Fiction: "Statesville: an overnight border town"

In Statesville, where the line between Texas and Oklahoma ran right through the middle of the town, it seemed no one wanted to talk about any of the troubles out in the open.

The town was situated on the line between the two Panhandles; for decades, residents had expressed a sentiment that neither of their States' administrations cared anything at all for the region known historically as "No Man’s Land."

State citizenship had meant little more than a difference between tax forms, and loyalties to different football teams. School children attended through the fourth grade on the Texas side, and went on from fifth until graduation six blocks north in Oklahoma, in a rare but decades-old setting of interstate school-district cooperation almost without parallel anywhere else in the country.

The police department, officially employees of the Sooner State, had in recent years been authorized to enforce Texas law as well, in cases originating south of the line. The volunteer fire department, the water and soil districts, the farmer’s co-op, all had mastered the requisite interagency challenges long ago, and the community had settled into a stable way of life for generations, almost as if the line did not exist.

No one seemed to know quite how to respond to the crisis brewing hundreds of miles to the south.

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At Statesville Market, he had noticed the tension since the beginning of the filibuster.

At first, shoppers came in from both sides of the line, and as many Mexicans as usual appeared. But the television up front, usually left tuned to a right-leaning news network, was left turned off, and everyone seemed to be frowning and unusually polite, like at a funeral.

When he carried purchases out to the parking lot for the customers, he would look instinctively at the Stop sign a block to the south, trying to imagine what would happen if one day that street began to be treated as an international border. Four blocks away he continued to drop off his daughter at the elementary school, but wondered if someday he would have to get a visa to cross the line and pick her up.

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Two weeks into the showdown, he was out patrolling for coyotes with his dogs, a couple of miles into Oklahoma and seven miles west of town. It was an unusually warm winter evening, and the full moon rose in the east at almost the exact moment the red sun disappeared to the west. Usually they would take these walks every three or four days, but lately he had taken to going out every evening just before sunset, in part to seek peace and quiet to sort out his thoughts after tense days at work, and in part because suddenly there seemed to be many more coyotes on the land, and it was right in the middle of calving season.

Before the trouble, he would usually see one coyote every few hunts or hear them singing behind a hill or beyond the horizon. Now, he and his dogs would see two or three wandering around uncertainly every time they went out, and instead of a couple of the animals setting up a chorus occasionally late at night, now they seemed to be all around the house and fifteen minutes would not go by without hearing them, throughout the night. It was haunting, and he was worried, but about exactly what he could not figure out.

He was sitting on the fill pipe from the windmill to the stock tank, when he heard the helicopters.

They were so close, and in such numbers, he could feel them through his boots reverberating the earth, but it was several minutes before he saw them. As he scanned the southern horizon with the binoculars he began to see floodlights beaming from ground to sky in the gathering twilight, and then finally the choppers appeared. They emerged out of the south, and then turned to fly in a straight line west, then bank to the south and return to the same line flying eastward.

He knew what this meant: that the yellow stripe down the highway, now projected into the sky, and that the issue had become one of not just airtime for differing viewpoints, but airspace, defended by force of arms.

This was bad.

As he watched the flights in the failing light he noticed that the doors on the fuselages of the ships were closed. Something about this struck him as significant. He had lived near a Marine chopper base in California years before, and always one would see the machines flying over with the side doors open and crewmen sitting on the deck with legs hanging out in space. He had known Vietnam vets who had been door gunners, and he knew somehow that keeping the doors closed in this way meant something, but what?

Were these soldiers reluctantly following orders but not with their hearts in it? How many of their comrades-in-arms were out in the streets in Austin? Would they fire on Americans out in this prairie, or along the hundreds of miles of boundary country the two states shared?

A coyote appeared on the top of the butte to the south and just stood there looking at him, tongue hanging out and head held low. He didn’t even raise his .22, but just called the dogs and stood up and walked away, leaving the animal the water he so desperately needed after his long panicked flight from south of the line.

He did not sleep well that night.

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“Well, what do you think we ought to do?” The fear in her voice was unmistakable. The cell phones were still working, at least those with Oklahoma area codes, and they were trying to work out how to handle the crisis, which for once was not a dispute over family politics and somehow had brought them closer.

“For what it‘s worth, I think this will pass pretty soon. I really don’t think anybody wants to start shooting at each other over all this.”

The phrase “all this” had become the universal descriptive for the ongoing standoff that had brought both states’ troops, as well as various police forces and bureaucrats and lawyers into the newly divided town, and nobody really seemed to know what to do, but the lack of hostile behavior was almost more frightening than any actual clash might have been.

“What have you heard around the store about the schools?”

Statesville Market, one block inside Oklahoma, had long been a focal point for gossip and inside tips, but was more so now than ever. Things were a lot different between them, he knew, because she had always been a little disdainful of all the revelations about the area that working there for two years had brought him.

“Well, I ran into Janey Riley today and asked her about it -” Jane Riley was the principal of the elementary school, a Texas state employee but an Oklahoma resident.

“What did she say?”

“- just that they were working with the Oklahoma side to set up classes for the elementary kids from over here, in the gym and maybe some of the churches until all this blows over-”

“Yeah, but when?”

“Well, she didn’t say. I guess legally it’s pretty complicated, and nobody really ever thought about this happening. I suppose for now we’ll just have to keep her home. Thank God we both live in Oklahoma, huh? I talked to Billy Clayton’s mom today too, and his daddy lives over there, and they can’t even call each other on the phone -”

“Damn…”

They both knew that conversations like this were going on all up and down the edge of No Man’s Land, and along the Red River Valley, not to mention the western side of Arkansas and Louisiana, and eastern New Mexico. But here in Statesville the urgency created by a single town and a single school district shared by two states brought a kind of uncertainty and fear that seemed to transcend politics and ethnic tension, as parents and pastors and farmers and teachers and police officers - basically everyone - pondered the single, inescapable question: what are we going to do?

At the store things had suddenly become very lively with the arrival of Guard troops and officials sent by Oklahoma City.

He had rolled out a pallet of twenty-four packs of store-brand bottled water that was already scheduled to be on sale, and it had disappeared in under two hours. Everything, from bread to meat to milk to work gloves and toys, was flying out the door faster than they could stock the shelves, and in the middle of all this the management had been forced to set up a new membership with a warehouse in Liberal, Kansas because the store’s main supplier had been for years an outfit in Amarillo. This had forced prices to skyrocket, but it seemed not to matter. The store was so barren of product but so full of people that it didn’t even resemble the order and plenty that shopping all over America had been throughout his fifty years of life.

Everyone was friendly, and somehow all the new faces had broken the tension of the early days. The Guard folks were really nice, and spoke openly of people they could see out the store window manning the checkpoints, men and women from both sides that they had known in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya. Their experiences of war and divided communities brought a kind of calm and reassurance that was infectious.

Of course everyone that came in was from the Oklahoma side. The conspicuous absence of regular customers from Texas meant that, at least in this one respect, life in Statesville, Oklahoma was much less inconvenient than for the folks on the other side who had to drive the twenty miles to Staunton to do their shopping. The problems of border crossings and visas, and issues like joint custody and criminal extradition and sales routes and farms operating on both sides had clearly not been thought through.

For now, few people were taking the risk of crossing the line, unsure of what it would involve to get back. Everyone seemed to think “all this” was pretty silly and it would blow over soon, but the camo-clad soldiers with loaded weapons made it deadly serious for at least the time being.

One of the first chores he’d had to do at work, in response to a State Supreme Court order, was to remove all the football memorabilia from Texas, as well as the Texas maps and any products with Texas manufacturing addresses printed on the labels, and it filled a pallet in the back that was stacked six feet high. They called it the “Texas stuff”. Out of a total of eighteen full- and part-time employees, only six had been unable to come to work, but one was the assistant manager, a thirty-year-old single mom whose confidence and tact had long held the place together. They all missed her, and worried about her.

It was a different workplace, and nobody knew if it would ever go back to how it had been.

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The newly elected governor of Oklahoma, who was either ignoring or had never read the United States Constitution, had sent out executive orders in thinly veiled language “requesting” both churches and private citizens to open their doors for the billeting of troops and State officials all along the Line (no one publicly called it a border, though the terms “state line” and “border” had been interchangeable all over the country for ages. Now it was just “the Line”), and this was met with little resistance.

It was a practical matter, motivated by the conundrum of keeping schools operating and the subsequent need for housing for thousands of soldiers, police personnel and bureaucrats. Thus far that had all been quite friendly, not to mention good for business. Commanding officers and team leaders brought with them books of chits guaranteeing future reimbursement for such services, and there was no shortage of offers to host the State’s personnel.

There were no refugees to speak of, at least not yet. People had crossed to one side or the other before the helicopters and troops arrived and largely been absorbed into the local populations, or kept going to destinations away from the Line. It was conceivable that this could become a bigger problem, but for the present few ventured across the Line in either direction, and waited instead for events to unfold.

The popular story about the schools in Statesville was that each side would re-organize its facility for a pre-K-through-12 student body on an ad hoc basis and await further directions from above. For the kids it was all exciting and not the least bit frightening (except those few from families split up by the Line) and daily life at school, after a brief holiday of only three days, seemed actually to be more stimulated and fun than ever.

The media, of course, arrived in force early on, and no one would either talk to them or offer them housing. When folks from MS-NBC or the BBC or Al-Jazeera came into the store for their shopping, the staff was icily polite but refused to answer questions or allow interviews or equipment setups on the premises.

The back-room talk was more hostile to these “paperazzi”, (who'd taken to calling Statesville "an overnight border town" in their reports) than toward anyone else, the local consensus apparently being that reporters had caused “all this” by going around Austin jamming microphones into faces and asking people “how does this feel?”

The journalists were completely non-plussed by this unprecedented reception, and were forced to just mill around taking establishing shots of soldiers and helicopters or uplinking talking-head shots with only their own people doing the talking.

The military people in command would only pass out vague and unrevealing press releases or speak in harsh officialese and refuse to go on the record or in front of the cameras, and their personnel were under strict orders not to even acknowledge the reporters in any way. After a few days they got bored and packed up their gear and left.

Statesville became an isolated frontier backwater, cut off from the world,

and everyone waited.