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: US for United States, and US for . . . 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 her mother 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 learned a curious thing about Low, who had little interest in intellectual matters, in history or economics. He could talk. 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.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” she told Low. “We’re going to start a militia, but it’ll be a real one. Our own fuckin’ army. None of this playing-with-guns shit.”