Чак Хоган - The Standoff

“Oughta sell tickets!” he said.

“Mr. Belcher.” Perkins nodded after introducing himself. “What did you think you were doing up on top of this mountain yesterday?”

Belcher grinned. “Ain’t against the law to walk a man’s own land, or visit a neighbor.” He looked from face to face with aggressively mirthful eyes. “Anyways, not yet.”

“You do understand that a United States Marshal was shot and killed there yesterday.”

Belcher mumbled acknowledgment. The man’s chattering grin did not go away. “I saw a whole lot of trespassers up there,” he said.

Perkins nodded. It was an official nod that gave away nothing while imparting a sense of developing rapport. Perkins executed it better than most. “So you’re a close friend of Mr. Ables.”

Belcher nodded. “Glenn’s a good neighbor. Clean liver. Real high morals. Got to admire a man who don’t buckle. Been mooning these marshals since ever.” He smiled up at the taller men on either side of him.

Banish said, “He’s holding his family hostage up there.”

Belcher looked at Banish and shook his grinning head as though he were being teased. “You federal boys all crap out your mouths. Don’t you think we’re ready for you? Don’t you think we know what the hell all this here is?”

Banish said, “Who are ‘we’?”

Belcher’s face was wide with sly, knowing excitement. “This here is the federal government trying to push us into armed confrontation. So they can rampage through here, taking our guns, killing off our families, imposing their New World Order on us. That’s known.”

Banish said, “Who is ‘us’?”

“See, around here people believe in the right to bear arms. The right to raise a family whatever way they see fit. The right to worship Yashua — your Jesus — however pleases you. This here’s the Great Northwest, the last stronghold of pure white freedom in this country. Do you see that? There’s a principle involved here.” His shackles, clattering as he grew more animated, became suddenly quiet. “I’ll say this, though. If Glenn ain’t come down off Paradise yet, he ain’t never coming down at all. Glenn’s willing to die for what he believes in. Big morals, a man of great faith.”

He was reveling in the attention, looking from face to face not merely for reaction but also for approval. Banish glanced over at the Indian. His eyes seemed a little brighter under his hat brim, but clearly not from anything he hadn’t heard before. The two marshals stood rigidly.

Perkins said, “That would be the Christian Identity faith.”

Belcher nodded matter-of-factly. “That’s so.”

Perkins grandstanding again. “A fundamentalist creed holding that Anglo-Saxons are the only true Israelites and that America is their promised land. That nonwhites are subhumans to be banished from the country.”

“Got to watch your separation of church and state there,” said Belcher, smiling, pointing. “Glenn likes agreeable people. So do I. The great race war is coming here. Glenn knowed it. He said all along, he said: the first shots’d be fired at his cabin. And now just take a look around you.” He was getting worked up again, clattering his handcuffs. “You know the United Nations Tower of Babylon in Jew York City is making all our laws. Twenty-five hundred blue-helmeted troops massing on the Canadian border right now. What does that tell you there? It’s coming. See, Glenn’s for preserving the white race. He’s for the Grand Old America.”

Belcher was nodding proudly, looking from face to face. Banish looked him back. He was recalling for some reason a patient at the Retreat, a former doctor in fine physical health who went around telling people that his body was riddled with cancer, describing the entire destructive process in florid detail.

Banish watched Perkins and Sheriff Blood watching Belcher. The sheriff was remarkably nonplussed. Perkins appeared proud of his success in drawing Belcher out — a chatty old fool who could have been drawn out in conversation by a mime. This episode was the sort of thing that Perkins might later try to bring up with Banish as a flint for conversation: “So how about that old guy...” But Banish had no interest in cultural oddities or the local color of one wrinkled mountain man. He did not care who hated whom, nor certainly why. The only thing he cared about was the nodding certainty in the old man’s voice, and the strong antifederal sentiment behind his words. Banish knew that this man did not stand alone.

Banish looked at Perkins and nodded, and Perkins said, “Thank you, Mr. Belcher, that is all.” The marshals led him away.

The Indian sheriff said, “Fifty more just like him living within a few miles of here. And none of them ever broke a law in their life.”

Banish turned to the van and rapped twice on its side with a single knuckle. The sound man nodded to him from inside the open door and began cueing up a reel of audiotape.

The throw phone remained untouched on the ground fifteen yards before the front porch. Banish stood at the imagined border of the roughly forty-yard no-man’s-land surrounding the cabin. A loudspeaker was mounted on a steel tripod near him, its legs anchored in the ground, metal flaps turned on either side to direct sound at the cabin.

Banish said into his Motorola walkie-talkie, “Go.” The hard bass beat and repetitive treble patter of urban black music boomed out of the speaker. The deepest bass notes shook the ground where he was standing, and then the rap lyrics began — shouted, abrasive.

Banish got behind the speaker and instructed the sound man by radio. “Twenty-minute loop, followed by ten minutes of silence the first play-through, one minute less each half hour. And req some earplugs for these men up here ASAP.”

Fagin was standing apart from his cadre, picking at an unlit cheroot in his hands and frowning at the music. He came forward and said above the noise, “You rattling him so fucking early?”

“I want him to get the phone and tell us to turn off the music,” Banish said. “I want him to start making demands.”

Fagin was shaking his head. “It’s too fucking early,” he said.

Banish just nodded. He looked back at the no-man’s-land and the two dog carcasses rotting there. They lay ten yards apart, backs tossed wildly, each drawing a distinct black cloud of hungry flies now. In another day or two the stench would be overwhelming.

Banish moved past Fagin to start back down the mountain. “Your kind of music?” he said to him.

Fagin scowled. “I’m the only man on this mountain who hates this fucking music more than Ables does.”

Brian Kearney had just come up the road from the bridge, where things were really getting going. The number of protesters there had practically doubled again. Parked cars lined both sides of the grass road now and people were hiking along beside them to the bridge, carrying signs, coolers, picnic baskets. There was plenty of speech-making and milling around in general. The work itself, what Brian and the other four cops were doing in support of the marshals, was pretty much like any other detail he was used to except that, unlike phone company workers or road repairmen, the marshals didn’t take any time to chew the fat. There was not much else to do on a detail other than drink coffee and stamp your feet, both of which made Brian piss like a fountain angel, which was why he was currently back up at the clearing.

Things were happening there too. He stood back and tried to picture the empty space he once knew. It was continuously rush hour here. And music now too, which was strange, from far off, drifting in and out like someone playing a radio or beating a drum. It seemed to echo off the peaks.