When the cop pulled her over, he claimed it was because she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, but of course he would have had to have raptor’s eyes to see that from three hundred feet away where he was fooling nobody behind a roadside clump of madrone except maybe the drifting black vultures overhead. She’d watched him swing out behind her, pulling a U-turn and settling in on her tail with his gumball machine spinning and his siren whoop-whoop-whooping. She might have gone half a mile or more before she finally pulled over — in a spot at the mouth of a dirt drive that seemed sufficiently safe, the whole road to this point bristling with jagged pines and dried-up weeds that snatched at the side of the car every time she drifted toward the shoulder. Looking back on it, she supposed she could have stopped sooner, and she supposed too that that might have had something to do with this particular cop’s agitation, but you did what you did and you couldn’t have regrets, not in this life that just marched you on toward the grave day by day.
He was lean, young, fresh-faced. He had to tap at the window three times before she rolled it down. Kutya lurched forward to give him a low warning growl and then he was barking and she didn’t do a thing about it. Let him bark, that was what she felt. It was his right.
“Do you know why I stopped you, ma’am?” the cop said.
Of course she did: he was the oppressor and she was the oppressed. She said nothing.
“License and registration,” the cop said, raising his voice to be heard over the clamor of the dog. “And proof of insurance.”
What she told him in response, in a voice as steady as she could hold it, even as Kutya settled into a ragged gasping continuous low-throated bark and people slowed to gape at her as if she were some circus attraction, was that she was not engaged in a contract with the republic of California. “I’m a sovereign citizen,” she said, speaking as clearly as she could, given the noise of the dog and the clank and hiss of the traffic as all the white-haired Baby Boomer tourists applied their brakes and then stepped back on the gas once they’d got a good look. “You have no authority over me.”
The cop just stared at her. After a moment he flipped up his sunglasses so she could see the fine red fissures of irritation fracturing his frog-belly eyes. “Maybe you didn’t hear me,” he said, “but I asked for your license and registration.”
She said nothing. Just fixed her gaze straight ahead to where the road ran on into the sunshine past a field of stiff yellow grass and a shadowy fringe of trees, the road that ran true to her destination, to the place where she had business when she had no business here at all.
“Ma’am?”
She turned her head back to him, locked her eyes on his, and her heart was going, all right, because she could tell where this was leading and it scared her and made the anger come up in her too, and why couldn’t they just leave well enough alone? “I told you,” she said, “I have no contract with you.”
“Does that mean you refuse?”
“Let me repeat,” she said. “I — have — no — contract — with — you.”
He shifted his boots in the gravel along the roadside, a dull grating intolerable sound that got Kutya back up into the high register. The cop put his hands on his hips, as if to show her where the gun was and the nightstick and handcuffs too. He said, “I’m going to have to ask you to get out of the car.”
“No,” she said. “I won’t.”
“Suit yourself.” He straightened up then and stalked back to his car, where she could see him in her rearview as he leaned in, pulled out the cord of the radio mike and started moving his lips.
Ten long minutes crept by. Each one of them, each second, dripped acid through her veins, and she thought of just putting the car in gear and driving off, but resisted because that would only make things worse. Kutya — he was a puli, a white puli — settled into the discolored basket of his dreadlocks and fell off to sleep, thinking the threat had passed. Foolishly. But then he was a dog, and dogs had other concerns.
Finally another cruiser appeared, lights flashing, siren screaming, swooping on up the road behind her like a black steel shroud and nosing in at an angle so close to her front bumper she thought it was going to hit her. In the next instant she was staring across the passenger’s seat of this new car and into the face — the hard demanding unforgiving put-upon face — of a female officer, who picked something up off the seat, squared herself and swung out of the car. Next thing she knew, both cops were there, one on either side of her, and Kutya was back on his feet, back at it again, barking in a renewed frenzy that just made everything that much harder.
“Good afternoon,” the female cop said, her eyes roaming over the interior as if she was thinking of making an offer on the car. “I understand that you refuse to comply with Officer Switzer’s request for identification, is that right?”
She said nothing.
The female officer — she was tall, thin, no shape to her at all, and she wore no makeup, not a trace, not even lipstick — asked her to get out of the car. Or no, commanded her.
She said nothing.
“Just to be sure you understand me,” the male cop cut in now — he was stationed by the passenger’s-side window, leaning in so he could watch her, and if that didn’t make her feel paranoid she couldn’t imagine what would because this was like being squeezed between two pincers and it was wrong, intolerable, a violation of every natural right there was—“I have to inform you that state law requires you to show a valid driver’s license, registration and proof of insurance at the reasonable request of a peace officer.”
She threw it right back at him. “Reasonable? You call this reasonable? You have no authority here — you’re nothing more to me than a man dressed up in a Halloween costume.”
“If you refuse,” he said, the muscles tightening around his mouth, “we will have no recourse but to remove you forcibly from your vehicle—”
“Which will be impounded,” the female added, as if they’d switched speakers on a stereo, his voice assaulting her on the right, hers on the left. “And your dog will be taken to the shelter.” She paused. A top-heavy camper swished delicately past them, ten miles under the limit. A pickup going the opposite way swung with elaborate courtesy off onto the shoulder to give it room and then continued on in a slow-motion crawl. “And you yourself, if you don’t comply this minute, will be arrested, I promise you that — and I personally will escort you to the county jail.”
It was hopeless, she could see that. The day was ruined. The week, the whole month. This was the mega-state in all its glory. She’d stated her status in plain English and they still didn’t seem to understand. Well, they could go to hell, all of them. She started screaming then, calling them every name in the book, shouting “TDC! TDC! Threat, Duress and Coercion!” over and over again, even as the female forced open the door and took hold of her by her left arm and Kutya, good dog, faithful dog, went right at her.
They took her to the county jail in Ukiah, retracing her route back up Route 20, though now she was in restraints and in the backseat of a police cruiser, separated by a heavy wire grid and Plexiglas shield from the female cop, whose right hand, resting at one o’clock on the wheel, sported two bright shining flesh-colored bandaids where the dog’s teeth had broken the skin, though it wasn’t much more than a scratch. Her own car was back alongside the road, awaiting the tow truck, and Kutya — poor Kutya — after having been poked, prodded and muzzled by two numbnuts from Animal Control, had been forced into a boxy white van, which must have been somewhere behind her now, on its way up this same road to the animal shelter, also in Ukiah. She’d missed her appointment, of course — and for what, for nothing, for a seatbelt? — and she’d had no way of letting the Burnsides know she wasn’t coming, that she’d been unavoidably and illegally detained and wasn’t just blowing off her responsibility, and who could blame them if they went online and found another farrier to shoe their horses and trim the hooves of their sable antelope? She had a reputation to maintain, a business to run, and she was doing no harm to anybody, doing nothing more than using the public byways as was her inalienable right, and now look at the mess she was in.