“Money,” Hawkes said. “If you’re going to get some real power, you need some real money. We need to figure something out. We need money. Lots of it.”
Time passed, months.The patrols continued. Then a man named Roscoe Winks, an oil wildcatter, so he said, wandered into the Ironsides bar where she worked part-time. He was taking a break from the oil patch, he said, a little vacation in the El Paso area. Did she know where a man might find a little... uh... action? He didn’t mean a poker game.
He was a sorry excuse for an oilman, she thought, but they got to talking, and though they at first talked in circles, they eventually got serious. Winks, like Hawkes, was in a perennial financial bind,but Winks had an idea of how he might get out of it, if he had some qualified help, people with some guts. How they might steal themselves some oil and make some real money. Though they’d need twenty thousand dollars to get organized.
She told him to come back: she’d think of something.
She told Low and Sawyer about Winks.
Low asked, “How much are we talking about?”
“Winks says our end could be a million bucks a year. He could give it to us in cash. He’s got that all worked out. The money would be clean.”
Low: “Terry knows an easy bank up in Lawton, Oklahoma. He knows how we could knock it over, no problem. We been talking about it. Don’t know how much we’d get, but it’d be enough to cover Winks.”
Hawkes took the next step, looked at Low and nodded.
Duran was right:Low and Duran went into the bank on a payday Friday morning, Sawyer drove the stolen car. They got $39,000. Seed money, for the good of the USA. They burned the stolen car in a pasture outside Lawton and were back in El Paso by midnight.
“You know who started this way, with a bank robbery?” Hawkes asked, thumbing through the pile of cash on her kitchen table. “Stalin started this way.”
Low and Duran looked at each other, then back at Hawkes. Low asked, “Who?”
Winks had a broken-down tank truck. The money from the bank robbery rehabbed the truck’s diesel engine and the transmission, gave the tractor unit a fresh coat of fire-engine-red paint, bought some decent recaps for it. A thousand bucks spent on a sandblaster cleaned up the tank. Red paint and careful drawing by one of themilitiamen converted the truck into a replica of the vehicles run by the biggest oil-service company in the Permian Basin.
A truck nobody would notice.
And they built themselves a pig. The pig cost eight thousand dollars, created in a machine shop in Waxahachie, Texas, to specifications created by Roscoe Winks.
Somewhat to Hawkes’s surprise, Winks’s scheme actually worked—small sips of oil from the major oil companies turned into hundreds of thousands of dollars over the two years they were working at it.
Hawkes, with serious money coming in, quit her day job at Fleet & Ranch to spend full-time organizing. She’d been right about the money. The protopopulist groups scattered around the Midwest and Northwest loved the idea of paid-for travel by air, rather than bus or pickup. Money to cover meals and rental cars, even decent motels, instead of the ratholes or back bedrooms they usually had to put up with.
Low became a celebrity among them, a tough guy who showed up at meetings with gun-toting bodyguards in off-road-equipped pickups, some with fuckin’ snorkels. And a woman, who stood behind him, her face half covered by a bandanna, who called herself Jael.
Low did the speeches; Hawkes did the thinking and the backroom negotiations.
“We need to galvanize people who think like us,” she told her conferees. “We need mythmakers. We need an Alamo. We don’t need a bunch of fuckin’ crazies running through the Capitol. We need an Alamo that people can be proud of, instead of hiding out like a bunch of chickens.”
Nods and questions. Whispered answers. Envelopes full of cash changed hands. They got organized.
More money went to the militia hardcore in El Paso. Those who couldn’t afford solid pickups got new ones, and new weapons to go with them, standardized nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistols and ARs and AKs as long guns.
At the end of August, two years after they started stealing oil, they had a target and they had a D-Day. They had their symbol of resistance, their Alamo, though they were the only ones who knew it at the time.
Then, almost at the last minute:
An oil company exec named Boxie Blackburn called Roscoe Winks, to see if he knew anything about some missing oil. Winks panicked and called Hawkes.
“We’re right there,” Hawkes told Low, later that evening. “We’re at the Alamo, but we’re gonna have to disappear afterwards. We need that money. We can’t get along without it. We spent too much on... other stuff, and we still have to pay for the stuff from Bliss.”
She never spoke the name of the stuff from Bliss. Bliss was a U.S. Army fort in El Paso. The stuff from Bliss would cost a ton.
“Five more runs,” Low said. “We’ll tell Winks we want all the money from the last five runs, and we want it now, up front, or he could get hurt—but tell him he can have the truck, the pig, the idea, and he can get his own gang together.”
“Kind of like extortion,” Hawkes said.
“More than that,” Low said. “When Winks gives us the money... we’re gonna have to get rid of him.”
