American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (62 page)

  “Welcome to Texas, Jake—what’s left of it,” Knight said, a broad smile on his handsome face.

  “Thank you kindly, my friend.” Featherston lied through his teeth. “We’ll see what we can do about getting back what the USA stole from us.”

  “How are you going to do that?” a reporter shouted. “The Yankees won’t pay any attention to us.”

  “They don’t have to pay any attention to the CSA, not as long as the Whigs hold on to Richmond,” Jake answered. “The Whigs say we lost the war, and so we’re stuck—stuck forever. And we are, too, long as we think that way. But even the Yankees knew better. After we whipped ’em, they set up Remembrance Day so they wouldn’t forget what happened. The Whigs
want
to forget—they want to pretend all their mistakes never happened at all. And they want the country to forget. Me, I don’t intend to.”

  “That’s right.” Willy Knight nodded vigorously. “That’s just exactly right. Here in Texas, we live with that every day when we look west and see what the United States did to us.” The reporters scribbled. Jake sent Knight a sour look. The Texan wanted to be part of the story, too.
If
you wanted
to horn in on this, why’d you invite me out here to the middle of nowhere?
 Featherston thought. But he knew the answer, knew it all too well.
Because you still want to be top dog, that’s
why, you son of a bitch.
 Most ways, having ambitious men in the Party was wonderful. They worked hard, for their own good as well as its. But having them here meant Jake could never stop watching his back.

  “I’m making my main speech at a park west of town, isn’t that right?” he asked Knight, though he also knew that answer. “Almost within spitting range of what they call Houston. Spitting’s not half what they deserve, either.”

  “Sure isn’t,” Knight said. “If the people in occupied Texas ever got the chance to vote, they’d come back to the Confederate States in a red-hot minute.”

  “Same with Kentucky,” Featherston agreed. “Same with Sequoyah.” He had mixed feelings about Sequoyah—it was, after all, full of redskins, and he had little more use for them than he had for niggers.

  (The USA had even less use for Indians; Sequoyah remained occupied territory, while Houston and Kentucky were full-fledged U.S. states.) But Sequoyah was also full of oil and gas, and cars and trucks and aeroplanes meant the Confederate States needed all the oil and gas they could lay their hands on. If the redskins came along, too, then they did, that was all. At least they’d been loyal during the war, unlike the blacks in the Confederacy.

  “Take you to the hotel first, if that suits you,” Knight said. “Give you a chance to freshen up, maybe rest a little bit, before you go out and give your speech. You aren’t set to start till six, you know.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Jake nodded as they left the platform together. “That way, it’s eight o’clock back on the East Coast—a good time for folks on the wireless web to listen in.” He laughed. “Who would’ve reckoned a few years back that we’d have to worry about such things? Times are changing—if we don’t change with ’em, we’re in trouble.”

  “That’s what’s wrong with the Whigs,” Knight said. “They’re a bunch of damn dinosaurs, is what they are.”

  Dinosaurs had been much in the news lately. A team of Japanese scientists in Mongolia had come back with not only spectacular skeletons but also some of the first dinosaur eggs ever seen. They’d sent some of their specimens to the Museum of Natural History in Richmond, where they’d drawn record crowds.

  Jake liked the phrase, too; it captured exactly what he felt about the Whigs.

  He slapped Willy Knight on the back. “They sure are,” he said. “You took the words right out of my mouth, matter of fact—I’m aiming to call ’em that very thing tonight.” And so he was, even if he hadn’t been a moment before.

  “Good,” Knight said, not suspecting Featherston was stealing his figure of speech.

  Driving through Abilene was depressing. The town had flourished in the years just before the Great War and, like so much of the Confederacy, languished since. Timber buildings looked sun-blasted; brick ones looked old before their time. As he did all over the CSA, Jake saw men sleeping on park benches and in bushes, and others prowling the streets looking for food or work.

  The hotel seemed as gloomy as the rest of the place. Ceiling fans spun lazily in the lobby, stirring the air without cooling it much. The carpet was shabby. The walls needed painting. The clerk behind the registration desk seemed pathetically glad to have anybody come in. “Welcome to Abilene, sir,” he said as he gave Jake his key.

  “Thanks,” Jake replied, in lieu of what he really thought. “Freedom!”

  “Uh, freedom,” the clerk said, but not as if he were a Party man.

  Since Featherston was due to speak at six, he and Willy Knight ate an early supper: enormous slabs of steak, a Texas specialty. Texas wasn’t dry; they could drink beer without breaking the law. Knight swallowed a big piece of rare meat and then said, “God damn you, Jake. I thought you were buzzard bait, but you turned out to be right all along. Our time is coming.”

  “I always said so.” Featherston cocked his head to one side. “You reckoned we were going down the drain, and you’d pick up the pieces.”

  The mixed metaphor didn’t faze the former head of the Redemption League. “Damn right I did. This party was drying up and blowing away four years ago.” He cut off another chunk of steak. By the way he did it, he would sooner have stuck the knife into Featherston. “Amos Mizell and I, we were ready to get on another horse. The Party did jussst well enough”—he stretched the word into a long hiss—“to keep us on board. But now— . . .”

  Jake finished for him: “Now we’re back in business.”

  “We are.” Knight nodded. “Hell with me if we’re not. I’d take my hat off to you if I was wearing it. All through everything, you said this was going to happen one of these days. You said so, and you were right.”

  “You bet I was,” Featherston said, adding,
You stinking bastard,
 to himself. “Come November, we’re going to pick up a hell of a lot more seats in the House. We’ll pick up some in the Senate, too, from states where we got control of the legislature two years ago. And two years from now . . . Two years from now, by God . . .” Even in the dimly lit steakhouse, a feral glow shone in his eyes.

  “Yeah.” That same glow lit Willy Knight’s face. He and Jake nodded to each other. Both men had been hungry, hungry in the spirit, for a long, long time, and at last they thought they could see satisfaction on the horizon.

  Softly, Jake said, “If things go our way two years from now, I’m going to pay back every blue-blooded bastard and every nigger who ever did me wrong. And I’m going to put this poor, sorry country back on its feet again.”

  “Yeah,” Knight said again. As with Featherston, he sounded more as if he looked forward to revenge than to rebuilding. He added, “We’ve got the United States to pay back, too.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Jake said. “Don’t you worry about that, Willy. I haven’t forgotten at all. That’s why I came out here—to help everybody remember.”

  When he got to the park, it was filling up fast. Bare bulbs bathed the platform from which he would speak, though the sun hadn’t set yet. As he walked up onto the platform and over to the microphone that would send his words across the CSA, a frightening, almost savage, roar went up from the crowd. He hoped the microphone would pick it up. He wanted people to get all hot and bothered when they heard him or thought about him.

  “Hello, friends,” he said at six on the dot. “I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth. The truth is, the United States are afraid of us. You look across what they call the border, you look into what they call Houston, and you’ll know it’s the truth. If they let people over there vote which country they wanted to belong to, they know what would happen. You know what would happen, too. Texas would be itself again. And so the Yankees don’t let ’em vote.” Cheers in Abilene had that savage edge, too. Here not far from the border, people feared the United States, whether the United States feared them or not.

  Jake went on, “The USA won’t let people in Kentucky vote on that, either, or people in Sequoyah.

  They know where the people would go, and they don’t aim to let ’em. Why? They’re scared, that’s why!”

  He pointed east, a gesture full of contempt. “And do the Whigs way over there in Richmond, the Whigs who’ve been running this country ever since the War of Secession, do they do anything about it? Do they push the USA to let the folks in Houston—
Houston!
—and Kentucky and Sequoyah vote about who they want to belong to? Do they?
Do they?
 Noooo!” He made the word a howl of rage. “They’re nothing but a pack of dinosaurs, is what they are. And you know what you’ve got to do with dinosaurs, don’t you?
Send ’em to the museum!
 ”

  A vast roar went up. Featherston looked back at Willy Knight, standing there behind him. They grinned at each other. Knight was happy about his own cleverness, even though he thought Featherston had had the idea on his own, too. Jake was happy about how well the line had gone over. He knew he’d stolen it, knew and didn’t care. The point was, it did what he wanted. And nobody else in the whole wide world knew, or cared, where he’d got it.

  Little by little, Party men turned the roar into a chant: “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” The crowd followed along. The chant went on till Jake’s head rang with it.

  He raised his hands. Quiet slowly returned. Into it, he said, “Come November, you get your chance to send some more Whigs to the museum. I know you’ll take care of it, friends. Folks who think they’re smart used to say the Freedom Party was dead. We’ll show ’em who’s dead, see if we don’t, and who needs burying, too. We’re not dead, by God. We’re just getting started!” Another roar went up, one that told him he’d found a brand-new slogan.

 
“H
asta luego,”
 Hipolito Rodriguez told his wife. “I’m going into Baroyeca. I’ll vote, and then I’m going to stay to see how the election turns out.”

  Magdalena wagged a finger at him. “And in between times you’ll sit in
La Culebra Verde
and waste money on
cerveza
.”

  “If a man can’t have a beer or two with his friends, the world is in a sorry state indeed,” Rodriguez said with dignity.

  “A beer or two, or four, or six.” Magdalena wagged that finger again, but indulgently. “Go on. Have a good time. I will say you’ve never been one to sit in the
cantina
all the time and come home drunk four days a week.
Libertad!
 ”

 
  “Libertad!”
 Rodriguez echoed. He put a serape on over his shirt; the weather was about as chilly as it ever got around Baroyeca. He put on a wide-brimmed straw hat, too. It wasn’t raining, but looked as if it might.

  The polling place was in one room of the mayor’s house. More often than not, Rodriguez still thought of the mayor as the
alcalde
; even though Sonora had belonged to the CSA longer than he’d been alive, the old Spanish forms died hard, especially here in the south.

  He gave his name, signed on the appropriate line in the record book, and took his ballot into a voting booth. He voted for the Freedom Party candidates for Congress, for his state legislature, and for governor of Sonora. When he’d finished, he folded the ballot, gave it to a waiting clerk, and watched till the man put it into a ballot box.

  “
Señor
Rodriguez has voted,” the clerk intoned, a formula as full of ritual as any in the Mass.

  As Rodriguez left the mayor’s office, Jaime Diaz came towards it. They exchanged greetings. From within, someone called out a warning: “No electioneering within a hundred feet of the polling place.” That too was ritual. Rodriguez snorted. “Electioneering!” he said. “All I want to do is say hello.”

  “I can’t chat anyhow,” Diaz said. “I’ve got Esteban back at the general store, and he can’t count to eleven without looking at his toes, so I have to get back there as fast as I can.”

  “We’ll talk some other time, then,” Rodriguez said.
“Adios.”
 He didn’t say,
Libertad
. The fellow inside had warned him against electioneering.

  When he wandered over to
La Culebra Verde
, he found it crowded. Many of the men sitting and drinking had worked in the silver mines that went belly-up soon after the stock market sank. These days, the miners didn’t have much to do with their time but sit around and drink. Rodriguez wondered where some of them came up with the dimes they used to buy beer, but that wasn’t his worry. A lot of the miners, he suspected, would spend money on
cerveza
before they spent it on their families. That wasn’t the way he would have done it, but they wouldn’t care.

  Carlos Ruiz waved to him. He waved back, bought himself a bottle of beer, and joined his friend at a corner table. Ruiz was also a farmer. He might not have a lot of dimes—what farmer ever had a lot of money?—but he did still have some income. “Have you voted?” he asked as Rodriguez sat down across from him.

  “Oh, yes.
Libertad!
 ” Rodriguez answered. He kept his voice down, though. Some people came into the
cantina
to brawl as well as to drink. Arguments over politics gave them a good excuse. Rodriguez had seen enough fighting during the Great War that he never wanted to see any more.

 
  “Libertad!”
 Ruiz said, also quietly. “I think we are going to do very well this year.”

  “I hope so,” Rodriguez said. “A pity, though, that it takes trouble to show people what they should have been doing all along.”

  His friend shrugged. “If you’re fat and happy, do you want to change? Of course not. You keep on doing what you always did. After all, that’s what made you fat and happy,
sí
? You need a jolt to want to change.”