Little Uganda
Short fiction by Drew Bufalini as published by Medium and Scars magazines.
When Walton walked into the Seven-Eleven for a bottle of water, he had no idea he was stepping straight into an armed robbery. No sooner was he in the door than he was on the floor, the victim of a wine bottle to the temple. He hit the dirty linoleum like a sack of potatoes, his head oozing copious quantities of blood.
One robber hollered for the cashier to open the safe, who swore up and down in a difficult-to-understand German accent, that she couldn’t. Who would give a minimum wage employee access to all safe. Deposits only.” The thief smacked her in the face with a gloved open palm. “Fill-the-bag-now!” He spoke slow and staccato so she’d comprehende. Crying now, she comprehended. The other robber kept the hostages under control with a weathered, sawed-off shotgun.
Walton opened his eyes to see the parking lot fill with first responders. Men and women in blue crouching close to the ground. They breached front and back simultaneous. Before the robbers could blaze their way out in a hail of bullets, the cops flushed the store with two canisters of zoo-grade tear gas. Customers and clerks came out howling, rubbing and scratching their inflamed eyes. When Walton reached the door, a large, hairy arm shoved him into the wall outside. His head was pressed against the bricks. “What the f- ,” was all Walton said before he was cuffed. Seconds later, the convenience store clerks were bound beside him.
“We work here!” One of the clerks yelled at an ICE agent, who was twisting her arm behind his back while cuffing her wrists.
“We know.” That shut up everyone.
These cops weren’t playing by the Constitution anymore. Parked adjacent to the store, just out of sight of CCTV, Walton spied three black, unmarked armored black vans idling patiently.
The police and immigration agents, burly white men with bulletproof vests all, started taking pictures of each mug. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what was happening - everyone a shade darker than almond milk was separated from the white group and made to wait on their knees for their fate. An ICE agent hollered, “¡Quítate la camisa! ¡Quiero ver tus tatuajes!” Walton desperately looked up and down the line for someone to translate and saw other men removing their shirts. “Show us your tats, puta,” the ICE agent said derisively. In his mind, there was no possibility that Walton didn’t speak Spanish.
“Hey!” Walton desperately attempted to get through to the agent. “Check my wallet. I’m a citizen.” Unfortunately, listening wasn’t part of the abbreviated ICE agent training.
The ICE agent looked at him like something he’d scraped off the bottom of his shoe and whispered “pendejo.” He took Walton’s wallet and appraised his ID, as if examining a horse at an auction. Like the doctor, he determined Walton was, indeed, “Mexicano.” Despite his papers proving he was a US citizen. Should he explain that he was one-hundred-percent Italian? That’s why he was slightly swarthy. He’d gone through some trouble having his nationality added to his identification so he wouldn’t be mistaken for an illegal alien. The agent took his wallet and tossed it into a dumpster without looking or even removing the cash. He laughed at Walton, “Tu Mexicano, pendejo.” Walton was clueless to its meaning, but guessed it was derogative.
Before outrage kicked in, Walton and company were herded onto a bus and each one given a water and several pills, which they were told were vitamins that would help them acclimate to their new home. This about sent Walton through the roof. He quickly found himself in the cold sweats of an anxiety attack. Luckily, ICE had drugged the detainees for the long bus ride to an Air Force Base in Missouri, where the detainees were hustled onto an enormous camouflage C-130 flown by armed people in uniform. Everyone he saw that looked like they spoke a modicum of English denied his requests for assistance. Some seemed surprised that he only spoke English. Others were shocked that he was dumb enough to open his mouth. The ICE agents and police were more than liberal with their rifle butts.
When Walton next opened his eyes, he found himself in a completely unfamiliar clime. He was prone on an airstrip lined with bullet-ridden palm trees, located just outside a refugee camp somewhere on the equator where no one would ever find them. Hundreds of white tents were lined up, row upon row, side by side, neat as could be, ready for the neighborhood to change for the better. But gentrification had no plans to visit. The populace were withdrawn, exhausted, and without purpose. The majority were black and spoke no Spanish. Everyone else he could only assume were Mexican. They would do the same for him. Clothing was primarily American throw-aways, promotional t-shirts and pants advertising beer and fast food. The cars that motored down the main thoroughfare were black. All of them. What was even more surprising was their provenance. These steel behemoths hailed from the mid-twentieth century. Nothing on the road was built before 1955. Like Cuba.
De-planed, the world was a claustrophobic hot box. As far as Walton’s eyes could discern, there wasn’t a tree to be found. Or green grass. Jungle grew right up to edge of the camp. The bugs were monstrous and intolerable. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of tents filled a muddy field the size of Manhattan. There were no power or telephone lines as far as he could see. Just masses of people in a variety of cultural couture, trying to squeeze another minute of juice from their mobile phones. There were Mexicans, Venezuelans, Columbians, and others from south of the US border. Somehow there were even Hutu and Tutsi refugees, both black tribes of Africa, far from Mexico on the world map. Some dressed like Americans in jeans and T-shirts bearing sports team logos. Other wore colorful robes adorned with ornaments communicating the wearer’s rank in their society. Despite the heat of the sun, a brown cloud of pollution hovered above the camp from the extraordinary number of campfires burning simultaneously.
Missing were the luxuries and trappings of a fantasist’s capitalist landscape along with their toys of technology running amok. Mobile phones with no charge were paper weighs. Gone were the conglomeration of ads blotting out the sky and invading every inch of human consciousness, covering physical blank space with ads selling cheap mortgage rates, upcoming sporting events, casino give-a-ways, and skinny cigarettes. Look deeper in any direction of the refugee camp and you’ll become accustomed to the variety of skin colors to which the wider world has long been acclimated, but which America had elected to reject by feigning colorblindness. Three generations ago, Walton might have been Maltese. That Mediterranean island giving him the olive skin that make him questionable in the eyes of the pearly white ICE agents. He couldn’t help but notice that the indigenous residents were primarily black and bore no resemblance to those ICE referred to snidely as Mexicans, as if their heritage were an insult. Requests for information were met with unwarranted, casual violence.
Eventually, the newly arrived immigrants found empty tents for themselves near the outer boundaries of the camp. Fires had been erected in anticipate of their arrival. ICE had left crates of refried beans, tortillas, spam, and bottled water. There was no way to open them. That night, the new neighbors - who also shared a common language and now two common countries - stayed awake by the fire, contemplating the future. Wondering where on the planet they were just then - they could as easily be in Kazakhstan as Swaziland. Walton was befriended by a man named Arsalan, of Pakistani origin by way of Detroit, who was a fellow US citizen and English speaker. Arsalan informed Walton that he heard some guards speaking Punjab when he first arrived. They could be anywhere.
Arsalan gave it to Walton straight: if we run, “they’ll shoot us dead. Otherwise, they bring us food when they remember. Mostly we’re in a hunting and gathering situation. There are no walls because there’s no place to escape to outside camp. We’re hundreds of miles of civilization.” Nidhi, an Indian woman with a medical degree, was the de facto leader of the community by merit of her expertise and preternatural ability to settle disputes without resorting to violence. She guided each group of newcomers to the place in the camp where people of their own nationality were residing. From Australians to Greeks to Chileans to Georgians to actual Mexicans, everyone in the ICE camp had an olive to brownish hue. Walton wasn’t the only legal US citizen. He was directed to part of the camp where naturalized Indians, Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Albanians, Egyptians, and Palestinians - all misjudged by the master ICE database - resided in squalor. Some might have all been Mexican, but others were naturalized US citizens. Not that identification papers mattered here. Wherever here might be. Skin color was equivocal to a passport. Or lack thereof in the case of the United States. This wasn’t the US Walton knew and loved. It certainly wasn’t the same country to which his grandparents had legally immigrated.
Led to his tent, Walton couldn’t help but notice the lack of road signs of billboard advertisements. There weren’t even street signs. There was no way to discern one row of muddy white tents from the next. Inside, he found a folding chair, a blanket, an empty pitcher for water, a pile of unfolded clothing, and what he assumed was a chamber pot. Functioning bathrooms weren’t a feature of Camp Trump. He dragged the folding chair to the front of his tent, which was a raised piece of plywood near the cold fire pit. Walter scavenged for kindling but came up empty. He eventually inquired with a neighbor named Jimbo, who laughed uproariously and, to demonstrate the reason for his response, dumped a small pale of plastic waste onto his own fire pit. The smell of burning plastic reached Walter’s nostrils and he wanted to gag. Jimbo inhaled the acrid odor as if it was the first fresh air he’d tasted in months, a bouquet of nature’s most redolent fragrances - like the air was exhaled by God himself to sustain Jimbo. And he seemed thankful for it. Walter watched as his neighbor sliced a hunk of SPAM out of a tin, pierced it with a piece of junk metal, and torched it like a marshmallows over the open fire. What remained seemed like pure charcoal but tasted like a filet after a week of forced fasting.
As disturbed as he felt from the events of the past forty-eight hours, Walton couldn’t shake a bizarre feeling he had about Jimbo. For one thing: he was several hues whiter than Walton. Also, his tent was crammed with tins of food and liquid he’d stolen. Some buried. Some not. His clothing looked practically new. His blonde hair was long and sticking out of his baseball hat at all angles. When Jimbo adjusted his hat, his shirt moved and exposed a tattoo of the “M” from the University of Michigan logo. That was it! The refugee slash prisoners were former college alumni. Where would their lives go now, Walton wondered to himself, not bothering to share the fact that he was also a Michigan alum. None of those things mattered anymore.
Jimbo shared an Orgina bottle with Walton filled with homemade hooch. Once the new friends were buzzing, Walton had to ask. He wanted confirmation. No way this was really happening. He kept expecting to wake up in a hospital, the victim of a head injury caused by the robbery. But seeing the number of injured and disabled people spattered throughout the camp, Walton doubted there was any medical care besides the Mayor. In his section of tents, the majority of the residents were some of hue of brown that ranked Trump’s hide to the point that he didn’t so much as want them out of the country, he wanted them off the continent. Mexican or not was beside the point. America was full and needed to purge the “undesirables” along with the immigrants. Walon turned to Jimbo and asked in his best southern accent, “Y’all voted Democrat too, huh?”
# # #