Chapter 9

Table of Contents

Chapter 9

For a breathless moment after the departure of the President-elect there was a stunned silence in the cell block, after which the row broke out in thunderous applause.  Michael Gasden had no idea that the acclamation was for him.  His hands clutched the metal bars fiercely, and the metal almost bit into his face as he tried to squeeze himself out, like Play-doh through a mold.

     "Damn, you a bad ass homes," said a voice in an adjoining cell.  "You really threw a brick at the President?"

     Was this his conscience speaking, or had the prospect of being locked up in perpetuity made Mike delusional?  "Excuse me, is somebody talking to me?" he answered meekly.

     “Chill out, homey.  Damn, we got a genuine bad ass terrorist in Santa Cruz County."

     Mike couldn't see the owner of the mystifying words being flung at him as from the ether,but there was no way they referred to him.  "I'm not a terrorist.  I didn't throw any bricks."

     “Well I tell you what, brother," the voice continued unabated, Mike's protests not making a dent on its opinion, because in prison everyone is innocent, innocence being a matter of psychological survival, "when you get to the big house you got a cell block of brothers here who will make sure you get good treatment, because you got balls, bro.  Just stay away from the Aryan nation because they're a bunch of Trump loving mother fuckers.

     None of this was particularly reassuring to Michael Gasden. He didn't want good treatment.  He didn't want to be anybody's hero.  He just wanted to get out.

     Outside the cell block, Dustin Diesel escorted Trump and his escorts out.  They were more like a spoiled rich kid’s entourage than a President and his security detail, and he wasn't sorry to see them go.  Maybe Santa Cruz County could get back to its normal dysfunctionality now.  With this false hope in mind the Sheriff walked back toward his office. It was a tiny cubbyhole barely containing desk and chair, definitely not worthy of his station, being dwarfed by those of smaller men puffed up with unmerited ambition, pufferfish who pop with the slightest application of the culinary fork.  Doris scolded him about it relentlessly. "You can't even pick a good office,” she chastized in quiet moments when she didn't have anything else to bitch about.

     "Heck honey," he would answer cautiously. He couldn't use the word hell because Doris was a God-fearing woman. "I don't use it for much besides hanging my jacket in.”

     When Dustin squeezed in through the tiny office doorway, Tony Vargas was already there, sitting with his feet up on the desk like he owned the place.  Dustin didn't think his day could get any worse, but now that he saw Tony this was an uncertainty.

     "Good morning Sheriff, have a seat," Tony said with a shameless grin.

     Dustin Diesel immediately closed the door, because the things Tony said were always scandalous enough to get somebody in trouble.

     "Damn, pardner," Tony started. "When you gonna trim that big ass mustache?  Doesn't that bother Doris when, you know, you're doing your business down there?"

     Dustin gave back an I’m not in the mood look.
     "Oh, I forgot, white people don't have sex.  They reproduce asexually, like, what's that called, through miosis." Tony dilated his pupils for emphasis.

     "I believe the word you're looking for is mitosis," Dustin corrected him.

     "Damn home boy, you're smart," Tony said, sounding genuinely impressed.  "How is it you're only Sheriff of this shithole county?  Anyhow, all I'm saying is that you better trim that bush under your lip because if you can't take care of Doris somebody else will, like me.  She’s hot, and she requires a Latin lover, at least once in her disappointing life."

     There were some days when Dustin was genuinely happy to see Tony, but his charm generally wore on you quickly, some days quicker than others.  "So what brings you through town, Tony?"

     "Oh you know me,” said Tony, fingering Dustin’s largely unused fountain pen, a gift from his granddaughter. “I'm never going through anywhere.  I'm always everywhere at once."

     The disturbing thing, Dustin thought, is that there was a grain of truth to that.

     “Hey why don't you sit down homey.  You look tired."

     "How can I sit down?" Dustin said. "There's only one chair in here and your butt's in it."

     "Oh yeah," said Tony, but he made no move to get up.

     "I hate to be a bad host," said Dustin, as if his lack of politeness would matter to someone who had invaded his office uninvited, made disturbingly accurate suppositions about his sex life, then left him standing, "but I have a lot of work to do.  Can we make this quick?"

     "Sure old buddy.  You gotta let the kid out.  Is that quick enough?"

     Dustin rubbed the inside of his cheek with his tongue as he contemplated the request. The identity of the kid was unmistakable, there was only one "kid" sitting in his jail.  Technically there were two people younger than Michael Gasden in there, but the word kid did not apply to them, because they had committed several lifetimes of crime already.

     "I can't let the kid out, and I think you know that," said Dustin. "He has committed a very visible crime.  He threw a heavy, dangerous object at the man who is going to be President of the United States, with the intent of causing bodily harm.  You just don't let people like that out.  He'll get his day in court.  Why do you care, anyway?"

     "Because he didn't do it."

     Dustin's eyes stood out wide on his denuded forehead.  "Who did it?"

     "I did it," said Tony.

     Dustin shifted a little in his big shoes.  He wore a size 15.  He was always catching them on something and stumbling.  He was pretty graceless, for a bad ass. "You expect me to believe that?” This was just a standard question people were expected to ask in certain situations.  It was entirely believable that Tony had done it.  He had fired a slingshot at Lyndon B. Johnson from a rooftop in Tucson once, but LBJ had only been Kennedy's running mate at the time, not the President-elect.

     Since everything Tony said was habitually bullshit, you instantly knew it when he told the truth.  He got a sort of innocent, wide-eyed earnestness on him and started scratching his head, like a monkey picking grubs from its own cranium for breakfast.

"What the fuck?" Dustin was a church going man.  He tried to keep it clean, but people like Tony sorely tried him.  "What'd you do that for?"

     Tony shrugged.  He must have snared a grub, because he was contemplating something small trapped between his thumb and forefinger.  "Seemed like the right thing to do.  Nah, maybe not right, but the appropriate thing to do."

     Dustin Diesel spent his every waking hour trying to keep the criminals at bay in Santa Cruz County, only to have people like Tony, who were not technically criminals -but only for the grace of God, sneak through the cracks.

     “Excuse me?  Would you mind elaborating on that?"

      Tony tapped out the drum line from the Macarena on Dustin's desk with his fingers. "Well, there was this brick on the ground, and I picked it up and I tell you what, it felt really good in my hands.  It took me back to the days when we were playing eight man football for old Wellton High.  You remember?"

     Dustin shook his head. "It wasn't really eight man football.  We just didn't have enough for a full eleven man squad."

     "Oh.  Those were good days though, don't you think?"

     Dustin put a finger through his belt loop and leaned back on his heels, as an alternative to sitting in his own chair.  "It would have been better if you had crossed the river to play Gilbert Christian for the championship.  You were our quarterback and best player.  We got clobbered.  So much for the stroll down memory lane.  Are you going to tell me why you threw the brick?”

     "You still sore I couldn’t cross the river?" Tony said unapologetically.  "That was like 100 years ago.  Hey, but don't short change yourself, you were a damn good offensive lineman and wide receiver all rolled into one."

     "I had no choice.  We were short handed.  I seem to recall I was the entire offensive line."

     Tony's eyes grew distant, looking off to some pleasant oasis of the past.    "I remember that game against Cortez, where you pancake blocked their whole D-line, then I hit you wide open in the end zone."

     “That was one hell of a play."

     "Yeah, I was thinking of that play when I threw the brick.  That damn brick had just about the right weight, and I threw a really tight spiral too.  I didn't mean to throw it, something just came over me.  Trump looked like such a stuffy little prick up there, like he hasn't taken a good shit since 1972.  I wanted to knock the shit right out of him.  You take good shits, right?"

     "Most of the time."

     "I can tell.  That's why you're at peace with yourself, because you take good shits.  Well, aren't you going to arrest me?"

     Dustin Diesel raised his eyebrows so high his normally heavily furrowed brow ironed itself out.

     "Damn Tony you make this tough on me."  Dustin was torn between the laws he was sworn to serve and loyalty to friends.  The Sheriff was incorruptible - he had never taken a dime to neglect his sworn duties.  But he was also fanatical about not micromanaging the spirit of justice.  Dustin had seen too many occasions where Lady Justice on the courthouse had borne witness to a crime in broad daylight, then had thrown the wrong person in jail anyway.  The sheriff was not a Pharisee where it came to the law.  If the law was screwed up or made no sense, unlike Lady Justice on the roof he was inclined to reach for the blindfold.

     "Well, when you look at it, nobody got hurt.  You're lucky the kid got his fingertips on your forward pass.  Hell Tony, you saved my life."

     “Twice."

     "What do you mean twice?  Are you talking about the time I passed out at that strip joint in Yuma?"

     "I pulled you out in the nick of time.  Doris would have castrated you and let you bleed out. Are you going to release the kid or what?"

     Dustin made a palms up gesture of helplessness.  "I got no reason to hold him anymore."

     "What are you going to tell the President-elect?"

     "He's still just a private citizen.  I don't answer to him."

     "One more thing.  What happened to Hal?"

     Dustin had suspected this question would pop up sooner or later.  Trump was changing the dynamic of the Gadsden Purchase.  People were taking sides, jockeying for position like vultures on a carcass.  "What do you mean?"

     "That pint-sized hijo de la chingada deported me the other day.  I mean, really deported me.  Most of the time it's just a joke, he drivess me to the border, then we go get drunk at the Sorry Gulch.  But this time the mother fucker dumped me in Mexico.  It took me a week to get back."

     Dustin chewed on this news.  Some of it stuck to his mustache.  "I think Hal wants to be sector chief, and he senses an opportunity in the new political climate."

     "Hal a sector chief!"  Tony put both hands flat upon Dustin's desk, as if asking to be handcuffed and locked up if this was a world where Hal Owens controlled whole sectors. "Since when does he care about stuff like that? "

     “Since his Mom got home from the sanitarium."

     "They let that looney bitch out?"

     “They couldn’t keep her.  Budget cuts restored her sanity.”

      “She tried to poison the vice president of the Union Pacific because Hal couldn’t get promoted.  That crazy, delusional broad pushes him to the edge.  He turns into Norman Bates when she’s around.  Do you think he’s really doing her?”

    Dustin stiffened up, because the elephant in the room had just shit on his shiny boots.  “How can you say that?"

     “Oh, like I'm the first one.  I find it strange that fucker ain’t never had no pussy.”

     “Are you kidding me?  Hal gets tons of pussy.”

     “He brags like he gets tons of pussy, but I ain’t never seen him with a woman in all the years I’ve known him.  But I caught him naked with his mother once.”

     “Get out of town.”

"I'm serious!"

"No, I mean literally, get out of town! Your big yapping mouth always gets me in trouble, every time you set foot in my town!"

     “Quit kidding around and listen for a change. We was carpooling to the railroad back then because they were on this save the planet kick and gave you free swag like movie tickets.  I went up to the door to get him, but nobody answered so I sorta let myself in.”

     “Sounds like you," said Dustin, eyeing his occupied chair.

     “Whatta ya know, but Hal and his Mother come out of the bathroom butt naked.  Hal says he was sick and his momma was giving him medicine, but what kind of mother gets naked to put medicine on you?”

     “I'm sure there’s a plausible explanation.”

     Tony laughed.  “Yeah right.  Overbearing bitches like that make men do some weird shit.  I don’t get it.”

     Dustin pointed a thick, gnarled forefinger, his trigger finger, in Tony's direction,.  “You don’t get it because you don’t live with a woman.  Why do you think the good book says that a man can't serve God and woman?  While you're out there doing the work of the Lord, we're sitting behind desks plotting how to do evil to people, just to satisfy our women.  While we’re rounding up the poor and helpless in the desert, you're being a Christian steward of the Earth.  Ambitious women will not permit us a moment’s mercy, but the Sonoran Zoo is full of God’s creatures that your mercy rehabilitated.  That javelina Ronald is real popular over there."

     "Roald."

     "What?"

     "Roald.  The pig's name is Roald, not Ronald."

     "What the hell kind of name is Roald?"

     "I don't know.  I heard it somewhere.  It fits him."

     "Well, they're calling him Ronald up there."

     "That's bullshit.  I'm going to fix that.  And I never  meant to give Roald up to any zoo.  He was as sweet as a puppy.  He was happy where he was, and I was happy having him.  Somebody in town called Fish and Game on me.  I didn't have time to hide all my critters.  Some of them got swept up in the sting.  Now they're all miserable, rotting inside some stinking zoo like prisoners.  One day I'm going to go in and liberate the whole fucking zoo."

     “Well," said Dustin. "I'm afraid I would have to arrest you for that one.  But not for this."

     Tony nodded.  Dustin knew this was the closest he would ever get to thanks, but he didn't have a problem with that.  For all his bullshit, Tony was the kind of guy who would say thanks by doing you a favor.  He would do something useful but of marginal legality that the county Sheriff, exposed to the public like a bug in a jar, couldn't get away with.  Tony was a hidden trump card up the sleeve, a trump that could even trump Trump.

     "Do me a favor," said Tony. "Don't tell him I got him out.  Give me a head start too. And oh yeah, do your job.  Do something about Danny."

     There is no day and night in prison. Mike checked out sometime in the afternoon, feeling like he had been locked up for days instead of hours.  He assumed he must look like Tom Hanks after months on an island making love to a volleyball.  His beard felt grizzled and unkempt, instead of the borderline peach fuzz it really was..  His belly groaned.  Here in the Gadsden Purchase officialdom subjected you to all manner of human rights abuses, including but not limited to starvation.  He had dealt with this by just going to sleep.

     Mike tucked in for what he hoped would be a nap of Rip Van Winkle proportions.  The good thing about Michael Gasden was that he could go to sleep anywhere, in any position.  He could sleep standing on his head on hot pavement, his Dad said.  Napping was one of his great talents.

     It was actually only a half hour of snoozing later that the angel rolled back the stone and a khaki clad deputy shook Mike awake.  He woke him from a dream where Mike had been running along a fetid stream in the desert, looking down at strange fish in the water that had human fingers, which they sucked on as if savoring some delectable. A poisonous plant with sinister purple blossoms choked out the banks of the stream.

     "Wake up kid," said the generic deputy.  "You're out of here."

     Mike blinked once or twice and tried to remember where he was.  One naturally tends to distrust strangers who disturb the somnolent state, even when they bear good news.

     "What are you talking about?" Asked Mike.  As a bad ass terrorist, he seemed slightly disappointed for being let out so quickly.

"Just go dude," said the deputy. "Hurry up, we need this cell."

     Mike cautiously walked out the open cell door, suspecting that freedom itself could be a trap. In the corridor he passed the hardened convicts who had sung his praises yesterday, or was that still today?  None of them looked up.  Now that he was free he was nothing to them.

     Mike picked up his belongings.  The pretty deputy behind the desk, the same one who had scowled on the way in, now smiled, the practice being acceptable outside the cage where the animals were locked up. Mike didn't smile back.  Fuck the bitch.

     Mike was free, but didn't feel like it.  At least in the cell he belonged to a certain society.  What society was he part of now?  Where was he supposed to go?  He imagined that this was how men who have been locked up for half a century felt.  He had been locked up for half a day, but half a day was enough for prison to put its tentacles into him. The jail cell was trying to pull him back.

     Mike's temporary celebrity was over.  Once again he was a nobody here in the Gadsden Purchase.  People assiduously ignored him as he plodded out onto the street, where he had half expected to get either a hero's or villain's reception.  Either one would have been fine, but indifference was depressing.  Shouldn't some eager reporter be standing there, anxious for a scoop about the Presidential brick tosser?  There was nobody.  The world yawned at his alleged deeds. The same sleepy, aimless cars rolled by the courthouse, circling over and over, piloted by the same meaningless faces, car and driver locked in infinite orbits around Santa Cruz County's center of gravity.  None of these cars belonged to anybody Mike knew.  Shouldn't Lisa's spray-painted Prius be stopping by to pick him up?  Come to think of it, where was Tony, driving his own fucking truck?  Where were the hoards of cat-calling Dump-Trumpsters?  This was what being a millionaire meant, thought Mike.  Everybody hovered around with a friendly face and a bucket, waiting for a stray crumb, but as soon as you got in trouble everybody bailed.

       While peering out across the endless rolling thorny scrub for signs of anyone he knew, Mike caught a glimpse of a large figure slinking around by a light pole.  Like a lizard on a fence post, the pole's proprietor was making a ridiculous attempt to blend in with it, but his girth gave him away.  Michael could see right away it was Otis.

     Mike stormed over, hoping that as the dumbest of the lot, Otis was only the expendable point man for the rest of the rescue squad.

     "Otis, you big fat son of a bitch!" Mike cried out as he reached the light pole.  He shoved the hefty youth square in the chest and was surprised as anyone, when he thought about it later, that Otis staggered backwards a few paces. Otis outweighed him by at least 120 pounds, but his shame had reduced him to a cardboard cutout of himself.

     "Otis why did you throw that brick, you fucking asshole!"

     Otis covered his hands with his face and cowered like a dog whacked with a newspaper.  "I didn't throw the brick, bro!  I didn't throw the brick!"

      Mike used the opportunity offered by Otis' shielded face totpummel his exposed midriff.  "You lying fuck up!"

     "I didn't do it bro!  I swear I didn't do it!"  Tears were streaming down Otis’s fat face.  The tears intimidated Mike more than his bulk did.  He backed off a little.

     "Are you crying?"

     "I didn't throw it bro.  I really didn't throw it," Otis blubbered.  "I came back for you.  Everybody else bailed, bro, but I came back."

     Mike suddenly felt a pang of pity, but he wasn't sure if it was for Otis or himself.  To him Otis was a non-entity, just a big fat dumb dipshit.  Could it really be true that this halfwit  brute was the only human on the planet who stuck by his side in this crisis?  Did that say more about the quality of the human race, or more about the quality of Michael Gasden as a person?  This thought only deepened his loneliness.  Maybe it was time to redefine loneliness.  Maybe out here in the cruel emptiness of the Gadsden Purchase he no longer had the luxury of picking and choosing who to remedy his loneliness with.

     "Are you serious, Otis?  Everybody bailed?"

     Otis wiped his puffy face with his Hulk sleeve and nodded tearfully. "It was like the Titanic, dude, where that one fat bitch says we gotta go back for the men but the asshole in the front says just keep rowing.  I tried to tell them we couldn't leave you, but Lisa was in a hurry.  She unlocked the front door and booted my ass out.  She stepped on it so fast the tires squealed.  You know what bro?  Everybody says fuck yeh we're ready to go to jail for what we believe but when it comes down to it, nobody wants to go to jail."

     It occurred to Mike then and there that Otis wasn't quite as stupid as he had thought.  He looked at Otis like a primatologist who has just discovered a new species, scrutinizing him with a sort of academic wonder until the fragile oaf stopped sobbing.  It really sucked that Otis was all he had left, loneliness might actually be better, but the hefty lout would never get home on his own.  What had this big doofus been doing, loitering around a light pole outside a jail? Had he been planning to bust in and set the captives free?

     "Come on Otis, let's go home." Mike said gently.

     "I didn't do it, " Otis whinnied.  "I didn't do it."

     "Yeah, whatever.  It's okay Otis. It's ok."



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Photo courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer Inc.  Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Chapter 8

 

Table of contents

Chapter 8

All Santa Cruz County Sheriff Dustin Diesel wanted to do was coast quietly into retirement with his patched  up, duct taped heart still ticking.  The reason why he had been against Donald Trump for President was because Trump was bringing undue attention to the border region that he patrolled, a scrutiny that threatened the integrity of a beleaguered heart that he kind of needed to carry him along into the sunset.

     Dustin Diesel was a big man who dragged his bulk around like a hoarder lugging a huge trunk filled with useless but coveted secret items. Because of his rather pronounced Baptist belly, the inmates in Dustin's lock up sometimes referred to his jurisdiction as Santa Claus county.  Dustin's houlders stooped and his walrus mustache drooped.  No amount of trimming could keep its bristling porcupine quills, rictal bristles of an insectivorous bird, the macrovibrissae attached to the snouts of any number of species of scrounging rodents, from growing into his mouth, so he often digested them with his food.  Dustin's rather sprawling, amoeba-like physique and unkempt mustache made the Spanish prisoners jokingly refer to him as La Morsa, but not to his face.

     Truth was, Dustin Diesel was a gentle man with a thick skin who was not above a joke at his expense, but he didn't look like it.  All the prisoners in the county jail could think about when he walked by was how he had picked up a desperate gangster by the neck with one hand and flung him across his cell without ever changing the tender expression on his face.  The prisoners also contemplated his legendary dead aim.  Dustin suffered from the early stages of macular degeneration, but could still shoot the cap off a bottle of Bud at 50 paces without leaving foam, which he sometimes did as a party trick when called to break up noisy fiestas.  The parties got quiet quick.  Tommy the deaf, dumb and blind pinball wizard played by sense of smell, and Dustin Diesel seemed to shoot by the same method. Without parallel he was the best shot in the Gadsden Purchase, and all men, hardened criminals as well as upstart young punks wisely feared him.

     Women did not. Dustin Diesel also had a reputation as the most henpecked man in the Gadsden Purchase. The principal reason he worked fifteen hour days was because his wife Doris berated him from the time he hung up his gun at home until the time he went to bed, which was within as little as half an hour if he could help it.  According to Doris, Dustin was a horrible father, husband, and human being in general.  She had been threatening him with imminent divorce since about 1972.  If Dustin had done anything worthwhile in law enforcement, it was only through dumb luck, divine intervention, or because he had been smart enough to take her advice.  Doris chastised him for not being at least a Congressman or Senator by now.  He was relentlessly rebuked for not opposing Arapaio up North in Maricopa, so they could move to a civilized place like Phoenix.  Doris complained about living in only a four bedroom house, even though they occupied just one of the rooms, and not often. Dustin's pathetic lack of ambition was the cause of all of their domestic difficulties and insurmountable social problems in their entirety south of the Gila River.  Truth was, Dustin Diesel lost all of his fabled swagger around Doris, which was why he tried to avoid her whenever he could legitimately duck out.

     A few years ago, after a particularly exasperating and humiliating round with Doris, Dustin had been in his office complaining to his secretary Lupe about it.  The Gadsden Purchase is a small place - Tony Vargas was there too, having decided to drop by and pick up a free donut as he rolled through town.

     "I think if two people don't love each other anymore there's nothing wrong with getting a divorce," Lupe told Dustin in her breathlessly seductive Latina accent as she pressed her sweater puppies provacatively against her desk. Lupe had been trapped in a haze of impossibly unrequited love with the Sheriff for years.  She smelled opportunity.

     "Bullshit," Tony retorted. "You got to stick it out and suffer.  You get points in heaven that way.  It's like airline miles.  You can exchange them for swag when you get up there."

     “What kind of swag?" Dustin growled, his words muffled by his thick mustache.

     "You know, like head of the line privileges in the duty free. Stuff like that."

     "Where the he’ll did you hear that?"  the Sheriff asked cautiously.  All too often, stuff Tony said that sounded like pure bullshit later turned out to be true.

     “Pastor Rick said it." Like most Catholics in the Gasden Purchase, Tony dabbled in evangelical Protestantism when convenient.  There were no first run movies, video games, free snow cones, or rock and roll bands at Catholic mass like they had at the mega church in Yuma. Unlike the pedantic, tired, stodgy priests, Pastor Rick was super chill, like a stand up comic.  Furthermore, people tended to believe him because he had his own airplane.

     "You're full of shit, Tony," Lupe hissed at him, like someone had let the air out of her tires. Dustin had been vulnerable.  He had been on the point of straying. Tony had fucked up her opportunity.

     Dustin knew damn well Tony was full of shit – they were old friends.  It was possible Pastor Rick had preached a sermon about airline miles in heaven, that sounded like his style, but Tony had twisted it out of context.  Dustin Diesel had been raised in a good Christian home.  A sense of guilty acceptance over being a horrible sinner had seeped through his mother's placental walls into the womb.  Womb and tomb rhymed, he thought while he was on the subject, but he didn't know if that meant anything. Anyhow, even though bullshit like Tony's seemed harmless at face value, it often touched a deeper truth.  Maybe there were no frequent sufferer programs in heaven, but even if Pastor Rick's prosperity gospel implied that it was okay to ditch your wife if she was digging too deep into your bank account, Dustin Diesel still looked upon marriage as a sacred deal.  Divorce was like severing a spiritual limb, and heaven wasn't keen on amputees.  His Daddy had taught him that. If you bought the horse on your earthly farm you had to ride the old nag into heaven.  Saint Peter didn’t let you check your baggage at the terminal.

     These were the things Dustin Diesel was pondering in his heart as he went to see the prisoner preventing him from coasting smoothly into retirement.  What was he supposed to do when he retired anyway, get yelled at by Doris on a full time basis?  Might as well get abused at work and get paid for it.

     Sheriff Diesel didn't know what to expect from this brick throwing fiend. He visualized some wild haired, tatooed, crazy-eyed anarchist carpet-bagging punk with piercings trying to stir up trouble in the name of progress.

     The prisoner had his head down when Dustin approached his cell, so the sheriff couldn't see the perp's face through his long mop of hair.  When the door buzzed open the detainee looked up briefly at Dustin, showing wide, intelligent eyes that were not wild at all, but indicated defiant stubborness.  It was a rebellious face, all right, but not the kind of face that belonged to your typical brick thrower.

     "What the hell were you thinking kid?"

     Mike looked straight at the Sheriff.  There was desperation in his eyes, but there was also resistance.  When you have several million in the bank, it is easy to resist.  You can afford to chill in jail a few days when nobody is expecting you at work the next morning.

     “What do you mean?  Like I told everyone else, I didn't do anything." He wanted to add -I actually stopped the brick from hitting that orange haired  jackass- but he was pissed, and it sounded like sucking ass.  He was in no mood to suck ass.

      Dustin laughed.  "That's the first time I heard that one."  He made a sweeping gesture with his arms, like a flabby Atlas holding Santa Cruz County on his shoulders. "This whole jail is filled with people who didn't do anything."

     Mike was not of a temper to get chatty with anybody in uniform. There are plenty of people who claim they hate law enforcement, but nobody really hates and mistrusts the police until they have been at the bottom of a dog pile eating dirt, while at the same time being handcuffed for doing nothing.

     "Look son," continued the Sheriff paternally, because he sensed he was not dealing with a hard core criminal element here, and cops always like to pretend they are there to reform, not punish.  "I've seen police officers do a lot of messed up things to young people like you.  I've seen kids get beaten up just for carrying signs but I've never condoned it and never participated in it.  In fact, I've thrown officers in jail for getting rough when they shouldn't have.  But you can't have this attitude that the law is always wrong.  You can't sit there looking at me all surly because they locked you up for trying to hurt people.  Peaceful protest is one thing, but throwing bricks cannot be condoned."

     Mike couldn't help but think about Krazy Kat getting a brick thrown at him by a clever mouse espousing the doctrine of bricks is love and he smiled despite himself.

     “I don't see what's funny, boy," said Diesel.

     Betcha if you knew I was black you wouldn't be calling me boy, thought Mike.  Black or not, didn't much like being called boy.

     "It's all really frickin funny actually," said Mike, "because I didn't even want to be here, much less be here throwing bricks, which I didn't.  My girlfriend dragged me along, with some of her useless friends.  Now they've all run off and left me.”

     "They left you holding the bag," said Diesel with surprising sympathy.

     Mike looked up from contemplating his hands in an ironic fashion.  Same hands, same capabilities, they could either throw a brick or stop a brick, but they didn't amount to shit behind bars.  "Beg your pardon, sir?"

     Dustin Diesel sighed impatiently.  "You kids today don't understand analogies.  You want to be fed everything literally.  I want to give you steak but all you can chew is oatmeal. Holding the bag is an expression that comes from an old prank called a Snipe Hunt.  In a Snipe Hunt the participants, that is the ones who are in on the joke, sweep through the woods to scare up an imaginary animal toward one sucker they leave in place, holding a gunny sack.  Said sucker is supposed to capture the non existent Snipe when it runs by.  Now, most times a Snipe Hunt is harmless fun, a little rough on the poor sap bullied into holding the bag, but not leaving any long term emotional damage.  In fact, if the bag holder is smart he figures out quick there is no Snipe, drops the sack and goes home alone, or better yet hides in the woods to ambush the jokers.  But not always does the snipe bag wind up empty.  Sometimes something really does get trapped in that bag, and I shouldn't have to tell you that the something is never good.  You, son, got left holding the bag, and now there is something bad squirming around in there.  Like it or not you're going to have to pay the price for that something because in Santa Cruz County, as in other jurisdictions across this nation, saying you were only the bag holder is no defense before the law.  Get some sleep, because tomorrow there’s no telling what will happen.  Good night."

     The cell door slammed into place behind the sheriff.  Mike never felt so abandoned.  He was an introvert by nature, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t comforted by the buzz of people around him.  Yeah, admittedly he was a douchebag who got annoyed easily when people chattered too much, but it felt awfully lonely without that chatter.  Certainly somebody must be waiting for him outside, but he hadn't seen any evidence of that.  Lisa had bailed, her douchebags friends had bailed, even that lowlife Tony had bailed, most certainly with Mike's truck.

     When Mike had arrived in the Gadsden Purchase, he had expected people to be more honest and loyal than in California. The reason he had sold his company and fled out here is because he had been fed up with the predatory nature of people in the Silicon Valley.  Even the bums there were aggressive, ungrateful, and hard to shake off.  The name of the local hockey team was completely appropriate, because everybody was a shark, patrolling the reef, sniffing for signs of blood, ready to rip apart the helpless and weak.  So now he had escaped deep into the desert, only to find that people were the same everywhere.  His Dad had told him that before he left.  It sucked that his Dad was always right.

     Mike really needed some moral support, but the only person he could rely on for that was his father, and his Dad didn't need this shit right now.  If things continued the way they were going he would have to call him eventually, but he was going to hold off as long as possible.  Mike supposed he should call his lawyer, but the number was in his phone and they had confiscated his phone.  Wasn't his Dad always ranting you goddam kids rely too much on your phones?  "I got all the important numbers right here in my head," his Dad bragged, "but you’re helpless without your goddam phone and it is going to come back to haunt you." It had come back to haunt him.

     Come to think of it, weren't they supposed to at least offer him a phone call?   Wasn't that a basic Constitutional right or something?  He remembered seeing that on a shit load of TV shows. Well, nobody in this dusty little shithole of a town had offered him a phone call, and he had the feeling they wouldn’t.

     As Mike sat stewing in his lonesome misery, Dustin Diesel walked wearily down the corridor in front of the holding cells.  The six or seven inmates being temporarily stored here were on their best behavior. Nobody catcalled him or started bitching about their rights.  They could hear his heavy, plodding steps and took that to mean his temper was temporarily on a hair trigger.  Nobody fucked with Sheriff Diesel when his footsteps went below a certain amount of RPMs.

     The double doors at the end of the hall popped open and half a dozen hard bitten G-men pushed through.  The suits were forming a formidable huddle around somebody in their midst, who was hunkered down where he couldn’t be seen. Dustin heaved another somber sigh, recognizing this interruption for what it was and deciding not to let himself be star struck.

     "You gentlemen caused enough of a stir in my town.  Don't you have somewhere else to be?"

     Muffled Brooklynese rose from the center of the huddle, but the Secret Service G-men wouldn't allow the speaker be seen.  It was a situation akin to when the burning bush talked to Moses.  Moses kept looking around for a speaker, because it was stupid to think a bush could be talking to him.  By the same token, it was stupid to think that a President-elect would be hiding like a scared bitch amidst a ring of knuckleheads.

     The burning bush voice coming from the interior of this human Stonehenge encircling the President-elect turned out to be uncharacteristically meek and subdued, not at all like what Dustin was expecting.

     "Excuse me, Mr. Sheriff Sir," sounded the thin east coast whine. "I was wondering if we could impose upon you to release your prisoner."

     Dustin Diesel did not appreciate it when carpetbagger Feds came in and tried to impose their will.  People assumed they were backward yokels here that could be easily walked over.  Hell, maybe they were yokels, but these out of town sophisticates could at least go through the motions of respect, buy us a drink before fucking us.

     "Why would you want us to release him?  He tried to hurt you."

      Dustin leaned in a little, as a test.  The President-elect nearly stumbled as he stooped down lower, and the Stonehenge circle squeezed tighter.  "Heh, heh," the burning bush laughed nervously.  "Without getting into too many details Mr. Sheriff, because this is a delicate matter of national security, probably the most delicate matter of national security in the history of our national security, but we believe that you should either let the prisoner go, or execute him on the spot."

     Never in his decades of law enforcement had Santa Cruz Sheriff Dustin Diesel been ordered to execute a prisoner without due process.  It was such an extraordinarily bizarre request that he actually had to think about it.

     "Well now Mr. President..."

     The President-elect cut him off abruptly.  "President-elect now, President-elect.  Let's not jump the gun."

     “Yes Sir Mr. President-elect.  You do understand that this is the United States of America, and there are a series of trials and appeals we go through before we can legally kill somebody.  Furthermore, we only use it for capital crimes, like murder.  As far as I can see, you're still alive, so there isn’t any murder.  I just can't shoot him on the spot."

     Dustin thought he could hear the scratching of fingernails against bald skin.  "Huh.  Wow.  Constitutional law is complicated. I'm a real estate man by trade. A really fantastic, top notch real estate man, by the way.  I'm sure you've seen some of my real estate. Being a real estate man, I have a whole gang of lawyers to take care of the complicated legal stuff, like executions.  Okay, so why not just let him go?"

     Dustin breathed in some patience.  "Mr. President-elect Sir, from my understanding you still have a month or so to go before you take the oath.  When that happens, I'll gladly respect any executive pardon you might wish to grant my prisoner.  In the meantime, he's a lawbreaker, and I am sworn to uphold the law.  So the answer is no."

     The President-elect poked one of the Secret Service agents in the kidneys, and the agent, who appeared to be a clone of all the other agents, reached back with a handkerchief.  Dustin heard no nose blowing, but couldn't know the President-elect was wiping the sweat off his head with it. "Okay, fantastic, utterly fantastic,” said Trump.  “Well, Sir, in that case, could you let me talk to the prisoner?"

     Dustin's lower teeth bit softly into his upper lip, forming a sort of sandwich out of his drooping mustache hair. "I guess I don't see any harm in that.  But make it quick.  I don't want you to stir up this cell block any more than it already is."

     A frail, pale hand rose to the top of the huddle to give a feeble handshake. "Thank you Sheriff.  I appreciate your remarkable understanding, truly remarkable understanding.  Now, may I impose upon you for one more small thing?"

     "That depends on what it is."

     "A minor detail.  A truly minor detail, probably the most minor detail in the history of details.  Could I ask you to turn off the lights here on the cell block while I hold my conversation with the prisoner?"

     Dustin scowled.  "Now that, sir, is going to create a ruckus here.  May I ask why?"

      "Security purposes sir.  Very weighty considerations of national security."

     It defied common sense that this man had been elected, but he was going to be President in a matter of days and Dustin supposed his decisions had to be respected, even if they were crappy decisions.  If nothing else, Dustin Diesel was a soldier who followed orders.

     "I'll give you five minutes, then the lights go back on," Dustin reluctantly conceded.

     "Outstanding, outstanding.  Err, ahem, may I ask one more question?"

     "You can ask questions all day, sir, but I've got a county to restore to some semblance of law and order, so let's make it quick."

     “Awesome, outstanding," said the President-elect.  "By the way, I'm just a tremendous, tremendous fan of law and order, I’ll have you know.  But my question, Sir, and I don't mean to take up anymore of your valuable time, is whether or not you have a lost and found around here?"

     Dustin's eyebrows lowered suspiciously. "What kind of lost and found?"  These were the kind of questions problem prisoners asked him all the time.

      "Well, you know," the burning bush said with a pathetically un-Presidential squeak. "a place where they turn in found items that were previously lost."

     “Son," said Dustin, forgetting decorum by addressing the future Chief Executive of with this rather diminutive sobriquet.  "This is Santa Cruz County.  In Santa Cruz County, when things get lost, they tend to stay lost.  What kind of items?"

     “No, nothing, forget it," the President-elect whimpeed from behind the safety of his human wall.

     “Okay, five minutes.  I advise you to make efficient use of your time by not repeating the same adjectives twice, like you tend to do.  But it's your nickel."

     The President-elect whispered to a Secret Service man, who whispered back that an adjective was a word that modified a noun.  This confused him even more, so he let it rest.  "Thank you Sheriff.  I'm extremely, extremely appreciative of the wonderful, wonderful work you are doing here in Santa Cruz County."

     The lights went out.  In his cell the sudden darkness startled Mike.  This was the part where they burst in with billy clubs to either beat out a confession or gang rape him, he was thinking. 

     The cell door creaked open slowly, and the featureless silhouette of a man appeared in the doorway, outlined by the faint emergency lights in the passageway beyond.  Mike noted that the visitor was not wearing the Smokey bear hat of his previous visitor.  In fact, his head appeared to be exceptionally round and naked, like Vin Diesel (only distantly, distantly related to the Sheriff of Santa Cruz County), Dwayne Johnson, or other famous bald guys.  Mike had no inkling it was Trump himself.  The silhouette did not jibe.

    Then, as the other prisoners on the block began to loudly protest the lack of light, the shadowed outline opened his mouth, which at once revealed his identity.  "Hello Michael, I think you know who I am."

     "I didn't throw that brick at you," Michael said immediately.

     "Brick? Brick?" the President-elect had to think.  "Oh yes, the brick.  I didn't come here to talk about the brick."

     But Mike was not done talking about the brick.  He wanted to make sure this man knew the truth.  "As a matter of fact, I tried to stop that brick, and I think I kept it from hitting you a lot harder."

     “Hmmm...yes." The umbra of Trump's bald head eclipsed the faint light from the hall in totality. "Aah, I do remember.  The incident is engraved in my mind like a photograph.  Believe me, believe me, the American people and myself are tremendously, tre..." Ah-hah!  That was the double adjective he had been warned about, wasn't it? "I mean, very, very grateful," Damn he couldn't help it but very was a lot shorter and quicker than tremendously, wasn't it? "...about what you did.  But Michael, I didn't come here to talk about the brick.  I came here to talk about something much more potentially dangerous to the security of our nation.  Are you patriotic, Michael?  Are you a patriotic American?"

     Being something of a libertarian, though he did not know that, Michael wasn't a real big flag waver.  He didn't get teary-eyed during the national anthem, but where the hell else was he supposed to live? He was kind of stuck in America, so he supposed he liked it well enough.  Like a wife, for better or worse til death do us part." I guess.  Sure.  Why?"

     "If you love your country, Michael, you have to promise you won't talk about what you saw back there."

     Mike was confused.  The darkness made it worse.  The darkness disoriented him.
"What do you mean?  What did I see?"

     “Exactly, exact- very good Michael. I knew you were a smart kid.  I could tell that right away.  You didn't see anything at all.  But by the way..."  the President-elect leaned in closer to whisper. “Did you happen to see what happened to that thing you didn't see?"

     Now it suddenly occurred to Mike what this man was talking about.  Now that it was brought to his attention, he did remember the brick striking the forehead, then something being jarred loose, then the blinding reflection of the sun and - whoa!  Did this give him some kind of leverage?

     "You mean the - " Mike started excitedly, but the President-elect grabbed his arm to cut him off.

     "I'll have to ask you to keep your voice down, Michael.  This matter is of strict confidentiality.  I thought you loved your country."

     "I want out of here!  You gotta get me out!  If you do I won't tell!"

     The President-elect slowly leaned back again. Somehow, this act was much more menacing than his leaning in had been.  "Easy, Mike, easy.  It's not that easy."

     "What do you mean it's not that easy?  I thought you had special powers to get people out of jail."

     "Get me out too!" Some desperate dude the next cell down yelled.

     "I need to remind you, Michael, that I'm not quite President yet.  Until I take the oath I am powerless, utterly powerless.”  Was powerless an adjective?  He wasn’t sure.  “You have violated the laws of Santa Cruz County, not to mention pissed off the Sheriff pretty badly.  So I'm afraid you are going to have to stew here awhile and think about the consequences of your actions."

     "What actions?  I didn't do anything!  I didn't do anything!  I saved you!"

     The President-elect, supreme wheeler-dealer that he was, was now satisfied that his upper hand, his pimp hand if you will, had been restored. "Michael, Michael my dear, dear friend.  You're just going to have to be patient. In a few weeks I take office, then I'll see what I can do."

      "Lights on in twenty seconds!" a voice at the end of the cell block warned.

      Mike was desperate. "What do you mean, see what you can do?  A few weeks? You have to get me out of here!  I saved you!"

     “Michael, Michael, I'm afraid I have pressing business elsewhere.  Shoot me a tweet in a few weeks and we'll talk."

     A tweet?  A frickin' tweet!  How the hell was he supposed to tweet from inside jail?  He didn't even have a phone to tweet with.  He didn't even have a Twitter account.  He was going to rot in here forever!

     “Wait, wait!  You can't go!  I don't know anything ! I didn't see anything!  I-"

     The cell door rolled shut.

Next>>

Image courtesy of Marine 69-71 via Wikimedia Commons.

Chapter 7

Table of Contents

Chapter 7

I didn't know your friend was Mexican," Lisa whispered to Mike in an awestruck voice when he got back to from the cafe with Tony's coffee, which he didn't drink because he was drinking the Keurig.  Her tone was that of the interplanetary scientist who has discovered life on Mars.  "That's fantastic.  That's perfect.”

     Mike and Lisa got into the pickup with Tony, who as usual insisted on driving.  Lisa wanted to ride up front, to bathe in the divine vibrations emanating from Tony's oppressed being. Meanwhile, Lisa's goons followed in the spray-painted Prius, sulking, shunned, and scolded for having wrecked their room that morning.  Not only had Mike found trash and bottles littered everywhere, but the punks had gouged a six by six inch hole in the wall to remove a NSA planted "bug," per Heyward, the spokesman for the group because his intellect at least Rose to earthworm level. The bug turned out to be a junction box that disabled power for that entire wing of the motel.

     Being completely focused on her new pet, Lisa was completely indifferent to the abuse Mike gave her henchmen.  Despite the depredations of these knuckle dragging brutes, the protest caravan seemed to be off to an auspicious start, until Tony remembered something and killed the engine.

     "I forgot to feed my dog," he said, bouncing from the truck on his two bad knees and limping toward his room.

     At the edge of the parking lot, Tony's disenfranchised coyote Rolf was sitting upon its sad haunches in the tumbleweeds. Mike pointed out the beast to Lisa and she gasped orgasmically.

     "The indigenous peoples here still interact with wild creatures,” she said breathlessly.

     Mike was tempted to tell her about Tony screwing the Hooters girl in the bed of his pickup, wondering what she would think about interactions of that sort, but why burst her bubble?  He was pretty sure Tony would do it himself, sooner rather than later.

     Tony came out of his room holding something that looked like beef jerky.  "Just like Dances with Wolves!" Lisa squealed.  Then a chorus of angry,  outraged yips and barks came from the other side of the parking lot.  Cornudo's local wolf pack, composed of seven or eight shaggy, dirty mixed breed semi-strays that all had some percentage of Chihuahua, including one quasi German Shepherd with a peculiarly elongated snout, was making its way toward the Coyote, led by the only dog that could be positively identified as a Chihuahua.  All fifteen inches of this diminutive beast was packed with blind aggresion and rage.  He very well could have been the  Father of the German Shepherd, who seemed to follow him with filial devotion, though the logistics of that mating strained the limits of both imagination and engineering.

     "Get out of here you mother fuckers!" Tony shouted, rushing toward the pack with a fistful of stones.  These he flung with surprising accuracy, pelting a mangy, discolored poodle on its fluffy haunches.  The pack of dogs lost its nerve and retreated beneath the barrage but it was too late. Tony's skittish Coyote Rolf had already spooked and scampered off.

     “Goddamn mangy fucking mutts!" Tony shouted, spinning upon his fat axis in frustration.

     Back in the truck, Lisa looked like she would cry.  Tony brushed himself off, as if the dog breath of the furry brutes had sullied him, then got back in the truck.  There he sat surly and silent, occasionally mumbling invective against the strays.  Drawing upon the reserves of her feminine wiles, Lisa coaxed him into conversation.

     Besides the stray dogs, Lisa couldn’t prod out the kind of greivances she was interested in, particularly how Tony suffered beneath the white man’s yoke.  When he confessed to being recently deported, Lisa was indignant, but Tony seemed indifferent. "Oh, that, that's no big deal.  Just a running joke between me and one of my border patrol homies.  I get a free ride down to Mexico, hang out with some of the old vatos, drink a few beers and hitch a ride back.  Sometimes you need a change of scenery.”

     "But doesn’t it make you angry that they are profiling you?"

     "Profiling?" Tony shook his head.  "I don't know.  I'm not really into photography."

     In the back seat Mike suppressed laughter.  Lisa closed her mouth and regrouped.

     "But doesn't it bother you, as a Mexican, when authorities deliberately target you because of certain cultural characteristics you might display?"  She was foaming up into a good hate crime lather.

      This time Tony was outraged. "Mexican? Who says I’m Mexican?  I'm a goddamm flag waving American mother fucker, sweetheart."

     Lisa had dealt with this sort of response before.  "That's what your Wall Street corporate  overlords want you to believe.  They want to suppress your heritage and pretend to be an American, even though you'll never receive the rights and recognition you are entitled to.  They do it to divide and conquer.  They do it in to the LGBT community too.”

     Tony smiled appreciatively this time. “LGBT?  Oh, I know that.  A friend of mine showed me that LGBT Facebook page.  Liquor, guns, bacon and tits."

     Tony laughed so hard he almost deployed the airbag.  He either did not notice or did not care that Lisa was not laughing.

     The drive got quiet for a while.  When they stopped for gas in Tucson, Tony went inside to use the bathroom.  When he came back, he was wearing a red Make America Great Again hat. Lisa shielded her eyes and switched places with Mike to the back seat.  An elephant climbed in the truck with Tony, and smothered all the conversation from there to Nogales.  Lisa avoided talking to anyone, and Mike was afraid to talk to Tony for fear of incurring Lisa's wrath.

     When they rolled into Nogales in cold silence, Lady Justice watched them vigilantly from atop the county courthouse.  Although she often peeks under the mask, in most other courthouse penthouses she resides on, Lady Justice is blindfolded.  This is not for any kinky sex games, but to keep her from drawing unfair conclusions based on things like skin color and socio-economic status.  In Nogales, however, the entire economy was fueled by unfair, culturally biased conclusions.  If this guy over here looks Mexican, we need to detain him for further investigation, and the local merchants will happily cater to his nutritional and toiletry essentials in the process.  If that guy over there has a towel on his head, we'll hold him for a few days to make sure he’s not wearing a bomb vest, and in the meantime he will have to be caged and fed, all for the benefit of local commerce.

     In the good old days of arbitrary frontier justice in Nogales, having a statue of Lady Justice with unimpeded eyesight atop the courthouse was accepted without question.  When the rule of law and its nagging insistence on impartiality moved in later there was some debate about whether to blindfold the bitch, but in the end it was decided just to keep her eyes naked and see what happened.

     What happened was revolution south of the border, when Pancho Villa and his associates moved back and forth across the boundary as if it was just an arbitrary line on paper, not an actual physical impediment.  Before Pancho Villa the two Nogaleses were really one, the inhabitants of both sides crossing freely either way.  If the locals had any knowledge of complex international law regulating citizenship, they didn't bore anybody with it.

     After Pancho Villa, however, people got scared.  As usual, fear caused them to do unfortunate things they regretted later but could not undo, any more than one can erase a facial tattoo applied as a drunken party dare.  After Pancho Villa the people decided to build a fence down the middle of town that could have been easily breached by Señor Villa's goons, but all the same somewhat soothed the town's institutionalized insecurities.

      So now an ugly, rickety fence snaked its way up, down and around the prickly hills of Nogales, looking like a geriatric boa constrictor that couldn’t strangle the life out of both countries, but did cause a great deal of indigestion. This is what Mike beheld when his hijacked truck rolled into town.  Tony didn't see anything because he had seen it hundreds of times before and, who knows, he may have been a descendant of one of Villa's merry band.  He preferred Lady Justice just the way she was, he had remarked more than once about what a hot babe she was and how he would like to lick her toes by way of foreplay. As for Lisa, she didn't see anything because she was looking at her own toes.  She was looking at her toes because she was trying not to look at Tony, who disgusted her, and she was trying not to look at Mike, who also disgusted her by not being disgusted enough by Tony.

     "Your friend is a pig," Lisa told him quietly as they dismounted the truck in a dirt lot where the protesters were gathering.

     Mike could not deny that Tony was a pig, but he had taken a certain proprietary shine to him.

     “Your friends are worse pigs.  They wrecked my motel.  They punched holes in the walls.  They're worse than pigs – they are insects."

     "You marginalized them by giving them second class accommodations."

     "If I had a livestock pen I would have locked them in there."

     As if summoned, the green spray-painted Prius carrying Heyward, Zack and Otis arrived.  The car had been improved since last seen in Cornudo.  In black paint sprayed across the green, slogans such as 'Dump Trump' and 'Tear Down the Wall' had been added.  What nobody knew was that Otis had dangled Zack from the moving car by his legs so he could write the manifesto.  Otis had also been the one driving.  Heyward supervised the process.

     Tony's Make America Great Again hat got menacing looks from the four or five dozen protestors that had assembled in the parking lot of a body shop.  The business operated on a strict cash only basis and primarily stayed in business by redecorating stolen cars.  The undocumented workers inside looked at the protesters suspiciously, rejecting any efforts to befriend or show solidarity with them.  The owner of the place disliked Trump because he might be bad for business, so he had agreed to let the kids use the lot, for a fee.  Otherwise, he had no interest in politics and thought these protesters were pampered idiots who should get a job.

     The platform where President Elect Trump was going to give his speech was about two hundred yards down the road, in the skinny shadow of the border fence.  As it turned out, it was impossible to walk there.  In addition to Secret Service and local law enforcement, a cordon of thuggish militiamen had formed an unofficial barrier around the rally to keep the protesters away.

     "I guess we'll just have to get as close as possible and make do," Lisa said when she saw the blockade.  "Find out where the media is and we'll do our demonstration in front of them."

     "Fuck that," Tony said to Mike.  "Your girlfriend gives up too easy.  Or did she just come down here to put on a cheerleading show?  Where’s her fucking pom-poms? Let me handle it!"

     Tony walked down the street toward the militiamen.  Mike watched him go uneasily, then looked at Lisa, who was wearing a disapproving bitch scowl.

     Tony knew most of the militiamen gathered there. They were delighted to see Tony, because a Mexican wearing a Trump hat was definitive proof that their orange-haired idol was not a racist.  Even though the militiamen's conversations were peppered liberally with beaner jokes, they were always trying to convince people that the movement was not about race.  They were happy to see Tony not only because he was a Mexican with a Trump hat, but because he told the best beaner jokes.

     Tony got high fives and fist pumps up and down the militia line. He laughed heartily when someone asked him where his low rider was parked.  He laughed heartily when someone asked if they had let him out of the border patrol holding tank to go to the rally.

     Then Tony saw a cute chick wearing a shirt that said 'Build the Wall, Enforce the Law,’ and knew what to do. Tony gave her his charming smile while wondering if this hat gave him a license to grab pussies.  He decided he better not, refocused, and instead asked where she got the shirt.  She smiled back and pointed to a booth about 20 feet away.

     Tony went to the booth and picked up a box of Build the Wall shirts, then returned to the protesters.  He met a wall of angry scowls cultivated by Lisa.

     "All right guys, listen up because here's what we're going to do. Put on these T-shirts and I can sneak you past the militia.  I'll get you right down to the front, where you'll really get on TV."

      "I'm not wearing that disgusting thing," Heyward protested.

      "You only have to wear it for a minute.  It's a Trojan horse, you know like one of those fake dissolving condoms you put on when you want to ride her bareback but she don't want to get pregnant."  Tony had no verification that such an apparatus existed, but he had always assumed that was where the Trojan horse expression came from.

     There were some chuckles in the crowd, which seemed to be lightening up to Tony.

     "This is wrong, guys!" Lisa protested to the protesters.  "You can't just sneak in like this. You'll get in trouble."

     Tony lowered his eyebrows at Lisa and his thick whiskers could not disguise his contempt.  "Get in trouble?  You're supposed to get in trouble.  If you want to make headlines you gotta get tear gassed and thrown in jail! Are you protesters or pussies?  Let's go!"

     The group surged toward Tony, thrilled with the prospect of being incarcerated.  This is what civil disobedience was supposed to be about, police dogs and rubber bullets, not standing back in a safe place and launching dud verbal grenades.

     Mike was torn between staying with Lisa or donning a T-shirt and going with the rest, but Tony settled the argument for him.  "Come on, I got these shirts on IOU.  You have to go pay the T-shirt lady."  Mike gave Lisa a helpless, palms out, what can I do look and went forward. Lisa stayed back alone with her bullhorn.

     Everybody was swept up in the moment.  The Trojan Horse Trumpsters pushed their way down the street toward the militiamen, who were suspicious about these young kids with corn rows, painted hair, and facial piercings, but lightened up when their pet Mexican Tony assured them that they were students from the U of A who were sick of liberals telling them what to think.

     “They smell like California to me," said one crusty old timer as he spit a wad of something onto the ground.

     "They were just on a field trip to San Diego,” said Tony. “That seaweed smell don't wash off."

     They listened because it was Tony doing the talking, and they all knew Tony.  Here was a man who had made a living chasing free-loading punks off the railroad through the skillful application of ass whippings.  They accepted his explanation and let the kids pass.

      Once inside the cordon, the protesters wriggled their way to the front of the crowd.  Tony used a combination of bullying, begging, bribing and finally, outright lying to get the kids through hundreds of adoring Trumpsters who wanted a front row seat for the President-elect. "Come on, step aside, they're just kids! Do it for the children!..Come on George, I got you onto the Duke's place in 1975.  You owe me one…Yeah Ralph, I can help you get a break on that shipment, I'll make a phone call.  Just make a hole...Hey people, the President wants some young, fresh faces up front, not a line of dried up, wrinkled old farts like you.  Don't make me go get the Sheriff!"

     When none of those techniques worked, Tony stuck out his two stout elbows and forced his way through like an angry rhinoceros.  The momentum of the disguised agitators gathered force behind him and they steamrolled their way to the front.  As he floated along in the flotsam of this kaleidoscope throng of rainbow skin colors, dazzling hair tints, and gaudy earlobe pendants, Mike stumbled and almost tripped on some hard object, which turned out to be a brick.  He kicked it aside thoughtlessly and kept moving forward.

     From the front of the packed mass of humanity, the greatest flock of two legged creatures ever splayed out across this upper Sonoran scrubland, Mike noticed that the brick he had stumbled over matched those piled on a concrete platform next to the stage, where there was also a tub of wet cement and a trowel.  Apparently the President-elect was going to use these implements to make a big show of laying down the first portion of his magnificent, legendary, holy covenant border wall, a barrier pledged to his dedicated, adoring disciples, an insurmountable fortress to prevent the unworthy from invading this thorny land of milk and honey.  In other words, Donald Trump was Moses in reverse.

     A chorus of boos erupted in the throng as the opening bass line of the famous Pink Floyd song about tearing down walls issued forth from the loudspeakers.  Then a familiar voice in a distinctive New York accent coming from parts unseen said "whoops!", after which boos turned to whoops as the song changed to Oasis' Wonderwall.

     "That's right folks!" Trump said as he walked out on stage to deafening roars of approval. "We're going to build a Wonderwall here, a real first class wonderwall, the best wall ever in the history of walls."

     As he presented himself to the throng, the President-elect quaked with undercurrents of suppressed enthusiasm, like an ADHD child forced into a straight jacket for a school assembly.  His unruly shock of orange blonde hair, its unnatural color proclaiming its dubious authenticity, gleamed in the infinite supply of Arizona sunshine.

     “There have been some great walls, wonderful walls, some really fantastic walls throughout history," the President-elect continued, gesturing to the crowd with a little circle formed by thumb and forefinger, a circle that represented a life ring for some but a noose for others. "The Chinese..." derisive cat calls erupted from the assemblage, "...the Chinese tried to build a wall once, as we all know, to keep out illegal immigrants.  They had the audacity to call it the Great Wall, but that wall turned out not so great. Hilary, yes our friend Hilary, tried to build a wall made up of lies and fake news to keep us from the White House. Let’s just say that all of those walls were real choke jobs, just like all the chokers and losers who said that, first of all, I would never be nominated, then said that I would never be elected, then said I would never, ever build a wall across the entire length of the Mexican border."

     The cheering reverberated, and the President-elect let it ring out freely across the length and breadth of the Gadsden Purchase, from where it spilled over into Mexico, a blast of hot wind that wilted foliage. "But here we are folks, here we are," Trump continued as the clamor gradually subsided.  "Here we are to build a wall, and to teach those Chinese a thing or two in the process.  First of all, we're going to teach them how to honor trade agreements, and then we're going to teach them how to build a really great wall, a wall that none of the rapists, or criminals, or drug lords, or freeloaders down in Mexico will ever be able to cross!"

     The crowd exploded again, and under cover of the hypnotic thrall Tony ordered the protesters to remove their Trump shirts, exposing diverse protest garments beneath.  One shirt read "Impeach Trump," a message urging that the President-elect be removed before he could leave so much as a sweat ring in the oval office chair, a slogan fueled by the fantasy that although no President had been ousted by impeachment before, the process was as easy as donning a T-shirt.  Another shirt declared "Tear Down the Wall," a catchphrase that earned enthusiasm points, even though no such structure yet existed. All of these taunting garments of the invading army of civily disobedient immediately drew unfriendly stares, though Mr. Trump was apparently so absorbed with himself he didn’t notice.

     When the buzz in the assemblage quieted, the Donald picked up one of the red bricks from the platform.  There was nothing especially resistant or inpenetrable about it, it was just a typical red brick that looked like the ones used to build houses in the days before seismic standards, a commonplace red brick that might stop the big bad wolf from blowing your house down but wouldn't stop the San Andreas from crumbling it into dust in a matter of seconds.  With the adoring, adorning crowd looking on, Trump inspected the brick lovingly, sensually, from each side.

     “These are great bricks," he said. "These are magnificent bricks.  We had these bricks custom made on the East Coast." This part was fake news, though in his defense the President-Elect did not know it.  In truth, a scared rookie Secret Service agent had bought them in a frenzy at a Home Depot in Tucson that very morning, hauling them onto the stage in such a rush that one or two had fallen off the cart.  But the truth was no obstacle for Trump. "They have the best brick makers in the world over there on the East Coast. Nothing against your local brickmakers, because Arizona has some fine, fine brickmakers.  I build folks, that's what I do.  I know my bricks.  So I can tell you that over there on the East Coast they have the best brick layers on the planet, making the absolutely strongest bricks. When I was building my fabulous casinos over there, we had these bricklayers that just boggled the mind.  Truly, truly magnificent bricklayers that..."

     Tony took Trump's long winded diatribe on the state of brick making in the US as a signal to launch the protest.  From his side of the protest group he evoked a chorus of rowdy anti-Trump cheers that quickly spread among the dissidents.  "Dump Trump!  We reject the President-elect!" Followed by soulfully singing  "We shall overcomb!"

     On the platform the President-elect lowered the brick, which he had been caressing and conversing with like Yorick's skull. Where be your jibes now, your gambols, your songs, he had been whispering in a gentle soliloquy to the brick, but now his full attention turned to the protesters, to whom he delivered an outraged, stalinistic stare of disapproval.  Next he shot a perturbed wtf look toward his Secret Service and the militia men, intimating there may be purges.  Trump didn’t like these Secret Service people. They refused to wear the TRUMP logo in large gilded letters on their clothing.  To him, if it didn't bear the TRUMP brand it couldn't be trusted.  Here was the proof.

     Trump let the brick roll off of his fingers.  It hit the concrete base of the podium and split in two. Somewhere along the high hills of inner Mongolia, stone soldiers  encased deep in some emperor’s crypt high fived in celebration of their own wall's continued supremacy.

     Out in the unruly crowd, a spectator took Trump dropping one brick as a cue to pick another up.  Meanwhile, Mike Gasden was nervously eyeing the proceedings.  Willingly enough, he had been swept along in the bum's rush to the front, but now he realized that this deed went beyond the abstract and was subject to the laws of cause and effect.  A year ago, when Mike was still just a starving software developer, social activism was his church on Sunday, but now he was a man of property and needed to keep his eye open for a safety valve, an escape route, a way to invoke plausible deniability later in case things turned sour.  This intensified scrutiny of his surroundings was why Mike was the first to see the brick as it whizzed inches above his head, flying from somewhere behind where husky Otis was standing.

      Civil disobedience, bored just standing around behaving itself, crossed the fine line over to rioting, just like when matriarch Eve, restless watching soap operas and waiting for Adam to come home from the bar, had started flirting with the serpent and wound up tasting the forbidden fruit.

     Trump removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves in an instant. He assumed an intimidating pugilist stance, but his eyes grew wide and his face went pinker than normal as he beheld the projectile racing straight for him. Mike followed the President-elect's eyes backwards and saw the brick zooming in with a perfect spiral, like a cubist-rendered football that would drill Trump directly between the eyeballs, instead of between the numbers.  Reacting immediately, Mike extended his arm and lightly touched the spinning projectile with the tips of his fingers.

     The contact was not enough to stop the brick, but was enough to slightly alter its trajectory and velocity.  What the intervention of Mike's extended fingers did was to move the brick just enough in space and time that it missed its precisely aimed target, that being an imaginary bull’s-eye square in the geographical center of Donald Trump's face.

     There have been some great shot blockers in the history of the National Basketball Association, heretofore to be referred to here as the NBA, if referred to at all.  Hakeem Olajuwon, Dikembe Mutombo, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar constitute the top three in career shot block leaders.  The mighty Wilt Chamberlain once blocked 26 shots in a single game.  You won't find him or Bill Russell on any shot block lists because no one was really counting back then, but in 1967 the Celtics defensive legend Russel made an immortal blocked shot on Wilt the Stilt, demonstrating quite plainly who was the champion of diverting thrown projectiles from their path.  That is until Michael Gasden came along.

     Michael Gasden made the shot block heard round the world, one that probably changed the course of American history, although we will never know for sure because there is no one hundred percent accurate way of determining what the effects of a brick striking the unprotected face of a 70 year old man will be. Not bad for a computer nerd who had never touched a basketball in his life.

     Suffice to say that the brick did not strike Trump in the face, where it was aimed. Instead, it glanced off the top of his forehead, dealing there a greatly attenuated blow, though still a meaningful one.  Looking toward the President-elect in horror, Michael beheld a series of events that unfolded so rapidly there was no time to correctly interpret them.  First of all, he discerned a fuzzy, reddish-blonde mass fall from the general region of Trump's forehead onto the ground, where it seemed to scurry off to safety of its own accord, like a beleaguered rodent. Immediately thereafter, there followed a brilliant, blinding reflection of the sun off of a smooth, rounded surface, so intensely bright that Mike shaded his eyes against retina damage. But all of this flurried activity was impossible to make sense of to any degree of certainty, because Trump was instantly smothered to the ground by his Secret Service agents, who formed a protective dog pile over him, including the one who had bought the brick that almost took the boss out.

     Michael stood motionless, paralyzed into inactivity by the set of circumstances the quantum probability theory of human history had placed him in.  He froze in place and did not flee, even as his fellow protesters wisely scattered in every direction.

     From the bottom of the Presidential dog pile, a Secret Service agent now looked outward and pointed a finger at Mike, who stood pale faced and dumbfounded in an evacuated circle of bare dirt where the protesters had once stood.  "He did it!  He threw the brick!" growled the agent.  "Get him!"

     Mike turned meekly to the left, then timidly to the right, trying to see if he could locate the target of the agent's accusation. Before he could spot the culprit, Mike was blind-sided and wrapped up in a human cocoon until forced to the ground, smothered within his own not so Presidential dogpile.

Next >>


Photo of Lady Justice atop Nogales courthouse by Ken Lund.  Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Chapter 6

Table of Contents

Chapter 6  - The next week and a half or so went by quietly for Mike there in the Gadsden Purchase, a place where events were measured on the scale of eons, rather than days or weeks.  Donald Trump was elected President and Cornudo buzzed with activity, people nervously bouncing about, hoarding as if for nuclear holocaust, fearful that this man whose orangeish scalp, as thinly vegetated as the surrounding desert, might erase them from the map with a megaton blast from his powerful vocal chords.

     Mike went about his business indifferent to these developments.  He was neither a Trumpster nor a passenger aboard the Hillary wagon, in spite of Lisa's attempts to forcefully drag him there.  In truth he thought the shrieking, self-entitled bitch had pretty much gotten what she deserved.  As far as Mike and politics were concerned, the primary policy issue to be rectified was where the hell were his truck keys, and when would they be back?

     As she drove Mike back to the motel in her faded Nissan Sentra, after another night bingeing at the 'Bud, Linda tried to reassure Mike that Tony should be crawling in the next day.  "Hal will lock him overnight in the Wellton holding tank then let him go," she said.  "He's not really going to deport him."

     "How could he deport him?  He’s a citizen?  Right?”

     Linda grimaced. "There's a lot of things you don't know about Tony, sugar britches.  I guess the answer is yes and no.  It's complicated."

     That did nothing to clear matters up, of course, as the days strung together into a week, and Tony did not appear on the horizon while Mike’s truck sat dead in the water In the Cornudo Café parking lot. In the meantime, there wasn't much Mike could do to keep his mind off things.   He wasn't going to waste any energy or money fixing up the back building, knowing that Lisa's activist friends would just trash it anyway.  Lisa's hooligan associates  interpreted cleanliness and order as evidence of fascism, and were quick to counterbalance it with the chaotic application of anarchy.

     Out of sheer boredom Mike decided to hang up his shingle as open for business.  His first three visitors were concerned citizen busybodies who dropped in to let him know his sign was spelled wrong.  After this, Mike never had more than two customers per night, all of them fitting into the same basic categories.  They were either nervous looking couples who kept their eyes guiltily lowered, or gruff, stocky Hispanic men wearing copious amounts of gold bling who grunted uninteligibly in response to Mike’s enthusiastic inquiries into their good health.  Everyone paid in cash.

     To break the monotony, Mike constructed a device to hijack the Internet signal beaming down from a repeater on one of barren hills between Cornudo and Yuma.  As a believer in the concept of life, liberty, and free internet, Mike suffered no moral qualms about this. His motel patrons were suddenly blessed with free Wi Fi, and in the spirit of net neutrality Mike hooked up the rest of Cornudo as well.  Linda enthusiastically drove him into Yuma so he could pick up a satellite dish and other fixings for his hacking heist.

     "Max is going to be so happy he might cream his Dickies," she chattered as they climbed the wall of granite between civilized Yuma and the badlands to the east, rising there like a fortress to keep the Mongol hordes out.  "It takes him forever to download his porn.”

     Mike blushed, but Linda kept her eyes straight ahead, unaware she had said anything saucy.  The inhabitants of Cornudo were very direct, and this took some getting used to.  In Northern California people were so politically correct they were afraid to say anything, no matter how harmless.  Linda's remark would have been interpreted by Nocal feminist bitches as subjugating herself to the oppression of the penis.

     "What?  What'd I say?"

      “Nothing.  When do you think Tony is coming back?"

     Linda grew somber.  "Hell, he should have been back by now.  He really set off Hal this time with those flapping lips of his.  Serves him right."

     Have you and Tony been friends a long time?"

      "All our lives.  Hell, we've been more than friends from time to time, if you know what I mean.  Let me tell you a little secret that ain't so secret, honeycakes.  Everybody in Cornudo has fucked everybody else at one time or another.  It's a small town, ain't shit else to do.  If you were smart, sugar britches, you'd be raking my coals right now, while there are still some embers to stoke."

     Mike blushed deeper.  It got quiet, and Linda lit a cigarette without asking permission.  "Boy, she sure do got your dick on a leash."

     High speed Internet was received in Cornudo with the same enthusiastic response as Moses drawing water from the rock at Horeb.  Although Linda told the locals to be sure and thank Mike, nobody really did. To them it was an a miracle akin to manna, something beyond the control of mortals.  Human to human gratitude seemed uncalled for, although more than one citizen did go to church to thank Jesus.

     For her part, Linda made sure Mike ate for free at the Cafe, and even bringing him a plate when she could get away.

     The day that Lisa arrived coincided ominously with Tony's return.  Mike was in the lobby, hanging up the portrait he had brought home from the Rosebud, having spent a couple of days refinishing the frame.  Synchronicity or not, he was in the same picture hanging pose as Jesse James was when shot in the back by the coward, Robert Ford.  As he centered the portrait, Mike would have been an easy target because he was meditating on the mysterious doe eyes he had glimpsed through the part in the curtain.  The doe eyes had come to dominate his dreams, sleeping and waking. Disembodied doe eyes moving across the face of the deep desert dust. Mike was so enraptured by thoughts of delightful doe eyes he didn't see Lisa’s Prius pull up.

     “Why are you hanging that baby killer in the lobby?" Lisa snarled as she walked through the door.

      For a moment Mike assumed he was hearing his own thoughts, so he answered himself back.  "The baby killer is a very famous man, and my ancestor.  His name is James Gadsden. He gave this place its name."

     “Well if he did, you spelled the sign wrong," said Lisa.

     The portrait of James Gadsden hanging now in the motel lobby was a reproduction of one painted by Claribell Jett when Gadsden was serving as Aide de Camp to General Andrew Jackson, during the Seminole campaign of 1818.  The young officer looked more baby faced than baby killer.  His cheeks had a fresh, rosy glow radiating from his ivory skin.  His thick locks were as curly as a babe's in the crib.  He had the air of the dandy about him, a decidedly effeminate quality.  The term foppish, currently out of favor but very popular in that era, might have been applied.  But the young Gadsden also seemed to bristle with energy and ambition.  He appeared impatient to sit for the portrait, giving the impression he would sneak out of the chair as soon as the artist's back was turned.  From certain angles, he looked a lot like Mike.

     Mike mumbled something about his ancestors changing the spelling as Lisa said
“Geez, aren't even happy to see me?"

     Mike snapped out of his trance.  "Lisa!" Mike lifted her off her petite Asian feet in a suffocating embrace.  He then tried  to put a lip lock on her, but she offered up a cheek instead.  "Coffee breath," she explained.

    Lisa Chu was, as Mike put it when she was out of earshot, your typical short, skinny, bouncy Asian twenty-bopper, soon to spin a cocoon, molt, sprout wings and transform into a fearsome dragon lady.  She wore huge librarian style spectacles that were too big for her face and seemed to have been picked that way on purpose, either to enhance her squinty eye size, to augment the illusion of intelligence, or to turn guys on with a naughty secretary look.  Her glossy black hair was tied up in a high, utilitarian pony tail that did not venture more than halfway down the back of her skull, as if denouncing materialistic excess. Her clothing, hair style, and overall vibe evoked a no nonsense impression of proletarian efficiency.  She wore no jewelry or other trivial adornments of bourgeois individual expression.  Her unadorned lips were locked tight in thought police perpetual suspicion of everyone about her.  Her eyes lacked the twinkle of laughter, at some point having decided that laughter was a white middle class luxury designed to denigrate the subject races.

"Let me help you with your stuff," Mike exclaimed merrily, bouncing out of the lobby and swinging Lisa's hand in his like a giddy child.  Here at last was a lifeline from the outside world, dispatched to this lonely skull island of castaways full of strange, mutated creatures.

     Mike's  enthusiasm over being reunified with civilization dampened considerably when he emerged into the parking lot and saw Lisa's friends standing there dumbly, obviously waiting for him to unload the trunk of the Prius that had borne them hither. The eco friendly car was spray painted a depressing shade of green Mike would not have believed existed in the visible spectrum.  The color looked more like a toxic algae bloom than the healthy, verdant forest that was supposed to be the goal of the tree huggers.

     "Tell your boys I'm not their bellhop," Mike told Lisa.  "They can unload their own crap."  This was the way all his problems with Lisa started, via peripheral criticisms of her associates that slowly strangled in tighter to include her.

     Lisa's three companions looked at each other in turn, each one incapable of labeling himself with Mike's accusations.  All three had lived at home far beyond acceptable nest booting time, and were accustomed to sitting on their asses until Mom got tired of looking at their mess and cleaned it up. They were Pavlovian conditioned to assume this was the way the world worked.  If they had noticed handles on their luggage they assumed they were for cosmetic value only.

     Lisa's crack civil disobedience team, assembled in the gravel parking lot of the Gasden Motel, consisted of Zack, Heyward, and Otis.  The tallest of the trio was Zack, who went through life either obsequiously apologizing for being a white man, or trying to deny that he was one.  His hair was braided in long ethnic dread locks that had been lovingly kinked and painted black by his mother, who he routinely emotionally abused and manipulated.

     Standing next to Zack was Heyward, a dark complexion Hindu of small stature who obviously hailed from some jungle choked subcontinent.  In contrast to Zack, Heyward expended most of his energy trying to convince people he was white.  He wore his dark hair in a fluffed and spiked dyed blonde pompadour, lovingly combed into place by his mother, who he routinely emotionally abused and manipulated.  His name Heyward was an Anglicization of some utterly unpronouncable Dravidian word.

     Otis, finally, was neither white or brown, but subtle combinations of both.  His hair was neither kinked nor straight, but subtle combinations of both. Unlike the other two, Otis was perfectly fine  with his racial composition, perhaps because he was too stupid to recognize any differences.  Otis gladly let others think for him, but he would never let others eat for him.  Otis was perfectly pacified as long as he was fed properly, and on time. "Feed Otis!" was a common precaution heard on these protest outings, because the ravenous, barrel-chested youth would get surly and want to smash something if he got hungry.  To remind his companions of this, he always wore the same Incredible Hulk T-shirt, an aging, mildewed affair that had patches of green coloring in places not on the Hulk's body. Otis's tremendous girth had been carefully cultivated through the constant application of nutrients, this wearying task being performed by his Mother, who he routinely emotionally abused and manipulated.  Despite the risks associated with caring for such an unpredictable beast, they always brought Otis along because he was good for punching or sitting on unruly Trumpsters, or they used his body for  a barricade against the cops.

     Not being able to conceptualize what was expected of them, Lisa's triad of troublemakers milled about stupidly, shuffling and looking up at the sky.  At last Lisa was forced to unload the Prius herself.  Being a gentleman, this meant that Mike was conscripted into bellhop duties, after all.

     As Mike was piling suitcases onto the motel porch, a hay wagon pulled up into the parking lot.  The only reason it could be called a hay wagon is because it was loaded with hay, otherwise it would have been an ordinary pickup truck equipped with high rails around the bed, the kind used for transporting salvaged merchandise to Mexico for resale.

     The passenger side of the hay wagon opened up and Tony Vargas tumbled out, like someone had rolled a bale down a chute. He was haggard and frazzled, the approximate color of withered livestock feed.  Without even a glance in Mike's direction, he staggered across the parking lot toward his room, ambulating along with a pronounced limp.

     "Hey Tony, what..." Mike started.

     "Don't want to talk about it," Tony said, feebly waving a tired hand that seemed too heavy to hold up.  Then he stumbled down to room 10 in an arthritic draftsman's attempt at a straight line, and shut the door behind him.

"Who was that?" Lisa asked with a distasteful look.

     “There goes your bellhop," answered Mike.

     Despite Lisa's protests about Michael's 1 percenter obsession with property, and Heyward's complaints that he needed isolation for his hair to spike properly, Mike corralled all three gorillas into the same cage. His only concession was to wheel in an extra bed, and he even did that under protest.  By putting them all in one room, Mike figured he could mitigate the damage.  He had installed a very old Xbox system in the room and as such was able to keep them shut in all night, only cracking the door occasionally to throw in pizzas and 12 packs of beer.

     "Hey, there's a Bible in here," Heyward complained, pointing to the Gideon's version on the lampstand.

     "There's one in every hotel room across the country,” said Mike. “If your Mother let you out more you would know that."

     "Hey, well like I'm not down with your instruments of Judeo-Christian oppression.

     "Yeah, Yeah," Zack echoed.  Otis did not look up from the Xbox.

     "Give it to me," Mike said.  It was entirely possible these apes would burn it, and the motel with it.

      The thrill of seeing Lisa quickly wore off.  She didn't want to get romantic, claiming she was on her period.  While Mike lay there, idly flipping through his hacked TV channels – he didn’t steal them out of poverty but simply because hackers gonna hack, Lisa spent most of the afternoon talking on her cell phone, apparently coordinating the impending activism.  As he listened to Lisa spew venom against the white devil, a few heretical thoughts buzzed through Mikes head, ideas he had been thoroughly indoctrinated never to voice out loud. For instance, if Lisa hated the white race so much, what about her five white boyfriends prior to him, Mike ostensibly being number six?  Why had she always spurned the amorous advances of the subjugated races?  What would Lisa do if Mike presented her with evidence of his black heritage? Would she break it off?  Dare he try?  What was he doing out here in the desert leaving a fiancee behind?  Was Tony right?  Was he hiding?

     It was dark already, so Lisa doused the lights and Mike finally coaxed her into  what was essentially unsatisfying sex for both.  Mike had to fantasize about Linda's milf titties to finish the business.  After that, they went to sleep.

     The next morning the motel occupants arose early for the Trump rally in Nogales.  Mike thought that now that he was President elect, the word rally didn't sound presidential enough. He had won, so who did he have to rally, and why?  But the anti-Trump people still talked about Trump's election like it was a mistake they could rectify with a little push.

     Lisa showered and Mike went to check on Tony.  Tony rarely locked or even closed his door, and as usual it was cracked open.  There was nothing the Gadsden Purchase could throw at Tony that he couldn't deal with.  Besides that, he had a roomful of mutant, often venomous critters that were better than a lock for deterring Intruders.

     Mike could hear Tony's light snoring as he cracked the door a little wider.  The sound was a rather pleasantly rhythmic, not like some people's snores that shake plaster loose from the walls.  Tony was laying flat on his back in a sweat-soaked wife beater T-shirt, having gone straight to sleep without changing.  Resting on his belly was an enormous scaly lizard that would have been identified as a Gila monster, if the idea wasn't so laughingly impossible.  When the reptile turned to scrutinize him, Mike could see it only had one eye, which made it seem more fierce and dangerous, like a pirate without a patch.

      Since arriving in the Gadsden Purchase, Mike was gradually becoming inured to such spectacles.  Nonetheless, he approached gently. "Hey Tony, you all right?"

     Tony immediately stirred on the bed.  "Aye Chingados. Hijo de su puta madre."  That said, he gently lowered the Gila Monster from his body. The lizard hissed its displeasure.

     "Sorry.  This is Roscoe.  I must have let him loose last night.  He likes the body heat, I think, but don’t worry, he’s harmless."

     "Aren't those lizards supposed to be poisonous?"

     "Only if they bite you on the dick or something, is what I read.  What's going on?"

     "My friends and I are going down to Nogales for some kind of Trump demonstration. I thought I would let you know in case you wondered.  I kinda need my truck keys, though."

     "Oh shit," Tony said, and he sat up anxiously on the bed.  "I forgot all about that.  Give me a couple minutes to get ready."

     “You don't have to go.  I'm just telling you so you won't - worry." It was hard to concieve how a man who slept with a toxic lizard on his belly could worry about anything.

     Tony looked up at Mike sternly.  "Are you kidding me?  I told you not to get mixed up in all that shit, but if you're going to do it you're gonna need someone there to help you, just in case.  Do me a favor.  Get me some coffee from the cafe while I take a shower.  It won't take long, it's only been a week."

     Mike thought it was pointless to protest and, if the truth be told, he preferred Tony's company over Lisa's goons. "I've got the Keurig machine right here in the lobby.  I'll make you a cup."

     “I can't stand that pussified pisswater.  Go get me some real coffee."

     Mike headed out the door then remembered why he had really come here.  "Uh, could I get my truck keys..."

     Tony rubbed his eyes and blinked.  "Oh yeah, sure.  Right over there with Sheila."

     He pointed to one of the dozen or so terrariums scattered about the room, some teetering precariously on the edges of the shaky furniture.

     Sheila turned out to be an enormous preying mantis, at least 6 inches long.  The bug had an extra half leg dangling in front, an appendage that could have been an evolutionary advantage, but probably meant it was hard to get dates in the mantis world, which was why she had washed up here at Tony's halfway house for wayward freaks.

     Mike's truck keys were in Sheila's protective custody.  She was standing in battle pose on top of them.

     "Do they bite?"  Mike asked.

     "Not really.  Only in self-defense."

     Mike delicately reached into the mantis den.  As Sheila shuffled backward in a defensive posture, Mike was able to slowly extend a pinky and drag his keys across the sand, then up the side of the container.

      Standing in a sultry hand on hip pose, Linda greeted Mike warmly as he entered the Cornudo Cafe.

     "Tony's back," Mike said.

     "Yeah peaches,” Linda acknowledged as she poured the coffee into a large Styrofoam cup.

     "Hey, what was really going on with that little incident the other day between Tony and Hal?"
 
      "Oh, that's just a little peacock tailfeather dance those boys do from time to time."

     "But Hal just can't deport him like that, can he?"

     "Technically he can," said Linda. You seee sugarplum, Tony is neither from here nor there. Officially, he is a man without a country.  He doesn't even have a real birth certificate.  There's no proof that he was ever born."

     Mike let this soak in a little.  All of the normal requirements of civilization couldn’t stand under the relentless desert dust.

     "How could he work all those years on the railroad?"

     "Back then it wasn't hard to fake documents like it is today.  This town takes care of its own, regardless where they crawl in from.  The rest of the world thumbs their noses at us when they speed by on the freeway, so we circle the wagons and give a big fuck you to the planet.  We do what we want here."

     Linda’s voice softened.  Her eyes floated away somewhere like two balloons set loose from a birthday party.  "From what I've been told, because it was long before my time," she looked at Mike sternly to make sure he pretended to believe it, "Tony's Mom and Pop were both of questionable immigration status.  Maybe Tony didn’t really crawl out of the desert like some say, but he was born somewhere South of the horizon, and that good for nothing derelict who claimed to be his Father didn’t take long to disappear back down there. Ruth Vargas settled in this town with her boys, raising them as only a tough Mexican Mama can, with a grab bag of choice Spanish swear words and by leaving just enough hair on their head so she could twist on it to make a point when needed.  Tony adored Ruth Vargas, she was the only human he ever obeyed without question.  But Ruth didn’t have any papers, and neither does Tony.”

     “You say Tony has brothers.  Do they live here?”

      Linda went into a defensive posture almost identical to that of Sheila the praying mantis.  “I’ll let Tony reveal that little secret in due time.  You’ll find out, one way or another.”

      Linda's face underwent a geologic transformation.  The plates moved beneath the crust, and deep valleys eroded into her skin.  "Ruth died young," she said, wiping away a tear with a corner of her apron.  "Tony was in his early teens and kind of went crazy.  He didn't have no place to go and started running with the wrong people.  He was heading for jail, is where he was heading.  But at that point Josef Müeller stepped in."

     “You mean Joe the guy I bought the motel from?”

     Linda nodded. "Josef Müeller had a thing for Ruth, that much was obvious to everyone, but it was what they call an unrequited love.  Yeah they had their flings in the sack, because this is the desert, but it didn't go past that.  He wanted to marry her but she was afraid of getting bounced again. So one day, a couple years after she died, Tony wound up in jail in Bisbee for a serious crime.  Josef went to bail Tony out.  Some say he paid off a judge. Josef told Tony his mother would not approve of the road he was going down. Mexican men typically only religiously obey one half of one of the ten commandments, and this is to honor thy mother. Tony went back with Josef to live at the motel, and he's still there today.  That's sort of his story.  So take that coffee and go before I bawl like a baby."

     Mike did as he was told, grabbing  the coffee and scrambling out the door. Outside, he found the path to his truck blocked by Catalina Eddy and several members of the FF, going the opposite direction.  Eddy was wearing an enormous grin beneath his cowboy hat, which was the only part of his face that showed from under the brim.

     "Well, well look who's here, Tony's nephew Mike who was just visiting, then decided to buy a motel and fix it up while he was passing through."  Eddy extended an enormous paw in Mike's direction, which Mike grabbed delicately with his fingertips, for hygienic purposes.

     "Is that a California handshake?  Give it the whole hand, son, that's how men do it around here."  Eddy grasped Mike’s hand and squeezed fiercely. "We're on our way to see the President elect in Nogales.  Hail to the Chief and all that.  We're going to make sure the out of town riff raff don't get out of hand.  He laid his thick digits on Mike's shoulder.  "But don't worry, we haven't forgotten about you.  Now that you had your grand opening, the boys are real anxious to stop by and sample the hospitality.  Expect to hear from us shortly.  We’re looking forward to it.”

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Image from Wikimedia commons by Jason: https://www.flickr.com/photos/webbaliah/4261934193/