American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (52 page)

  “What’s the news here in South Carolina?” Anne asked.

  “Not as bad as that,” the Whig said. “We’re going to lose the seat we picked up two years ago, and maybe one more besides.”

  Potter pointed at the blackboard on which new results were going up. “Maybe two more besides, looks like to me.”

  After a second look at the numbers, the other Whig scowled and nodded. “Maybe two more besides,” he admitted, and went off as if Potter had some sort of contagious disease.

 
  He does,
 Anne thought.
He tells the truth as he sees it, and he pulls no punches. Such men are
dangerous.

  Returns from Georgia started coming, and then Tennessee and Alabama. The more of them there were, the longer the faces at Whig headquarters got. People started slipping over to the saloon across the street. Some of them came back. Others didn’t—they stayed away and began the serious business of drowning their sorrows.

  Clarence Potter didn’t go. Each new seat lost to the Freedom Party—and those came in one after another, with no possible room for doubt in most of them—brought not howls of dismay from him, but rather a bitter smile. He might have been telling the world,
I knew this was going
to happen. Now here
it is, and what are you going to do
about it?
 No one in the Whig headquarters seemed to have the slightest idea what to do about it . . . except for the men who headed across the street to get drunk.

  As Anne watched the man she was with, so he watched her, too. After a while, he said, “It’s probably not too late for you, you know.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, though she had a pretty good idea.

  And, sure enough, he said, “Your politics aren’t that far from Jake Featherston’s. If you want to, you can probably make your peace with him.”

  She wanted to haul off and slap him. She wanted to, but she couldn’t, for the same thought had crossed her mind. He told her the truth as he saw it, too. Still, she said, “I don’t know. I turned him down once when he asked for money, years ago. He doesn’t forget things like that.” Potter laughed scornfully. “I’ll tell you what he won’t turn down. He won’t turn down money if you give it to him now, that’s what.”

  Anne wondered about that. She decided Potter was probably half right. Jake Featherston might take her money if she offered it to him again. But would he ever trust her, ever let her have any real influence? She had her doubts. Featherston struck her as a man whose memory for slights an elephant would envy.

  Casually, Clarence Potter added, “If you do go back to him, we’re through. I don’t know how much that means to you. I hope it means something. Losing you would mean a lot to me. But I’ve known Featherston longer than any of the ‘Freedom!’-shouting yahoos who go marching for him these days. We aren’t on the same side, and we’re never going to be.”

  “What if he gets elected president?” Anne asked.

  A muscle jumped in his right cheek, perhaps an inch below his eye. “No one ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the Confederate people, but I still find that hard to imagine—even harder than it was in 1921, when he came so close. And 1933’s still a long way away. Things are bound to look better by then.” He paused and sighed. “And the way you asked that question makes me wonder if we aren’t through anyhow.”

  “Up till now, you never put any conditions on me,” Anne said. “I liked it that you never put any conditions on me.”

  “Up till now, I never imagined I needed to,” he answered. “But I can’t put up with the Freedom Party.

  I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  “Don’t you want revenge on the USA?” she asked.

  “I don’t want anything that badly,” Potter said.

  Anne sighed. “Some things are worth any price.” He shook his head. Now she sighed. “It’s been fun, Clarence,” she said. “But I’ll do what I think I have to do, and not what anyone else tells me to. Not ever.”
No wonder I never got married,
 she thought. She walked out of the Whig headquarters and back toward her motorcar.

 
K
amloops, British Columbia, was a long way from Philadelphia, and a long way from the Confederate States, too. That didn’t keep news from getting there about as fast as it got anywhere else, though, not in this age of telegraph clickers and wireless sets. Colonel Irving Morrell studied the Confederate election returns with a sort of horrified fascination.

  “Sweet Jesus Christ!” he said, looking at the newspaper that had set them out in detail.

  “Er—yes, sir,” his aide-de-camp said, and chuckled.

  “No offense, Lieutenant,” Morrell said hastily. “Just a manner of speaking.”

  “Oh, yes, sir. I know that,” Lieutenant Ike Horwitz answered. “You’re not like that damn German sergeant who was tagging along with your buddy from the General Staff over there.”

  “I should hope not.” Morrell set the paper on Horwitz’s desk. “But look at this. For heaven’s sake,
look
at this. The Freedom Party went from—what?—nine Congressmen to twenty-nine. They won three governorships down there. They took control of four state legislatures, too, and that means they’ll start electing Senators, because their state legislatures still choose ’em. They didn’t switch to popular vote, the way we did.”

  “That’s a big pickup, no doubt about it.” Horwitz leaned forward to study the numbers. He looked up at Morrell. “I’m awful damn glad I’m a Jew in the USA, and not a
shvartzer
in the CSA.”

  “A what?” Morrell said, and then he nodded, making the connection from Yiddish to German. “Oh.

  Yeah. I bet you are.”

  “There’s people here who don’t like Jews—plenty who feel just like that stupid sergeant,” Horwitz said.

  “But it isn’t all
that
bad. Hell, even the president’s wife’s Jewish, not that I’ve got any use for her politics or his. If you’re colored in the Confederate States, you’ve got to be shaking in your shoes—if they let you have any shoes.”

  He was right. Morrell hadn’t even wondered what the Negroes in the CSA felt about the election returns he’d been dissecting. He rarely thought about Negroes. What white man in the USA did? Maybe Horwitz, being a Jew, was more likely to look at other people who had a hard time in their homeland.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Morrell said. “Write me an appreciation of the Confederate Negroes’ likely response to this. Do a good job on it and I’ll forward it to Philadelphia, see if I can get you noticed.”

  “Thank you, sir. That’s damn white of you,” his aide-de-camp answered.

  Morrell’s own thoughts were on the more immediate. “Any time the Freedom vote goes up, that’s trouble for us, because those bastards want another shot at the USA. And Featherston’s boys haven’t seen numbers like these since 1921. I hope to heaven the president sits up and takes notice.”

  “What do you think the odds are?” Lieutenant Horwitz asked.

  “Do I look like a Socialist politician to you? I’d better not, that’s all I’ve got to say,” Morrell replied.

  “They cut off Confederate reparations early, they haven’t been checking about rearmament near as hard as they should have, they’ve cut
our
budget. . . .” He sighed. “They think everybody should just be friends. I wish that would work, I really do.”

  “People vote for it,” Horwitz said. “Nobody wants to go through another war like the last one.”

  “No, of course not. But both sides have to want peace. You only need one to have a war. And the only thing worse than fighting a war like that is fighting it and losing. Ask the Confederates if you don’t believe me.”

  “I don’t need to ask anybody,” Horwitz said. “I can see that for myself. Anyone with a brain in his head ought to be able to see that for himself. But what are we going to do?”

  “That’s the question, all right.” Morrell drummed his fingers on the desktop. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. Half of those people who voted for Featherston’s gang of goons probably don’t hope for anything but jobs and three square meals a day if he calls the shots. They sure aren’t getting ’em with the folks they’ve got running things now.”

  His aide-de-camp smiled unhappily. “And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth, sir? When I joined the Army, I never thought I’d be glad to be in for the food and for the roof over my head. But that’s how it looks nowadays. If I were a civilian, I’d probably be scuffling like everybody else.”

  “Good point.” Morrell nodded. “We’re insulated from that, anyhow, thank God.”

  “I suppose the Socialists
are
doing everything they can there,” Ike Horwitz said grudgingly. “Feeding people who are out of work and giving some of ’em makework jobs—it’s not great, God knows, but it’s better than nothing, you know what I mean?”

  “I guess so.” Morrell sighed. “If you give a man something for nothing, though, will he want to stand up on his own two feet again when times get better, or will he keep wanting a handout for the rest of his life?”

  “You ask me, sir, most people want to work if you give ’em the chance,” Horwitz answered. “Other thing is, if they do starve, talking about the rest of their lives starts looking pretty silly, doesn’t it? And if they’re afraid they’re going to starve, then what happens? Then they start voting for somebody like Jake Featherston in the USA, right?”

  “I suppose so,” Morrell said again. Up till now, his politics had always been firmly Democratic; he’d never had to think about it. He still didn’t, not really. But he’d never been a man to worry about subtleties, either, and now he wondered whether he’d made a mistake. “You’re saying the Socialists are giving us a safety valve, aren’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but yes, sir, I guess I am,” Lieutenant Horwitz answered. “If things blow up, what have we got? Trouble, nothing else but.” Like any soldier—and like anyone else with an ounce of sense—he was convinced staying out of trouble was a good idea.

  A couple of days later, Morrell went into the town of Kamloops to do some shopping—Christmas was coming, and he wanted to buy some things for Agnes and Mildred that he couldn’t hope to find at the post exchange. The weather was crisp and chilly, the sun shining bright out of a blue, blue sky but not giving much in the way of warmth even so.

  The reception he got in Kamloops gave little in the way of warmth, either. Here a dozen years after the end of the war, the Canucks cared for the green-gray uniforms their occupiers wore no more than they had after the USA finally battered them into submission. People on the streets turned their backs when Morrell walked by.

  Most of them did, anyhow. He’d got used to that. What he hadn’t got used to were the ragged-looking men who held out their hands and whined, “Spare change, pal?” And he especially hadn’t got used to the respectable-looking men who held out their hands and said the same thing. One of them added, “Been a long time since my twin boys saw any meat on the table.”

  “Why don’t you get a job, then?” Morrell asked.

  “Why?” The man glared at him. “I’ll tell you why, even though you’re a damned fool to need telling.

  Because there damned well aren’t any jobs to get, that’s why. Lumber companies aren’t hiring—that’s what I got fired from. Farms aren’t taking on hired men, not when they can’t sell half the sheep and cows and wheat they raise. Even here in town, only way you can keep your job is if you’re somebody’s brother—if you’re just a brother-in-law, you’re in trouble.
That’s
why, you stinking Yank.”
 Well, I asked him, and he went and told me,
 Morrell thought. He dug in his pocket and gave the Canadian some coins. “Here, buddy. Good luck to you.”

  “I ought to spit in your eye,” the hungry man told him. “Hell of it is, I can’t. I’ve got to tip my hat”—he did—“and say, ‘Thank you, sir,’ on account of I need the money so goddamn bad.” Never in all his days had Morrell heard
Thank you, sir
sound so much like
Go to hell, you son of a
bitch.

  And he discovered the problem that sprang from giving one beggar some money. As soon as he did, all the others became four times as obnoxious, swarming around him and cursing him as foully as they knew how when he pushed past without doing for them what he’d done for one of their fellows. Maybe they hoped they’d make him feel guilty. All they really did was make him mad.

  He’d just shaken free of the crowd when a woman sidled up to him. Skirts were longer than they had been a couple of years before, and the day wasn’t warm, but what she wore displayed a lot of her.

  “Want a good time, soldier?” she said. “Three dollars.” She was skinny. Like any town with soldiers in it, Kamloops had its share of easy women, but she didn’t look as if she’d been part of their sorry sisterhood for very long. “What did you used to do?” Morrell asked quietly.

  “What difference does it make?” she answered. “Whatever it was, I can’t do it any more. Do you want to go someplace?”

  “No, thanks,” he answered. She cursed him, too, with a sort of dreary hopelessness that hit him harder than the anger the male beggars had shown.

  Even the storekeepers’ attitudes seemed different from the way they had before things went sour. He’d never seen men so glad to take money from him. When he remarked on that, the fellow who’d just sold him a doll for Mildred said, “You bet I’m glad. You’re only the second customer I’ve had today.

  Anybody with any money at all looks good to me right now. How am I going to pay my bills if nobody buys anything from me? And if I can’t pay my bills, what happens then? Do I end up out on the street? I sure hope not.”

  Later, another shopkeeper said, “Hate to tell you this, but Kamloops’d wither up and die if it wasn’t for you Yank soldiers. They still pay you regular, so you still have money in your pockets. Damn few folks do, and you’d better believe that.”

  A third man was even blunter: “If things don’t turn around pretty quick, what the hell’s going to happen to us?”