A History of the Future (35 page)

“They’re just fine,” I go, not really thinking.

He’s like, “Is that so? Well, things will hotten up there soon, you bet.”

“You think so?” I say.

He lowers his head and whispers, “It’s all the talk we’re gonna lay siege to Cincinnati, right across the river there. Didn’t you see our soldiers coming in?”

“I’ve been away from home on business for weeks.”

“Well, that’s the news, friend. The barroom here is the center of the Foxfire universe. Government bigwigs come and go all day and all night. You’ll hear it all first at the Yancey. Just wait and see. We’ll take the Ohio and from there it’s on to the lakes. Gonna push the federals clean up to Canada—and maybe we’ll have that, too, by and by.”

“Perhaps you should join the army and enter the fray,” I go. He shoots me a look.

“I’m needed here,” he says indignantly.

I realize I’d better check my banter and study up on my
legend,
as they call your cover story in the Service, so I can be quicker on my feet.

Meanwhile he’s turned all business with me. “The electric goes off at ten-thirty p.m., midnight on weekends,” he says. “After that you have to use candles so please take the usual precautions. Welcome to the Yancey, and praise her.”

He was referring to the Foxfire leader. I’d learn that most formal transactions in Franklin finished with that praise salute to Loving Morrow. I would employ it myself in the days ahead. Apart from that, I was happy to find that they were serving real old-times pizza in the barroom when I finally got down there. There was plenty of wheat in Franklin. These people had plenty of everything.

In the morning, I found an envelope slipped under the door with instructions to report to the paddock at Stokely’s mule barn out on Acton Street at ten o’clock. When I got downstairs to the restaurant it was already 9:15, so I had to bolt some eggs and biscuits and hurry over. There were half a dozen men there at Stokely’s, some country people, some in good linen suits. I was just standing at the fence, like I was a buyer, looking at the stock. It was already very hot and the mule paddocks were dusty. Soon, a slight man about fifty sidled up to me. He was delicate in his figure, dressed in good clothes and high boots, with a broad-brimmed hat and steel-rimmed eyeglasses.

“I’m Hector Tillman,” he says.

“Then I am the one you are looking for,” I say.

He tells me to go out the checkpoint on the Murfreesboro Road at the edge of town and cross the bridge and go up by the path along the creek and wait for him in a cottonwood grove. I do just like he says, directly. It’s a quarter mile, just a five-minute walk past some half-demolished highway strip buildings, fields of asphalt, old-times desolation. The checkpoint on that side of town is much less grand than the one coming in on the Nashville Pike—just a shack and a fence with a gate in it. It happens that the solitary soldier there is tilted back in his chair napping in the sunshine. He smells like a distillery. I duck under the gate and continue on my way. I take the well-trodden path beside the lazy stream, find the grove, and shortly Mr. Tillman appears. He takes my hand in both of his.

“I’m very glad you’re here, son, and none too soon,” he goes. “How is our Mr. Albright?”

“I think he’s got his hands full, sir.”

“I hear they got a new headquarters up in Michigan. Lakefront property.”

“It’s not as grand as this place,” I say, which seems to annoy him.

“This place . . .” he goes. “Hmph. Well, you’re a fine specimen,” he says. “Our Leading Light is going to like you, I believe. You give ole Harvey my fond regards, you get out of here alive.”

That threw a chill in me for a moment. Mr. Tillman plucked a grass stem with a seed head and sucked the stalk, searching the riverside for an awkward interval. A faraway look came over him, as though for a moment he clearly saw a lurid fate beckoning him.

“Is it true that you’re called Barefoot?” I say.

“I was a fast runner as a child,” he says. “I’m still pretty quick. Might come in handy yet. Well, here you are at last,” he says coming back to himself and sizing me up more. “They promised to send me someone who is prepared and capable. You feeling up to your task, son?”

“I guess I do, sir.”

“Looks like you arrived in good order.”

“I met up with robbers just the other day.”

“I gather you prevailed.”

“They were sickly, inept, and depraved,” I say. “And they don’t have a lot of love for their rulers, you might be interested to hear.”

“I know all about it,” he says. “Sounds like a very general run of the Foxfire populace. Beginning to catch on to the hoodwink nature of their deal, which is they get to stay poor while their rulers wallow in luxury.”

“That’s how they put it in so many words,” I tell him.

“It breeds resentment and grievance, of course.”

I’m like, “It’s hard not to be impressed by things here. The electric, the goods flowing in, the activity.”

“Well, you’ll be more astounded before long.”

“I saw an automobile last night on a back street.”

“Yes, the Leading Light goes about in one, like a goddess in a machine,” he says. “I reckon that’s what you saw. She likes to patrol the streets, inspecting her domain. She’s met not a few young men that way, I hear, but she has a tendency to dispose of them when she’s had her fill, so to speak. You stay alert once you’re on the inside, and make your move wisely. Before long, this will all seem like a strange dream you had.”

“I’m twenty years old and lived through the change from the old to the new,” I say, “and I’ve never seen anything like this place.”

“This is the new Rome, boy. Only we not doing it exactly the Roman way. More like the Disneyland way.”

I’m like, “What’s Disneyland, sir?”

“Long ago and far away,” he says. “You take a left at Never-Never Land and keep going.”

“I think I see.”

“This thing here ain’t going to be no thousand-year endeavor. It’ll be a miracle if it goes five more, with or without Miz Praise Her. We stripping all the value out of these poor-ass states as fast as we can so the fantasy of wealth and power might linger on here for a little while longer. It’s a scavenging operation. The people behind all this look like adults, but they have the minds of children. What was your impression up in Kentucky?”

“’It was some sorry country I rode through coming here, sir. With few and sorry people.”

“I had a trip over to Arkansas a year ago, visiting with the home folks,” he says. “Looked like scenes out of the fourteenth century over there. They just about picked clean. What I’m saying, something you’ll come to understand about the Foxfire Republic, these people here in Franklin were determined to not change with the world when the world changed. They still living like it was the old times, as much as they can, but because there’s so little left out there, this town and a fraction of its inhabitants are the only ones that get to live this way. In the meantime, they strangling and starving and bleeding down the rest, like a demon tick on a sick dog. That is, the ones that don’t get killed or run off outright. They already killed fifty thousand at least, and they’re hot for more. Seems the more they kill, the more they like it. They call their policy the Unspeakable, which is funny, ’cause if you spend enough time around them on the inside you’ll realize it’s nearly all they talk about: eliminating the nigger and the Jew and the Spanish and anyone else they regard as less than one hundred percent Foxfire. They a goddamn menace to life and decency in North America.”

Mr. Tillman took off his hat and wiped his brow with his sleeve. His eyes were rheumy, like he didn’t sleep well.

I’m like, “Pardon me for asking, where do you fit in, sir?”

“That’s just it, I don’t,” he says. “I was old time federal, going way back to Bubba himself. When the Service was called CIA. Being deep in and deep down is my element. You want to know how come? I got an acute aversion to despotism. I never met with the devil and his associates, but I know political evil when I see it and this here’s the real deal. We saw where these folks were going a long time ago, and I been in so long and deep amongst them that it’s like living underwater. Tell you the truth, I’d like to breathe again.”

“What happens now?” I ask.

“You’ll be assigned to work in the Logistics Commission,” he says. “It’s the civilian side of quartermaster. That’s mostly seeing to the flow of goods into the city, keeping track of cargoes, grain shipments, inventories, distribution of provisions, accounting for excise taxes, and such. Soon, you’ll be brought into the inner circle. You will not be connected to me in any manner people know about. I’ll see to that. She’s a piece of work, our Leading Light, Loving Morrow. She’s well protected, though. You got to be inside on the inside to get to her, otherwise I might have tried to do the job myself. It never ceases to amaze me how this nation managed to raise up its own little Hitler, and how it turned out to be a down-home gal who likes fried food and Jimmie Rodgers songs. You know, history is nothing if not a prankster. Well, this is the last and only one on one you and me going to have. I’ve played a dangerous game here and I dare not make a misstep at this point. You’ll receive instructions at your place of business and I wish you Godspeed with your mission.”

We shook hands, both of us pretty damp with heat and nerves. He left me down there by the river and told me to wait awhile before returning to town. The guard was awake when I passed his checkpoint, but he just waved me through, like his head hurt too much to even ask my name. I moved later that day from the Yancey to a rooming house on Fair Street, where I was to live modestly until called to my duty. The town was full of people from elsewhere all over the Foxfire states who worked on government business, true believers but strangers to one another. I was as anonymous as anyone. I reported to the Logistics Commission offices across town on Monday and I began to learn a few things about how the Foxfire Republic actually functioned.

The electric was kept going in Franklin by means of “the eighth wonder of the world,” as they called it: an oil well in Overton County, a hundred miles to the east, that was capable of producing thirty-seven barrels of oil a day. Unfortunately, the largest oil distillery able to be built was capable of refining only twenty barrels a day, and the output could not be moved by old-time motor truck because the pavement on the roads was in such poor condition and there weren’t the resources to fix a hundred miles of roadway. So what they managed to distill at Miller Mountain came all that distance to Franklin in horse-drawn vehicles. There was a daily train of these wagons coming and going to power electric generators that ran a few hours in the evening in the central district of town. The journey for each wagon took the better part of a week, and each one required a team of six mules, so you can imagine the expense. Generators ran in the wealthy villa neighborhoods of Loving Morrow’s higher-ups and another portion of diesel fuel was allotted to the Leading Light’s personal compound west of town. There were some ideas about using armored motor vehicles in military operations to shock and awe the Foxfire enemies, but the battlegrounds were so far flung—Atlanta, in the first instance, and presently Cincinnati—that there wasn’t the fuel to get the vehicles there, let alone run them once they got there. So they gave up on that idea and went back to cavalry.

I worked that first week at the Logistics Commission, which had me in and out of an office, going to warehouses about town to physically inspect stores of commodities, entering the figures in ledgers, and compiling reports for a Mr. Bodrew, who I never met, at the head of the commission. I got the impression in just that first week that an awful lot of stuff was being spirited away by anyone who could manage to fob off with it, and therefore that I could make up numbers in my reports and it wouldn’t especially matter. But my duties allowed me to get out and about and see things and not have to consort with the others at headquarters. It was lonesome, nervous work in an enemy land, and I awaited my call.