“Mayor Silver, you need to come with us,” said the detective.
“Where?” the Mayor asked.
“Just some questions. We’re talking to a lot of leading citizens today. So, you need to come to the station with us. Now.”
“And miss the march?”
“Let’s go,” said the detective.
The Mayor looked over at Turnbull, who met his eyes. The Mayor rose and the PSF took him by the shoulders.
The detective turned to the two remaining men. “And who are you?”
“Dale Chalmers,” said the insurance salesman.
“Mike,” Turnbull said. “Mike Nesmith.”
“ID?”
Chalmers handed his over. Turnbull took his wallet out of his shirt pocket and removed the driver’s license. He handed it to the detective, who looked it over. He then ran them both through a portable reader.
“Why are you so far away from home, Mr. Nesmith?”
“I’m a CPA,” Turnbull replied.
“And why are you here in Jasper?”
“I’m CPAing,” Turnbull replied innocently. He decided that if the detective asked him to stand he would shoot the detective first, then kill the two PSF. After all, you always had to be prepared to change a plan as the situation developed.
“He’s doing accounting for my insurance agency,” Dale said. “The new reparations taxes, you know.”
“He’s one sixteenth Chippewa,” Turnbull said. “So, we have to factor that in and it’s complicated.”
“You’re telling me you’re an Indigenous Person?” the detective said to Dale.
“Well, yes,” said Dale, snippy. “You know, I resent you questioning my First Peoples identity. President Warren suffers from that same kind of racist hate doubt too. We might as well be in the United States again!”
“Are you heritage shaming my client?” asked Turnbull, furrowing his brows with all the intensity he could muster. Now the other diners were starting to stare and the two PSF officers began to look uncomfortable.
The detective handed them back their identification. “I didn’t mean to say you weren’t an Indian,” he said.
“Indian?” Becky the waitress exclaimed from across the diner. “Did you just call him an ‘Indian’?”
“Are you profiling him?” said Turnbull to the stricken detective. “What next, are you going to call him a wagon burner?”
“No, I never—” stuttered the PBI detective. The PSF officers visibly stepped back from him, as if they thought him contagious. He turned around and walked fast out the door. The PSF officers followed at a distance, bringing along the Mayor.
“Wagon burner?” asked Dale.
Turnbull shrugged. “We had some stupid diversity session back in basic training and they encouraged us to share all the epithets we’d ever heard. That was supposed to build bridges or something. A guy from Oklahoma shared that one. And we had an Apache who called him a ‘cousinfucker’ right back. Then they started kicking each other’s asses. So, it was memorable.”
“The protest is almost ready to start,” Dale said.
“We don’t want to miss that,” Turnbull said. “You got it all squared away?”
“I think so.”
They walked out front on the sidewalk. Across the street, a pair of workers were desperately trying to scrub something off of the brick face of the old hardware store. Via the medium of white spray paint, someone had rendered the crude image of a large penis next to the words “PSF SUCK THIS.”
Main Street was crowded, not only with PSF but with regular citizens too. The local businesses had been ordered to have their workers attend and observe the “Voluntary Youth March Against Terrorist Hate Criminals and Intolerance.” To make sure everyone did, the PSF had blocked off not only the streets for the march but also the key roads out of town lest anyone try to sneak away home.
There were a lot of people milling about near the front of the diner, mostly grumbling. A woman with long, straight hair and a purple crystal around her neck was there too, smiling and yapping about how, “This is so wonderful to see youth spontaneously reject hate crimes!” She checked her watch. Only a few more minutes until the spontaneous protest was scheduled to begin.
The children from all the local schools were gathered at the north end of Main Street where it intersected 15th. Their teachers were busy attempting to wrangle them into something like order. The PSF had forced the town’s only licensed print shop owner to open up the prior evening after the principal had received a special permit to print up a variety of placards and banners. The eager principal was shouting in her bullhorn, having her subordinates herd the high school kids up front and the elementary school kids to the back.
Carl Hyatt was a senior, and his pockets were full of rocks. Like everyone else, he was wearing jeans and the white school sweatshirt – on the front in red letters it said “Jasper High School” and on the back it read “Our Most Important Subject Is Diversity And Inclusion.” The sweatshirts had been distributed at the beginning of the year, and none of the teachers had yet noticed the plural problem.
At seventeen, Carl’s prospects were unpromising. He got good grades – very good grades, in fact – but his guidance counselor was very clear. This son of a single mom who worked as a bookkeeper for the grain storage co-op was much too privileged for his dream school, the newly-nationalized Notre Dame, since his great-great-great grandfather had immigrated to Indiana from Dusseldorf and not from some more favored locale.
“Maybe you could start identifying as trans,” the counselor helpfully suggested. Carl just walked out.
And maybe he could go spin his wheels in the community college system and then go on assistance and collect a weekly pittance. Without a degree from one of the prestigious colleges – and the connections he could make there – he was never going to gain admittance to the People’s Republic’s elite. The door was shut to him. It would be a life of taking the scraps the masters chose to toss him from their table. His friends didn’t see that, but Carl was smart enough that he did so with crystal clarity.
And it gnawed at him.
Since then, his grades had declined and he had received several warnings from the principal for “lack of commitment to progressive change” and “incorrect thinking.” Ms. Marfull took seriously her task of providing the People’s Republic with thoroughly committed participants in the struggle for change. Without intervention, privileged youths like Carl Hyatt would embrace and perpetuate the racist and sexist paradigms that unconsciously formed their worldviews. It was up to her to help them in their battle against their original sin; she could at least neutralize the contagion, though the carrier himself was a lost cause.
She paid Carl special attention, especially lately as the local hate criminals turned violent. His kind was potentially dangerous.
“Let the voices of the children demand justice!” Marfull shouted through her bullhorn as her subordinates continued to try to form up the kids for the march. She checked her watch. They needed to start in just eight minutes.
Carl Hyatt had gotten the news of Turnbull’s confrontation with the PVs just like everyone else – from fellow townspeople. Some were delighted, others frightened, for they feared the repercussions. They wanted to hunker down and hope the bad times would just pass them by.
And some locals had been horrified – these were mostly the people who dutifully flew whatever the current People’s Republic flag was and berated their neighbors for carbon insensitivity for grilling hamburgers. Now those people were called “Tories” – Carl recognized the term from the American Revolution, but not from his school, which taught “people’s history,” not history history. Instead, he got it from books he secretly borrowed from neighbors – well before Turnbull arrived, there had been secret clubs that covertly passed around books that were no longer available to buy.