“We stopped at Jerry Loudermilk’s place this morning for a final gas-up and some breakfast,” said John. “Something’s going on over in Boulder. Emergency combined meeting of the county commissioners and the city council. Don’t know what, but you know this county. Whatever happens on one side of the Road in the morning, everybody on the other side knows about it by sundown.”
“Okay, well, if that’s all, I guess that’s all,” said Bobby. “Let me know when you’re going out again, boys, and thanks for the cigars.”
“Will do,” said Selkirk.
“I’m calling Mom and Patsy to let them know we got back okay, then I’m going to the bank and deposit this,” said Hatcher, lifting his check from Nordstroms. “Let me guess, you’re going to the Emerald House to get hammered? That’s fine, just give Mike your keys and you have Linda call me when you’re on the floor so you don’t try flying a car when you’re drunk.”
“No, I’ll go cash my check as well, then I got some business to take care of,” said John with a smile. “Don’t worry, sober business.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Hatch, unsmiling. “Sure you don’t want to get hammered? I think the Emerald House is a better option all around.”
“Don’t worry about it!” snapped John.
“Let me ask you something, Lieutenant,” said Hatcher Selkirk with a scowl, turning to Bobby. “What happens if and when my idiot brother here gets himself killed Over The Road some day, or night, because he’s doing something stupid? What’s the Guard’s position on that?”
“If it happens Over The Road, we don’t have a position,” Bobby replied. “Officially, anyway. Not our jurisdiction, not our country. Unofficially, what are you talking about?” He looked at Johnny Selkirk. “Something going on I need to know about, John?”
“Nope,” said Johnny. “Not a damned thing.” He turned and walked away.
“Danny Tolliver?” Sweeney asked Hatcher, arching his eyebrows. “He still on that kick?”
“So it would appear,” replied Hatcher.
“Danny Tolliver?” asked Bobby. “Don’t recognize the name. Who’s he?”
“She,” said Sweeney. “Danielle’s her name. Stunning young lady from Over The Road, sweet sixteen and stacked like a seam of grapes. Johnny has been sneaking Across The Road for a good six months now.”
“Not illegal,” commented Bobby. “At least not on our end. Technically speaking, under their law none of us is supposed to be Over The Road at all, but nobody pays any attention to that fact any more.”
“It may not be illegal, but it’s stupid and dangerous,” growled Hatcher in frustration. “If Elwood Tolliver catches John Selkirk with his granddaughter, it doesn’t matter whether they’re doing the wild thing or just sitting there reading Bible verses, he’s going to shoot, and either John kills him or old man Tolliver kills John. If John dies then I and my brothers, and my father and my grandfather are going Over The Road. You could call for some backup from Butte and maybe stop us for a while, but not forever. You understand, that’s not a threat, Lieutenant. God knows I don’t want anything like that to happen. None of us do. We’ve all talked at John until we’re blue in the damned face, and he just won’t listen. I’m just telling you how it is. If any harm comes to John Over There, then we know there won’t ever be any justice from the Americans, so we’re just gonna have to take it for ourselves.”
“Jesus, this sounds like some kind of blood feud!” commented Bobby.
“Pretty much,” said Sweeney with a nod. “Goes back to the war. The first war, forty years ago. The Selkirks were Nationalist and the Tollivers were Union. Ray Selkirk was a Volunteer and Elwood Tolliver was a Patty.”
“A Fattie?” asked Campbell, surprised. “And he dares to live this close to the border? Why hasn’t the Circus cut his throat?”
“No, a Patty,” explained Sweeney. “Kind of local slang for Police Anti-Terrorist Unit. Militarized police the Americans used as auxiliaries. Beginning back in the 1990s, the Americans loaded local police and sheriff’s departments up with everything from body armor to armored cars to heavy weapons like .50-caliber machine guns, brought in military personnel to train them, created SWAT teams and all kinds of special units that were supposed to be a new law enforcement élite, trained them in fire and maneuver and counter-insurgency, so forth and so on. Plus ideological indoctrination from the Southern Poverty Law Center in how to recognize evil racist white male Enemies of the People. After a while folks noticed that these militarized cop teams and units were being set up not just in big cities where there was certainly justification for it, but in remote areas of the country that were majority white. Especially there. Montana got a lot of those. Elwood was a Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy and he was offered an extra two hundred dollars a week and better medical insurance for his family if he’d join the PATU, which is what these special teams were called in this part of Montana.”
“Does Sheriff Lomax know about all this?” asked Bobby.
“He does,” confirmed Sweeney. “He says the same thing you and Hatch say now. Number one, it’s not unlawful and there’s nothing he can do unless somebody files a complaint, and number two, has Johnny lost his frigging mind?”
“I know the first war was really bad here in Montana,” said Bobby soberly. “In a way almost as bad as the second war, which was also largely fought here. At least the second war was over in seven weeks. It was conventional, and the lines were clear. Us against them, good against evil, no gray area, no moral ambiguity. The first one lasted five years, and it consisted mostly of a long string of individual homicides that just never seemed to stop, killing after killing and horror story after horror story that after a while poisoned the very air. My Aunt Jenny, Mrs. Stockdale the retired university Chancellor’s wife, she was a Volunteer, and so was Jason. She and Jason Stockdale were two of the few survivors of the Helena Raid, when Jack Smith of the Regulators was killed. They never talked about it much.”
“Most people around here don’t any more, either,” said Hatcher. “Talk about it, I mean. I’m almost thirty, and I think I can count on my fingers the number of times my grandfather has even mentioned the Volunteers or the War of Independence. But he wears his roundel with the ribbon any time he dresses in a jacket. I think I was about ten years old before I got curious and asked him what it was. But some people have a lot more reason not to remember than others.”
“Elwood Tolliver and Ray Selkirk being two of those?” asked Bobby,
“Yep,” said Sweeney. “Elwood Tolliver was wounded during an NVA contact in the fourth year. Not just wounded. He was deliberately kneecapped, a punishment shooting. Crippled for life. He was given an artificial knee which worked for a while, but then the U.S.A. fell apart and so did Elwood’s artificial knee, and he can’t get a replacement that works. So he just had some Hindu butcher at a clinic stick a pin in it to keep it straight. He can’t move the knee at all now and he can barely walk, even with a cane.”
“Great Caesar’s ghost! The National Health could give him an artificial knee that would have him dancing a Highland fling in no time!” exclaimed Bobby. “You know they’ll take any white man or woman, from anywhere. This guy lives within ten miles of a clinic that can heal him for good, and he does nothing?”
“Elwood would literally die rather than take anything from this Republic or any man in it,” said Hatcher flatly. “He almost did once, when he had double pneumonia and the hospital in Boulder wouldn’t help him because the Americans had run out of money and stopped the medical insurance for veterans.”
“Well, okay,” conceded Bobby. “So the guy’s a bitter-ender. I can see why he wouldn’t be too pleased to have the grandson of a Northwest Volunteer squiring his granddaughter around.”
“It’s worse than that,” said Hatcher. “My grandfather, Ray Selkirk, was the Northwest Volunteer who blew off Elwood Tolliver’s kneecap.”
XXXI
THE AMERICAN SIDE
(40 Years, t
en months, and one day after Longview)
Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
—Proverbs 16:18
About the same time Johnny Selkirk was slipping back Across The Road in his private ground car to see if he could find Danielle Tolliver and sneak in a few hours of forbidden love, Jefferson County Sheriff Ben Lomax and the mayor of American Boulder, Jay Gavin, were holding an impromptu get-together in the clerk’s office in the Boulder Town Hall. Several other local political types were gathered around the clerk’s desk, sitting in chairs borrowed from elsewhere or else on other functionaries’ desks. In the bad old days when Hunter Wallace and One Nation Indivisible ruled the land, they would have held such unofficial conclaves outside the building altogether, preferably out on the open prairie somewhere, for fear of electronic eavesdropping.
Americans on the whole weren’t afraid of bugs any more—the federal government outside the New England Union and Washington, D.C., areas no longer had the capability in money, personnel, or expertise for extensive electronic monitoring, and no one remembered how to work the surveillance drones any more. Some of the remaining American local governments had miniature Surveillance States in operation these days and some didn’t, and it had to be admitted that Montana under its current Republican coalition of native-born cattlemen, rural and small-towners, and Christian evangelicals was pretty good about not spying on its citizens. The old outside-backed, liberal Democrat coalition of eco-freaks, media, and Judaeo-liberals had been crippled by the Longview treaty forty years before, as well as the subsequent loss of most of the state’s large urban areas where liberals and non-whites under the United States régime always congregated their assets and their numbers in order to outspend and outvote the white countryside. There were still some ageing liberals left in East Montana, operating in the state legislature as the Green Party, since good leftists didn’t use the name Democrat any more. The corruption, perversion and murder of the two elder Clintons had never shaken the faith of good lefty-libs one jot, holding firm through three impeachments and endless wars and catastrophes. But Longview had burst like a bomb on the world Left and shaken its faith to the core, while Chelsea Clinton’s surrender to the racist forces of darkness had damned the Democratic Party forever in the eyes of the world’s Judaeo-liberal élite. It had disbanded unmourned shortly afterward and its political elements had melded into the Greens or One Nation Indivisible.
However, the absence of all-powerful central government spying on Montana citizens did not remove the fear of plain, old-fashioned informers. The state police and the politicians in Billings were notorious for maintaining eyes and ears throughout the remainder of the state, especially along the border. To be sure, sometimes these networks of unofficial state operatives were put to ambiguous uses. Like all democratic (small d) politicians, the East Montana state legislature and state government contained a good many men who liked to play both ends against the middle. In addition, the random citizen in the border counties who picked up the odd backhander in New American dollars from Billings in exchange for information also occasionally received similar baksheesh in Northwest credits from BOSS and the War Prevention Department, sometimes for the same piece of intelligence. The city fathers of Boulder wanted to make sure that the discussion at this particular meeting didn’t end up either in Billings or Missoula, hence the closed door and the select attendee list. Besides Sheriff Lomax and Mayor Gavin there were the town treasurer, Roland Hoy, Councilman Shep Akins, and the chairman of the Board of Commissioners, Monty Sanderson, who was also the biggest rancher in the county. Sanderson was a tall and weather-beaten man of about 60, wearing a plaid shirt and a battered Stetson, who looked like he played a cowboy in the movies but who in fact really was one. He even chewed tobacco.
These men constituted a kind of unofficial subcommittee of local government in Boulder, a kitchen council. They were united by two common motivations. The first was a genuine and urgent desire to keep Jefferson County a functioning, stable and decent place to live, free of cross-border violence and turmoil. They knew they were sparrows nesting in a rain gutter who could be washed away by the flood at the slightest lapse of attention, and that in order to survive the community had to stay on the good side of both the régime in Billings and their bellicose neighbors Over The Road. The second unifying factor was a visceral loathing for East Montana governor Walter Wellman, his scurvy thieving crew of suits up in Billings, and all their works. Monty Sanderson spoke for them all when he once declared from the floor of a council meeting, “I wouldn’t piss on Walt Wellman if his heart was on fire!” The fact that Wellman had handily defeated Sanderson in a primary election some years before was a contributing factor to this attitude.
Now Sanderson was saying, “Jay, we’ve got to stop this! We cannot allow that son-of-a-bitch in Billings to re-militarize the border on some excuse about protecting the development of this wonderful new economy we’re supposed to be getting out of the goodness of east coast hearts! We’ve had twenty-eight years of peace with that bunch Over The Road—well, more or less peace—and now Wally Wellman wants to start poking them with a stick to see what happens! Well, I think we know what will happen when we start bringing in not just soldiers but hippie-dippies and non-whites and maybe even Jewish people, for God’s sake! We know damned well how those lunatics are gonna react! I always figured the days of having goddamned so-called diversity jammed down our throats by central government were long gone!”
“They’re not jamming it down our throats, Monty,” replied Gavin. “They’re making us an offer that could make life better for everybody in the county, at least in the short term, and they’re asking for our permission to set up the Prosperity Zone in the form of a vote of the council and the commissioners or a referendum from the voters. That’s the way they should be going about a major change like this. They’re playing by the rules. But yeah, I agree, those people Over The Road will probably take exception, and we need to be concerned with that.”
“They’re like rattlesnakes,” commented Shep Akins, shaking his head gloomily. “You leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone, but you’d damned well better leave ’em alone! They are going to view this as Montana deliberately picking a fight with them, is what, and our border here is gonna end up being as bad and as bloody as their southern border with the Aztecs.” Out of two generations of habit, none of the men ever used the words “Northwest Republic” or “East Montana.” There was only one state of Montana. That whatever-it-was Across The Road was an elephant in the parlor that no one ever spoke of if it could be helped, some kind of freak weather condition that would one day dissipate by itself and everything would be back to normal. Whatever normal was.
No one remembered any more. For much of the remaining functional America, “normal” was fragments of the electronically preserved past, mostly entertainment people remembered from childhood, bits and pieces of MTV and adult cartoons that some elderly people remembered from the 1990s, or later pornography and propaganda. In Montana there was a vague feeling that normal somehow resembled those old situation comedies from a hundred years before that many people now kept on their computers and stored in their home entertainment screens, since they had become legal again, or at least since the police had stopped confiscating them and fining people for “non-diverse recreational viewing.” (Yes, that had been a criminal offense at one time.) The shows from the 1950s and 60s where everybody was white, where families consisted of a married man and woman who had white children, and lived in a nice house, and never had family meetings to discuss fellatio. It was a powerful but archaic collective cultural memory of the old America, which was now a nearly mythological past Golden Age that white people sensed rather than knew much about. It was a legend that whites had somehow acquired and retained from before “all that, you know, stuff” began at some vague time in the later 20th Century. Northwesters called this period the Dark Time, but to the rest of white America it was known as the Time of A
bundance, a simpler and happier period, a dim memory that was more felt than consciously thought about. There was a sense that once there had been a wonderful Camelot where all the faces were white, something that was almost extinct now everywhere in the world except in a few parts of North America like East Montana which was a little too close to that—that whatever it was in the Northwest corner of the map that was never labeled, not even in school textbooks. There was no law against black or brown or Jewish or homosexual people living in East Montana, not at all, but they just didn’t feel comfortable there. The winters were too cold, the landscape in the eastern part of the state was too bleak, and Nemesis was too near.
“What do you suggest we do about it, Monty?” asked Mayor Gavin. “And what makes you think most folks in the western counties want anything done about it? Have you grasped the implications of this Prosperity Zone thing they’re talking about? We’re talking tens of thousands of new residents for this part of the state over the next few years, thousands of new high-paying jobs. All those new people will need housing and need someplace to spend those big salaries, so we’re looking at a boom that can pull those of us who live here off welfare and actually give us a pot to piss in again! This is a rising tide that really will lift all our boats.”
“Yeah, I get it, but I don’t understand it,” said Sanderson. “Why the hell do the state and the ERA, or whatever that outfit in Burlington is, suddenly want to come all the way out here of all places, right on the very edge of the dragon’s den, and start throwing money at us for? Why exactly do they suddenly want to build factories and research labs and give us all these fancy development loans for our ranches and farms so we can double our production? Yeah, I heard what they said about the need for the U.S.A. to increase food production because all the poor colored folk in the cities are starving and if we can’t feed ’em they might break out of their pens and go marauding. Hell, American white people have been buying off those black sons of bitches to stop ’em from rioting for a century now. But there’s still farms in the rest of the country, or what’s left of the country after we gave the Southwest to the Mexicans and the Northwest to homicidal maniacs. Why here? Why not Wisconsin, or downstate Illinois, or Kansas?”
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