American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (25 page)

  “Yes, I saw it go by,” Magdalena said. “Who was at the cantina? What’s the gossip?”

  “I was mostly talking with Carlos,” he answered. “We were going on about how you hear more and more English these days.” He spoke in Spanish; Magdalena was far more comfortable in it than in the other language.

  She nodded even so. “The way the older children bring it back from school, I wonder if their children will know any Spanish at all.”

  “It’s good they go to school, in English or Spanish,” Rodriguez said. “Maybe then they won’t have to break their backs and break their hearts every day, the way a farmer does.” Magdalena raised an eyebrow. Rodriguez felt heat under his swarthy skin. He hadn’t broken his back today. He spread his hands, as if to say,
You want too much if you expect me to work hard
every
day
.

  His wife didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. The eyebrow had already done the job.

  Rodriguez said, “And we talked politics.”

  “Ah.” Magdalena perked up. “What will you do?” Here in Sonora, women’s suffrage was a distant glow on the horizon, if that. She couldn’t vote herself. But that didn’t keep her from being interested.

  “I don’t know yet,” Rodriguez answered. “I don’t know, but I think I may just vote for the Freedom Party.”

 
B
rakes squeaking a little, the Birmingham pulled up in front of the Freedom Party offices in Richmond.

  Jake Featherston’s guards fanned out and formed a perimeter on the sidewalk. They were well armed and alert; they might have been about to clear the damnyankees out of a stretch of trench. Featherston’s enemies inside the CSA weren’t so obvious as U.S. soldiers in green-gray, but they probably hated him even more than the Yankees had hated their Confederate foes. Soldiering, sometimes, was just a job.

  Jake had also discovered politics was a serious business.

  One of the guards nodded and gestured. As Jake came forward from the building, another guard opened the curbside door for him. “Freedom!” the man said as he got into the motorcar.

  “Freedom, Henry,” Featherston echoed. He settled himself on the padded seat. This beat the hell out of life as an artillery sergeant, any way you looked at it.

  “Freedom!” the driver said, putting the Birmingham in gear.

  “Freedom, Virgil,” Featherston answered. “Everything ready at the other end?”

  “Far as I know, Sarge.” Virgil Joyner made that sound as if he were addressing a general, not a noncom.

  Yes, this was a pretty good life, all right.

  They went only a few blocks. When the driver pulled to a stop, Featherston scowled. “What the hell?” he said angrily. A squad of Freedom Party guards were arguing with some Richmond policemen in old-fashioned gray uniforms. Several reporters scribbled in notebooks. A photographer’s flash immortalized the moment. Featherston got out of the motorcar in a hurry. “What’s going on here?” he demanded.

  “This is a polling place,” one of the cops said. “No electioneering allowed within a hundred feet. Far as I’m concerned, they sure as hell count as electioneering.” He pointed to the armed guards.

  “We’re just here to protect Mr. Featherston,” one of the men in not-quite-Confederate uniform insisted.

  He sounded ready for business. The policemen looked nervous. Well they might—the Freedom Party guards outgunned them, and had proved to the CSA they weren’t shy about mixing it up with the police, or with anyone else they didn’t like.

  Here, though, Jake judged it a good time to walk soft. “It’s all right, boys,” he said, as genially as he could. “Don’t reckon anybody’ll take a shot at me while I go and vote.” He walked past the policemen and toward the doorway above which the Stars and Bars fluttered.

  The guards didn’t look happy. Like watchdogs, they wanted to stay with their master all the time. But, once he’d decided, they didn’t argue. The cops didn’t bother hiding their relief.

  “Who you gonna vote for, Mr. Featherston?” a reporter shouted.

  “Freedom—the straight ticket,” Jake answered with a wave and a grin.

  Despite that cocky grin, he remained alert as he went to the polling place. If anybody wanted to take a shot at him, this was a hell of a good place to do it. If a rifle muzzle came out of that building, where would he jump? Or from that one? Or that one? He hadn’t fought in the trenches—the First Richmond Howitzers had been in back of them—but he’d had plenty of bullets whip past his head. He knew everything that needed knowing about diving for cover.

  No shots rang out. He strode into the polling place with grin intact. A man coming out of a curtained booth recognized him, did a double take, and grinned a grin of his own, a big, delighted one. “Freedom!” the fellow blurted.

  “Freedom,” Featherston said.

  Somber, disapproving coughs from the officials at the polling place, four or five graybeards who might have fought in the Second Mexican War or maybe even the War of Secession, but surely not in the Great War. One of them said, “No electioneering, gentlemen, if you please.”

  “Right,” Jake said; he was doing this by the rules. He scrawled his name and address in their registry book, and went into the booth the fellow who’d recognized him had vacated. As he’d told the reporter he would, he put an X by the name of the Freedom candidates for Congress, for the Virginia Assembly and State Senate, and for the Richmond City Council. The last race was nominally nonpartisan, but everybody knew better. With the Whigs and Radical Liberals pretty evenly split in the district, he thought the Freedom Party man had a decent chance of sneaking home a winner, too.

  After finishing the ballot, he went out and presented it to the election officials. One of them folded it and put it into the ballot box. “Jacob Featherston has voted,” he intoned solemnly.

  “Jacob Featherston is a murdering son of a bitch,” said a man who’d come out of his voting booth a moment after Jake emerged from his.

  More coughs from the old men. “None of that here,” one of them said. Another took the ballot. “Oscar Herbert has voted,” he declared.

  A few years earlier, when the Freedom Party was just getting off the ground, Jake Featherston would have mixed it up with Herbert right outside the polling place, or maybe here inside it. He was no less angry now, but he was shrewder than he had been.
Some day soon, pal, somebody’s gonna pay you a
little visit,
 he thought.
Your
name’s Oscar Herbert and you live in this precinct. We’ll find you. You
bet we will.

  Herbert went one way, Featherston the other. He walked through the cops and out to his guards. With audible sighs of relief, they closed in around him. Photographers took more flash pictures. He waved to them.

  “How many seats do you expect to lose this time?” a reporter called.

  “What’s that?” Jake cupped a hand behind his ear as he got into the Birmingham. “Spent too long in the artillery, and my ears aren’t what they ought to be.” He slammed the car door before the reporter could finish the question again. He
had
lost some hearing during the war, but not so much as that. Still, artilleryman’s ear came in handy for avoiding questions he didn’t want to answer.

  “Back to headquarters, Sarge?” the driver asked.

  “You bet,” Featherston answered. The car pulled away from the curb.

  On the short ride over to Party headquarters, Jake contemplated the question he’d pretended not to hear. He liked none of the answers he came up with. His best guess was that Freedom
would
lose seats in the House of Representatives. He hoped the Party would hold its own, but he didn’t believe it. And if he lost seats—he took everything personally, as he always had—how long would people keep finding him a force to be reckoned with?

  “We were so close,” he muttered. “So goddamn close.”

  “What’s that?” Virgil Joyner said.

  “Nothin’. Not a thing.” Jake lied without hesitation.

  When he got back to Freedom Party headquarters, he wished he hadn’t gone and voted so soon. He had nothing to do but sit around and wait and stare at the banks of telegraph clickers and phones and wireless sets that would bring in the election results when there were election results to bring in. That wouldn’t be for a while yet. Polls in Virginia didn’t close till seven P.M., and those farther west would stay open a couple of hours longer than that. Meanwhile . . .

  Meanwhile, he did some more scribbling in
Over Open Sights
. He’d fiddled with the—maybe journal was the right name for it—now and again in the days since the Great War, but he’d never quite managed to recapture the heat he’d known while writing it in the odd moments when he wasn’t throwing three-inch shells at the damnyankees.

 
  One of these days,
 he told himself.
One of these days, I’ll be ready to put it out, and people will be
ready to read it. I’ll know when. I’m sure I’ll know when. But the time isn’t ripe yet.
 He fiddled with the pile of Gray Eagle scratchpads in lieu of twiddling his thumbs, and accomplished about as much as he would have twiddling them. He changed a word here, took out a couple of words there, added a phrase somewhere else. It all added up to nothing, and he knew that, too.

  His secretary stuck her head into the office. “Can I get you something to eat, Mr. Featherston?” she asked, as if she were his mother.

  He wouldn’t have taken that from anyone else—certainly not from his real mother, were she still alive.

  But he nodded now. “Thank you kindly, Lulu,” he said. “Some fried chicken’d go down mighty nice about now.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” she promised, and hurried away. Take care of it she did, as she always did. Jake ate like a wolf. No matter how much he ate, his gaunt form never added an ounce. He ate as much from duty as from hunger. His stomach would pain him no matter what when he watched the returns coming in, but it would pain him less with food in there.

  A little before seven, Freedom Party leaders and telegraph operators gathered at the headquarters.

  Featherston made himself greet them, made himself shake hands and smile and slap backs, the way he’d made himself eat. It needed doing, so he did it. But it was a distraction he could have done without.

  “Polls are closing,” said somebody—somebody with a gift for the obvious—as church bells all through Richmond chimed seven times. A minute or so later, the very first returns began coming over the wire.

  They meant as little as the changes Jake had made in
Over Open Sights
earlier in the day, but everybody exclaimed over them even so. Featherston did a little exclaiming himself when a Freedom Party candidate jumped into an early lead in a Virginia district he’d been sure was safely Whig.

  “Maybe the people are wising up,” he said. “I hope they are, God damn it.” In the first days of the Great War, he’d thought the Confederate Army would drive everything before it, too. He’d taken unholy glee in shelling Washington, and he’d delighted in swarming up into Pennsylvania and toward Philadelphia. If the
de facto
capital of the USA had fallen along with the
de jure
one . . . But Philadelphia had held, and, inch by painful inch, the C.S. Army had been driven back through Pennsylvania and Maryland and into Virginia itself.

 
  If the niggers hadn’t risen up and stabbed us in the back . . .
 But he knew they had, however much white men nowadays tried to pretend otherwise.

  On one of the competing wireless sets, an announcer said, “If this trend holds up, it looks like the third district in South Carolina will be coming back to the Whigs in the next Congress after staying in Freedom Party hands these past two terms.”

  Curses ran through the headquarters, Featherston’s loud among them. The Party had held that seat in the debacle of 1923; he’d counted on holding it again. Maybe the people weren’t wising up after all. Maybe they were an even bigger pack of damned idiots than he’d thought.

  A colored waiter, hired for the occasion, brought around a tray of drinks. Featherston took a whiskey.

  The Negro nodded respectfully as he did. Jake tossed back the drink. His mouth tightened.
Where were
you in the uprising, you sorry black son of a bitch? You didn’t have a penguin suit on then, I bet.

 
Probably just another goddamn Red. If we’d shot a few thousand bastards like you before you got
out of line, we wouldn’t have had any trouble like we did.
 He had some sharp things to say about that in
Over Open Sights
.

  Another Freedom Party seat, this one from Arkansas, went down the drain. Amid more curses, somebody said, “Well, we didn’t elect any Senators till 1921, so we don’t have to worry about them for another couple o’ years.”

  That was exactly the wrong attitude to take, as far as Jake was concerned. “We’re playing this game to win, dammit,” he snarled. “We don’t play not to lose. We don’t play safe. We’re playing to win, and we’re gonna win. Remember it, damn you all!”

  Nobody argued with him, not out loud. But nobody seemed anything close to convinced, either. That meant he got to crow extra loud when, out of a clear blue sky, the Freedom candidate won a tight three-way race for governor of Texas, and then, in the wee small hours of the morning, when a new Freedom Congressman came in from, of all places, southern Sonora.

  “See, boys?” Featherston said around a yawn. “We ain’t dead yet. Not even close.”
I hope not even
close,
anyhow.

 
D
uring the Great War, Nellie Jacobs had heard more aeroplane motors above Washington, D.C., than she’d ever wanted to. Aeroplane motors, back in those days, had always meant trouble. Either observers were over the city taking photographs to guide bombers and artillery, or else the bombers themselves paid calls, raining destruction and death down on the Confederate occupiers. Later, Confederate bombers had tried to slaughter U.S. soldiers in Washington. Neither side cared much about civilians.