As she came down, Low climbed up and took the microphone. A big man with shoulder-length black hair, he was dressed in a black T-shirt under a black sport coat, black jeans, and black combat boots. He was carrying a black AR-15 with a thirty-round mag banged onto the bottom of it. As the crowd tightened around the truck, he peeled off the jacket to reveal a tan leather shoulder holster with his Beretta. Hawkes had calculated the effect, and she’d been correct: a ripple of ooo rolled through the crowd. Low flashed his smile and picked up the microphone.
“I’ve been asked to coordinate our action tomorrow. In your invitation to the party, we noted that Texas has open carry of long guns, but you need a license to carry a handgun, either open or concealed. That’s not really here nor there tomorrow—carry whatever you have—but we don’t want anybody recklessly shooting them off . . .”
He went on about guns for a while, answered a couple of shouted questions, spoke about the media—“They’re gonna be all over us, calling us Nazis and all that bullcrap . . .”—and then began to preach.
* * *
“This country should be a paradise. There should be a job for every working man, and how long the liberals been talking about that, and what have we got? Sold out to the Chinese and the Mexicans and everybody else we could be sold out to. The Vietnamese, who killed fifty thousand American boys back in the sixties and seventies . . . We got any veterans here?”
Hawkes marveled. When she was sitting in a McDonald’s with him, Low came off as a Texas hick, white trash, gobbling fries with oil-stained fingers, chewing with his mouth open, spitting pieces of Quarter Pounder around the table, dribbling ketchup on his shirt . . .
On a rifle range, he was a dangerous man, to himself and everyone around him. He never seemed to know quite where his gun was pointed, whether it was a rifle or a pistol, and if you sat next to him long enough, the muzzle would inevitably track across your nose, with his finger on the trigger . . .
But.
Get him to talk at a meeting, and he came alive. He couldn’t write his speeches, but he could deliver them, working into a kind of controlled frenzy that animated crowds and made even the skeptical pay close attention.
“。 . . goddamned wetbacks taking over our country? I don’t think so, that ain’t gonna happen, as we say up in Crocket County . . .”
* * *
When he climbed down from the truck to continuing applause, Crain cut the generators, and the lights snapped out. Overhead, the stars were tiny suns, pouring their light over the gathering, bringing out another long sustained ooooo . . .
Hawkes wrapped an arm around Low’s waist and said, “You did it. You got them. Now, tomorrow morning, we got to keep them.”
“I’m worried about the first part of that, where you tell them we’ve been lying to them . . .”
“It’ll grab their attention . . .”
“It might be better if you started off sayin’ we’re worried that there are spies among us. Even one would be too many. So I lied to you a little last night.”
Hawkes considered, and said, “You could be right. I think either way is okay. I’ll sleep on it. You worry about what you’re gonna say. I’ll take care of mine.”
Low nodded and, looking out over the encampment, where people were crawling into their truck beds, or standing around talking, or smoking, random laughs and giggles, and said, “I’ll remember this night for the rest of my life.”
“We all will.”
* * *
Hawkes lay awake for a long time, lying on a yoga mat next to Crain, in the back of Crain’s truck, both of them wrapped in lightweight sleeping bags. Crain, from long practice in prison, was asleep almost immediately, and snoring. Hawkes ran through the whole scheme for the next day.