Chapter 10

Table of Contents

Chapter 10

She wakes up in the shade of the Terebinth tree, thinking she fell asleep drawing water. At her age she has no business with this kind of foolishness. Mother will be angry.

Then she feels the little boy sleeping against her chest, and remembers she has not come here to draw water, and this is probably no Terebinth tree. This is not the sacred shady grove where the prophets rested, the place she sometimes sleeps and dreams the holy tribal dreams.

Indeed she rests in the sandy bed of a dry waadi, not unlike those in her sacred home across many seas. But over this ephemeral watercourse stands a wall of dark stone on which squiggles, swirls and crescents are carved, the dank memes of the ancients. Centuries ago other prophets came here and left behind their wisdom, but they definitely were not the prophets of her people, just as this shade was not made by the Terebinth tree of her people.

Severe dehydration grips her body and that of the little boy using her body for a pillow. This dryness of body and spirit muddles her thoughts. But her principle confusion comes from the fact that this place looks so much like the dry steppes she comes from. The wind whipping and whistling above the wash is the same wind that scours the Syrian sand. It blows whispered messages in from the jinn dwelling back there among the ancient rocks and trees of the old world. The voices rolling in in gusts from 7,000 miles away taunt and tease her. You abandoned the graves of your ancestors. What do you expect but this misery?

As similar on the surface as this land is to that distant, abandoned one from which she and the boy rode on a foul wind over endless oceans, it is still only a warped, distorted version of the place where the blessed prophets roamed on naked feet that never tired and never bled. Had she been inclined toward scientific speculation, she would say it was a relativistic version, skewed and warped along the axes of space and time. She has never seen a Dali painting, but there is a Daliesque touch to this place. There are Terebinth trees, but they are stumped and twisted hobgoblins of Terebinths. They offer shade, but only a dismal, mocking shade that holds no hope of life giving water in the ground beneath. There are pastures here, but they are mirage pastures that offer only thorns to desperate travelers. There are prophets, but they are dead prophets of a dead, trampled religion that reveals there is no holy land for any man. The indecipherable revelations of these obscene seers and scribes are written on the stones that wall in the waadi. Perhaps they offer some sort of warped wisdom, but their meaning has perished with their prophets.

The boy opens his eyes and looks about with dull indifference. He should cry, the mother thinks, but he does not. It is remarkable how war squeezes the tears out of babes. Eighteen months and he does not cry, neither does he walk because he can never roam far or free enough to learn. His entire life has been spent pressed tight against mother's lap in some cramped bunker or basement.

Her eyes shift to the horizon. The bleached Earth of the desert is like a mirror that reflects the sun blindingly back toward her. Even in the shade of the anti-Terebinth she has to shade her eyes to filter the glare. But by squinting she can see the tower, standing like a holy minaret of hope, though no longer transmitting the blinking red lights of its call to prayer. In this land everything is reversed. In the black of night the tower summons the faithful, those steadfast devotees of the water cult, to come bow down and be refreshed. Now in the day it is rendered powerless, its red plastic bulb covers with the sacred blinking lights nothing but cheap children's toys glued to the top of a plastic pole.

She is told about the towers via hand gestures and pantomime by those who migrated here before. At first, she looks upon these nomads as ugly brown trolls who are incomprehensible of speech. Yet soon she finds they can be kind, gentle, and generous with what little they have. The migrant women delight in the blue eyes of her half-Circassian baby, and take turns holding him. With the icebreaker of her child creating tolerance they somehow communicate the idea that there is water at the towers but beware the white wolves that lurk about. If the wolves catch her scent, she and her child are doomed.

In quest of the tower she finds herself imprisoned in a dizzying limbo where day blends into night, dreams blend into waking, and the chronological order of events has no meaning. But even in this disorienting, pitiless world between worlds she sees no discernible signs of the wolves of which she is warned. Is this another false hope? The god of this desert is not the sacred one of the holy book, it is the god of false hope. It lures people into a hostile wasteland with visions of glittering, watered cities, but these cities are forever out of reach, like the cursed tree of Zaqqum in the eternal fires of Jahannam.

The water of the twinkling towers seems also forever out of reach, but she has to try. Another day without water and they are dead.

She lifts the boy, who squirms uncomfortably as they emerge from the shelter of the tree into the sun but still does not cry. Even if he remembers how to cry, there is not enough water in his little body to produce tears. She lugs him through the sand of the waadi, up an eroded crack in the opposite bank, then onto the endless creosote plains that lay between her and the tower with its lights hanging inertly in their sockets, like martyred prophets strung from a high place as a warning.

As she plods across the waterless, windswept pavement of the desert, she thinks back to when this began, in that holy spot beneath the real Terebinth. She is tending the family's flocks, what meager remnants remain after the depredations of rival armies. This is normally a job for her numerous brothers, but they are all conscripted into one side or the other - who can tell the difference, and it is left to the women to protect the tribe’s livelihood.

The Terebinth shades a well used by the same, unchanged bands of nomads for thousands of years. It is said that father Abraham watered his flocks at this well when his people wandered from wicked Ur of the Chaldees to the sacred promised places. It is a well not unlike the one into which Joseph, Abraham’s great-grandson, was later thrown by his jealous brothers. The flow from such wells is blessed by angels then cursed by evil jinn in turn, filling the hearts of men who stop there with alternating waves of goodness and malice.

She finds one such fallen angel unconscious beneath the Terebinth. He must be an angel, she thinks, because his hair is so fair and his light skin is unscathed by punishment from the sun. Perhaps he has been cast down from the battles in heaven, which those on Earth are but poor imitations. So fixated is she upon his complexion, a lightness of coloration that casts a warm glow through the shade, that she fails to notice his soldier's uniform.

She wonders how he arrived here. While still dozens of yards away, while bringing her flock up, she looked toward the well as a precaution, because these days there are dangerous men taking refuge in such places. Normally her sheep bleat out the presence of strangers, but they are silent.

This man is a miracle who fell from nowhere. Angel or not, it is clear he needs help. His camouflage jacket has a dark stain in the shoulder area. His face is sullied by soot and grime, which dulls but cannot extinguish his radiance. His hands are scratched and his pants worn at the knees, as if he had been squatting in brush for long periods. His lips are parched and cracked.

Overwhelmed by pity and perhaps other feelings best kept guarded in her heart, she cannot take her eyes from the stranger's angelic countenance. As she stands petrified by wonder, the angel begins to mumble words in a language she cannot understand, further proof that he comes from the world beyond the veil. Then, where the wind and sun of the steppe could not, the adoration from her awestruck eyes wakes the angel, who stirs, turns toward her, then slowly opens his eyes.

"Are you an angel?" he asks, once in his mysterious angel tongue and then, sensing confusion, in Arabic.

Startled, she quickly covers her face, then stumbles backward. Her serene, silent flock spreads out on the hillside. The angel man groans and grasps his forehead. The tormenting flies, always buzzing about the spoils of war, do not bother him. An angel he must be.

“I am alive," he says, sounding somewhat disappointed.

At length her tongue recovers from the shock of finding a fallen angel at her feet. "You are hurt," she says. "I will bring you water."

The angel drags himself up painfully against the trunk of the tree. She moistens his lips gently with water from the sacred well. "You are not afraid?" he asks her.

“ Of what?" Truly she feels no fear.

"Of helping a stranger who could kill you. Of helping the wrong side and being punished for it by the other side."

She says nothing. She knows nothing of geometry, nothing of sides, nothing of the ideas that stir the vortex of wars into motion. She only knows wars are a storm that blows across and scourges the desert. Most of the men in her tribe were conscripted, some by one side, some by another, then had blown away to be swept up in that scourge. One day some of them would blow back and life would continue as before. No one would ask what side they were on.

As the angel speaks he gradually looks more human and vulnerable. The act of speaking weakens him. After drinking, he groans and sinks back down beneath the tree. She knows now he is human and is losing life-giving blood, so she gathers in her flock quickly and moves swiftly home for help.

The law of the desert prevails over the laws of men. Each side in the confusing geometry of this multi-faceted struggle declares it a crime to help any of the other sides, but the code of the desert cuts deeper. Long before Rashil ministered to Yaequb at such a place, resting travelers were welcomed and protected at this well without being asked what side they were on.

The angel is taken into the village. He is bathed, fed, and his wounds are tended to. On the third day he arises and tells his story.

It turns out he is of the fair-skinned Circassians. Once a captain for Assad, during the Arab Spring he refused the order to fire into protesters. Instead, he and most of his men fled and joined the FSA, where for months they fought for the city of Homs. From there he was sent to stir up opposition in the Hamad desert, to look for backing among the Bedu. This operation turned sour when his men were ambushed by Assad-backed militiamen, then quickly assaulted by ISIS, who did not discriminate between pro and anti-Assad soldiers. The two enemies joined forces against the greater evil, but were overwhelmed. The angel was shot trying to recover a wounded man of the pro-Assad ranks. With all of his soldiers killed or captured, he hid in a wadi, which he traveled down by night to escape. Morning found him beneath the Terebinth.

The politics of the war are incomprehensible to the humble tribesmen, scraping out a living in the hard packed soil of the Hamad. They find no reason to condemn their wounded visitor, but instead conceal and shelter him for weeks. Giggling Bedu girls sneak into his tent to peek at his pretty blue angel eyes, but the Circassian only has eyes for his own angel, the water drawing maiden who saved him from being buried beneath the Terebinth.

But the angel cannot stay forever. The prophets endured seven years tending flocks to win the hand of a shepherd maiden, but the prophets are now all conscripted into one army or the other. The war has rendered the tribesmen desperately poor, their flocks thin and scattered. Tribal custom dictates that the maiden belongs to a second cousin, but where is this second cousin? He is presumed dead. The patriarchs dig deep for precedents, then out of practicality let her marry her angel.

When they marry they do not ascend the boughs of the Terebinth back into the heavens, from which the angel had fallen. They go to Aleppo. The angel’s wings have been clipped.

In those early days of the civil war, the rebels are emboldened by success to move on Aleppo. Aleppo is the oldest city in the world, and the most fought over.. Its citadels have been battered by Turks, Mongols, Arabs and Crusaders. In ancient times it has been controlled by Rome, Constantinople, and Paris, lately by Moscow and Damascus. It is a giant city commanding a rich plain, but despite its grandeur remains one of the great what-ifs in history. Aleppo has had five thousand years to realize its full potential, but has disappointed. As such, Aleppo suffers from an inferiority complex. It is a city with a chip on its shoulder.

Far from the magic of the Terebinth, the angel changes to match resentful Aleppo. In the warzone he becomes cruel and demanding. Beneath the sacred aura of the tree he loved his shepherd maiden dearly, but within the dismal, smoking wreck that Aleppo has become, love loses its meaning. The protection of the prophets does not apply here, the city is ruled instead by war machines. The angel transforms into an agent of these sinister beasts. He no longer laughs or delights in flowers, birds and poems. Instead, to his bride he delivers long, weary, harangues about a freedom that does not sound free. The bride listens obediently, but thinks that the freedom she enjoyed on the steppe as a birthright had been surrendered in Aleppo. Here she is confined in a small basement, cowering under the whizzing of bullets and the rumble of bombs.

The angel treats her like an object, another piece of gear stuffed into his rucksack. He disappears for days, then returns and forces himself upon her. When she does not conceive he blames and slaps her. If her tormentor had been just another typical dark-eyed brute she could have tolerated the abuse better.. But when a fair-skinned, blue-eyed storybook angel is beating you then the world is upside down and without hope. Even nomad shepherd girls dream of Disneyland. Even nomad shepherd girls are crushed to discover that Prince Charming is only a myth.

She cannot understand why this angel-man, her husband of mysterious origins, wants to bring a child into this nightmare. She takes precautions taught to her by other women in the bunker. Her womb remains barren.

Then one night the angel comes to her in a dream. He descends through the ceiling, lowering himself by the rusty pipes in the basement as if they are the branches of the Terebinth. He kneels above her, glowing his angel glow, then gently lifts her veil and kisses her. For the first time she becomes aroused. For the first time she lowers her defenses and let's him sow his angel seed. He lays there through the night, embracing and kissing her tenderly. In the morning he is gone. She never sees him again.

But his angel image persists in the little boy he sows within her. The little boy is raised in the cellar, an angel born in hell that rarely sees the sun. His only playthings are postcards taken from an abandoned curio shop upstairs, a relic from a time when tourists pass through the ancient city to marvel at the architecture of a city that does not age, even through the urban renewal of war.

The bombs bursting overhead and the Russian jets cleaving the air above are part of the little boy's world. The sounds do not frighten him because they belong to the natural order. He spends hours ignoring the destruction above, perusing the pleasant postcard sky framing Aleppo's fabled streets, towers and mosques, wondering if they have any connection to the gray, smoking ruin he sometimes glimpses outside. The boy gathers his pile of postcards under his thin pillow at night, where by osmosis they enter his psyche.

One day a soldier comes and tells them they have to leave quickly. Aleppo will fall, Assad is coming. The shepherd woman knows Assad to be the mask worn by a legion of inhuman beasts called Alruwsia. The Alruwsia have wings, like demons, and they spit fire. Or do they shit fire? There are competing theories. She believes the Alruwsia cannot find her out on the steppe, because of the protective shield of the Terebinth. "I want to go home to my people," she says.

"Your people are all dead," the soldier tells her. He does not say how, she does not ask. These days, everyone knows the cause of death in advance. What goes without saying is that the Terebinth has been uprooted, the prophets have been banished. "Your husband made arrangements for you,” he says. “We're getting you out of the country. Gather your things."

There is not much to gather. All of their clothes fit into a small bag. The boy jealousy carries along his little collection of postcards. In minutes they are gone, wandering down the once picture postcard streets that are now piles of twisted concrete rubble. Aleppo has lost again, beaten up by big bully Damascus.

They are shipped to Somalia like so much freight. For weeks she and the boy live among pirates who eye them suspiciously, unconvinced they own nothing worth stealing. From there they are dispatched to Mexico, packed into crates like produce. Mexico does not look like Mogadishu, the people have an air of civility and some are genuinely kind to her. But the air she breathes everywhere is heavy with the same oppressive fear that has enveloped the planet since the day she left the shade of the Terebinth.

The day comes to cross the border. The pollitos she travels with call it "La Frontera," the word singing off their tongues as if it is a magical Oz that will solve all their problems. She, the boy, and a couple dozen more are packed into a produce truck that is stifling by day and freezing by night. Meanwhile, all she knows about her destination is that it a place called New Jersey, and her husband’s refugee sister dwells there. She asks one of the other pollitos where New Jersey is. He has to think about it, never having heard the word himself, but so as not to appear bruto he says - Cruzando la frontera, luego caminando dos, tres dias, about two or three days walk across the border.. This gives her hope. She has walked for weeks on the steppe. Two or three days afoot to New Jersey will be easy.

Even though they are kept in complete silence and darkness in the back of the truck, the pollitos seem to sense when they are approaching la frontera. The atmosphere grows tense. The friendly attitude of the pollitos changes. She and her boy are now competition, they won’t be weighed down by her and her baby. They are different, they are a danger. Terroristas, it is murmured. Being captured with them will be bad. Que Dios te bendiga and goodbye.

The uneasy suspicion of the pollitos in the back of the truck infects the coyote drivers up front. Yeah, they have been paid extra to carry this puta madre terrorist bitch in the back, and yeah, now that she ditched her headdress you couldn't tell if she was Gloria from Guadalajara from Baghdad Betty, but the militia they pay off to look the other way draws the line at towel-heads. Where the sand niggers are concerned, …. Making America Great Again is not for sale.

So they unload her and the boy two miles short of the border. She is pointed in the general direction of New Jersey and cut loose. She assumes this is the way things are done. A Bedu afoot is not unheard of. Without realizing the scope of her journey she starts walking across the sand with her baby on her back.

The concept of frontera is alien to her. Her people cross freely between Iraq, Jordan and Syria but these are only names learned in school that carry no meaning. There is no frontera that defines the land of her birth. She isn't even sure in which of the three she has been born. She cannot comprehend that calling herself a Jordanian makes her a harmless traveler, but being from the other two marks her as a dangerous terrorist. Unlike here, the Bedu do not draw such lines on paper, they govern their movements by the natural contours of the land and the mostly friendly agreements among tribes. All of this hiding in trucks to cross from one parched patch of land to another equally parched patch makes no sense. In her view, you protect land where there is running water or good grass. You don't protect bare dirt.

But she is pointed to a patch of bare dirt in the distance that is somehow infinitely more valuable than the dirt where she now stands. At first the going is easy enough, but she is a woman, not a camel. The coyotes give her no water, no food. She does not store water in a hump, and though she sees some green winter grass, she does not graze. Also, years of hunkering in Aleppo basements have made her weak.

Sometime in the late afternoon she crosses the invisible line on the planet that subdivides the dirt. She sings a gentle shepherd's song to the little boy to calm him, but he needs no calming. He is a good, sweet, gentle child and she loves him even to lay her own life down. People love their children, she thinks, no matter which side of the ever shifting sand it is their fortune or misfortune to occupy.

Walking down a well traveled wadi, she trips a motion sensor without knowing. She finds a washed-out hole in one of the banks and decides to stop for the night, not knowing that by tripping the sensor she has set men in motion. Although their journey has barely begun, she and the boy already suffer from extreme thirst. His little pink lips are shriveled and cracked.

Somewhere in the distance, she thinks she hears the rumble of a motor. She pushes back deeper into the hole, not knowing what kind of men dwell here. In her desert there is a code of hospitality for travelers, but she was shown no hospitality by the coyotes who dumped them on the roadside, and she expects no hospitality on this side of la frontera, either. Better to play it safe and stay hidden.

When the sun goes down she can see the gently blinking red lights of which she was told, singing to her softly of the wonders of wetness. The promise of water gives her hope, but an incredibly vast distance seems to separate them from the beacon. Can they endure the torment of thirst one more day?

Even though she hears unseen things move in the darkness, they are soothing desert sounds like those she is used to and they lull her to sleep. In her restless dreams the Terebinth burns without being consumed, but there is no voice coming forthwith. The voice is dead.

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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."



Next >>


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.

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