Return Engagement (10 page)

“Well, I don’t mind,” Jake Featherston said, which was not only true but an understatement. He’d lived pretty well since coming up in the world. But he added, “Money’s not why I wrote it.” And that was also true. He’d set things down on paper during the war and afterwards to try to exorcise his own demons. It hadn’t worked, not altogether. They still haunted him. They still drove him. Now they were all out in the open, though. That was where they belonged.

“Everyone who joins the Freedom Party should have to buy a copy of this book,” Goldman said.

Featherston nodded. “I like that. It’s good. See to it.” The Jew pulled a notebook from an inside pocket of his houndstooth jacket and scribbled in it. Jake went on, “Other thing you’ve got to do is arrange to get it translated into Spanish. The greasers in Texas and Sonora and Chihuahua may not be everything we wish they were, but they don’t much fancy niggers and we can trust ’em with guns in their hands. An awful lot of ’em are good Party men even if their English isn’t so hot. They need to know what we stand for, too.”

Goldman smiled and said, “Sir, I’ve already thought of that. The Spanish version will only be a couple of weeks behind the English one.”

“Good. That’s damn good, Saul. You’re one sharp bastard, you know that?” Jake was usually sparing of praise. Finding fault was easier. But without Saul Goldman, the Freedom Party probably wouldn’t have got where it was. The wireless web he’d stitched together sent the Party’s message all over the Confederate States. It got that message to places where Jake couldn’t go himself. And now all the wireless stations and newspapers and magazines and newsreels in the CSA put out what Goldman told them to put out.

“I try, Mr. President,” Goldman said now. “I owe you a lot, you know.”

“Yeah, you’ve said.” Jake waved that away. Inside, he wanted to laugh. Right at the start of things, Goldman had worried that the Freedom Party might come after Jews. It was a damn silly notion, though Featherston had never said so out loud. Why bother? There weren’t enough Jews in the Confederate States to get hot and bothered about, and the ones who were here had always been loyal. Blacks, now, blacks were a whole different story.

“Well . . .” Goldman dipped his head. All these years, and he was still shy. “Thank you very much, Mr. President.”

“Don’t you worry about a thing.” Jake shook his head. “No—you worry about one thing. You worry about how we’re going to tell the world we’ve kicked the damnyankees’ asses, on account of we’re going to.” He looked toward the door. Saul Goldman took a hint. He dipped his head again and stepped out.

Jake went back to the desk. He spent the next little while flipping through
Over Open Sights.
The more he read, the better he liked it. Everything—everything!—you wanted to know about what the Freedom Party stood for was all there in one place. Everybody all over the Confederate States, even those damn greasers, would be able to read it and understand.

He expected the telephone to ring and ruin the moment. As far as he could see, that was what the lousy thing was for. But it held off. He had twenty-five minutes to flip through twenty-five years’ worth of hard work. Oh, he hadn’t fiddled with the book every day through all that time, but it had never escaped his mind. And now the fruits of all that labor were in print. The more he thought about it, the better it felt.

In the end, the telephone didn’t interrupt him. Lulu did. “Sir, the Attorney General is here to see you,” she said.

“Well, you’d better send him in, then,” Jake answered. His secretary nodded and withdrew. Ferdinand Koenig came into the President’s office a moment later. Jake beamed and held up his fancy copy of
Over Open Sights.
“Hello, Ferd, you old son of a bitch! Ain’t this something?”

“Not bad,” Koenig answered. “Not bad at all, Sarge.” He was one of the handful of men left alive who could call Featherston a name like that. A massive man, he’d been in the Freedom Party even longer than Jake. He’d backed the uprising that put Jake at the head of the Party, and he’d backed him ever since. If anybody in this miserable world was reliable, Ferdinand Koenig was the man.

“Sit down,” Featherston said. “Make yourself comfortable, by God.”

The chair on the other side of the desk creaked as Koenig settled his bulk into it. He reached for the book. “Let me have a look at that, why don’t you? You’ve been talking about it long enough.”

“Here you are,” Jake said proudly.

Koenig paged through the book, pausing every now and then to take a look at some passage or another. He would smile and nod or raise an eyebrow. At last, he looked up. “You saw a lot of this before the last war even ended, didn’t you?”

“Hell, yes. It was there, if you had your eyes open,” Jake answered. “Tell me you didn’t know we’d never be able to trust our niggers again. Everybody with an eye to see knew that.”

“That’s what I came over here to talk about, as a matter of fact,” Koenig said. “Way things are going, I need to ask you a couple of questions.”

“Go right ahead,” Featherston said expansively. With
Over Open Sights
in print and in his hands at last, he felt happier, more mellow, than he had for a hell of a long time. Maybe this was what women felt when they had a baby. He didn’t know about that; he’d never been a woman. But this was pretty fine in its own way.

Koenig said, “Well, the way things are, we’re doing two different things, seems to me. Some of these niggers are going into camps like the one that Pinkard fellow runs out in Louisiana.”

“Sure.” Jake nodded. “Bastards are going in, all right, but they’re not coming out again. Good riddance.”

“That’s right,” the Attorney General said. “But then we’ve got all these other niggers we’re roping into war production work, and they just live wherever they’ve been living when they aren’t at the plant.”

“So?” Featherston said with a shrug. “They’ll get theirs sooner or later, too. The more work we can squeeze out of ’em beforehand, the better.”

“I agree with you there,” Ferdinand Koenig said. Hardly anyone dared disagree with the President of the CSA these days. Koenig went on, “I’ve been thinking, though—there might be a neater way to do this.”

“Tell me what you’ve got in mind,” Jake said. “I’m listening.”

“Well, Sarge, the word that really occurs to me is consolidation,” Koenig said. “If we can find some kind of way to put the war work and the camps together, the whole operation’ll run a lot smoother. And then, when some of these bucks get too run down to be worth anything on the line . . .” He snapped his fingers.

Featherston stared. Slowly, a grin spread across his face. “I like it. I like it a hell of a lot, matter of fact. Get it set up so it doesn’t disrupt everything else going on too much, and we’ll do it, by God.”

As Saul Goldman had a little while before, Koenig took a notebook from an inside jacket pocket and wrote in it. He said, “I’ll have to see exactly what needs doing. Whatever it is, I’ll take care of it. It does seem to be a way to kill two birds with one stone.”

“You might say that,” Jake answered. “Yeah, you just might. But we’ll do a hell of a lot more killing than that.” He threw back his head and laughed like a loon. He was not a man to whom laughter came often. When it did, the fit hit him hard.

“Damn right we will.” Koenig got to his feet. “I won’t bother you any more, Sarge. I know you’ve got the war with the USA to run. But I did want to keep you up to date on what we’re doing.”

“That’s fine.” Featherston laughed again. “Oh, hell, yes, Ferd. That’s just fine. And the war with the USA and the war against the niggers go together. Don’t you ever forget that.”

D
own in southern Sonora, Hipolito Rodriguez could have thought the new war against the USA nothing but noise in a distant room. No U.S. bombers appeared over the small town of Baroyeca, outside of which he had his farm. No U.S. soldiers were within a couple of hundred miles, and none seemed likely to come any closer. Peace might have continued uninterrupted . . . except that he had one son in the Army and two more who might be called to the colors at almost any time. For that matter, he was only in his mid-forties himself. He’d fought in the last war. It wasn’t unimaginable that they might want to put butternut on his back again.

He didn’t want to leave his farm. He even had electricity these days, something he couldn’t have imagined when he left Sonora the first time. That went a long way toward making the place a paradise on earth. Electric lights, a refrigerator, even a wireless set . . . what more could one man need?

One evening when the war was still very new, he kissed his wife and said, “I’m going into town for the Freedom Party meeting.”

Magdalena raised an eyebrow. “Do you think I didn’t know you were going to?” she asked. “You’ve been going as many weeks as you can for more than fifteen years now. Why would you change tonight?”

They spoke Spanish between themselves, a Spanish leavened with English words absorbed in the sixty years Sonora and Chihuahua had belonged to the CSA. Their children used more English, an English leavened with many Spanish words from the 350 years Sonora and Chihuahua had belonged first to Spain and then to Mexico. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren might one day speak an English more like that heard in the rest of the Confederacy. Thinking about that occasionally worried Rodriguez. Most of the time, though, it lay too far beyond the horizon of now to trouble him very much.

Out the door he went. He still hadn’t had a letter from Pedro since the shooting started. There was a worry much more immediate than any over language. He also hadn’t had a telegram from the War Department in Richmond. That made him think everything was all right, and that his youngest son was just too busy to write. He hoped so, anyway.

Baroyeca lay in a valley between two ridge lines of the Sierra Madre Occidental. The westering sun shone brightly on them, burnishing their peaks and gilding them. From lifelong familiarity, Rodriguez hardly noticed the mountains’ stern beauty. The wonders of our own neighborhoods are seldom obvious to us. What he did notice were the men coming out of the reopened silver mine, the railroad that had closed in the business collapse but was running again, and the poles that carried electricity not only to Baroyeca but also to outlying farms like his. Those, to him, were the real marvels.

He lived about three miles outside of town. The power poles ran alongside the dirt road. Hawks sat on the wires, looking for rabbits or mice or ground squirrels. He had never understood why they didn’t get electrocuted, but they didn’t. Some of them let him walk by. Others flew away when he got too close.

The country was dry—not disastrously dry, not with water coming down out of the mountains, but dry enough. Somewhere off in a field, a mule brayed. In the richer parts of the Confederate States, tractors did most of the field work that horses and mules had done since time out of mind. Around Baroyeca, a man with a good mule counted for wealthy. Hipolito had one.

The town could have been matched by scores of others in Sonora and Chihuahua. The
alcalde
’s house and the church stood across the square from each other; both were built of adobe, with red tile roofs. Baroyeca had one street of business. The most important of those, as far as Rodriguez was concerned, were Diaz’s general store and
La Culebra Verde,
the local cantina. Down near the end of the street stood Freedom Party headquarters.

It had both freedom! and ¡libertad! painted on the big window out front. The Freedom Party had always been scrupulous about using both English and Spanish in Sonora and Chihuahua. That was one reason it had prospered. The Whigs used to look down their snooty noses at the citizens they’d acquired in the states they bought from the Empire of Mexico. Even the Radical Liberals had dealt with the rich men, the
patrones,
and expected them to deliver votes from their clients. Not the Freedom Party. From the start, it had appealed to the people.

Rodriguez went in. Robert Quinn, the Party representative in Baroyeca, nodded politely. “
Hola, Señor
Rodriguez,” he said in English-accented Spanish.
“¿Como está Usted?”

“Estoy bien, gracias,”
Rodriguez answered. “And how are you,
Señor
Quinn?”

“I am also well, thanks,” Quinn said, still in Spanish. Not only had he learned the language, he treated people who spoke it like anyone else. The Freedom Party didn’t care if you were of Mexican blood. It didn’t care if you were a Jew. As long as you weren’t black, you fit right in.

Carlos Ruiz waved to Rodriguez. He patted the folding chair next to him. Rodriguez sat down by his friend. Ruiz was a veteran, too. He’d fought up in Kentucky and Tennessee, where things had been even grimmer than in west Texas. He too had a son in the Army now.

Quinn waited another fifteen minutes. Then he said, “Let’s get started. For those of you without wireless sets, the war news is good. We are driving on Columbus, Ohio. The town will fall soon, unless something very surprising happens. In the East, our airplanes have bombed Washington and Baltimore and Philadelphia and New York. We have also bombed the oil fields in Sequoyah, so
los Estados Unidos
will not get any use from the state they stole from us. We are going to beat those people.”

A pleased murmur ran through the Freedom Party men. A lot of them had fought in the Great War. Hearing about things happening on U.S. soil instead of a massive U.S. invasion of the Confederate States felt good.

“You will also have heard that the Empire of Mexico has declared war on the United States,” Quinn said. Another murmur ran through the room. This one was half pleased, half scornful. Sonorans and Chihuahuans, these days, looked at Mexicans the way a lot of white Confederates looked at
them:
as lazy good-for-nothings living in the land of perpetual
mañana.
That might not have been fair, but it was real.

Somebody behind Rodriguez asked, “How much good can Mexico do us?”

“Against
los Estados Unidos, los Estados Confederados
need men,” Quinn replied. “We have the factories to give them helmets and rifles and boots and everything else they require. But getting more
soldados
up to the front can only help.”