Amerika (43 page)

“God, Am, what’s the point?” he demanded.

She was angry, and tried to fight back her tears. “Look at our children, Peter. They don’t even understand what they’ve lost.”

“Hey, Mom, I understand,” Scott protested. “But I guess I don’t see the big deal. I mean, it’s too bad a bunch of creeps blew it up and all, and I’m sorry somebody was killed, but we’re not a part of that anymore, are we?”

“It was part of our heritage, son,” Peter said. “It’ll always be a part of us.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know why Mom’s always getting on my case lately,” Scott said heavily.

Amanda stood. “I—Peter, it’s too much for me. I want to go home. Be in my own house. I want to walk down a street and know where to watch out because the elm roots are pushing up the sidewalk. I need to do that for a while. Maybe I can never be what you want—I could be your wife, but I’m not sure I can be your first lady. I’m sorry.” She was quiet for a moment, staring at the husband she loved very much. “Can you have someone drive me?” she asked. “I think I’ll take Justin back to his folks. Alan says the more he’s around people who love him ...” She was suddenly aware that everyone had been watching her talk nonstop. She caught herself and shrugged. “Anybody can come. Scotty, Jac, Peter?”

Peter leaned against the doorway, shaking his head in wonder. Andrei was unreachable, Marion had her stormtroopers in the streets, his new “nation” was on the brink of anarchy, and now his wife was leaving him. He shrugged his shoulders a little.

“Maybe it’s a good idea,” he said. “For a while. This Capitol business is going to create some trouble; maybe Milford’s the safest place right now.”

She moved to where he stood. “You’ll come?”

“You know I can’t, Am. But I’ll come and get you as soon as this has settled down a little.”

“That won’t be too late?”

He smiled sadly. “It’s never too late. You know that. That’s what we’ve always said.”

Jackie stood. “I’ll go with you, Mom.”

Amanda was a little surprised. “Your dancing?”

“It can wait awhile.” Jackie smiled.

“I t
hink
I’ll hang around here,” Scott said, avoiding his mother’s look, staring down at his size-12 basketball shoes.

“Sure, honey. Whatever you want.”

Peter walked over to Scott. “He’ll be fine. We’ll batch it.”

Amanda threw her hands open in a small gesture of uncertainty. Now that she had done it, she wasn’t sure she should have. And yet, someone had to decide where their home was, and did it matter?

“Well,” she sighed. “We’d better get packed.”

“The house is pretty empty, isn’t it?”

“Not entirely,” she said. “We stored a lot of things in the basement. We’ll camp out, so to speak.”

She smiled at her husband and walked out of the room quickly, before she could change her mind.

Jackie looked at her brother, not quite sure of how to deal with her emotions toward him. Peter watched them a moment, then threw his arms open. Jackie ran into them.

“Daddy, you’ll be all right?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You could come, you know. Mom really wants you to.”

Peter closed his eyes, taking in the scent of his daughter.

“I know, baby. I know.”

General Sittman and three truckloads of well-armed troops from the Heartland Defense Force pulled up to Peter’s home. As they sped away with her husband, Amanda idly wondered if they would ever give him back. Oddly, her speculation was more out of curiosity than concern.

The convoy sped toward Natnet’s Omaha studio. As they approached, Peter tried unsuccessfully to suppress a hope that this mission might somehow help him get back his wife. When they arrived, the soldiers moved out smartly, strategically surrounding the building.

Inside, Peter confronted the station manager, Reg Holly, a plump, balding man, who was soon sweating profusely. Jeffrey joined them in the office, clutching the film he and his crew had shot at the psychiatric unit of People’s Acceptance Hospital.

“I don’t see how we can possibly run that report,” the station manager protested.

“Why not, Mr. Holly?”

“In the first place, it’s sickening. Those patients are like . . .
zombies.”'

“It’s strong,” Peter agreed. “Tough, dynamic TV— great for your ratings.”

“To hell with my ratings,” Holly said. “In the second place, the PPP would never approve it.”

“Mr. Holly, you don’t seem to understand the situation,” Peter said. “I’m the governor-general of this region. I don’t give a damn about the PPP censors; I’m ordering you to run that film, or I’ll take over this studio and run it without you. Do I make myself clear?”

The station manager wiped his sweaty brow. Peter could appreciate his distress. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Except for Peter, the top political officials had always been loyal PPP members, so there had been no reason for conflict.

“When do you want to go on the air?” Holly asked.

The footage was powerful, brutal. The camera missed nothing: the drugged, deathly figures with tubes in their arms, Amanda’s anguish, Justin’s pitiful condition, even the hospital administrator’s protestations of innocence. Jeffrey’s commentary was cool and understated: as he well knew, the pictures said it all.

When the twenty-minute report was finished, Jeffrey appeared on the screen live. “That is our report, from the psychiatric unit of the People’s Acceptance Hospital,” he intoned. “Now we have here in the studio, for his comments, the governor-general of Heartland, Mr. Peter Bradford.”

Peter sat at a desk, with some law books and the new Heartland flag behind him. He wore a dark blue suit, a light blue shirt, and a red-and-blue regimental-striped tie—the politician’s basic TV outfit. As county administrator in Milford, Peter had made a point of dressing like everyone else—jeans, plaid shirts, windbreakers, an old tweed coat on the most formal occasions—but he’d changed that now that he was governor-general.

Peter felt supremely confident as he began to speak. He’d been thinking about this ever since he heard of the Capitol bombings and the trouble that Marion’s thugs were causing. He knew that he would have a large and responsive audience. In the wake of the massacre at the Capitol, people were anxiously watching TV, wanting more news. And he would give them more: he’d give them one hell of a show.

“My fellow Heartlanders,” he began. “Some terrible things have been happening. We just saw a dramatic report on the cruelty and inhumanity that can result when people stop caring about their fellow human beings. I say to you that this sort of inhumanity has no place in Heartland, and I will put an end to it, once and for all!

“We saw another instance of inhumanity at the U.S. Capitol, when invaders bombed it and slaughtered scores of our elected representatives. It isn’t clear yet who was guilty of that attack, but this much is certain: they represent an alien philosophy, whether it’s homegrown or foreign.

“Now, in the streets of many of our cities, we face demonstrations, riots, vandalism, hooliganism. Why? Because of real grievances? Or because certain political zealots are trying to twist national concern to serve their own ends?

“I say the troublemakers are politically inspired, and they must be stopped. It is time for the decent, hardworking, law-abiding Heartlanders to say no to anarchy and opportunism. If the extremists call a strike, then go to work early that day. If they demonstrate, then get your Mends and neighbors to form a bigger and better demonstration. If they start fights or break windows or otherwise break the law, then see that they’re arrested—if you have to do it yourself. Speaking as commander-in-chief of the Heartland Defense Force, I promise you that my full authority will be used to support the law-abiding majority of Heartland.

“But I need your support. I intend to tour all the major cities of Heartland in the days ahead, to meet with local officials and ordinary citizens. Please come meet me; give me your ideas, your support, and your prayers. Thank you and God bless you.”

Marion Andrews and Mike Laird watched the newscast in her library. “Why didn’t we stop him?” she asked, keeping her anger in check.

“As I told you, he had the national guard surrounding the studio. I can’t send my men to fight a war with them.”

“Call all our people—get them into the streets. I want a general strike! We’ve got to topple Bradford before it’s too late.”

“It may already be too late,” Laird said. “He’s going to have bis own people in the streets, the way it looks.”

She looked at him, her eyes burning with a fierce determination. “You can give up,” she said. “But I won’t; the people are counting on me.”

The Milfords listened to the broadcast on the radio, huddled around the fire in the root cellar. “What do you t
hin
k?” Alethea asked all of them as Peter Bradford finished.

“Just another slick damn politician in a three-hundred-dollar suit, if you ask me,” Will declared.

Dieter Heinlander’s face was sad. “That part about going into the streets, it frightens me. That is the way it all started back in Germany.”

“What do you think, Devin?” Alethea asked.

Devin was wrapped in blankets, eating some potato soup. He considered the question for so long that she thought he wasn’t going to answer. “Peter’s become quite a politician,” he said finally. “I know he means well, but sometimes meaning well just isn’t good enough.”

Peter’s office called later that afternoon to alert Amanda of the fact that the film of her dramatic visit to the psychiatric unit would be shown that evening, followed by comments from Peter. Amanda took the portable TV upstairs so she and Jackie and Justin could watch the show together. She thought that perhaps seeing that hospital on the TV screen might rouse Justin froip his apathy. Ever since they’d been home, Justin would sit up and sip milk or soup, but he did not speak or give any sign that he could recognize anyone.

It wasn’t easy. You talked to him, you fed and bathed him, you read to him, but nothing came back. Amanda knew how tired and discouraged she was, but Jackie’s blind faith filled her with pride and the will to continue. About the only consolation they had was the improvement in his appearance. They had shaved him and trimmed his hair, and he was gaining back some weight and color: his body was improving but apparently not his mind.

So Amanda decided to risk the TV program; perhaps seeing pictures of the unit, indeed of himself there, would shock or frighten him—by now Amanda was ready to settle for any response at all, even fear. But despite the horrific images that appeared on the screen, she didn’t even get that response: Justin might have been staring at the wall.

After Peter’s speech, Jackie switched off the set and said, “I’ll read to him; you get some rest,” and picked up the copy of
Lonesome Dove
that they’d been reading, at Amanda’s suggestion. Amanda loved the novel, because the story was so exciting, and because its portrait of America in the 1880s meant so much more to her now. Those people in the west had lives filled with incredible danger and, at the same time, lives of almost total freedom. Perhaps danger went hand in hand with freedom, and somehow in modem times their mistake was in thinking there could ever be real freedom without great risk.

Amanda went down to the kitchen to straighten up and have some time to herself. The house seemed awfully big and quiet without Peter and Scott stomping around. She poured a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table, looking out at the fields. The sun was out, slowly melting the snow, leaving the yard a muddy quagmire. Soon she’d have to think about planting her garden. Sometimes she thought that human beings were intended to live on farms and raise their own food, and somehow “civilization” had turned them away from that—and brought with it the Nuclear Age. She needed the garden, not for the tomatoes, potatoes, beans, and lettuce, but because she needed to feel some contact with a simpler, better past.

Amanda couldn’t keep the images of the psychiatric unit from her mind. When they had come on the screen, she had turned away: she had lived that nightmare once and had no wish to experience it again, even on film. But she couldn’t force those images of deathly pale men and boys from her mind. They were far more real to her than the speech Peter had made on TV just a few minutes before. In truth, when Peter appeared, she barely paid attention to his words. Her real attention was on Justin. Since she had returned to Milford, Peter’s political battles had become quite unreal to her. They were like a movie, playing in some distant theater, one she chose not to patronize. Peter was trying to save America, or Heartland, and she was only trying to save that pathetic speechless boy upstairs in her guest room.

Amanda put away some dishes and hoped no more of her neighbors would drop by that day. People had been nice, they had brought food and offered to help with Justin, and they tentatively asked questions about Chicago and Omaha or Peter’s job. No one seemed quite sure why Amanda was back in Milford when Peter was still in Omaha. She had to laugh at herself. She knew how people gossiped in small towns. She just hadn’t often been someone who people gossiped about.

My turn at last, she thought.

And the truth was, she welcomed the gossip, in one way. She wanted to hear about Devin. She knew he was back, that they’d rescued him from People’s Acceptance, and she guessed he was in pretty good shape. Ward and Betty had been by that morning, to visit Justin, and they’d spoken of taking him home, but the truth was that they had no home now, and Amanda convinced them it was best to leave their son with her. Ward feared for the safety of the farmland, with Devin there, and Billy still hiding nearby. No one trusted the fact or understood the reason why the SSU had stayed in its barracks, and Ward constantly wondered when its tanks and helicopters might come charging forth.