Minuteman Patriot!

Forrest B. Smallwood came to the attention of the Wandering Gentile through his service as a security guard to the Lone Star Candies (Fudge Packing Division) plant in Tarado (tuh-RAY-doe), Texas. An engaging conversationalist, he shared some extremely enlightened opinions regarding American sovereignty and the threat posed by desperate, disposessed people.

I accepted a ride to Tarado's finest, and only, quick service eatery, the Dairy Duchess at exit 3 on I-36. It is possible to see the Dairy Princess from Lone Star Candies, but it is also possible to see Lubbock clearly from Midland. Texas has a lot of flat places.

Smallwood's car was a rusty blue '92 Lumina with a 2005 registration from Big Beaver County, Ohio; a Rick Case Cleveland dealer badge; and a Tancredo for President bumper sticker.

"They're coming over the border and riding straight up this road toward Wichita Falls," Smallwood said. "The Minutemen are the last, best line of defense of American freedom."

I positioned myself in such a way as to avoid a DVD case featuring the images of late '90s boy band, the Backdoor Brothers, and a some sort of foreign substance that prevented the hard plastic cover from sliding on the velour.

"They're bringing diseases, and drugs. Illegal aliens are taking jobs and driving down wages for middle class people like us. The drain they put on our social services comes out of our pockets!

"My tax dollars are paying to support people who are breaking the law!" Smallwood eased the Chevy up to 70 in the 45 zone. He was near tears.

At no point was the idea of the price of vegetables tripling mentioned, but it seemed that Mr. Smallwood, standing five-three and a robust 310 pounds, had little use for food that did not quadruple the recommended yearly allowance for Lard. There was also no room for the idea that we are near full employment with several million undocumented people in the labor stream.

"So what would you propose that we do?" I asked.

"Seal the border and send them all back. Preferably using a slingshot. You know the administration is trying to give up our sovereignty by merging the United States with Canada and Mexico? They're going to change our currency to the Amero."

He seemed to be referring to a Bush administration proposal to work with Canada and Mexico to find common ground in law to get some consistency and reciprocity between jurisdictions.

"You don't seem to have a Texas accent," I said.

"Those big corporations who want amnesty for illegal aliens packed up all of the jobs back in Cleveland and sent them to Mexico for cheap labor."

Somehow, if all of these jobs were in Mexico, it would seem that there would be no motivation to leave, at least to me. I did not share this opinion. Having visited Cleveland, I also supposed that the undesirable climate and high taxation and state regulation in Ohio might have had a little something to do with the situation as well.

Of course, I come from Atlanta, where a lot of operations moved from heavily regulated, highly taxed states with cruddy climates, so I might share some complicity as well.

"I'm going to duck into my house for just a second. I got to make a little withdrawal from the bank of Maxwell House."

His house was a Champion singlewide manufactured home. In fact, a tax sticker from Terco County, Texas, was issued in 1973, thus it was old enough to still be called a trailer. Inside was mediterranean style furniture, harvest gold appliances, and orange cut-pile carpeting. There was another boy band video with a strange substance on the cover.

"Where's your daughter?" I asked.

Smallwood pulled a ten-dollar bill out of the Maxwell House can in the freezer. Icily, he replied "I don't have a daughter."

"Oh." I had an idea what the substance on the boy band video covers might be, but the logical answer was too disgusting to be contemplated. One wall featured eight-by-ten glossies of Lou Dobbs, Michael Savage, and Congressman Brian Bilbray. They seemed to be autographed by the same pen, in the same handwriting, with the same spelling errors.

"So, you went to school in Cleveland?" I asked.

"The schools in Cleveland were filled with the same liberal agenda. Algebra, chemistry, term papers. But they won't teach Illegal Mexican Aliens to talk English! So I left them to live in the cesspool they created."

"Were there many illegals in Cleveland?"

Smallwood became vehement. "You bet! They were from Fajardo and Guayama and Aguadilla."

I smiled. Not only were the places not even in Mexico, the people he was describing were United States Citizens from Puerto Rico. "Let's get over to the Dairy Duchess and get ourselves some chili dogs. And a Moderate Snow Shower frozen dessert!"

The conversation ends there, as there was a minor electrical system meltdown in the Lumina, and he chose to wait for a friend from the Terco County, Texas, Minuteman Militia intead of returning to the plant with a moonlighting electrical engineer from Tegucigalpa.

EPILOGUE

Forrest B. Smallwood died on September 6, 2006. He had been working on a fence to prevent migrants from New Mexico from entering Texas when he encountered a trucker evading the scale in Mulehead City, and immediately accused him of being an Illegal Mexican Alien.

The driver, Raymond "Moose" Thunder Cloud, of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, took high offense to the idea that he was in some fashion less entitled to be in the United States than Mr. Smallwood.

Mr. Thunder Cloud, in a sworn statement released by Terco County Constable Diego Velasquez, defended himself from what he believed to be grave and imminent danger from what he presumed to be a highjacker on FM 13490, three miles west of Tarado. The Texas DPS Crime Scene investigator found the shards of a blue exchange pallet consistent with the severe pummelling of Mr. Smallwood, and a sudden storm washed Mr. Smallwood's remains into a nearby culvert.

There was no funeral, no body, nor were there any survivors.