Flashback

reconquista checkpoints along Ramona, and north to Glendale.

Everywhere there were convoys of armored military vehicles—National Guard, Homeland Security, and even some regular Army. The smoke in the south was very thick. Los Angeles radio and local Internet news reported nothing out of the ordinary.

In the end, returning to their still-empty and dark basement apartment around 7 p.m., Leonard was beside himself with anger and concern.

Perhaps it was just the sight and diesel-stink of all the military vehicles he’d seen and madly pedaled out of the way of that day, but Leonard wondered if this increased belligerence and erratic behavior from Val were a result of him turning sixteen and having to face the draft now in less than a year. It was the last real discussion that Leonard and his grandson had really had, that afternoon of the boy’s lonely birthday “party.” Leonard was sure that Nick’s failure to call his son must have hurt Val deeply, but there was no discussion of that. Val’s questions that evening centered on the draft, possible ways to avoid it (there were essentially none for a healthy, white young American male who’d registered, as Val had, when the forms showed up on his phone screen), and about the various wars that American soldiers were fighting for India and Japan.

On that last query, Leonard had been less than helpful—he really had trouble understanding the NSEACPS hegemony, much less its war goals in China and elsewhere, and could only explain that sending the troops to fight for the financially more stable India and Nippon was one of America’s few sources of hard currency.

“Mr. Hartley at school says there was an old Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere almost a hundred years ago,” Val had said, “and that it had something to do with that big war fought then, but I didn’t quite understand the connection.”

The connection is irony, Leonard had thought, but he’d explained about the militarist Japanese Empire and its fancy name for its short rule over major parts of China, Malaysia, what was then called Indochina, and the Philippines and other islands of the South Pacific. He gave a quick explanation of how the Japanese during their rapid imperial expansion had touted their brutal military occupations as a throwing off of white imperial domination—which it certainly was—but only in exchange for a Japanese version of Hitler’s Master Race form of imperial conquest. “They were very close to adding Australia to their so-called co-prosperity sphere and would have done it if it hadn’t been for the Battle of Midway,” said Leonard but stopped when he saw the birthday boy’s eyes glazing over. Val was a reader, but he didn’t enjoy history the way his grandfather thought he should. As was true of most American high school students in this era of politicized curricular “relevance,” Val had never been made to place… say… the Civil War within a hundred years of its actual dates.

Was Val running away because of the draft? Tens of thousands of pre-seventeen-year-old American kids did, Leonard knew.

But he still had almost eleven months. Certainly Val wasn’t so frightened of the draft and of fighting overseas that he’d act so recklessly now.

As if commenting on Leonard’s thoughts, the twenty-four-hour TV news channel he had babbling in the background—there were more than sixty on this basic sat subscription, one catering to almost every political stance imaginable—announced that “United Nations forces” had, after “fierce fighting with local rebels loyal to Chinese warlord Lu fei Zhongzheng,” taken the key city of Langzhong. Leonard had no idea where Langzhong was nor did he ask his phone to find out. None of it mattered. He had a sudden flash of a kid born twenty years or so earlier than he’d been, before World War II, which Val thought of only as “that big war fought a hundred years or so ago,” moving pins on giant wall maps as battles raged and American and Allied forces moved closer to Berlin or Tokyo.

The “United Nations forces” always cited in the news reports about fighting in China these days simply meant American forces. India, Japan, and the Group of Five so dominated the expanded Security Council that the UN did their bidding without so much as a threat of a veto. When the fighting dealt with the Balkans, Africa, or the Caribbean, Leonard knew, “UN forces” meant the Russians, who were trying as hard as the Americans to earn some hard currency by hiring out their military.

Leonard sighed and shifted the small phone from one hand to the other. He realized that he was doing the Academic’s Shuffle—shifting his thought from real-world worries and fears, not to mention the need for rapid decision making, to vague historical musings and abstractions. It was almost 10:30 p.m. He would have to call Val’s father in Denver. He had no other choice. The boy might be injured or kidnapped or dead… lying in a ditch somewhere in one of the taped-off and unrepaired earthquake zones near the old freeways. It was precisely the kind of place where flashgangs such as Val’s loved to hang out.

Leonard realized that this moment was the first time he’d admitted to himself that Val was almost certainly running with a flashgang.

Sighing again, he lifted the phone to punch Nick Bottom’s number.

Val stomped in smelling of gasoline and something sharper, more astringent—gunpowder? Cordite?

The boy didn’t even look at his grandfather but went straight to his room. Deathcult Rock started blasting through the locked door.

Leonard marched angrily to that door and raised his fist to bang on it. Then he paused. What was he going to say to the boy that hadn’t been said? What ultimatum was he going to give that he hadn’t already given?

Leonard went back to his study and sat in the weak cone of light from the single desk lamp.

Tomorrow he’d go see Emilio. In the meantime, he could only hope that Val and his buddies would be caught in the act for some small crime they were committing. That way, if it were a first offense and since Val was a juvenile, the LAPD would implant a tracker in Val, and Leonard wouldn’t have to pay for it or the tracker software.

Leonard was ashamed of what he was thinking and wishing for. But he still wished it.

THURSDAY

After Val left for school in the morning, Leonard went to find Emilio. He carried his life’s savings in cash in a canvas messenger bag slung over his shoulder.

Leonard rode his bicycle southeast from Echo Park past the Dodger Stadium Detention Center and under the Pasadena Freeway to where Sunset became Cesar Chavez Avenue. As the neighborhoods deteriorated, Leonard was certain that someone would rob him for the bicycle and end up with the more than a million new dollars in his messenger bag. The older Professor George Leonard Fox got, the more he was certain that the only real god was Bitch Irony.

No one robbed him during his cycling east.

By midmorning he was at the old Union Station, a landmark he loved—Leonard and his daughter Dara had once spent a weekend just watching old movies, most of them set in the 1930s to the 1950s, with major scenes shot in Union Station—and then south under the abandoned stretch of the 101. It was a hot day for September and Leonard was sweating through his white shirt by the time he reached his first roadblock where Santa Fe Avenue ran into East 4th Street.

East 4th was barricaded. On both sides of the street hung the large green-white-red tricolors of Nuevo Mexico. Unlike the former United States of Mexico flag designed in 1968, the eagle in the center of these flags was not wrestling with a snake and was facing forward. It wore a crown. Emilio had once explained that this flag was based on the 1821 flag of the First Mexican Empire, but the new eagle was so stylized that it reminded Leonard more of the FDR-era National Recovery Act eagle or—more ominously—of the stylized Nazi eagle.

He didn’t have time now to study the flags. Men armed with automatic weapons came out from behind the permanent barricades.

“?Que quieres, viejo?”

Professor George Leonard Fox didn’t appreciate the “old man” but he presented the card Emilio had given him and answered in a voice he managed to keep from quavering, “Exijo que me lleven a la casa de Gabriel Fernandez y Figueroa.”

Perhaps he shouldn’t have used the verb “demand,” but it was too late now. One of the spanics started to laugh but his comrade holding the small card showed it to him and the laughter died.

“?Por que quieres ver a Don Fernandez y Figueroa, gringo viejo?”

Leonard was tired of the smirks and insults. “Just take me there,” he said in English. “Don Fernandez y Figueroa is expecting me.”

Five of the armed men conferred rapidly. Then the one with the card gestured Leonard toward a black Volkswagen G-wagen parked behind a barricade. “Come.”