American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (13 page)

  As soon as he walked into his own flat, Cincinnatus was glad he’d camouflaged the fire engine, because Achilles sat at the kitchen table doing homework. The boy pointed. “What you got, Pa?”

  “None o’ your business. Get back to work,” Cincinnatus answered. Back in Covington, before the war, there’d been no public schools for Negroes. Finding school not only present but required in Des Moines had made a lot of the hardships in uprooting his family worthwhile. Wagging a finger at Achilles, he went on, “I had to sneak around to learn my letters. You got help. I expect you to take advantage of it.”

  “I am, Pa,” his son said. “But you still haven’t told me what you got there.” Achilles’ accent was an odd mix of Kentucky and Iowa. Cincinnatus knew he would have said
ain’t told me
himself. He also knew that was wrong, but it seemed natural to him in a way it didn’t to the boy.

  He went into the kitchen, where Elizabeth had a beef tongue boiling in a pot with potatoes and carrots, and with some cloves that gave the air a spicy smell. She too pointed to the burlap-wrapped toy.

  “What’s that?”

  Cincinnatus showed her—the fire engine wasn’t for her, after all. Her eyes widened. She nodded. He said, “You got a place in here where we can hide this till the day?”

  “Right here.” She opened a cabinet and pointed to a top shelf. He stood on tiptoe to push the fire engine back as far as he could. That done, he gave her a kiss. She smiled, as if to say something might come of that later on.

  Then Amanda toddled into the kitchen and wrapped her arms around his shins. “Dada!” she said. Hard to believe she was a year and a half old now. Above her head, Cincinnatus and Elizabeth exchanged wry, tired grins. Something might not come of Elizabeth’s inviting smile, too. Before Amanda was born, Cincinnatus had forgotten, perhaps mercifully, how much of a handful a baby in the house was. She’d reminded him, though.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Elizabeth said. “We got us a letter today.”

  “A letter?” Cincinnatus said in surprise. “Who from?” Most—almost all—the mail they got was either bills or advertising circulars. Only a few people they knew, either friends or relatives, could read and write.

  For that matter, Elizabeth could hardly read and write herself. Till Achilles started going to school, she hadn’t even known the ABCs. But he’d taught her some of what he’d learned. Now she said, “It came from Covington, I know that. But I can’t make out who sent it, and I didn’t open it up. Didn’t reckon I could cipher it out myself, and I didn’t know if it was anything Achilles ought to see, you know what I mean?”

  “Sure do.” Cincinnatus looked in the icebox and took out a bottle of beer. Iowa was a dry state that took being dry seriously. The beer was unofficial, illegal homebrew, made by Mr. Chang upstairs. Till he came to Des Moines, Cincinnatus hadn’t know that Chinamen drank beer, let alone made it themselves.

  As he yanked the cork out of the bottle, he said, “Why don’t you let me have a look at it now?”

  “I do that,” she said. When she left the kitchen, her skirt swirled, showing off her ankles and several inches of shapely calf. She’d finally given in to what everyone else was wearing these days. Cincinnatus thought the new styles risqué, but that didn’t keep him from looking. On the contrary. She brought back the envelope. “Here.”

  Sure enough, it bore a Covington postmark. Cincinnatus tried to puzzle out the return address, but couldn’t. He took a clasp knife from his pocket and opened the envelope. Looking up from the letter, he asked Elizabeth, “You recollect a fellow name of Hadrian, moved next door to my folks a little after the war ended?”

  She thought, then nodded. “Believe I do. Never had nothin’ much to do with him, though. How come?

  What’s he say?”

  “Says Pa’s sick, mighty sick, maybe fixin’-to-die sick.” Cincinnatus wished he’d never got the letter. He went on, “Says Ma asked him to write me, get me to come back down there ‘fore Pa goes.” Tears blurred his vision. His father wasn’t an old man, but anybody could take sick.

  “Mama Livia, she can’t very well write you her own self,” Elizabeth said. That was true; Cincinnatus’

  mother and his father, Seneca, were both illiterate. They’d grown up as slaves, back in the days when teaching a Negro his letters was against the law.

  “I know.” Cincinnatus took a long pull at the beer bottle, wishing it were something stronger. He read the letter again, as if expecting it to say something different the second time around. That was foolish, but who wasn’t foolish sometimes?

  “What you gwine do?” Elizabeth asked.

  “I got to go,” Cincinnatus said. “We got enough money to pull through if I’m gone a week or two.” They had more money than that, even after he’d bought the bigger truck. He’d always salted away as much as he could. Even when Kentucky was still a Confederate state, he’d done his best to get ahead, and his best had been about as good as a Negro’s could be in the CSA.

  Elizabeth nodded. “All right. You take the truck or you ride a train?”

  “Train,” he answered. “Hadrian, he say to wire him when I come, an’ he’ll meet me at the station.” He finished his beer in a couple of big gulps. “Wish he would’ve wired me. I be there by now.” He sighed.

  “Letter’s cheaper, I reckon. What can you do?”

  “I say prayers Sunday an’ every night for your father,” Elizabeth said. “Papa Seneca, he’s a nice man.”

  “Yeah,” Cincinnatus said tonelessly. As people will, he’d come to take his father for granted. The idea that the older man might not be there forever—might not be there for very much longer—hit him hard, and all the harder because it caught him by surprise. Everything had been going so well. Everything still was—for him. But with his father sick, that didn’t matter any more.

  There was a Western Union office in the Des Moines train station. Cincinnatus sent Hadrian a telegram from there. A couple of hours later, he boarded an eastbound train. A crow flying from Des Moines to Covington would have gone about six hundred miles. The train took a longer route, and took its own sweet time getting there. It seemed to stop at every worthless little town along the way, too. Cincinnatus stared out the window, now and then drumming his fingers on his trouser leg in impatience.

  On a train in the CSA, the attendants would have been black men. Here, they were almost all foreigners of one sort or another. They muttered things about Cincinnatus that he couldn’t understand, but he didn’t think any of them were compliments.

  The Confederates had dropped the old railroad bridge from Cincinnati to Covington into the Ohio when the Great War broke out. The train rattled over its replacement in the wee small hours. Cincinnatus yawned and knuckled his eyes. He hadn’t slept a wink. He hoped his father was still breathing.

  He had no trouble spotting Hadrian: his family’s neighbor was the only Negro waiting on the platform.

  He didn’t look to have slept much, either. “C-come along with me,” he said. Cincinnatus didn’t remember him stammering. He had a nervous tic under one eye, too.

  No sooner had they got off the platform than four big, tough-looking white men in plain clothes surrounded them. “You fuckin’
bastard
!” Cincinnatus exclaimed. He knew he’d been betrayed—he just didn’t know to whom yet. Hadrian miserably hung his head. What had these people done or threatened to get him to write that letter?

  They all piled into a big Oldsmobile. When it stopped in front of the city hall, Cincinnatus knew who had him. It didn’t make him feel any better—worse, in fact. “Come along, boy,” one of the whites snapped.

  He’d probably been a cop in the days when Covington belonged to the CSA.

  However unwillingly, Cincinnatus went. The man waiting for him inside gave him a smile that might have come from a hunting hound. His luminous, yellow-brown eyes strengthened the resemblance. “Howdy, Cincinnatus,” Luther Bliss said. “Been a while, hasn’t it?” The head of the Kentucky State Police—the Kentucky secret police—didn’t wait for an answer. He turned to Cincinnatus’ hard-faced escorts and spoke three words: “Lock him up.”

 
E
very once in a while, Nellie Jacobs would take her Order of Remembrance out of its velvet box and look at it. She didn’t wear it much—where would a woman who ran a coffee shop in Washington, D.C., have occasion to wear the USA’s highest civilian decoration? The last time she’d put it on was for Teddy Roosevelt’s funeral. Roosevelt had presented the medal to her with his own hands. He’d given Nellie’s daughter, Edna, a medal, too, but hers was only second class, not first.

 
  She didn’t know she was being a spy,
 Nellie thought.
Lord, she wouldn’t have cared if the
Confederates held Washington forever.
 It was funny, if you looked at it the right way.

  The eagle on the Order of Remembrance stared fiercely back at her. Of course, Roosevelt hadn’t known the whole story, any more than Edna had. Roosevelt hadn’t known she’d stuck a knife into Bill Reach, the U.S. spymaster in Washington. Nobody knew that, nobody but Nellie. Not even her husband knew, and Hal Jacobs had reported directly to Reach.

  “He had it coming, the filthy son of a bitch,” Nellie muttered. It wasn’t that Bill Reach had been a drunkard, though he had. But he’d also been a lecher and, in his younger days, a man who’d had—and paid for—assignations with Nellie. He’d thought he could keep on having them, too, if he just slapped
down the cash.

  Nellie’s long oval face settled into the lines of disapproval it had worn so often since she’d escaped the demimonde.
Shows how much he knew,
 she thought. She’d fought hard for respectability. She hadn’t been about to throw it away for a drunken bastard and his red, throbbing prick. One of the things she liked about her husband was that he didn’t trouble her in the bedroom very often.
Old men have their
advantages.

  Her mouth twisted.
You’re no spring chicken yourself,
 she thought. She’d turned fifty earlier in the year. She felt every year of her age, too. It wasn’t so much that she was going gray, though she was.

  That aside, she looked a good deal younger than her years. But keeping up with a four-year-old would have made anybody feel her years.

  As if the thought of Clara were enough to make her get into mischief, she called, “Ma! Help me tie my shoe!”

  “I’m coming,” Nellie said. Her back twinged when she got off her bed. Clara couldn’t tie her shoes yet.

  Sometimes she insisted on trying anyhow. Four-year-olds were nothing if not independent. That they drove their parents mad never once crossed their minds, of course. That was part of their . . . charm.

  “I’m going to go out and play,” Clara declared when Nellie hurried into her bedroom.

  “Not yet, you’re not.” Nellie surveyed the damage. “Oh, child, what
have
you gone and done?” Actually, the damage itself left little room for doubt. Clara had put her shoes on the wrong feet and then tied as many knots as she could in the shoelaces. She couldn’t manage a bow, but knots she had no trouble with. The shoes came up well over her ankles; they were almost boots, and fit snugly even before Clara created her knotty problem.

  Nellie couldn’t even get the shoes off her daughter till she untied some—several—of the knots. Clara didn’t want to hold still for the process. Four-year-olds didn’t hold still unless they were asleep or coming down with something. Nellie asked her twice not to squirm. That failing, she swatted Clara’s bottom. Her daughter squalled, but then did hold still . . . for a little while.

  It was, Nellie decided, long enough. It was, at any rate, long enough for her to get the shoes on their proper feet and tie a couple of bows. “Play on the sidewalk in front of the shop here,” Nellie warned.

  “Don’t you go out in the street. I’m going to come downstairs and keep an eye on you. If you even go
near
the street, you’ll get a spanking like you’ll never forget. No, you’ll get two—one from me, and one from your pa.”

  “I promise, Ma.” Clara solemnly crossed her heart. “Hope to die.”
 No, it’s so you don’t die,
 Nellie thought, but Clara wouldn’t have had the faintest idea what she was talking about. “Let’s go downstairs,” Nellie said. Clara took her favorite toy, a rag doll named Louise, and went down to the ground floor at what Nellie would have reckoned a suicidal pace. Nellie followed more sedately.

  Nellie turned away for a moment to get a whisk broom and a dust pan. The coffee shop was closed on Sundays, of course; Washington’s blue laws were as strict as any in the USA. But the more cleaning she did now, the less she would have to worry about come Monday morning, when she’d also be busy brewing coffee, frying eggs and ham and bacon and potatoes, toasting bread, and serving her customers.

  Her door might be shut, but she didn’t reckon Sunday a day of rest.

  Before Nellie had taken more than three steps, brakes screeched out in the street. Metal crumpled.

  Glass tinkled musically. It reminded her of artillery bombardments during the war, but wasn’t so dramatic.

  Or it wouldn’t have been . . . “Oh, God in heaven!” Nellie said, and dashed outside. “Clara!” she shouted. “Where are you, Clara?”

  No answer. Fear rising in her like the tide, Nellie stared at the accident. A Ford and a Packard had locked horns. The Ford, predictably, was the loser. Steam gushed from its ruptured radiator. Its driver descended to the street holding a handkerchief to his head, which he’d bloodied when he greeted his windshield face first.

  “Clara!” Nellie called again. “Dear God, please . . .” The last time she’d prayed had been during the U.S. artillery barrage that nearly leveled Washington before the Confederates finally, sullenly, drew back into Virginia. God must have heard that prayer—she’d come through alive. But everything back then seemed small and unimportant when set against her daughter’s safety.
“Clara!”
The gray-haired man who’d been driving the Packard had to kick at his door before it would open. He didn’t seem badly hurt, and started shouting at the other man: “You idiot! You moron! You thumb-fingered baboon!”