A state of disobedience (4 page)

"That is God's choice for them, Father, not ours."

A murmur arose among the protesters. Montoya turned about to see a line of armored, shielded and baton wielding riot police forming up the street from the clinic. These were not Dallas police, but the United States Surgeon General's new special troops, specially flown in for their first real test. They were four hundred of Rottemeyer's planned one million new police, raised at the same time and under the same bill that gave her a major expansion of manpower, arms and equipment for the Secret Service's new Presidential Guard, in all but name a personal mechanized brigade.

A loudspeaker blared, "Attention. Attention. In accordance with the Act of Congress for the Prevention and Suppression of 'Emotional Terrorism' you have five minutes to clear away from this clinic. This will be your only warning."

Montoya glanced at his watch, then looked around for Miguel. "Get our people out of here now, Miguel. Hurry."

Miguel just nodded and ran, first to Elpidia where she sat playing with her baby, then to the others. "Father says we have to go now. Hurry."

Before the protesters had a chance to so much as move, long before the mandated five minutes were up, the riot police began their charge. Peaceful dispersal was replaced by panicked, screaming flight.

Undaunted, his flock in danger, Montoya steeled his heart and moved to interpose his own body between them and "police" running amok.

If anyone among the boys of the Mission held a position of leadership, under the father, it was Miguel Sanchez. Need to rebuild a shed? "Miguel, see to it." "Si, padre." Need to put up a fence? "Miguel, see to it." "Si, Padre. Julio, come on and help me."

Did a field need plowing, a tree need pruning, a boy need "counseling"? "I'll take care of it, Padre."

With the father now lying broken and battered, head bandaged where a policeman's baton had cracked it, much of the day-to-day running of the mission fell to young Miguel, under the guidance of Sister Sofia, the mission's sole nun.

But if anyone, besides the father, held leadership over Miguel, it was not Sister Sofia, but little, thin Elpidia. She had so held since about three days after she and the baby arrived at the Mission.

For her part, Elpidia liked Miguel well enough, as well as she could be expected to like any normal male after the life she had led. But her heart belonged to the priest.

"How old are you girl?" 
 

"Old enough to work," she answered. 
 

Shaking his head slightly, the priest provided his own answer. "Fifteen? Fourteen? Fourteen, I think. This is no life for you, child." 
 

"It is the only one I have, Padre." 
 

"Parents? Family?" he asked. 
 

"None, Padre. Just me and my baby, Pedro, and the man I live with, Marco." 
 

"He sends you out to do this and you still call him a man? We shall see. Get in the car. Where do you live?" asked the priest.  

Will overborne, Elpidia entered and gave directions. Following these, the priest drove through narrow back streets and side alleys, past garbage and trash long uncollected. At length the car arrived at the girl's—Shabby? "Shabby" would have to do, though it was much worse than that—apartment. 
 

"Padre, what are you doing?" 
 

"Taking you and your baby to a better life," he answered, without further elaboration. He exited the car, walked around and opened the door for the girl—no one had ever been so polite to her before—and asked, "Which one?" At the girl's hesitantly pointed finger, he ordered, "Lead on. I will follow." 
 

The sound of a squalling baby and the smell of soiled diapers hit them even as the girl opened the apartment's cheap door. There was another smell too, one the priest recognized from days long past. 
 

Sprawled on the couch, a man—Marco—scruffy, unkempt, filthy, slack faced, smoked a pipe. He looked up as the door opened. "Hope you made some goddamned money tonight, bitch." The man saw the priest as he stepped around to stand beside the girl. "Get the fuck out of my house, old man." 
 

The father ignored the dope smoker. "Get the baby, Elpidia. You might want to gather up its things, too. Neither you nor he will be coming back here." 
 

Doped Marco certainly was. He was not, however, so drugged that he didn't recognize the imminent threat to his livelihood. "You ain't goin' nowhere, you little slut." He stood to bar the way to the baby's unutterably filthy closet. When Elpidia tried to go around him he slapped her to the floor.  
 

Marco was never quite sure, thereafter, how it was that he found himself suspended above the floor, back to the wall and a grip of iron about his throat. He kicked for a little while, his bare, filthy feet impacting on some stone-seeming wall that he knew had not been in the apartment before. With his vision fading, blood pounding in his ears, he dimly heard the priest repeat, "Get the baby, girl." 

"Where's Pedro, Elpi?"

"He's sleeping, Miguel."

"Oh. Too bad. I wanted to play with him. Cute little critter."

He looked at Elpidia and said, "You're a good mom." Then he asked, shyly, "Do you think I might make a good father someday? Before he was hurt Padre Jorge told me he had been talking to his friend, Jack, about maybe finding me a decent job with the Guard once I turn eighteen."

"That would be so good for you, Miguel. How is Father?" A tear escaped the girl's eye.

Miguel shook his head angrily. "The same. He can barely walk. But did you see him fight them? It took fifteen of them to beat him to the ground. Fifteen! What a man!" exclaimed Miguel, who had himself once made the mistake of fighting the father. That was the last mistake he had ever made—or wanted to make—where the priest was concerned.

What kind of man is this? My very first instance of "hate at first sight," thought the governor of her state's new "Federal Commissioner."

"So you see," droned that worthy, Harold Forsythe, Yale Law '66 and a long-time crony of both Wilhelmina and her ex-husband, "you have got to stop seeing yourselves as separate states. We are all one country and we are all in this together. We can't have Texas going its own way anymore. Take abortion. You have placed some restrictions here that are just intolerable. And so, until those are lifted, Texas can forget about seeing one red cent in federal aid for Medicare or Medicaid. Nor will we permit you to stop funding them at your level. Same for your schools. Nearly half of them have failed Federal certification and no more educational aid is going to them until their entire staff has been reviewed and approved for retention or fired."

"You mean reviewed for political leaning, of course, don't you?" demanded Juanita. "Your entire test was a thinly disguised check of political correctness."

"Well, we can't have unenlightened teachers polluting the minds of America's youth now, can we?" Forsythe smiled smugly.

"And you had better do something about getting a handle on the guns in private hands in this state too. And soon. You are not going to be permitted to give people the right to the implements of death or to deny women the right to do what they choose with their own bodies."

How did we ever let it get this far? wondered Juanita. Then she supplied her own answer. We let it get this far by letting the federal government take the burden of taxing for us. And now they have more—a lot more—power than the states do because they have so much more money than the states do.  

Guns holstered and concealed, the federal agents poured over the smoking ruins of an abortion clinic torched by fanatics in the night. No note or sign claimed credit for the arson. Nor had anyone been hurt in the blaze.

Special Agent Ron Musashi pondered the lack of evidence. To one of his men he said, "Get me the files on the six leading antiabortion groups in this part of the state."

"Already did it, Chief."

"Good," Musashi complimented. "Who's the most likely candidate?"

"Catholics for Children," came the instant reply. "We suspect them of having torched two other clinics. Never a shred of proof, though. Professional, you know? Their headquarters is over in Fort Worth."

In another life, Ron Musashi would have been happy enough pouring Zyclon B crystals into gas chambers full of Jews. The Rape of Nanking would have been a wonderful vacation. Bayoneting stragglers on the Bataan Death March? Just a pleasant walk in the woods. But for being short of stature—and having the wrong shape of eye— Musashi would have fit right into Himmler's Waffen SS.

Not that he would have enjoyed the killing. All Musashi ever felt from killing was recoil. Though he
did
derive considerable personal satisfaction from a job well done.

This job was made for him. The orders were simple, amazingly so considering they came to him from Washington, DC: "Assume that the occupants found at the headquarters of that terrorist organization known as 'Catholics for Children' are armed and dangerous. Kill or capture them all."

Returning from lunch, Father Flores turned the corner to see an even dozen plain-clothed men—police of some kind, so he assumed, based on the drawn pistols and locked and loaded machine guns—crouching by the main door to his organization.

Unseen by the agents, themselves intent on their mission, Flores ducked back behind the building corner, one eye only watching the event. His heart began pounding wildly as he saw four of the agents draw back a large battering ram then smash it once, twice, three times against the front door.

He heard muffled screams.

The door collapsed inwards, torn off its hinges. Musashi ordered, "Go! Go! Go!" and the first team of four burst over the shattered door and through the empty frame. Inside a woman screamed with fear and shock. Automatically, she reached for her purse.

A gun? The agent who saw her could not take the chance. A burst of submachine-gun fire punched through the woman's body, spinning her in her desk chair while inertia made her head do an imitation of Linda Blair in
The Exorcist.
The woman fell, bloody and torn, to the floor.

As if the initial shots were a signal, the other three agents in the first rush likewise opened fire on the office workers, cutting them down in a welter of gore. Fired. Fired. Fired again. There were no survivors.

When Musashi looked into the woman's purse, he found a cell phone. He left the phone, but added to the purse's contents one small-caliber pistol.

Unseen, Father Flores, olive complexion turning pale, turned and ran; ran for his car, for his life.

DIRECT EXAMINATION, CONTINUED

BY MR. STENNINGS:
Q. So tell the court how it was for you, Alvin, how it became?
A. Like I said before, life was hard. And it kind of hurt, you know; me—a man that worked all his life—having to take welfare parcels and charity just to feed his family. But pride didn't count for much. And besides, near everybody in that part a town was in the same boat, mostly.
Always remember something my daddy used to say, "Ain't no such thing as a free lunch." The breakfasts and dinners weren't free neither. They come with a "social worker" . . . and she done come every damn week.
First time she come around she stuck her pointed up little nose into every little nook and cranny in the house. She told my wife—yeah, she'd started feeling poorly again—that if she didn't clean house better she was going to lose her children. Talked down to us, you know, like we were some kind of lower life form. I confess, I kinda lost my temper.
That was a mistake too, no two ways about it. Next week, week after too, we found that our food allotment's been cut. Got cut again the week after that, then again.
Like I said before, I ain't no educated man. Don't mean I'm a dummy though. I swallowed my pride; made my apologies so my family wouldn't starve.
But I never could see the justice in giving that woman that kind a power over us. For a long time, I couldn't see what I could do about it, neither.

In the dimly lit cloister, Miguel strained to hear the reclined priest's weakly spoken words. Mostly they had to do with things the mission needed done, but that Montoya lacked the strength, in his current condition, to do anything about. " . . . and I want you to do something about the rabbits in the garden, Miguel. I was able to walk—a little—earlier today and I noticed they had been at the new shoots."

Montoya had taught Miguel to shoot—and
well
—a year earlier. He had, in fact, begun teaching him shortly after having administered Miguel a fairly painful and quite salutary drubbing over a no-longer-to-be-mentioned breach of mission rules. At the time Miguel had thought,
He whips my ass . . . then teaches me how to kill him. What a man!
 

Miguel, too, was now rapidly approaching manhood; just as Elpidia had long since reached practical womanhood.

"Father," he asked, hesitantly, "would it be all right if I took Elpidia along, taught her to use the rifle?"

Montoya smiled, knowingly—he had stood in as "
Father" of the bride
on more than one occasion since opening his mission doors. Miguel's interest was plain and,
frankly it would be a good match
. He thought about it briefly and answered, "I think that might be a good thing Miguel. She's had little enough control over her own life so far. Maybe giving her a little . . . what's that word the politicians like to use? Oh, yes, give her a little 'empowerment.' It might be good for her. Yes . . . I think so. Do it."