Chosen Country by James Pogue

Author:James Pogue
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

CHAPTER 19

The Central Pastime

I went outside and found a gigantic, custom, six-door stretch limousine 4x4 Expedition idling. There seemed to be nothing to do but get in, so I climbed aboard and found myself surrounded by three middle-aged men I’d seen once or twice around the refuge but hadn’t met. They regarded me with naked wariness. The one driving, a long, lean, dark-bearded man in a black cowboy hat, barely looked at me at all, just pulled his hat down to the point where it almost entirely covered his eyes, leaned his seat back, pulled the collar of his shearling jacket up around his throat, and drove out of the lot. Wes rolled down the window as we passed the men at the campfire checkpoint. He was full of bravado again. “I’ve got a few more ARs I can get,” he said. “And just let me know if you want any tac gear. Tell Ammon or something and he can text me.”

It was snowing by the time we got to Burns, where we were to pull onto the highway to head toward Idaho and Utah. I still hadn’t been able to figure out who the men were, exactly. They wanted to stop for dinner, since it would be hours before we hit the next town, and so we went to the Central Pastime, which is maybe the only weird rural dive bar I’ve ever been to that I genuinely hate. It has inedible food and caters to a rougher and more antigovernment element than the Pine Room. This makes it interesting, but the place is garishly lit and the music is always either eerily quiet or way too loud and there’s a surly feel about it that makes it hard to pick up a conversation with a stranger. “I honestly don’t like it when I can’t see a gun on a guy in here,” one of the bartenders, a cranky thirtysomething woman, said to me once. “It means it’s concealed, and then you don’t know where you stand. Or that he doesn’t have one, which I don’t like either.” I saw her a lot over the next year, but she never once seemed to remember me.

* * *

Some of the PPN guys were there, and I had a vodka at the bar with Hollywood. “Give me the worst vodka you have,” he told the bartender. “That way I’ll taste it.” I followed him. “Round two,” he said, raising the glass immediately after downing the first. I followed him. “You know,” he said, “this stuff is politics or whatever, but I don’t really think of it that way. We do stuff, we go places, we meet interesting people. I mean, here you and I are, right? How else would we have met? I’m not saying it’s a social club, but it’s kind of a fucking social club. And these are my brothers.” He seemed—all the PPN seemed, actually—slightly perturbed by the heavy feel at the refuge, the sense that, unlike at the Bundy ranch and the Sugar Pine mine, there was no deliverable victory to win.

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