American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (48 page)

  Scipio nodded.
I can blame them,
 he thought, hearing inside himself the precise English he no longer dared speak loud.
I can blame them, for the Freedom Party will not make their troubles disappear,
even if they think it will. And what the Freedom Party will do to me and mine if ever it should
come to power . . .

  That fear had spread all through the colored communities of the CSA in the early 1920s, and then receded as the Party’s fortunes ebbed. Now white men were seeing the Confederate States could still know hard times. What would that discovery, that rediscovery, mean for Negroes here? Scipio didn’t know. He feared finding out. Try as he would, though, he saw no escape.

  “What kin we do?” he said aloud, hoping one of the other men in the place would have a better idea than he did. “Can’t go nowheres.”

  “Ain’t noplace else wants us,” Erasmus said. “Not the USA.”

  “That’s for sure,” Athenaeus agreed. “They don’t like the niggers they got. Ain’t got very many, an’ sure don’t want no more.”

  “Stock market in de USA down de sewer, too,” Scipio said. “They ain’t got no money, no spirit, to help nobody else, not when they got trouble helpin’ they ownselves.”

  “Good things they’s down, too, you wants to know what I thinks,” Athenaeus said. “If they was up, they be lordin’ it over us. They do that, jus’ git more buckra listenin’ to Jake Featherston on the wireless and gittin’ all hot and bothered afterwards.”

  For a long time before the world finally went mad in 1914, respect for each other’s strength had kept the United States and Confederate States from going to war. Scipio had never imagined mutual weakness could do the same, but he couldn’t deny Athenaeus had a point. It wasn’t one he’d thought of, either.

  “Empire of Mexico, mebbe,” he said. But neither Erasmus nor Athenaeus paid much attention to that.

  Scipio couldn’t take it seriously himself. To a Negro in eastern Georgia, the Empire of Mexico might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. Besides, what were the odds that Mexicans had any more use for Negroes than white men did?

  Erasmus asked a more immediately relevant question: “‘Fore long, some black folks gwine start runnin’ out o’ money. What happen to ’em?”

  “They git hungry,” Athenaeus said.

  “Church help some,” Scipio said.

  “Church be swamped,” Erasmus said. Scipio nodded. By all the signs, that would come true, and soon.

  His boss went on, “Ain’t no use waitin’ fo’ the gummint to do somethin’. Wait till Judgment Day, gummint won’t do nothin’ fo’ no niggers.”

  “ ‘Fore long, some white folks starts runnin’ out o’ money and gettin’ hungry, too,” Athenaeus said.

  “Plenty po’ buckra, they ain’t hardly better off’n niggers. Gummint worry ‘bout the buckra first, you wait an’ see.”

  “What’s a po’ nigger gwine do?” Erasmus asked. “Starve?” The word hung in the air. Scipio had known a lot of hungry people; during the war, he’d been hungry himself after the Confederates destroyed the Congaree Socialist Republic. But there was a difference between being hungry and starving. He tried to imagine thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of Negroes (and whites, too) going without because they had no money with which to buy food.

  Outside, the sun shone brightly. The day was hot and muggy. It would stay hot and muggy from now all the way till fall. Even so, Scipio felt a chill. This was liable to be a disaster of Biblical proportions.

  “What kin we do?” Athenaeus asked mournfully. “What kin anybody do?”

  “Pray,” Erasmus answered. “God done made this happen. He kin make us come through it, too, so long as He take it in His mind He want to do dat.”

  “Amen,” Athenaeus said. Scipio made himself nod. He didn’t want to seem out of place—seeming out of place was one of his greatest fears, because it was deadly dangerous. But if God had really wanted to do something about this disaster, couldn’t He have stopped it in the first place?

  “More we pray, more He gonna know how much we loves Him,” Erasmus said. Along with being a believer, though, he was a relentlessly practical man. He went on, “ ‘Course, we gots to work hard, too.

  God ain’t never gonna pay no heed to nobody who don’t work hard.” Scipio would have bet he’d say that. Erasmus not only believed in the virtues of hard work, he practiced what he preached. Scipio himself was sure it couldn’t hurt. What he wasn’t sure of was how much it could help.

 
S
omething was wrong in Salt Lake City. Colonel Abner Dowling shook his head. Something was always wrong in Salt Lake City. It wouldn’t have been the place, or the sort of place, it was if something hadn’t been wrong all the time. But something now was different. Anything different in Salt Lake City automatically roused Dowling’s suspicions. As far as he could tell,
different
and
dangerous
were two sides of the same coin.

  “I’ll tell you what it is, sir,” Captain Angelo Toricelli said.

  “Go ahead, Angelo,” Dowling urged. “Tell.”

  “Nobody’s building anything, that’s what,” his adjutant said. “It’s quieter than it ought to be.” Slowly, Dowling nodded. “You’re right. I’ll be damned if you’re not right. It isn’t on account of they’ve got everything rebuilt, either. Still plenty of wreckage lying around.”

  “Yes, sir,” Captain Toricelli agreed. “But an awful lot of money that would have paid for more construction all of a sudden isn’t there—it’s gone.”

  Dowling nodded again. He gave Toricelli a sidelong glance. Fortunately, his adjutant didn’t notice. The way the younger man watched every penny, he might have been a Jew, not an Italian. Dowling didn’t want Toricelli to know he was thinking that. He didn’t want to insult his adjutant. And everybody had to pay special attention to money these days, because it was so very thin on the ground.

  With a sigh, Dowling said, “Not much we can do about it. At least we’ve got the Army paying our salaries.”

  “Yes, sir, and I’m damn glad of it, too,” Toricelli answered. “I just got a letter from New York, from home. My brother-in-law’s out of a job.”

  “What’s he do?” Dowling asked.

  “He reads X rays, sir—went to night school to learn the trade,” Toricelli said, not without pride. “My sister and he’ve got five children, and another one on the way. I don’t know what they’ll do if he doesn’t find something quick.”

  “I hope he does,” Dowling said, on the whole sincerely. “Who would have thought the bottom could drop out of things so fast?”

  “Nobody,” Captain Toricelli answered. “But it has.”

  He was right about that, too. The Army censored Salt Lake City papers pretty hard. Pain came through their pages even so. Stories of half-done buildings abandoned, of banks going under, of people losing jobs, couldn’t very well be prettied up. And the only way to leave those stories out of the newspapers would have been to have no papers at all.

  Captain Toricelli touched a fat document on his desk. “Don’t tell me what that is,” Dowling said. “Let me guess: another normalization petition.”

  “Right the first time,” his adjutant said.

  “It’s not as though I haven’t seen enough of them,” Dowling said. Every few months, the Mormons of Salt Lake City—and the occasional gentile, too—would circulate petitions asking that Utah finally be treated like any other state in the USA. Dowling had got a couple of dozen since coming to the state capital. With a sigh, he went on, “They still haven’t figured out I’m not the one they ought to send these to, because I have no authority to grant them. They should go to General Pershing—he’s supreme commander of the military district.”

  A thoroughly precise man, Toricelli said, “He hasn’t got authority to grant them, either. Only the president and Congress can do that.”

  “What do you think the chances are?” Dowling asked.

  “Better than decent, if the Mormons can keep their noses clean,” Captain Toricelli answered. “The Socialists seem to want to do it.”

  “I know.” Dowling packed a world of meaning into two words. “They think a zebra can change its stripes, the way the one in that Englishman’s fable did. I think . . .” He shook his head. “What I think doesn’t matter. I don’t make policy. I just get stuck with carrying it out.” He picked up the petition. It was a hefty one; it had to weigh a couple of pounds. “I’ll take this to General Pershing’s office, if you like.”

  “Oh, you don’t need to do that, sir,” Toricelli said. “It’s not important. I can fetch it next time I go over there.”

  “I’m on my way,” Dowling said. “Better Pershing’s adjutant should have it on his desk than you on yours.”

  He caught Toricelli’s eye. They shared a slightly conspiratorial chuckle. “Thank you very much, sir,” the young captain said.

  “You’re welcome,” Abner Dowling answered. “I’ve got to go over there and talk with the general about his scheme for mounting better guard on Temple Square. We need to do it; every broken rock from the Temple and the Tabernacle counts for a sacred relic with the more radical Mormons these days.”

  “Yes, sir,” Toricelli said. “But there’s a certain problem in shooting anybody who bends to pick up a pebble in the square, too.”

  “A certain problem, yes,” Dowling agreed. “And that’s what I’ve got to talk to General Pershing about. How do we keep the Mormons from getting symbols of revolt without provoking them and ruining whatever bits of goodwill we’ve managed to build up since the war ended?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know, sir,” his adjutant replied. “I hope you and the commanding general can find a way.”

  “So do I. Can’t hope for much in the way of normalization if they’re still picking up broken rocks and dreaming of treason.” Dowling tucked the petition under his arm and strode down the hall to his superior’s office. He took no small pleasure in dropping the document on Pershing’s adjutant’s desk, and in watching the papers already there jump as it thudded home.

  “Thank you so much, sir,” Pershing’s adjutant, a major named Fred Corson, said with a sickly smile.

  “The general is waiting for you.” He sounded reluctant to admit even that much to Dowling.

  “Hello, Colonel,” General Pershing said when Dowling walked in. A grin spread across his bulldog features. “Was that the thump of a normalization petition I heard just then?”

  “It certainly was, sir,” Dowling answered.

  “Well, I’ll forward it to Philadelphia,” the commandant said. “That’s my duty. And there that petition will sit till the end of time, along with all the others.”

  “Unless the Socialists decide to grant them all, that is,” Dowling said.

  “Yes. Unless. In that case, Colonel, you and I will both need new assignments, because normal states don’t have soldiers occupying them. Part of me won’t be sorry to get away.” Pershing rose from behind his desk and went over to the window not far away. He looked at his fortified headquarters, and at Salt Lake City beyond. “Part of me, though, will regret leaving this state, because I’m convinced that, no matter what this administration may believe, Utah isn’t ready for normalization. As a matter of fact, here we—”

  Abner Dowling heard a distant
pop!
 It might have been a motorcar backfiring, or a firecracker going off.

  It might have been, but it wasn’t. At the same instant as he heard it, or perhaps even a split second before, the window in front of which General Pershing was standing shattered. Pershing made a surprised noise. That was the best way Dowling could have described it. It didn’t hold much pain. Before Dowling fully realized what had happened, the military commandant of the state of Utah crumpled to the carpet in front of him.

  “General Pershing?” Dowling whispered. He hurried over to the fallen man. He needed a moment to add two and two together. Only when he saw the neat hole and the spreading bloodstain in the middle of Pershing’s chest did he fully understand what he was seeing. “General Pershing!” he said, sharply this time.

  He grabbed for Pershing’s wrist and felt for a pulse. He found none. Aside from that, the sudden sharp stink in the room told him what he needed to know. Pershing had fouled himself when the bullet struck home.

  Thinking of a bullet made Dowling think of the man who’d fired it. He peered out through the shattered window. The U.S. perimeter around the headquarters ran out for several hundred yards. The gunman must have shot from well beyond it, which meant he had to be a brilliant sniper. In war-ravaged Utah, that was anything but impossible, as Colonel Dowling knew all too well.

  Only while Dowling was shouting for Pershing’s adjutant did he pause to wonder whether the sniper was still out there, peering through a telescope on his Springfield and waiting for another shot. He was, at the moment, too shocked, too stunned, to worry about it.

  Major Corson hurried in. In his outer office, he hadn’t even heard the gunshot. Dowling’s shouts were what drew him. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” he said, which summed it up as well as anything. “Is he—?” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word.

  Dowling did: “He’s dead, all right. He dropped down like somebody let all the air out of him. He was dead before he hit the rug—never knew what hit him.”

  Out on the perimeter, soldiers had started shouting and pointing. A couple of them started running.

  Dowling noted all that as if from a very great distance. In one sense, whether they caught the sniper mattered a great deal. In another sense, it hardly mattered at all. The damage was done, and more than done.

  Pershing’s adjutant saw the same thing. He got the truth into four words: “So much for normalization.”

  “Yeah,” Dowling said. “We just went back to square one.”

  “Sir, you’re senior officer in the state right now,” Corson said. Dowling nodded; the city commandants in both Provo and Ogden were lieutenant colonels. Pershing’s adjutant looked to him with desperate appeal in his eyes. “What are your orders?”