American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (49 page)

 
  You’re in charge of Utah. God help you, you poor, sorry bastard.
 Dowling tried to pull himself together. “Fetch a doctor. It won’t do any good, but fetch him. Send men after that sniper.” He feared that wouldn’t do any good, either, but he had to try. “Call the president and the War Department, in that order. Let them know what’s happened. After that, we close Salt Lake City down. We take hostages.

  We do whatever we have to do to let the Mormons know that if they want to play rough, we’re going to play ten times rougher. Have you got that?”

  “Yes, sir,” Major Corson answered. He saluted and hurried away, leaving Dowling alone with General Pershing’s body.

 
  If the Mormons want to play rough, we’ll play ten times rougher?
 Dear God in heaven, had he really said that? He nodded. He had. And, in saying it, he’d sounded a great deal like General George Armstrong Custer. He hadn’t wanted to. He hadn’t intended to. But he had, all the same. Custer had rubbed off on him after all. And if that wasn’t a chilling thought . . .

  If that wasn’t a chilling thought, maybe it was a reminder that Custer, for all his enormous flaws—and nobody knew them better than Dowling; a general had no more secrets from his adjutant than a man from his valet—had ended up the most successful soldier in the history of the United States.

 
  I won’t keep this command long,
 Dowling thought.
They’ll bring in someone with stars on his
shoulder straps as fast as they can.
 Meanwhile, though, it was his. He had to do the best job he could while it remained his.

  A doctor dashed into Pershing’s office, little black bag in hand. “What do you need, Colonel?” he asked.

  “Not me, Major,” Dowling answered. “It’s General Pershing who’s dead.”
Along with any hope for
peace in Utah for God only knows how long.

 
J
ake Featherston strode through the streets of Richmond, his bodyguards surrounding him front and back, left and right. He moved swiftly and confidently, and with such abrupt decision that his turns would sometimes take even the alert guards by surprise, so they’d have to scramble to stay with him.

  Richmond was not the city it had been before the war. By now, ten years after the Confederate States had yielded to the United States, almost all the damage from U.S. bombing aeroplanes had been repaired. Even so, something was missing from the city’s heart. Before the Great War, everybody in Richmond had known the CSA sat on top of the world.

  Nowadays . . . Nowadays, Richmond felt poor and shabby. Everything looked gray. It all needed cleaning up, hosing down, painting. Nobody bothered to give it any such thing. And the people seemed as gray and grimy and defeated as the town in which they lived. Jake had thought the same thing even before the stock market submerged, but it was much more noticeable now.

  He hurried past a man with shoulders slumped from lugging heavy sample cases to firms that weren’t buying, that wouldn’t have been buying if he’d been selling gold for the price of lead. That luckless drummer was a dead man walking—till he saw Jake. He straightened up. His eyes got back their spark.

  “Freedom, Mr. Featherston!” he called.

  “Freedom to you, pal,” Featherston answered. “Hang on. Just remember, we’ll lick those bastards yet.”

  “How?” the man asked. “What can we do?”

  “Same thing I’ve been saying all along,” Jake told him. “First thing is, we’ve got to get rid of the stupid bastards who landed us in this mess in the first place. They aren’t fit to carry guts to a bear, but they’ve been running this country—and running it straight into the ground—ever since the War of Secession. That means the politicians
and
the bonehead generals in the War Department.”

  “Sounds good to me. Sounds mighty damn good to me,” the salesman said. “What else?”

  “Got to pay back the niggers,” Featherston said. “Got to get strong again, so we can look the USA in the eye again. Got to get strong, so we can spit in the USA’s eye, too, if we ever have to. How do you like that?”

  “Me? I like it fine,” the man said. “You go on and give ’em hell.”

  “Just what I intend to give ’em. But I’ll need your help, buddy. Remember, vote Freedom come November. We’ve got to get this country on its feet again. I’ve been saying that for years. Now maybe people will start paying attention to me.” He walked on, leaving the drummer with a last, “Freedom!”

  “Freedom!” the fellow echoed.

  Back in the middle of the 1920s, that luckless drummer had probably been comfortable enough to vote Whig. Bad times made the Freedom Party grow. Featherston knew as much. He looked around. He’d seen plenty of bad times right after the war, when the money went down the toilet. This . . . This felt worse. This felt as if the Confederate States were closing down, one store, one factory, at a time, and might never open for business again.

  “Freedom!” somebody else called—a woman, her voice high and shrill with worry.

  “Freedom, dear,” Jake told her. “Everything’s going to be just fine.” He waved and kept going.

  During the war, he’d usually had a pretty good notion of whether the troops in front of him would succeed in an attack—or, later, if they would succeed in holding back the damnyankees when
they
attacked. Now, after years wandering in the wilderness, he felt things in his own country turning his way again.

 
  Shame it took a panic and a crash to do it,
 he thought.
But that’s the way it goes sometimes. If you
don’t grab with both hands when you get the chance, you deserve what ever happens to you.
 He intended to grab what ever the times gave him. He’d had one chance, and seen it go glimmering.
God
damn you to hell and gone,
Grady Calkins.
 That had been the first time. He’d wondered if he would ever see another. Now, here it was again, if he could make it so.

  He and his escorting guards rounded a corner. One of them pointed up Grace Street toward Capitol Square. “Look at that, boss,” he said. “Isn’t it a shame and a disgrace?”

  “It’s a judgment on the damn Whigs, that’s what it is,” Jake answered.

  Back just after the Great War ended, Capitol Square had been full of soldiers fresh out of the Army.

  They’d had nowhere to go and nothing to do, so they’d camped there, many of them still with their weapons—enough to make the police leery of trying to clear them out, anyhow, even though they’d rioted more than once.

  Now tents and shanties sprouted in the square once more. Jake didn’t know who all was in them. Some veterans, certainly. But some men who weren’t, and a lot of women and kids, too. People who’d lost jobs and lost their homes or couldn’t pay the rent on a flat any more . . . where else were they going to go?

  Again, the police were going easy on them. Clearing them from the shantytown by force would have made dreadful headlines. Another guard said, “Those people shouldn’t ought to be in a mess like that.

  Ain’t their fault, not most of the time. But that ain’t the only shantytown in the country, neither.”

  “Damn right it ain’t, Joe,” Featherston agreed. “There’s one outside of every town in the CSA. And you’re right—most of the people in ’em are decent, hardworking folks who’re just down on their luck.” He slapped Joe on the back, hard enough to stagger him. “And I’ll be go to hell if you didn’t just give me next week’s wireless talk on a silver platter.”

  By then, going into the studio was second nature for him. When the red light came on, he rasped out the greeting he’d been using for years: “This is Jake Featherston of the Freedom Party, and I’m here to tell you the truth.”

  Inside the glassed-in room next to the studio, the engineers nodded at him—everything was going the way it should. And his words were going out to far more people in the CSA than they had a few years before. A whole web of stations, a nationwide web, was getting this broadcast now. It went everywhere, from Richmond to Miami to deep in Sonora. And stations near the postwar, U.S.-imposed border beamed it up into Kentucky and Houston and Sequoyah.

  “Truth is,” Jake went on, “all across our country people are losing their jobs. Truth is, all across our country they’re losing their homes. Truth is, all across our country they’re trying to get by in shacks and tents a God-fearing
dog
wouldn’t want to live in. And the truth is, my friends,
the Whig Party doesn’t
care
.”

  He banged his fist down on the table, hard enough to make papers jump in front of him—but not hard enough to make them fall off or to tip over the microphone. He’d had practice with that thump. “So help me God, friends, that
is
the truth. I’m ashamed to say it about anybody in these Confederate States, but it is. What are the Whigs doing to help these folks get new jobs? Nothing! What are the Whigs doing to help ’em hang on to their houses? Nothing! What are the Whigs doing to keep ’em from starving?

  Nothing, one more time! ‘That’s not the government’s job,’ is what they say.

  “Well, friends, I’m going to tell you something. The Whigs proved how useless they were two years ago, when the big floods came. Did they do anything much for the poor, suffering people in Tennessee and Arkansas and Mississippi and Louisiana? Did they? In a pig’s ear they did. They patted ’em on the head and said, ‘Sure wish you good luck. Y’all’ll be just fine.’
Were
they just fine? You know better’n I do.

  “I’ll tell you something else, too. This here panic, this here crash, is dragging more people under than Mother Nature ever dreamt of doing. And that’s happening all over the Confederate States, not just in the Mississippi Valley. God help us all, there’s a shantytown in Capitol Square here in Richmond. The fat Whig Congressmen could look out their windows and see the poor hungry folks. They could, but they don’t.”

  On and on he went, finishing, “Two years ago, the Supreme Court—the bought and paid-for Supreme Court—said Burton Mitchel could run for president again. Well, he did, and he got himself elected again, too. And now we’re
all
paying for it.

  “So if you want things to work again, if you want us to be strong again, if you want to tie a can to the Whigs’ tail—and to the Supreme Court’s tail, too—if you don’t want to have to live in a shack like a nigger cotton-picker, vote Freedom in November. God bless you all, and thank you kindly!” The lead engineer drew a finger across his throat. The red light in the studio went out. Jake Featherston leaned back in his chair, then gathered up his papers and left the small, soundproofed room.

  Saul Goldman, the station managed, waited in the hallway. “That was a strong speech, Mr. Featherston, a very strong speech,” he said.

  “Let’s hope it does some good,” Jake answered.

  “I’ve heard a lot of your speeches the past few years, Mr. Featherston,” Goldman said. “I think this one will sway people, especially . . . with things the way they are.”

  “Yeah. Especially,” Featherston said. “I think this one’ll do some good, too. High time people got the wool pulled away from over their eyes. High time they see you don’t have to be a Whig to run the country. High time they see we’d be better off with people who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty, who aren’t afraid to pitch right in and do what needs doing. We’ve got to fix things. We can’t go on like this.”

  “No.” Goldman shook his head. “Times are very hard.” He risked a smile at Jake. “You should be glad you have a job.”

  “I am,” Jake said. “I’ve had a job ever since the war ended: to see the Confederate States back on top. It’s taken me a long time to start doing that job. But I think my hour’s coming round at last.”

  “I think you may be right,” the station manager agreed. “If not now, when will it come?”
 If not now, will it ever come?
 But Jake Featherston pushed that thought to the back of his mind, as he did whenever it cropped up. He couldn’t afford to doubt, and so he didn’t. “I’m going to tell you something, Mr. Goldman,” he said. “This here station and the web you’ve set up have done the Freedom Party a hell of a lot of good. We don’t forget our enemies. Everybody knows that. But we don’t forget our friends, either. You’ll see.”

  “Thank you,” Goldman said. “That I should be your friend surprises me. We’ve had that talk before, a long time ago. But thank you. Thank you very much. It has passed over me.”

  “What’s that?” Featherston asked. The Jew only shrugged and changed the subject. Jake didn’t push it.

  He had other things to worry about. The world wasn’t his, as he thought it should be. But now, at least, he had the hope it was going his way.

 
W
hen Jefferson Pinkard opened his pay envelope at the Sloss Works, he discovered it contained a pink slip along with his salary. His curses were soft and bitter and heartfelt. “I should’ve stayed in Mexico, by God,” he said. “If I’d known the company was going to treat me like a nigger, I would’ve.” The paymaster, a gray-haired man named Harvey Gordon, had known Pinkard since before the Great War. He shook his head. “You never should have gone to Mexico in the first place. You forfeited all the seniority you had. Now they’re treating you like a new hire. I’m sorry as hell, Jeff, but them’s the rules.”

  “Fuck the rules,” Pinkard said. “How am I gonna
eat
?” Gordon didn’t answer that. It wasn’t a question that had an answer, except maybe,
God knows.
 If God did know, He hadn’t bothered telling Jefferson Davis Pinkard.

  “Get moving,” the fellow in line behind him said. “Don’t hold up the works.”

  “Fuck you, too,” Jeff answered, hoping for a fight. He didn’t get one, only a stony glare. Muttering under his breath, he strode out of the steel mill.
Won’t be coming back, either,
 he thought.
Ain’t that a son of
a bitch?