Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (14 page)

Alex’s former wife had already dropped his name.  Now Karin Garabanda-Bergen was once again simply Karin Bergen.  She had divorced him, dropped his name, and was now attempting to take Brian away.  The fact that the female judge also had a hyphenated last name filled him with additional foreboding.

His attorney whispered, “No matter what, don’t let the judge bait you into losing your temper.  That’s what she wants, an incident—I know how this bitch works.  Remember, if it doesn’t go our way today, we’ll straighten it out on appeal.  Just keep your cool.”  Rudy Contreras was a local Albuquerque lawyer with a good reputation for successfully defending fathers’ custodial rights, even if he came across as somewhat sleazy, with his thin mustache and slicked-back hair.

Judge Balfour-Obregon began, while slowly shaking her head in obvious disdain.  The proceedings were being conducted entirely in Spanish, in accordance with recently passed state laws.  Her Spanish was adequate, but choppy and ungrammatical, with a residual New York accent.  “Special Agent Garabanda, I’ve reviewed the case file.  I’m particularly concerned with that absolute disaster two weeks ago at the Federal Law Enforcement Officers annual Memorial Day picnic.  I must say, I find it hard to believe that the federal government entrusts a firearm to an FBI agent who can get drunk and assault a woman, in front of over a hundred witnesses!”

“Your Honor, my client was not under the influence of alcohol, and he did not ‘assault a woman!’  What happened at that picnic was deeply regrettable, but an initial board of inquiry has determined that it was Ms. Bosch who initiated…”

“That’s enough, counselor!  Don’t even go there!  Special Agent Bosch, let us not forget, had to be hospitalized after your client put her in a choke hold!”

“My client was only restraining Ms. Bosch, so that she could not strike him again with an aluminum softball bat—”

“Silence! I’ve heard enough!  More than enough!  The irrational homophobic attitude of your client is very well known to this court!  He’s lucky he wasn’t charged with hate crimes after that picnic incident!  If Special Agent Garabanda can’t deal with the fact that his ex-wife is dating a woman, that does not speak well to his stability nor to his socialization, not to mention his fitness to share in the raising of their son.”

“But…”

“Therefore, it is the decision of this court that your client shall lose all custodial rights and privileges.  Mr. Garabanda, your joint custody agreement is hereby terminated.  And furthermore, I’m granting Plaintiff’s motion to make the temporary restraining order against you permanent. Special Agent Garabanda, if you so much as come within two hundred yards of Karin Bergen, Brian Garabanda, or Gretchen Bosch, I’ll have you arrested and thrown in jail for contempt!”

Garabanda’s lawyer tried again, “Your honor, I—”

“Save it counselor!  It’s time that homophobes like your client were dragged into the 21
^st
century!  The fact that he is an FBI supervisor doesn’t mitigate the facts of this case.  In fact, I should have expected a far more socially progressive attitude from someone of his ethnic background.”

“Your honor, the fact that my client is—”

“I told you I was finished, counselor!  We’ll re-examine limited visitation rights in, oh, six months.  Until then, I would strongly advise your client to stay well clear of his former wife, her fiancée Ms. Bosch, or their son Brian.” 

Special Agent Alex Garabanda slowly lowered his forehead to the table.  Behind him, he heard Gretchen Bosch snickering in her unmistakable female baritone voice.

***

The back of the old Dodge van
had a thick yellow foam mattress pad covering the cargo deck.  That was the extent of the custom furnishings and creature comforts.  Derek and Kalil sat up front in the separate “captain’s chairs,” arguing about road directions, arguing about the exact form of the perfect socialist utopia, and arguing about their best speed to avoid shaking the van to pieces.  Because of their limited top speed, there was no benefit to taking State Road 60 all the way west to I-25, which ran north along the Rio Grande, on the other side of the mountains.  Instead, they decided to take the narrow two lane State Road 355 north from Mountainview, along the eastern slopes of the Manzano and Sandia mountains.  This was shorter in total mileage, and their wobbly front end meant holding their speed below 60 miles per hour anyway.

The green van was a clapped-out windowless commercial model, with exposed steel frames on the insides.  Destiny and Lisa wedged themselves into sitting positions in the back, leaning against luggage bags and heaps of mixed-up clothing.  Ranya was not surprised to see that the male “comrades” took the two comfortable front seats.  She guessed that Derek, the driver, owned the van.  He looked to be the oldest, probably a graduate student, and he was clearly the “alpha male” of the motley pack.

The interior of the van stank of unwashed clothes and stale food, but it was a ride, and it was heading to Albuquerque.  The twenty gallons of gas Derek had put into the tank at the service station in Mountainview had cost Ranya eight of her crisp blue $100 bills.  This was a flat nonnegotiable $40 a gallon, well above the posted cost, and even then it required extensive pleading to get the fuel at all.  This was a serious chunk of her working capital, but she knew that if she couldn’t make it to Albuquerque, the money meant nothing anyway.

The girls were quiet, zoning out with tiny music buds planted in their ears.  The guys were talking almost nonstop, providing a running political debate and travelogue from the front seats, almost shouting over the music blasting from their stereo.  Ranya didn’t recognize the rock group or the songs.  It appeared that Derek leaned toward classical Soviet or Cuban-style Marxism, leavened with a dash of Trotsky.  Kalil seemed to be a garden variety America-hating anarchist; primarily out to take part in what he believed was his best opportunity to “strike back at the white corporate power structure.”  

Ranya sat on an overturned plastic milk crate just behind them, between their two seats.  From that makeshift seat, she could see out of the front windows, and enjoy the odor-dampening fresh air.  She had peeled off her sweatshirt as the morning warmed up, and was wearing a plain black t-shirt above her long blue jeans.  They occasionally plied her with questions as they drove up the cracked asphalt.

“That’s right, I came from Virginia.”

“You hitched all the way from Virginia to New Mexico?” asked Derek.  “That’s like, so totally awesome!  I’ll bet you had some sick adventures along the way, eh?”

“Yeah, you’d win that bet.”

“So, did you see any of that Cameroon Fever back east?  The Monkey Pox? Man, that was some bad shit down there in Florida and Georgia last year, eh?”

Ranya put this question together with what Olivia and her husband had mentioned in their RV, and groped for enough of a response to satisfy them.  “Not in Virginia.  I didn’t see it in Virginia.”

“Those Monkey Pox scars really freak me out,” said Derek, shuddering.  “I think I’d rather die from the fever than live with those scars.”

Ranya was tempted to ask him why, then, he had punched giant rivet holes in his earlobes, and had tattoos on his neck…but she resisted the momentary impulse.

Kalil said, “I know how bad the crackers are back there in Virginia— you’d never catch me in those redneck states!  They’d probably lynch my black ass just to keep in practice.  You see any of those KKK dudes back there?”

“No, I guess I got lucky. Didn’t see any Klan this time,” Ranya answered.

“How about the Klan down in North Carolina, burning out the immigrants?” asked Kalil.  Ranya thought that he resembled Jimi Hendrix, from the posters she remembered seeing in college.  Bushy Afro hairstyles must have made a fashion comeback while she was imprisoned.

“I don’t think that’s just the Klan,” said Derek.  “I saw it on TV. There were lots of African-Americans right in there with the rednecks in those riots.”

Kalil responded angrily, “Man, that is bullshit!  Well, some Uncle Toms maybe, but that’s all.  Real brothers wouldn’t be hangin’ out with no crackers, attacking no people of color!”

“Hey man, I saw what I saw—it was on television!  Blacks and whites were together, going into those immigrant shanty-towns with clubs and Molotov cocktails!”  Derek turned around to their new passenger, one hand on the wheel.  “What do you think? You’re from back there.  How bad are those anti-immigrant riots in the Carolinas?  It’s ethnic cleansing, right?”

Ranya had to stall and evade, hiding her lack of current knowledge. “It’s not so bad in Virginia…but I’ve been on the road for a few weeks.  I haven’t been following the news much.  What’s the latest?”

Derek answered his own question without a pause.  “Some kind of new Minuteman militia is trying to terrorize the Hispanics into leaving the South.  They call themselves the ‘American Patriot Party’ and other bullshit fascist names like that.  American Nazi Party is more like it!  They’ve been firebombing housing developments built by immigrants, you know, the ones who used to be undocumented workers.  Before the federal amnesty, I mean.  The fascists still call them ‘illegal aliens’ and say they’re not real citizens.  Hispanic day workers can’t wait outside of home supply stores anymore, or rednecks in pickup trucks will jump them with baseball bats.  Or sometimes they get in a truck, they think it’s for a job, and that’s it—they’re never seen again.  Gone!  The rednecks say all the jobs are going to immigrants—that’s what they say.”

“Same old racist KKK, if you ask me,” said Kalil, disgustedly.  “Now it’s the Minuteman Klan!  I mean, how can a worker be illegal?  Man, the whole idea of borders and nations: that is so 20
^th
Century!  It don’t matter where a worker is from, does it?”

“It might matter if he took your job, don’t you think?” ventured Ranya. “I mean, that’s what all those rednecks and Uncle Toms probably think.”

Kalil appeared confused, forming thoughts and mouthing words that he could not articulate.  Clearly, his internationalist orientation was at some level in fundamental conflict with the idea of American blacks losing jobs to newly arriving “undocumented” Hispanic immigrants, whether or not they were granted some kind of guest-worker amnesty along the way. In a nation seemingly in an economic depression, Ranya guessed that losing a job could mean losing a home, or not putting food on the table.

While Kalil shook his head and muttered curses, Derek continued with his lecture.  “And this ethnic cleansing, it’s not just in the South.  The fascists have been terrorizing Hispanic immigrants in New England, Michigan…hell, almost everywhere. I mean, in Idaho, the police have been rounding up immigrants and bussing them right out of the state, ‘for their own protection,’ they say! The immigrants all got the federal amnesty, but some states say the amnesty is bogus and the immigrants are still illegal.  It’s bullshit any way you slice it, the way Hispanic immigrants are being treated!”

Kalil added, “And lots of them are heading right here to New Mexico: this is where the oppressed peoples of color are finally making a stand! This is where the revolution is happening, I mean really happening!” 

Derek switched the subject to Ranya, and her intentions.  “So, umm, you’re going to UNM to join the revolution too…right?”  He kept pushing his loose hair behind his ears, and it kept sliding forward across his oily and unshaven face.  “That’s where we’re going.  Time to put up, or shut up, right?”

“Right, put up or shut up.”  Ranya fervently hoped they would shut up.  She didn’t want to sit this close to them, but she felt compelled to look out the front windows, and she needed the fresh air from the open side windows to subdue the pervasive stench of body odor in the back.  It stank worse than a D-Camp field latrine.

Derek continued, “Michigan sucks so bad anyway.  Other than school, there’s nothing left for us back there.  Nothing but reactionary fascists up there anymore!  Real Nazis!  Except for Detroit and Lansing of course.  But what’s the point of just preparing ourselves to join the intellectual class?  I mean, how’s that going to help the people? Sitting around Starbucks, bitching and moaning about the fascist plutocracy, while we swill their corporate coffee? What good does that do? Right here is where the front line in the revolution is today! 
Viva la revolución
, right?”

“Oh yeah,
viva la revolución
,” she replied.  “Say, Derek, speaking of
la revolución
, how’s your Spanish? You know, with the
Español Solamente
laws?”

“Oh, that…that’s no problem.  That was just so they could fire all the reactionary white racist pigs.  That won’t matter for us, because we’re coming to help—we’re joining the cause.  We’re on their side.”

“So…you don’t actually speak Spanish?” Ranya asked.

“Uhh…
yo quiero
Taco Bell?”  Derek twisted around and winked at her, and laughed at his own joke.  The holes punched in his ears disgusted her more each time he turned in profile.  “I’m a quick study. I’ll learn it fast, I mean, how hard can it be?”

Ranya asked, “Do any of you guys actually speak Spanish?”  She repeated her question twice, and the blond girl pulled out an earpiece to hear her question.

“I’ve got Spanish One loaded on my music pod,” offered Destiny. “I’ve been listening to it when I can, sometimes.  ‘
Yo habla Español mucho bueno
.’ See, I’m picking it up.”

Derek said, “It won’t matter.  They have volunteers coming from all over, like an international brigade!  Kind of like the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.  You know, last semester we took the most incredible course on the history of the international proletarian struggle.  That’s where we all met.  That’s how we found out the real truth about New…I mean...
Nuevo
Mexico’s new revolution.”

“Yeah,” added Destiny.  “Professor Ruskin, he was just so awesome! He really opened up my eyes, I want to tell you. He was just…the best…ever.  Hey, show her his letter, Derek.  Show her Rusky’s letter to Professor Johnson.”