accidentally lucid line of examination, that you are not a combatant, but an advocate.”

  “Your Honor—” said Bridget.

  “Hold on, Ms. Kelly,” said Broyles. “I have also heard quite enough to be persuaded that Ms. Rocafuerte has revoked her citizenship, and qualifies for denaturalization on that basis.”

  “Your Honor,” objected Donny. “That has not even been charged by the government.”

  “You forget that in this court I am the government, Mr. Kimoe.”

  “Could have fooled me,” said Donny, looking at the suits in the back.

  Broyles ignored him. “I am also persuaded by her admissions, which you so handily served up, that the defendant participated as a conspirator in the illegal occupation of United States government facilities in the Coastal Evacuation Zone, an act of insurrection.” He held up a document. “All of which is substantiated by her confession, which is all we need.”

  “Obtained through unlawful means of interrogation,” said Donny. “But I suppose your master Mr. Walton wouldn’t let us talk about that, either—”

  “In light of all this,” said Broyles, talking over Donny, “I find that Ms. Rocafuerte’s denaturalization should therefore be handled under the expedited procedures and interim detention authority of the Special Emergency Tribunal.”

  “You want to take away the citizenship of a woman whose family has lived here longer than this has been a nation?”

  “To that I would remind you of what Justice Marshall concluded in such matters,” said Broyles. “‘Conquest gives a title which the courts of the conqueror cannot deny.’”

  “A title stamped in blood,” said Donny. “Perfected with cover-ups and lies. And cured in the cowardice of spineless jurists.”

  Broyles finally lost it. “Gregorio Zarate-Taylor was a traitor!” he yelled, the veins in his temples engorged with his anger. “And if he was killed by government agents, it was not murder. No more than was the execution of Jerome Hardy.”

  Thank you for getting your real feelings on the record, thought Donny. He wanted to keep pushing Broyles’s buttons, but Xelina beat him to it.

  “When we take over, we know who will be in the front of the line for execution,” she said.

  “And there we have it,” said Broyles. “An aspiring Robespierre represented by an aspiring Oswald. I am afraid, Ms. Rocafuerte, that you will find my property lines rather harder to cross than the ones where you live, or in the abandoned quarters of the Zone where you like to go help your animal friends.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Xelina.

  “Not as surprised as you will be as to the even harder time you will have getting through the barriers that will contain you in the place I am sending you now.”

  “I’m not afraid,” said Xelina, not looking entirely convinced.

  “You should be,” said Broyles. “Because you are going to find out, too late to do anything about it, why they say it is the only sentence worse than death.”

  She definitely looked scared now.

  Donny started to interject, but Broyles banged the gavel and ordered the court reporter to cut. Then he called the marshals to bring back the hood, and take the prisoner away to the prison so secret they didn’t even let you know the name.

  PART TWO

  DISCOVERY

  21

  The morning after the hearing, as Xelina waited in a cold prison cell for her transfer to the insurgent detention facility, Donny went fishing in a concrete creek.

  Houston was a city built on a swamp. A place where the pavement was either on top of the water or underneath it. Most of the homesites along the bayou were empty now, the idea of their occupancy ceded to the inevitability of the next flood. People who could afford it had been elevating their houses, as armies of entrepreneurial good old boys with pickup loans to pay and a will to conquer got into the business of adapting real property to the environmental future their grandfathers had endowed. People who could afford more than that started tearing down their old houses and building entirely new structures on stilts. The best of those were beautiful lattices of fractal steel rising up out of ferally landscaped tropical foliage, the kind of innovation Houston’s zoning-free development culture fostered, beautiful and also sad in the message they sent about what was coming. The banks were behind it all, keen to believe in a viable future for the business of asset-backed securitization.

  The irony of living in a city that was partly underwater for a good chunk of the year was not lost on Donny. He wondered how the quants in the skyscrapers did their present value calculations, in a world where the historical weather data the nerds had so studiously compiled over the years had lost almost all of its predictive power. Maybe someone was teaching the bots how to make their models factor in alligators sunning on the on-ramps of submerged freeways.

  On mornings like that when he woke up early and sober, Donny would crack the books with a cup of coffee and do his best work, taking advantage of that
hour after dreamtime when the big fish of the subconscious were still swimming close to the surface, ready to yield glimpses of the unconsidered possible. And as dawn began to seep through the flyover, Donny would grab his fly rod and walk down to the water where the real fish were waiting.

  The first few casts in the morning were always the best, especially when they hit, when the lure would land right there for some big boy ready to bite. This stretch of the bayou was not paved in the channel, part of old Mayor Barthelme’s awesome but unfunded plan to restore the waterways to a simulation of their natural condition, but there were roads running along the curve of both banks, and bridges in sight upstream and down. That time of year a lot of waterfowl were on the move, headed south or settled into the Texas tropics for the season, and it never got old to hear the quacking and flapping of a flock following the routes of the urban rivers. The herons and egrets were always out there, fishing alongside him as the planes took off in the distance and the Coast Guard choppers set out on their morning patrols. Sometimes Donny would see a big owl in this one tree on the opposite bank, watching the weird hairless ape do his loopy string-and-hook dance. And once in a while an osprey would show up, cruising over the creek, sharing intelligence about where the big fish were loitering.

  The fish in that urban water were not beautiful, especially not the gar, and the way the water sometimes made your skin tingle was a good reminder not to eat them. The trash that showed up on the banks after the floodwaters receded—tires and lawn furniture and backyard toys, plastic bags filling the trees like toxic fruit, and a million plastic bottles bearing their invisible messages of the absence of human care—made you wonder what less visible pollution lurked in the dark channel. But those fish were fighters, hardy survivors adapted to this fucked-up place we made, and when Donny reeled one in on the barbless hook he would eyeball it, check for mutations, then give it a little massage and let it swim off. Catch and release was a concept largely alien to Texas, the only state Donny knew of that had included the right to hunt and fish and “harvest wildlife” in its Bill of Rights, a place where coming off the water without filling the cooler with your limit was a species of failure, but it made sense here. At least until the food in the stores ran out. That hadn’t happened yet. But it had come close after Zelda, especially in the poorer parts of town.