“I’ll take care of that,” Low said. “Dick’s gotta get the bridge guys out there, why don’t you find the TV guy and send them a message?”
“I’ll do that,” Hawkes said. And, “Hey, nobody’s said anything about the cops.”
“They won’t be any trouble,” Dick said. “We disarmed all four of them, made sure they didn’t have any guns hidden in their houses. They’re all part-timers, and Patty said she talked to all of them and they promised not to give us any trouble. They basically take drunks to jail. If they had a real problem, they sorta counted on the Border Patrol guys to help out.”
* * *
The TV truck was parked on the shoulder of the highway, the right side pressing into the brush that lined the shoulder, fifty yards up the hill from the border station. Three militiamen, all with rifles, were standing beside it. Oliver Rodriguez was standing next to the truck with a camerawoman, named, Hawkes thought, Cherry something. They’d met once before, on a patrol along I-10; neither one of them had actually seen Hawkes’s face.
She tightened her mask as she walked up, made sure her sunglasses were firmly on her nose; nothing to do about her hair, but her hair wasn’t distinctive yet. In a week, it would be red, and her eyebrows were blond enough for red hair to look natural.
Rodriguez saw her coming and nodded, recognizing the green triangle on her hat and her general shape. “Jael,” he said. He waved at the town. “Is this you?”
“I’m one of more than a hundred, all equal,” Hawkes said. “We now have this town and we will not let the caravan pass.”
“Say that again, in one minute,” Rodriguez said. He turned to the camerawoman and asked, “Sound?”
The camerawoman nodded. “I got it while you were talking. You can go ahead.”
Rodriguez nodded, turned to the camera, and said, “The town of Pershing was invaded this morning by the Land Division, a local militia intent on stopping the caravan now approaching the border crossing at Pershing, Texas. They have arrested the mayor and the city council, and are holding them in the city jail. The local policemen and the Customs and Border Protection employees have been disarmed. At the latest report, the caravan of migrants, most of them from Honduras and Guatemala, is nine miles out and moving steadily toward us . . .”
He turned to Hawkes and said, “I only know you as Jael, the leader of the Land Division. I don’t suppose you’d remove your mask for this interview?”
“Might get COVID,” she said. The COVID pandemic lingered on, though few people still wore masks. “I’ll keep it on.”
“You have conquered this town,” Rodriguez said. “What are you going to do with it?”
“We’re going to keep it American,” she said.
As she spoke, the cluster of locals edged closer to listen to her. One of them, who appeared to be a young woman dressed badly, she nodded at. “We’re going to try to protect American workers from immigrants, however pitiful their stories may be, from undercutting the wages of Americans. This is not a race thing, this is a wage movement: we have all races in our movement, black, white, red, Hispanic . . . The big corporations, and I’m looking at you, McDonald’s, are desperate to keep us from succeeding in our efforts . . .”
The young woman had her hand in her jeans pocket, held there unnaturally, Hawkes thought, and she wondered if the hand were disfigured in some way. Maybe they could talk after the interview . . .
Rodriguez was saying, “There could be as many as a thousand refugees coming down the highway at you. You have guns. Are you willing to kill some of them to keep them from crossing the river? Because they seem pretty determined to cross . . .”
Hawkes spoke directly to the camera: “We will block the bridge. We will stop them.” And, a little self-consciously, “They shall not pass!”