American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (29 page)

  George, Jr., started for the door. “I’d better go find Mr. Butcher and tell him. I don’t know how long he’ll hold the job for me.”

  “Go on, then, dear,” Sylvia said, half of her hoping Fred Butcher
wouldn’t
hold the job. The door opened. It closed. Her son’s footsteps receded in the hallway. Then they were gone.

  Sylvia sighed. She muttered something she never would have let anyone else hear. That helped, but not enough. She pulled a whiskey bottle out of a kitchen cabinet. A fair number of states had made alcohol illegal, but Massachusetts wasn’t one of them. She poured some whiskey into a glass, then added water and took a drink. Whiskey had always tasted like medicine to her. She didn’t care, not now. She was using it for medicine.

  She’d medicated herself quite thoroughly when the front door to the flat opened. She hoped it would be George, Jr., coming back all crestfallen to tell her Fred Butcher had given someone else the berth. But it wasn’t her son; it was Mary Jane, back from helping her teacher grade younger students’ papers.

  Sylvia’s daughter even got paid a little for doing it. She made a better scholar than her brother. That would have been funny if it hadn’t been sad. A boy could do so many more things with an education than a girl could, but Mary Jane seemed to want to learn, while George, Jr., couldn’t have cared less.

  “Hello, Ma,” Mary Jane said now, and then, as she got a better look at Sylvia’s face, “Ma, what’s wrong?”

  “Your brother’s going to sea, that’s what.” Without the whiskey in her, Sylvia might not have been so blunt, but that was the long and short of it.

  Mary Jane’s eyes got wide. “But that’s good news, not bad. It’s what he’s always wanted to do.”

  “If he’d always wanted to jump off a cliff, would it be good news that he’d finally gone and done it?” Sylvia asked.

  “But it’s not like that, Ma,” Mary Jane protested. She didn’t understand, any more than George, Jr., did.

  “He needs a job, and that’s a good one.”

  “A good job is a shore job, a job where you don’t have to worry about getting drowned,” Sylvia said.

  “If he’d gotten one of those, I’d stand up and cheer. This—” She shook her head. The kitchen spun slightly when she did. Yes, she was medicated, all right.

  “He’ll be fine.” Mary Jane was fourteen. She also thought she was immortal, and everybody else, too.

  She hardly remembered her own father, and certainly didn’t care to remember he’d died at sea. She went on, “Things are a lot safer than they used to be. The boats are better, the engines are better, and they just about all have wireless nowadays in case they run into trouble.” Every word of that was true. None of it did anything to reassure Sylvia, who’d seen too many misfortunes down by T Wharf. She said, “I want him to have a job where he doesn’t need to worry about running into trouble.”

  “Where’s he going to find one?” Mary Jane asked. “If he goes into building, somebody could drop a brick on his head. If he drives a truck, somebody could run into him. You want him to be a clerk in an insurance office, or something like that. But he’d be lousy at clerking, and he’d hate it, too.” Every word of
that
was true, too. Sylvia wished it weren’t. Mary Jane was right. She did want George, Jr., in a white-collar job. But Mary Jane was also right that he wouldn’t be good at one, and wouldn’t like it. That didn’t stop Sylvia from wishing he had one. She knew the sea too well ever to trust it.

 
W
hen Jefferson Pinkard went down to the Empire of Mexico, he never dreamt he’d stay so long. He never dreamt the civil war would drag on so long. That, he realized now that he understood things here a little better, had been naive on his part. The Mexican civil war had started up not long after the Great War ended. The USA fed the rebels money and guns. The CSA sent money and guns and—unofficially, of course—combat veterans to prop up the imperialists.

  Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. Jeff took a sip of strong, black coffee. The coffee had been improved—
corrected
, they said hereabouts—with a shot of strong rum. Alabama was officially dry. The Mexicans laughed at the very idea of prohibition. Some ways, they were pretty damn smart.

  He finished the coffee as the artillery barrage went on. The front line ran quite a ways west of San Luis Potosí these days. Mexican-built barrels had driven back the rebels, and the damnyankees didn’t seem to be helping
their
pet Mexicans build armored vehicles. Maybe they would one of these days, or maybe they’d just import some from the USA. If they did, a lot more greasers would end up dead, the front line would stabilize or start going back, and the civil war might last forever.

  A Mexican soldier in the yellowish shade of butternut they wore down here politely knocked on Pinkard’s open door. “Yeah?” Pinkard said, and then, “
Sí
, Mateo?”

 
  “Todo está listo,”
 Mateo said, and then, in English as rudimentary as Pinkard’s Spanish, “Everyt’ing ready, Sergeant Jeff.”

  “All right, then.” Pinkard heaved himself to his feet. He towered over Mateo, as he towered over almost everybody down here. Lieutenant Guitierrez—no, he was Captain Guitierrez these days—was an exception, but Jeff could have broken him over his knee like a stick.

  He left the little wooden shack that served him as an office and strode out into sunlight bright and fierce enough to make what he’d got in Birmingham seem as nothing by comparison. Summer down here was really a son of a bitch. It was bad enough to make him understand just how the spirit of
mañana
had been born.

  Standing out there in the broiling sun were several hundred rebel prisoners, drawn up in neat rows and columns. They all stiffened to attention when Pinkard came into sight. He nodded, and they relaxed—a little. Some of them wore uniforms of a darker shade than those of Maximilian III’s soldiers. More, though, looked like peasants who’d chanced to end up in a place where they didn’t want to be—which was exactly what they were.

  Pinkard inspected them as if they were men he would have to send into battle, not enemies of whom he was in charge. While they stood out in the open, he strode through their barracks, making sure everything was shipshape and nobody was trying to tunnel out of the camp.

  He wished he had a proper fence, not just barbed wire strung on poles, but he made the best of what there was. Guards on rickety towers at each corner of the square manned machine guns. Jeff waved to each of them in turn. “Everything good?” he asked, and then, in what passed for Spanish,
“Todo
bueno?”

  He got answering grins and waves and nods. As far as the guards were concerned, everything was fine.

  They had easy duty, duty unlikely to get them shot, and they got paid for it—as often as anybody except Confederate mercenaries got paid. The Mexicans didn’t stiff the men from the CSA the way they did their own people.

  For a while, Jeff had wondered why the devil any Mexican would fight for Maximilian III. Then, from interrogating prisoners, he’d found out the rebels cheated their soldiers every bit as badly as the imperialists cheated theirs. Nobody down here had clean hands. Nobody even came close.

  He went back up in front of the prisoners. “Dismissed!” he shouted. Mateo told them the same thing in Spanish. They all saluted. He thought they meant it, too. As long as they did what he told them to, he treated them fairly. Nobody’d ever treated a lot of them fairly before, and they responded to it even from the fellow in charge of a prison camp. If they got out of line, they were liable to earn a kick in the nuts. As far as Pinkard was concerned, that was fair, too.

  As the prisoners went back to the barracks to get out of the ferocious sun, Mateo asked, “Sergeant Jeff, how you know so much about—this?” His—orderly, Pinkard supposed the word was—waved around at the camp. “In Confederate States, you
policía
—policeman?” Jeff laughed like hell. “Me? A cop? Jesus God, no. I was a steelworker, a damn good steelworker, before I came down here.”

  Getting across what a steelworker was took a little while. When Mateo finally did figure it out, he gave Pinkard a peculiar look. “You do work like that,
mucho dinero,
 eh? Why you leave?”

  “On account of I couldn’t stand it any more,” Jeff answered. That plainly made no sense to the Mexican.

  Pinkard tried again: “On account of woman troubles.” That wasn’t the whole story, but it sure was a big part. If Emily hadn’t decided she wasn’t going to wait for him to come back from the war . . . Well, he didn’t know how things would have been, but he sure knew they would have been different.

  “Ah.” Mateo got that one right away. What man wouldn’t have?
“Sí. Mujeres.”
 He rattled off something in Spanish, then made a stab at translating it: “No can live with, no can live without, neither.”

  “By God, buddy, you got that one right!” Pinkard burst out. Even now, when he thought about Emily . . .

  He did his best
not
to think about Emily, but sometimes his best wasn’t good enough.

  “You no
policía
, how you know what to do with—?” Mateo waved again as he came back to what he really wanted to know.

  Pinkard answered him with a shrug. “Just another job, God damn it. Somebody had to do it. Remember when we took all those prisoners after the barrels came up from Tampico?” He’d lost his orderly, and backtracked in clumsy, halting Spanish to let the other man catch up. When Mateo nodded, Jeff went on,

  “Like I say, somebody had to do it. Otherwise they probably all would’ve died. So I took charge of the poor sorry bastards—and I’ve been in charge of prisoners ever since.” He wasn’t altogether sorry—far from it. The distant mutter of artillery reminded him why he wasn’t sorry. If he weren’t doing this, he’d have been up there at the front, and then some of those shells might have landed on him. He’d seen enough combat in the Great War to be glad he was part of an army, but not part in any immediate danger.

  Mateo said, “You do good. Nobody never hear of nothing like how you do with prisoners. Everybody now try do like you. Even rebels now, they try do like you.”
 There
was praise, if you liked. When the enemy imitated you, you had to be doing something right.

  A couple of days later, Pinkard decided to do something right for himself. He grabbed a ride on a supply truck and went north to the village of Ahualulco, where Maximilian III’s army had a supply dump that kept the prisoners eating. Ahualulco wasn’t anything much. It wouldn’t have been anything at all if two roads—well, two dirt tracks—hadn’t crossed there.

  Red-white-and-green flags fluttered everywhere. Both sides in the civil war flew those colors, which got as confusing as the Stars and Bars and the Stars and Stripes had during the Great War. For Maximilian’s side, they were also the colors of Austria-Hungary, from which his ancestors had come. Pinkard was damned if he knew why the rebels also flew those colors, but he’d never been curious enough to find out.

  The fighting was the biggest thing that had happened to Ahualulco since . . . maybe since forever. A couple of new cantinas had opened, and a whorehouse, and a field hospital. Jeff went into one of the cantinas—which had a picture of the Mexican emperor, cut from some magazine, tacked to the front door—and ordered a beer. Mexican beer was surprisingly good, even if they didn’t believe in keeping it cold. He lit a cigarette, found a table, and settled down to enjoy himself.

  He’d just started his second beer when the door flew open. In came a couple of big men talking English.

  One of them looked his way, waved, and called, “Freedom!”

  “Freedom!” Jeff echoed. “Who the hell are you boys? Where y’all from?” One of them, a blond, was named Pete Frazee. The other, who sported a fiery red mustache, called himself Charlie MacCaffrey. They sat down by him. Frazee got a beer. MacCaffrey ordered tequila.

  “How do you drink that stuff?” Pinkard asked him. “Tastes like cigar butts, you ask me.”

  “Yeah, but it’ll get me drunk faster’n that horse piss you and Pete got,” MacCaffrey answered. He knocked it back and waved for more.

  He was from Jackson, Mississippi; Frazee from the country not far outside of Louisville. The Kentuckian said, “They told me I could’ve gone back after the war, but I was damned if I wanted to live in the United States. I spent three years tryin’ to kill those damnyankees. Screw me if I wanted to be one myself.”

  “Oh, hell, yes,” Pinkard said. “How’d you find out about the Party?”

  “Heard one of their people talkin’ on a street corner in Chattanooga, where I was at,” Frazee answered with a reminiscent smile. “Soon as I did, I decided that was for me. Haven’t looked back since.” He nudged the fellow who’d come in with him. “How about you, Charlie?”

  “I like bustin’ heads,” MacCaffrey said frankly. “Plenty of heads need bustin’ in Mississippi, too. We got as many niggers as white folks, and some o’ them bastards even got the vote after they went into the Army. I don’t cotton to that—no way, nohow. Whigs and Rad Libs let ’em do it. Soon as I found me a party that didn’t like it, I reckoned that was for me.”

  “How’d you come down here?” Jeff asked.

  MacCaffrey made a face. “Ever since that stupid bastard plugged Wade Hampton V, we pulled in our horns like a goddamn snail. Wasn’t hardly any fun any more. I still got more ass-kickin’ in me than that.

  How about you?”

  Jeff shrugged. “Didn’t like what I was doin’. Didn’t have nothin’ holdin’ me in Birmingham. I thought,
Why the hell not?
 —and here I am.”

  “You’re the fellow with the prisoners of war, ain’t you?” Pete Frazee said suddenly. Pinkard nodded.

  So did Frazee, in a thoughtful way. He went on, “Heard about you. From what everybody says, you’re doing a hell of a job.”

  “Thank you. Thank you kindly,” Pinkard answered. He paused till the barmaid got him another beer, then chuckled and said, “Wasn’t what I came down here to do, but it hasn’t worked out too bad.” He spent most of the afternoon drinking with the other Party men and enjoying the chance to speak his own language. Then, despite a certain stagger, he made his way to the brothel and laid down enough silver for a quiet room and the company of a girl named Maria (not that half the women down here weren’t named Maria), far and away the prettiest one in the place.