Duran said, “I don’t get it.”
Low had turned his headtoward the backseat as he laughed, and Hawkes slapped her hand on the dashboard and barked, “Watch it!”
Low snapped his head back around and hit the brakes, hard. They all rocked forward as he came to a stop at the end of a traffic pileup. They spent fifteen minutes edging up to three DPS cruisers and two wreckers, all with their lightbars flashing blue and red light out into the afternoon. At the front of the line, they found a crowd of cops and relevant civilians standing in the ditch, where a tractor-trailer lay on its side. The left side of a manufactured house, still strapped to the trailer, was crumbled like an aluminum can.
A thin, frightened-looking man in a white T-shirt, jeans, and a bush hat was waving his arms around as he talked to a cop; the driver, Hawkes thought.
Low said, “There’s a good ’ol boy gonna need a new job.”
As a young man, Rand Low had looked... Texan. Large, rawboned, he was permanently angry. He’d been born in Odessa, Texas, where his father worked as a short-order cook and his mother was a waitress. His parents wanted him to learn a trade. They thought the Army might train him in heavy equipment operation, because heavy equipment operators made good money in the oil patch. But the Army recruiter had conned him and he landed in the infantry, carrying a rifle. He saw distant combat—he could hear it, but not see it—and got away uninjured, angered by the restraint imposed on the troops by their officers.
Afghanistan? They could knock it down in a month, he told anyone who’d listen—and enlisted people listened, nodding—if only the Army would turn them loose. The officers said that was crazy talk. You should see the chaplain, they told him. He worried them and they suggested that he find another line of work and finally insisted that he do that. They’d be happy to give him an honorable discharge at the end of his enlistment, but if he stayed on... well, then maybe not.
His anger grew in the Army and he carried it out to civilian life in the West Texas oil fields.
If a shopper should back out of a parking space while Rand Low was coming down the supermarket lane, block him for a half-second, you’d hear from him, a bearded, red-faced man in a rage at the audacity of some unlucky woman who occupied the lane ahead of him. Rand Low was coming through and he didn’t have that half-second to waste.
“Get the fuck out of the way, bitch, you fuckin’...”
Pounding on the steering wheel of his pickup, leaning on the horn. Hitting on the bottle of Lone Star, or Pearl, in the cupholder.
Low was somewhat tough. Not crazy tough, but maybe eighty-five percent on the male tough-o-meter, what you’d get after two tours in Afghanistan.
One Monday night, at a drive-in burger place in Odessa, Texas, he did his screaming-and-horn act with a woman who rolled down her window to give him the finger. He slammed his Chevy pickup into park and jumped out and went running after her and smacked the trunk of her car with an open hand, hard.
She’d stopped, and as he was about to go around to the driver’s-side window to explain the error of her ways, the woman’s boyfriend—or possibly her pet gorilla, could have been either—got out of the passenger side of the car, grabbed Low by the neck, dragged him to his pickup, and beat his head against the truck’s fender hard enough to dent it and put Low in the hospital for eight days with a concussion and a shattered nose, which was never quite right after that.
Low had learned from that lesson; learned he wasn’t jack shit.
He’d gotten out of the hospital with a bill for $47,000, which he had no way to pay, because he had no money and no insurance. His jobs were sporadic enough, and Low was elusive enough, that the hospital eventually wrote off the loss and stopped pursuing him.
But the experience had increased his already volcanic rage with his world. Then he met Jane Jael Hawkes in a military bar in El Paso, where she worked nights, after her day shift at Fleet & Ranch.
When she was twenty-nine, Hawkes had used her Army computer skills and her reading of American history to start her own website, ResistUS. She chose the name because of the slight pun at the end:USfor United States, andUSfor... us. The view was to the political right and pushed further to the right over the years.
She spun her economic theories out on ResistUS, operating under her middle name, Jael, which she pronounced “Jail,” because hermother had fished the name out of the Bible, and she’d pronounced it that way. Jael made no appearances, made no speeches, remained an articulate, mysterious woman known only to people who prowled the hallways of the right-wing darknet. She harvested email addresses of border folks, militia people, sent them anonymous links to her website.
She attracted followers, many ex-military, mostly male, but women as well, all embittered by the lives they were leading. Living in apartments no bigger than cells, or in decaying trailer homes, trying to decide whether to pay the heating bill or the electric bill or to actually buy a steak this month.
Good Americans, hooking up with the woman at ResistUS, and calling themselves Jael-Birds.
“You’re a smart guy,” she’d told Low, over rum Cokes. “You think you’re here by mistake? Hauling pipe for some rich fuckin’ oil company? You think BP gives a wide shit about you? We’re the modern slaves. Sure, they tell us we’re free people, but free to do what? Earn forty grand a year breakin’ your fuckin’ back? Can you afford a house? Fuck no. Or if you can, it’s a shack.
“Why are we pissed on by all those TV people you see on CNN and MSNBC and Fox who make fun of us every chance they get? The people they fly over? The Rust Belt? The Bible Belt? The only time they can see us is when somebody overdoses on OxyContin and they put up a picture of some asshole passed out in the street. For them, that’s us. Why should anybody make fun of us because we eat at Olive Garden and not some fruity fish-and-steak place in New York City?”
And Hawkes learneda curious thing about Low, who had little interest in intellectual matters, in history or economics. He couldtalk. Feed him the words and he could turn them into rage. And he told her something else, one night sitting at the bar:
“You can bullshit all you want, Janie. Bullshit until you drop dead. Nobody’ll really give a flying fuck until you do something. Get out there.”
“Do what? Get a bunch of guns and go shoot up stop signs, like those fuckin’ gun nuts?”
“They’re only gun nuts because they don’t know what else to be,” Low said. “You tell them, but you don’t show them. They read all that shit on ResistUS and then what? I’ll tell you what. They go watch the football game on ESPN.”
She thought about that: how to convert words to action.
She was aware of the militias operating in the El Paso area, because the members hooked up to her ResistUS site. They flew “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and Confederate battle flags and wore camo and carried AR-15s and drove Jeeps and bought all that geardo military crap that she’d thought was crap even when she was in the military.
She didn’t want that; but she did want something else.
