“Did you eat all the ice cream?” asked Georgia solemnly.
“What?”
“Mom says the Nazis ate all the ice cream in the stores, and that’s why we can’t have any for dessert,” said Georgia. She pointed at the eagle and swastika sewn over the Guard’s buttoned right pocket. “You’re a Nazi. Did you eat all the ice cream?”
“Uh, no, honey, I didn’t,” said the bemused Rhinehart. “And actually, I’m not a Nazi. Most Civil Guards aren’t. We were city police or county deputies before, and we stayed on. That emblem is just part of our uniform, now that we have a new government, and yeah, it’s a bit strange. I never thought I’d be wearing a swastika, but a lot of strange things have happened in the past five years. I’ve met some real Nazis since Longview, true, and they do some unusual things sometimes, but no, I don’t think they’re running around to grocery stores and eating all the ice cream so children can’t have any.”
“Ignore her,” said Clancy. “My daughter is ten years old and not four, as she just reminded us a few minutes ago, and she knows she’s being silly.”
“Peanut is just being a brat to pick at Mom,” said Kevin. “I think the revolution is cool!”
“You were talking about the new unarmed police force,” said Clancy, trying to steer the conversation away from both Amber’s confectionary paranoia and Kevin’s adolescent enthusiasm about the Northwest revolution.
“Oh, yeah,” said Rhinehart as he sipped his coffee. “The way they laid it out to us in our briefings is that in a truly free society, everyone should have guns except the police. That way we’re not just another armed gang, we’re representatives of the law, and if the law and the state itself command respect, then we don’t need guns to do it for our officers. The message does seem to be sinking through, even in a wild and woolly place like Montana,” he went on. “Oh, the cops still have guns, all right. We actually have a better firearms course and higher range qualification standard these days than we did under the old system, and we can get weapons quick enough if the need arises. We just don’t carry them around with us on routine duties and community contact work. So far, everyone seems to be getting with the program. Unless they’re just plain crazy, nobody is going to pull down on a Guard, because they know who’s standing behind us, and they know who’s standing behind us won’t f… uh, fool around if you shoot one of us. It’s not like the old days, when there were zillions of laws and the whole system could be played like a pinball machine by anybody with enough money. We have very few laws these days, but the ones we have, you obey. Period, end of story. When folks clearly understand where the lines are and that you don’t ever cross them, there’s no problem.”
“People having jobs certainly helps,” said Clancy. “My understanding is that what with the new Labor Service, and with all the regulations and taxes taken off small businesses, we already have full employment here in Missoula, which was certainly not the case a year ago. Kevin has an after-school job now, and other business people downtown keep trying to lure him away with better offers.”
“Mr. Majeski is already paying me in the new Northwest credits,” said Kevin, holding up a red five-credit note bearing Melanie Young’s image, modified from its original pink by the Ministry of Finance.
“Yeah, the Guard is getting paid in credits now as well, even though the official transition period doesn’t start until July the first,” said Rhinehart. “The new mayor was talking in the city council last night about how Missoula is going to petition the Bureau of Race and Resettlement in Olympia to steer a lot more of these refugees from the States out here, instead of Portland and Seattle and the I-5 corridor, because with the old factories re-opening and new ones on the drawing board, we actually have a labor shortage. You’re right, Dr. Myers. With no minorities and full employment, crime figures disappear. Sure, in any society you’re going to get a small element of people who are too lazy to work, or who are weak in the head, or just plain predatory. That will happen here, but when it does we’ll deal with it, and we have a lot more latitude to do so now. Since we’re no longer locking people up for having a couple of joints, we can concentrate on more serious stuff, like what’s left of the meth trade, which isn’t much.”
“How on earth did you ever clean that up?” asked Clancy curiously. “Meth was everywhere in Missoula. I used to be afraid to go certain places with my family because of all the hopheads.”
“First time we catch anybody with meth or rock, we take ’em down to the station and beat the crap out of ’em,” said Rhinehart happily. “We figure a lot of people just haven’t wrapped their minds around the fact that things have changed. Then we tell them that the second time we catch ’em, we’re going to take them up into the mountains, dig a hole, and leave ’em in it. So far, we haven’t had to do that. For one thing, the market has dried up, since almost all the remaining junkies ran off when the NDF marched in. You’d be amazed how quick people acquire a whole new attitude, when they know some lawyer in a thousand-dollar suit isn’t going to help them play games with the system for a year and then get them off with probation. Of course, there are no more lawyers any more, and I can tell you for sure that every cop is over the moon about that.”
“And you think this is right?” demanded Amber from the doorway where she stood. “A totalitarian state denying accused persons legal representation? Assaulting and threatening substance abusers and denying them due process?”
“I’m no big legal scholar or philosopher, ma’am,” said Rhinehart with a shrug. “All I know is that this way works, and the old way didn’t. I know that arrests are way down for everything from drugs to burglary to domestic violence. I know that with no blacks or browns, there’s almost nobody ever in our jail any more. I know we don’t need half as many police as we did before the revolution, and I know everybody in the community is a lot safer. The old system sounded good in theory, but in practice, it sucked. The new way is better, and that’s a fact. Well, thanks for the coffee, folks, but I need to get going.”
Clancy escorted the cop out the door and down to his patrol car. “Look, Rhinehart, I really did want to talk to you about something,” he said. “You heard what my wife said when she opened the door. She was a lifelong Democrat and a Hillary Clinton supporter before the revolution, and she has a tendency to kind of—overreact these days. She really isn’t any kind of threat to the new government, her liberalism is just kind of a habit I know she needs to break. She really did think you were coming to take her away just now, and I know it happens, because some friends of ours have, ah, disappeared.”
“Yeah, it happens,” agreed Rhinehart grimly. “Nothing we can do about it. When somebody files a report on one of those missing person cases, it goes to the new captain, who is a former NVA man. He knows which ones are the political cases, and he balls it up and throws it in the wastebasket. Although to be fair, sometimes it’s not a political disappearance in that sense. A lot of the time it’s people just getting twitchy about something in their past or some run-in they’ve had with the NDF or something, so they jump in their cars and they cut and run back east across Interstate 15, back into the United States. Those highways are still open, you know. All of the border posts and barbed wire and fences and minefields they’re building are on the U.S. side. The media in both countries are starting to call it the McCurtain, you know, from McDonald’s, like everything in America could be called a McSomething or other. The Republic doesn’t want to keep anybody in who doesn’t want to be here, it’s the United States that wants to keep people out of the Republic. Anybody who wants to leave the Northwest still can. The official attitude is good riddance.”
“Amber wanted us to leave, but I think we’re past that, and now that we own the house I think that will be a definite incentive for her to forget about fleeing,” said Clancy. “But look, Rhinehart, I have to ask you, please, if you could forget about Amber’s little outburst when she came to the door, and her attitude just now, and not report it to anyone who might de
cide to take it further. She just talks that way because it was fashionable when she was in college, and she never grew out of it. But still, if certain people were to overhear her saying some of these things and it got back to the wrong quarters…”
Rhinehart nodded somberly. “Yeah, there is a downside to this new way of ours, and that is that the people we’ve all been used to insulting and bad-mouthing for the past five years, and before that, are now in a position to do something about it. Looks like what goes around does indeed come around. Nobody ever figured that these men and women we were taught all our lives to hate and deride would win, and that someday we’d have to put our asses where our mouths once were. Liberalism is no longer an affordable luxury. It’s dangerous, and now that it’s dangerous and the other side of the bread is buttered, there’s a lot fewer liberals around. Don’t worry, Dr. Myers, I won’t say anything, but you really need to see if you can get your wife to tone it down in public. I was never NVA, but some of my new colleagues at the station house were, and she’s lucky it wasn’t one of the new guys doing this milk run delivering papers tonight.”
“Is it true this Bureau of State Security thing we keep hearing about is in town now, spying on people and tapping phones and hunting down people opposed to the new régime?” asked Clancy in a worried voice. “I really need to know. Is my wife in real danger or is she just being paranoid?”
“Yeah, the revolutionary spooks are around,” admitted Rhinehart. “Nobody knows where they are, or how to contact them. They’re genuine secret police, in that sense. I guess my captain would know. He’s that former NVA guy I told you about. Ironically, we were hunting for him during almost the full five years of the Trouble. He was the brigade commandant for Missoula County, and we never got near him. He walked in a few months ago wearing a new Guard uniform and called us all into the assembly room. ‘My name is A.J. Drones,’ he says. ‘I’m your new station commander. Some of you boys have been wanting to get me in this place for years, and now I’m here.’ Shook us up, I admit. He would probably know how to contact BOSS, but none of us does. None of us has even seen ’em, but we know they’re around. I would advise your wife to be a little more circumspect in the future, Dr. Myers. Hell, a lot more circumspect.”
* * *
The next day was a Saturday, and Clancy decided it was time finally to take the bull by the horns and have it out with his wife over her attitude toward the new government and her risky practice of baiting Missoula’s new top dogs in public. He decided to send Kevin and Georgia to a movie that evening to give them some privacy, which was now both physically and morally safe to do, since the streets were white at night and the theaters were showing virtually nothing made after 1965 or so. Clancy found an old John Wayne flick on at the downtown Paramount, which was within walking distance, and he figured it was time for his kids to meet the Duke.
He went into work that morning to grade papers and work on his lecture notes for the coming week, when his students would be covering the poet William Blake. The first warning he got that anything was off kilter came at about four thirty in the afternoon, when Kevin called him from the school track meet. His mother had failed to pick him up. Puzzled, Clancy drove over and collected Kevin, then arrived at his home about five o’clock.
He could tell the moment he walked into the house that something was badly wrong. The place felt empty, and it was. He looked in the garage and saw that the second SUV, the Range Rover, was missing. He went upstairs and found signs of hurried packing in the bedroom and in Georgia’s room. He ran downstairs, calling the names of his wife and his daughter, somehow knowing in one terrifying moment that he would never hear either of them answer him again.
Clancy Myers found the note taped to the refrigerator, read it, and then he staggered into his living room and collapsed into a chair. “Dad, what’s going on?” demanded Kevin. “Where are Mom and Georgie?”
“Your mother has left us,” he told his son. “She is going to live with your grandmother in Washington, D.C. She says in this letter that I can have you, because you’ve already been ruined, and you’re nothing but a little Hitler Youth now. Her own words. But she says she won’t let us ruin Georgia. Ruin Georgia? Christ in heaven!” Clancy Myers looked at his son, tears streaming down his face. “That damnable bitch! She took our little girl, Kevin! She took our little girl!”
V
THAT TODDLIN’ TOWN
(Nine months after Longview)
Chicago, Chicago, that toddlin’ town!
Chicago, Chicago, I’ll show you around!
—old Frank Sinatra song
Elias Horakova was having a really bad day.
That sweltering July morning, he arrived late at his job at the Chicago Tool and Die Company’s last functioning American plant in Calumet Heights, after a train commute that had stretched to three hours due to several mechanical breakdowns, and also due to a dead goat on the tracks from a Santeria ceremony the night before. Needless to say, the air conditioning on both the local rail and the El was broken. It hardly ever worked any more.
When Eli finally got to work, he learned from a memo in his mailbox that the venerable factory was finally closing its doors, and the last jobs were being shipped to the new plant in Guatemala. Eli took his lunch break in the Moose Lodge tavern down the street, quaffed one too many Old Style beers, and when he returned to work, he took a swing at his obnoxious Mexican foreman with a pipe wrench. For this he was informed that he would lose fifty percent of his severance package. The company Human Relations Committee also told him they were notifying the FBI of a possible hatecrime. Then after the endless trip home on the oven-like trains, Eli had arrived at his home in Cicero to find a dead nigger lying in his living room.
The dead man was still bleeding. He wore a filthy tank top, an empty holster on his hip, jeans and boots, and on his coal-black head was glued the remains of a bright multi-colored wool toboggan cap that was soaked in blood and brain matter. Horakova’s 16-year-old son Eddie, a chunky tow-headed youth whose arms and hands were already as big and muscular as his father’s, was sitting on the couch, still holding the old .45-caliber Colt automatic he had used to shoot the huge congoid. A nine-millimeter Glock automatic that Eli had never seen before was lying on the coffee table. “Jesus Christ! Eddie? What the fuck happened?” croaked Elias, his throat suddenly bone-dry.
“It’s that Jamaican badass Rico Tubbs,” Eddie said in a toneless voice. “He was gonna take Millie to the Center. For questioning, he said.”
“Mother of God!” cried Eli in horror. Everyone in Chicago knew what such questioning in a Neighborhood Watch clubhouse would have entailed for a 13-year-old white girl. “Where’s Millie? Is she all right?” he demanded.
“She’s in her room,” said Eddie. “I already laid it all out for her, Dad. She was in her room the whole day, on her computer, or listening to music with her headphones on, and she didn’t see or hear nothing. No matter what the cops do or say to her, she didn’t see or hear nothing. She understands. She won’t break, Dad. This is all on me. I won’t let them involve her.”
“It’s not the cops I’m worried about, it’s Rico’s nigger buddies down at the Neighborhood Watch,” said Eli, sitting down in an armchair and shakily lighting a cigarette. “Tell me what happened, Ed.”
“It was maybe half an hour ago. Rico came in the door…”
“Did he break in?” interrupted Eli.
“No, he used his house key, the one the city made us give to the Watch,” his son told him.
“Did he have any papers on him about Millie, about the family? Anything from the FBI or the Human Relations Commission?”
“Nah,” said Eddie. “He just walked in. Millie and me were sitting here watching TV. Rico walks over and grabs Millie by the arm. He says, ‘You be coming wit me, little mama. We got some questions for you down at de Sen-tair,’ you know that crappy Jamaican accent he had. He didn’t even look at me. He didn’t care I was there. I was just a white boy, what was I g
onna do? But I knew what I was gonna do, Dad. I didn’t say nothing. I just got up and went into your bedroom and got the gun from your stash, jacked in a round like you showed me that time we went shooting down in the Forest Preserves, and I walked back in here. Millie was kicking and screaming, and Rico was laughing as he dragged her out the door. I shot him once in the chest and put him down. He was lying there gasping like a fish out of water, clawing at his holster for his gun. I leaned over and took the gun. That’s it on the table there. Then I put the muzzle right onto his teeth and I pulled the trigger again. Outfit style, like Stash says they used to do back in the day. I just did what I hadda do, Dad.”
“I know, son,” said his father, his heart breaking. “Where’s your mother? Does she know?”
“No. Mom’s still at work. Tommy’s still at day care. Mom is picking him up on her way home.”
“What about Stash?”
“He wheeled himself into the room when he heard the yelling and screaming and the shots. He’s out in the garage now. He said he was getting some stuff we’re gonna need.”
“What stuff?” asked Eddie’s father, still trying to take it all in.
“Dis stuff,” said Eli’s father Stanislas, a lean and wiry old man in his seventies, as he rolled his wheelchair into the living room. On his lap were several hacksaws and a roll of black garbage bags. “I’m glad you’re home, Eli, because it’s gonna take two of you to get dis buck’s clothes off and get him into de bathtub. Den you gotta cut him up. We put de pieces in dese garbage bags, we weigh de bags down wit bricks or scrap iron, and tonight you and Eddie take de van, and you toss de bags into de lake. Throw each one in at a different place.”
It was a testament to the realities of life in the United States, and Chicago in particular, that the idea of calling the police was so foolish it never even occurred to Eli to suggest it. His son had raised his hand against a man with a black skin; in Chelsea Clinton’s America, his life was now over. “They’re gonna come looking for him,” said Eli hopelessly, gesturing toward the black carcass on the floor. “There’s what? Three white homes left on Kildare Avenue, and we’re the only family with a girl? If the homeys didn’t know where he was going, they’ll figure it out soon enough.”
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