American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (24 page)

  Erasmus only shrugged. “Ain’t nobody perfect, Xerxes. Ain’t nobody even close to perfect. Yeah, I’s pretty damn good. But I been doin’ this goin’ on fifty years now. Every so often, the knife is gonna slip.”

  “Uh-huh.” Scipio couldn’t take his eyes off those battered hands. He’d noticed them, but he hadn’t really studied them. They repaid study. Like so many who did something supremely well, Erasmus had suffered for his art. Scipio kept looking at them till a fat woman came in and asked Erasmus for three pounds of crawdads.

 
  What have I got that shows what I’ve done with my life?
 Scipio wondered. Only one thing occurred to him: the way he talked, or could talk if doing so wouldn’t put him in mortal danger. He
felt
smarter when he talked like an educated white man than he did using the thick Congaree River Negro dialect that was his only other way of putting his thoughts out for the world to know. He didn’t suppose he actually
was
smarter, but the illusion was powerful, and it lingered.

  Erasmus wrapped the crawdads in the
Augusta Constitutionalist
Scipio had been reading that morning.

  The woman paid him, said, “Thank you kindly,” and left.

  “I been tellin’ you and tellin’ you,” Erasmus said, “you ought to save your money and git yourself your own place. You end up doin’ a lot better working for your ownself than you do when you works for me.”

  “Don’t like tellin’ folks what they gots to do,” Scipio answered, not for the first time. “Reckon I kin”—if he’d run Marshlands for Anne Colleton, he could surely manage a little café for himself—“but I don’t like it none.”

  “You gots to have some fire in your belly to do a proper job,” Erasmus agreed. “But you gots to have some fire in your belly to git ahead any which way.”

  He eyed Scipio speculatively. Scipio concentrated on cleaning a catfish. He was better at doing what others told him than at telling others what to do. Back at Marshlands, he’d had Anne’s potent authority behind him. If he started his own business,
he’d
be the authority. No, he didn’t care for that. Still feeling Erasmus’ eye on him, he said, “I gits by.”

  He sounded defensive, and he knew it. Erasmus said, “Any damn fool can get by. You could do better, an’ you should ought to.”

  Scipio didn’t answer. Before too long, the first dinner customers started coming in. He hurried back and forth from the stove to the tables out front. The sizzle and crackle of fish going into hot oil filled the place.

  He served and took money and made change and then did endless dishes, getting ready for the next morning. When he finally left, Erasmus stayed behind, still busy.

  And when he got back to his flat, Bathsheba was waiting at the door to give him a kiss. Her eyes glowed. Scipio hoped he knew what she had in mind, and hoped that, after a long, hard day, he could perform. He turned out to be wrong—or, at least, not exactly right. She took his hand and set it just above her navel. “We gonna have us a young ‘un,” she said.

  All of a sudden, Scipio discovered he might have fire in his belly after all.

 
H
ipolito Rodriguez knew he should have counted himself a lucky man. For one thing, he’d come through the Great War without a scratch. If that by itself wasn’t enough to make him light candles in the church in the little mining town of Baroyeca, he couldn’t imagine what would be.

  And, for another, Baroyeca lay in the Confederate state of Sonora, not in the Empire of Mexico farther south. It was close enough to the border to hear the echoes of the civil war that convulsed the country of which Sonora had once been a part, but not close enough to have let any of the fighting come near.

  Nothing bothered Baroyeca very much. A couple of men hadn’t come home from the war in the north.

  A few others had come home, but maimed. Mostly, though, days went on as they always had.

  Rodriguez’s farm outside of town yielded no better crops than it ever had, but he managed to keep his wife, three sons, and two daughters fed.

  And, every so often, he had enough money left in his pocket to go into town and spend some time at
La
Culebra Verde
—the Green Snake—the cantina across the street from the church where he lit candles to thank God for his salvation. Having been preserved alive, didn’t he have the right to enjoy himself every once in a while?

  “Why not?” Carlos Ruiz said when he posed the question out loud one day. Carlos was his age, and had fought in Tennessee, where things had been, by all accounts, much worse than his own experience in Texas. Ruiz asked his counterquestion in English, not Spanish.

  “
Sí
, why not?” Rodriguez agreed, the last two words also in English. He dropped back into Spanish to continue, “My children speak as much of the new language as of the old. Ten million devils from hell take me if I know whether to be glad or sorry.”

  “If you want them to stay here and be farmers or marry farmers, Spanish is good enough,” Ruiz said—in Spanish. “If you hope they try to make money, English is better.” He was a farmer himself, and wore the ribbon for a Purple Heart on his baggy cotton shirt. Had he been a rich man, or a townsman, or even someone who hadn’t also fought in the north, Hipolito Rodriguez might have got angry, especially since he’d been drinking for a while. As things were, he only shrugged and said, “How much good will English do people who look like us, Carlos?” Like Ruiz, like almost everybody in Baroyeca, he was short, with red-brown skin and hair blacker than moonless midnight.

  “Even with English, what are we but a couple of damn greasers?” The last five words were in the official language of the Confederacy.

  “We may be greasers,” Ruiz said, also in English, “but we ain’t no niggers.
Mallates,
 ” he added in Spanish, in case Rodriguez didn’t understand him. Then back to English: “In the law, we’re the same as anybody else.”

  That was true. The people of Sonora and Chihuahua were Confederate citizens, not merely residents of the CSA. They could vote. They could run for office. They could—if they were rich enough, which some few were—marry whites from the other states in the Confederacy. They could. And yet . . . Rodriguez sighed and took another pull at the beer in front of him. “The law, it means only so much.” That was also true. If it weren’t for Negroes, Sonorans and Chihuahuans would have been at the bottom of the pile. Most Confederates who called themselves white looked down their noses at them. Rodriguez had seen as much during the war, the first time he’d ever had much to do with ordinary whites.

  “When the election comes, who will you vote for?” Ruiz asked.

  Rodriguez shrugged. “My
patrón
is a Radical Liberal.” Ever since Sonora and Chihuahua came into the CSA, small farmers like him had voted as the great landowners in the area wanted them to vote. But, like so many things, that wasn’t quite as it had been before the Great War. Rodriguez didn’t want to say as much out loud, though. What he didn’t say couldn’t get back to anyone. He lifted his cup, emptied it, and asked the same question of Carlos Ruiz.

  Ruiz gave back the same shrug. “Don Joaquin is a Radical Liberal, too.” Hipolito Rodriguez nodded.

  The Radical Liberals had been strong in the Confederate Southwest for years. Voting for them had always been a way to show Richmond the people here weren’t happy with the neglect the Whigs gave them.

  “I’d better go home,” Rodriguez said, setting his mug on the table in front of him. “If I go now, Magdalena won’t yell at me . . . so much.” He got to his feet. The room swayed slightly, but only slightly.

 
I’m not drunk,
 he thought.
Of course I’m not drunk.

 
“Hasta luego, amigo,”
 Ruiz said. By the way he sat, he wasn’t going anywhere for quite a while.

 
  “Luego,”
 Rodriguez answered. He walked to the door—steadily enough, all things considered—and left
La Culebra Verde
. The cantina had thick adobe walls that kept out the worst of the heat. When he went out into the street, it smote full force. His broad-brimmed straw hat helped some, but only some.

  He sighed as he drew in a lungful of bake-oven air. He’d known it would be like this. It always was.

  Baroyeca looked a lot like any other little Sonoran town. The main street was unpaved. Dust hung in the air. Horses and a few motorcars stood in front of shops. Like the cantina, most of the rest of the buildings were of adobe. Some had roofs of half-round red tiles, some of thatch, a few of corrugated tin.

  A roadrunner trotted down the street as if it owned it. The bird held a still-wriggling lizard in its beak.

  When a stray dog came towards it, it flapped up into the branches of a cottonwood tree and gulped the lizard down. The dog sent a reproachful stare after it, as if to say,
That’s not fair.

  “Life’s not fair,” Rodriguez muttered. Both dog and roadrunner ignored him.

  Advertising slogans were painted on the whitewashed fronts of the shops. Here and there, signs and posters added to the urge to sell. Rodriguez remembered his father saying there hadn’t been so many of those when he was young.

  Posters—well printed in both Spanish and English—extolled the virtues of Horacio Castillo, who was seeking a fourth term in the Confederate Congress. Castillo, his pictures showed, was a plump man with a neat, thin mustache. FOR PROGRESS AND SECURITY, VOTE RADICAL LIBERAL, his posters said.

  A few posters also touted the Whig candidate. Vicente Valenzuela wouldn’t win, but he’d put up a respectable showing.

  And then there were the scrawls on the walls, again in both Spanish and English. ¡LIBERTAD! some said, while others shouted, FREEDOM! Rodriguez eyed them thoughtfully. The Freedom Party had never been strong in Sonora up till this election. It probably wouldn’t win now, either. But it was making itself known in ways it hadn’t before.

  Most of what Rodriguez knew about the Freedom Party was that it wanted another go at the USA and wanted to keep black men in their place. He didn’t like the USA, either. And if black men weren’t on the bottom in the CSA, he would be, so he wanted them kept down.

  But a Freedom Party man had murdered the president of the Confederacy. Rodriguez scowled. That was no way to behave. He sighed. It was too bad. If people could only forget that . . .

  He sighed again, and headed for his farm. A horse-drawn wagon coming into town kicked up more dust, a yellow-gray cloud of it. A couple of men with rifles rode atop the wagon. They gave Rodriguez a hard, watchful stare as it rattled past. He sighed yet again. He was no
bandido
. And, even if he were a
bandido
, it wasn’t as if the silver mines in the hills outside of Baroyeca yielded enough precious metal to be worth stealing. Fewer than half as many miners as before the war went down into those dark shafts. If the mine ever failed altogether, what would become of Baroyeca? He didn’t like to think about that, either.

  High up in the sky, several vultures wheeled, riding the columns of hot air that rose from the baking ground. If Baroyeca dried up and blew away, even the vultures might not find enough to eat in this valley.

  After not quite half an hour, Rodriguez got back to his farm. He raised corn and beans and squashes and chickens and pigs. A sturdy mule, one of the best for miles around, did the plowing and hauling. He raised almost all his own food.
But if Baroyeca fails, what will I do for salt and nails and cotton cloth
and coffee and all the other things I can’t make for myself?
 He clicked his tongue between his teeth.

  He had no idea.

  A scrawny dog ran toward him, growling and baring its teeth. “
Cállate
, Maximiliano!” Rodriguez shouted. The dog skidded to a stop about ten feet away. It whined and wagged its tail, as if to say,
Well,
you might have been someone dangerous, and I was on the job.
 Rodriguez wasn’t fooled. He’d had Maximiliano for three years now, and had never seen a stupider dog. He’d known exactly what he was doing when he named the beast for the Emperor of Mexico.

  On the other side of the border, naming a dog for the Emperor might have got him stood up against a wall and shot for a rebel. All things considered, he was just as glad to be where he was.

  His older daughter, Guadalupe, carried a hen by the feet toward the chopping block by the house. Spit flooded into Rodriguez’s mouth at the thought of chicken stew or any of the other interesting things Magdalena, his wife, could do with the bird. He waved to Guadalupe. She was eleven now; she’d been born just before he got conscripted. It wouldn’t be more than another year or two before she started having a real shape, before boys began sniffing around, and before life began wheeling through a new cycle. The thought made him feel old, though he’d just passed thirty.

  In the house, Miguel and Jorge were wrestling. They were less than a year apart, seven and six, and Jorge, the younger, was big for his age, so the match was pretty even. Susana, who was five, watched them with her thumb in her mouth, probably glad they weren’t picking on her. Rodriguez didn’t see Pedro, the youngest; he was probably taking a nap.

 
  “Hola,”
 Rodriguez said to Magdalena, who sat patting tortillas into shape. His mouth watered again. As far as he was concerned, she made the best tortillas in the whole valley.

 
  “Hola,”
 she answered, cocking her head to one side to study him.
“Como estás?”
He recognized that gesture, and straightened up in indignation. “I’m not drunk,” he declared.

  Magdalena didn’t answer right away. After she’d finished studying him, though, she nodded. “No, you’re not,” she admitted. “Good. And what’s new in town?”

  “It’s still there,” he said, which, given the state of the silver mine, wasn’t altogether a joke. He added, “A wagon came into town from the mine while I was walking home.”