The Victorious Opposition (13 page)

“Heh,” Jake said. “We’ve already taken care of that.” He thumbed the intercom on his desk. “All right, Lulu. You can let Chief Justice McReynolds come in now.”

The door to the president’s private office opened. Featherston got only the briefest glimpse of his secretary before James McReynolds swept into the room, slamming the door behind him. He wore his black robes. They added authority to his entrance, but he would have had plenty on his own. Though a few years past seventy, he moved like a much younger man. He’d lost his hair in front, which made his forehead even higher than it would have otherwise. His long face was red with fury.

“Featherston,” he said without preamble, “you
are
a son of a bitch.”

“Takes one to know one,” Jake said equably. “Have a seat.”

McReynolds shook his head. “No. I don’t even want to be in the same room with you, let alone sit down with you. How dare you, Featherston? How
dare
you?”

With a smile, Koenig said, “I think he’s seen the new budget, Mr. President.”

“You shut up, you—you stinking Party hack,” McReynolds snarled. “I’m here to talk to the head goon. How
dare
you abolish the Supreme Court?”

Before answering, Jake chose a fine Habana from the humidor on his desk. He made a production of clipping the end and lighting the cigar. “You torpedoed my river bill,” he said. “No telling how much more trouble you’ll make for me down the line. And so . . .” He shrugged. “Good-bye. I don’t fool around with people who make trouble for me, Mr. Chief Justice. I kill ’em.”

“But you can’t get rid of the Supreme Court of the Confederate States just like
that
!” McReynolds snapped his fingers.

“Hell I can’t. Just like
that
is right.” Jake snapped his fingers, too. Then he turned to Ferdinand Koenig. “Tell him how, Ferd. You’ve got all the details straight.”

Actually, the lawyers who worked under the attorney general were the ones who’d got everything straight. But Koenig could keep things straight once the lawyers had set them out for him—and he had notes to help him along. Glancing down at them, he said, “Here’s the first sentence of Article Three of the Confederate Constitution, Mr. Chief Justice. It says—”

“I know what Article Three of the Constitution says, God damn you!” James McReynolds burst out.

Koenig shrugged. He had the whip hand, and he knew it. “I’ll quote it anyway, so we keep things straight like the president said. It goes, ‘The judicial power of the Confederate States shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.’ ”

“Yes!” McReynolds stabbed out a furious finger. “And that means you can do whatever you please with or to the district courts, but you have to keep your cotton-pickin’ mitts off the Supreme Court.”

“No, sir.” The attorney general shook his head. Jake Featherston leaned back in his chair and blew a perfect smoke ring, enjoying the show. Koenig went on, “That’s not what it means, and I can prove it. There
was
no Supreme Court when the Confederate States started out. None at all. In 1863, just after we finished licking the damnyankees in the War of Secession, Jeff Davis backed a bill setting up a Supreme Court, but it didn’t pass. He was wrangling with Congress the way he usually did, and so the CSA didn’t get a Supreme Court till”—he checked his notes for the exact date—“till May 27, 1866.”

“But we haven’t been without one since,” James McReynolds insisted. “No one has ever dreamt that we
could
be without one. It’s . . . unimaginable, is what it is.”

“No it’s not, on account of I imagined it.” Jake tapped the fine gray ash from his Habana into an ashtray made out of the sawed-off base of a shell casing. “And what I imagine, I do. Ever since I got into the Freedom Party, people have said to me, ‘You don’t dare do this. You don’t dare do that. You don’t dare do the other thing.’ They’re wrong every goddamn time, but they keep saying it. You think you’re so high and mighty in your fancy black robe, you can tell me what I can do and what I can’t. But you better listen to me. Nobody tells Jake Featherston what to do.
Nobody.
You got that?”

McReynolds stared at him. “We have Congressional elections coming up this fall, Mr. Featherston. The Whigs and the Radical Liberals will make you pay for your high-handedness.”

“Think so, do you?” Jake’s grin was predatory. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a five-dollar goldpiece, and let it ring sweetly off the desktop. Thomas Jackson’s bearded countenance stared up at him. “Here’s a Stonewall says we’ll have more men in the next Congress than we do in this one.”

“You’re on.” McReynolds leaned forward and thrust out his hand. Featherston took it. For an old man, the Supreme Court justice had a strong grip, and he squeezed as if he wished he could break Featherston’s fingers. “The people will know you and your party for what you are.”

“Who do you think sent us here to do their business?” Jake answered. “We set out to do it, and then you seven sour bastards wouldn’t let us. And now you’ve got the nerve to blame me and the Freedom Party for what you went and did?”

“That law plainly violated the Constitution,” McReynolds said stubbornly. “If you violate it from now on, who’s going to stand up to you and call you to account?”

That was the key question. The answer, of course, was
nobody
. Featherston didn’t say it. If McReynolds couldn’t see it for himself, the president didn’t want to point it out to him. No matter how true it was, better to keep it quiet.

“You do see, though, Mr. Chief Justice, what we’re doing here is legal as can be?” Ferdinand Koenig said. “You may not like it, but we’ve got the right to do it.”

“You’re breaking every precedent this country knows,” McReynolds thundered. In the tradition-minded Confederate States, that was an even more serious charge than it might have been in other lands. “You’re not politicians at all. You’re crooks and pirates, that’s what you are.”

“We’re the folks who won the election, that’s what we are. You forgot it, and you’re going to pay for it,” Jake Featherston said. “And the attorney general asked you a question. I think you’d better answer it.”

“And if I don’t?” James McReynolds asked.

With no expression at all in his voice, Featherston answered, “Then you’re a dead man.”

McReynolds started to laugh. Then he took a second look at the president of the Confederate States. The laughter died unborn. The chief justice’s face went a blotchy yellow-white. “You mean that,” he whispered.

“You bet I do.” Featherston had a .45 in his desk drawer. No one around the office would fuss if it went off. And he could always persuade a doctor to say McReynolds had died of heart failure. “Mr. McReynolds, I always mean what I say. Some folks don’t want to believe me, but I do. I told you you’d be sorry if you messed with our good laws, and I reckon you are. Now . . . Ferd there asked you a question. He asked if you thought getting rid of you black-robed buzzards was legal. You going to answer him, or do I have to
show
you I mean what I say? It’s the last lesson you’ll ever get, and you won’t have a hell of a lot of time to cipher it out.”

The jurist licked his lips. Jake didn’t think he was a coward. But how often did a man meet someone who showed in the most matter-of-fact way possible that he would not only kill him but enjoy doing it? Jake smiled in anticipation. Later, he thought that smile, more than anything else, was what broke McReynolds. Spitting out the words, and coming very close to spitting outright, the chief justice of a court going out of business snarled, “Yes, God damn you, it’s legal. Technically. It’s also a disgrace, and so are both of you.”

He stormed from the president’s office. As he opened the door, though, he nervously looked back over his shoulder. Was he wondering if Jake would shoot him in the back?
I would if I had to,
Jake thought. Not now, though. Now McReynolds had backed down. No point to killing a man who’d yielded. The ones who wouldn’t quit—they were the ones who needed killing.

Koenig said, “Now we find out how much of a stink the Whigs and the Rad Libs kick up about this in the papers and on the wireless.”

“Won’t be too much. That’s what Saul says, and I expect he’s right,” Featherston answered. “They’re like McReynolds—they’re starting to see bad things happen to folks who don’t go along with us. How many papers and wireless stations have burned down the past few months?”

“Been a few,” the attorney general allowed. “Funny how the cops don’t have a hell of a lot of luck tracking down the boys who did it.” He and Jake both laughed. Koenig raised a forefinger. “They did catch—or they said they caught—those fellows in New Orleans. Too bad for the D.A. down there that the jury wouldn’t convict.”

“We had to work on that,” Jake said. “Harder than we should have, too. That Long who ran for vice president on the Rad Lib ticket, he’s a first-class bastard, no two ways about it. Trouble, and nothing else but. If we hadn’t beat him to the punch, he’d’ve made the Whigs sweat himself. Now he reckons he can make us sweat instead.”

“Bad mistake,” Koenig said thoughtfully. “Might be the last one he ever makes.”

“That’s something we don’t want traced back to us, though,” Featherston said. “All the little ones—those are what make people afraid. We can use as many of them as we need. This—this’d be a little too raw just now. We’ve got to nail the lid down tighter. After the elections things’ll be easier—we’ll be able to get away with whatever we need. ’Course, I don’t suppose we’ll need so much then.”

“McReynolds thinks we’ll lose,” the attorney general observed.

They both laughed. Jake couldn’t think of the last time he’d heard anything so funny. “That reminds me,” he said. “How are we doing with the politicals?”

He already knew, in broad terms. But Ferdinand Koenig was the man with the details. “Jails are filling up all over the country,” he answered. “Several states—Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia—have dragged in so many of those fuckers, the jails won’t hold ’em any more. They’re building camps out in the country for the overflow.”

“That’s good. That’s damn good,” Jake said. “We’ve got a lot of things left to do in this country, and we’ll need people for hard work. Nobody’s going to say boo if a bunch of prisoners go sweat all day in the hot sun, eh?”

“Not likely.” Koenig, who was a big, blocky man, contrived to make himself look not just fat but bonelessly fat. “Render all the lard out of those porky Whig bastards who never did any honest work in their lives.”

Featherston nodded emphatically. “You bet. And getting those camps built now’ll come in handy, too. We’ll have plenty of uses for places like that.” He nodded again. “Yes, sir.
Plenty
of uses.” He saw a piece of paper sticking out of a pile on his desk, pulled it free, and grinned. “Oh, good. I was afraid I’d lost this one. I’d’ve felt like a damn fool asking the secretary of agriculture to send me another copy.”

“What is it?” Koenig asked.

“Report on the agricultural-machinery construction project,” Featherston answered. “Won’t be long before we’ve got tractors and harvesters and combines coming out of our ears. Gives us practice making big motor vehicles, you know?” He and Koenig chuckled again. “Helps farming along, too—don’t need near so many people on the land with those machines doing most of the work.”

The attorney general smiled a peculiar smile. “Yeah,” he said.

IV

C
olonel Irving Morrell was elbow-deep in the engine compartment of the new barrel when somebody shouted his name. “Hang on for a second,” he yelled back without looking up. To Sergeant Michael Pound, he said, “What do you think of this carburetor?”

“Whoever designed it ought to be staked out in the hot sun, with a trail of honey running up to his mouth for the ants to follow,” Pound answered at once. “Maybe another honey trail, too—lower down.”

“Whew!” Morrell shuddered. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Sergeant: I may come up with nasty ideas, but you have worse ones.”

Someone yelled his name again, adding, “You’re ordered to report to the base commandant immediately, Colonel! Immediately!”

That made Morrell look up from what he was doing. It also made him look down at himself—in dismay. He wore a mechanic’s green-gray coveralls whose front was liberally smeared and spattered with grease. He’d rolled up the coveralls’ sleeves, but that only meant his hands and forearms had got filthy instead. He wiped them on a rag, but that was hardly more than a token effort.

“Can’t I clean up a little first?” he asked.

The messenger—a sergeant—shook his head. “Sir, I wouldn’t if I were you. When Brigadier General Ballou said
immediately
, he meant it. It’s got to do with the mess down in Houston.”

Sergeant Pound, who’d kept on guddling inside the engine compartment, poked his head up at that. “You’d better go, sir,” he said.

He had no business butting into Morrell’s affairs, which didn’t mean he was wrong. After the war, the USA had made a United State out of the chunk of Texas they conquered from the CSA. Houston had always been the most reluctant of the United States, even more so than Kentucky, and looked longingly across the border toward the country from which it had been torn. Since the Freedom Party triumphed in the Confederacy, Houston hadn’t been reluctant—it had been downright insurrectionary. It had a Freedom Party of its own, which had swept local elections in 1934 and sent a Congressman to Philadelphia. Every day seemed to bring a new riot.

Tossing the rag to the ground, Morrell nodded to the messenger. “Take me to him. If it’s got to do with Houston, it won’t wait.”

Brigadier General Charles Ballou, the commandant at Fort Leavenworth, was a round little man with a round face and an old-fashioned gray Kaiser Bill mustache. Morrell saluted on coming into his office. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said. “I apologize for the mess I’m in.”

“It’s all right, Colonel,” Ballou said. “I wanted you here as fast as possible, and here you are. I believe you know Brigadier General MacArthur?”

“Yes, sir.” Morrell turned to the other officer in the room and saluted once more. “Good to see you again, sir. It’s been a while.”

“So it has.” Daniel MacArthur returned the salute, then sucked in smoke from a cigarette he kept in a long holder. He made an odd contrast to Ballou, for he was very long, very lean, and very craggy. He’d commanded a division under Custer during the war, which was where he and Morrell had come to know each other. He’d had a star on each shoulder even then; he was only a handful of years older than Morrell, and had been the youngest division commander and one of the youngest general officers in the U.S. Army. Since then, perhaps not least because he always said what he thought regardless of consequences, his career hadn’t flourished.

Brigadier General Ballou said, “MacArthur has just been assigned as military commandant of Houston.”

“That’s right.” Daniel MacArthur thrust out a granite jaw. “And I want a sizable force of barrels to accompany me there. Nothing like armor, I would say, for discouraging rebels against the United States. Who better than yourself, Colonel, to command such a force?”

His voice had a certain edge to it. He’d tried to break through Confederate lines with infantry and artillery alone. He’d failed, repeatedly. With barrels, Morrell had succeeded.
Does he want me to fail now?
Morrell wondered. But he could answer only one way, and he did: “Sir, I am altogether at your service. I wish I had more modern barrels to place at your disposal, but even the obsolete ones will serve against anything but other barrels.”

MacArthur nodded brusquely. He stubbed out the cigarette, then put another one in the holder and lit it. “Just so,” he said. “How many barrels and crews can you have ready to board trains and move south by this time three days from now? We are going to put the fear of the Lord and of the United States Army in the state of Houston.”

“Yes, sir.” Morrell thought for a bit, then said, “Sir, I can have thirty ready in that time. The limit isn’t barrels; it’s crews. The modern ones need only a third as many men as the old-fashioned machines.”

“Thirty will do,” MacArthur said. “I’d expected you to say twenty, or perhaps fifteen. Now I expect you to live up to your promise. You may go, Colonel.” He’d always had the sweetness and charm of an alligator snapper turtle. But, if you needed someone to bite off a hand, he was the man for the job.

Fuming, Morrell left Brigadier General Ballou’s office. Fuming still, he had thirty-two barrels ready to load onto flatcars at the required time. Daniel MacArthur’s cigarette and holder twitched in his mouth when he counted the machines. He said not a word.

The trains left on time. People started shooting at them as soon as they passed from Kansas to Sequoyah, which had also belonged to the CSA before the war. Sequoyah had been a Confederate state; it was not a state in the USA. It was occupied territory. The United States did not want it, and the feeling was mutual.

Before long, Morrell put men back in the barrels as the train rattled south and west. They could use the machine guns to shoot back. More shots came their way in the east, where the Five Civilized Tribes had dominated life in Confederate times. The United States weren’t soft on Indians, as the Confederate States had been—especially not on Indians who’d looked to Richmond rather than Philadelphia.

But, bad as Sequoyah was, it didn’t prepare anybody for Houston. The train was two days late getting into Lubbock because of repeated sabotage to the tracks. Signs screamed out warnings:
SABOTEURS WILL BE SHOT WITHOUT TRIAL!
“Maybe they can’t read here,” Sergeant Pound suggested after one long, long delay.

Then they passed a trackside gallows with three bodies dangling from it. One of the bodies had a Confederate battle flag draped over it. That was what Morrell thought at first, anyhow. Then he realized the colors were reversed, which made it a Freedom Party flag, not one from the CSA.

He’d seen plenty of
YANKS OUT!
graffiti when he was stationed up in Kamloops, British Columbia. Those were as nothing next to the ones he saw as the train slowed to a stop coming into the Lubbock railroad yard.
LEAVE US ALONE!
was a common favorite.
CSA!
was quick and easy to write. So were the red-white-red stripes and the blue X’s that suggested Confederate flags.
LET US GO BACK TO OUR COUNTRY!
was long, and so less common; the same held true for
HOUSTON WAS A TRAITOR!
But the one word seemingly everywhere was
FREEDOM!

“Good Lord, sir!” Sergeant Pound said, eyeing the graffiti with much less equanimity than he’d shown rolling past the hanged Houstonians. “What
have
we got ourselves into?”

“Trouble,” Morrell answered. That was the only word that came to mind.

“We will advance into downtown Lubbock,” Brigadier General MacArthur declared as the barrels came down off their flatcars. “I have declared full martial law in this state. That declaration is now being published in newspapers and broadcast over the wireless. The citizens of Houston are responsible for their own behavior, and have been warned of this. If anyone hinders your progress towards or through the city in any way, shoot to kill. Do not allow yourselves to be endangered. Is that clear?”

No one denied it. Daniel MacArthur climbed up onto the turret of one of the modern barrels (to Morrell’s relief, MacArthur didn’t choose his). He struck a dramatic pose, saying,
Forward!
without words. The barrels rumbled south, toward central Lubbock.

They couldn’t advance at much above a walking pace, because most of them were slow, flatulent leftovers from the Great War. Morrell knew the handful of modern machines could have got there in a third the time. Whether that would have done them any good was another question.

Lubbock didn’t look like a town that had seen rioting. It looked like a town that had seen war. Blocks weren’t just burnt out. They were shattered, either by artillery fire or bombardment from the air. The twin stenches of sour smoke and old death lingered, now weaker, now stronger, but never absent.

Not many people were on the streets. The eyes of the ones who were . . . In Canada, plenty of people had hated and resented American soldiers for occupying the country. Morrell had thought he was used to it. But, as with the graffiti, what was on the faces of the people here put Canada in the shade. These people didn’t just want him gone. They didn’t even just want him dead. They wanted him to suffer a long time before he died. If he ever fell into their hands, he would, too.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a shot rang out from an apartment building that hadn’t been wrecked. A bullet sparked off the barrel Daniel MacArthur was riding, about a foot from his leg.

At the sound of the shot, all the men and women on the street automatically threw themselves flat. They knew what was coming. And it came. Half a dozen barrels opened fire on that building, the old ones with their side-mounted machine guns, the new with turret cannon and coaxial machine guns. Windows vanished. So did a couple of big stretches of brick wall between the windows as cannon shells struck home. Glass and fragments of brick flew in all directions. People on the street crawled out of the way; they knew better than to get up and expose themselves to the gunfire.

Through it all, Daniel MacArthur never moved a muscle. He had nerve and he had style. Based on what Morrell remembered from the Great War, none of that surprised him. Did MacArthur have brains? Morrell wasn’t so sure there.

Only after the front of the apartment building was wrecked did the brigadier general wave the barrels forward once more.
They make a desert and they call it peace,
Morrell thought. But no one fired any more shots before the armored detachment reached its perimeter in the center of town.

Once they got there, MacArthur summoned reporters from the
Gazette
and the
Statesman
, the two local newspapers. He said, “Gentlemen, here is something your readers need to know: if they interfere with the U.S. Army or disobey military authority, they will end up dead. And, having died, they will be buried in the soil of the United States, for they cannot and will not detach this state from this country. All they can do is spill their own blood to no purpose. Take that back to your plants and print it.”

They did. The same message went out over the wireless, and in the papers in El Paso and other towns in Houston. Contingents of Morrell’s barrels, along with infantrymen and state police, reinforced it. The rioting eased. Morrell was as pleased as he was surprised. Maybe Brigadier General MacArthur was pretty smart after all. Or maybe someone on the other side of the border had decided the rioting
should
ease for the time being. Morrell wished like hell that hadn’t occurred to him.

M
iguel and Jorge Rodriguez stood side by side in the farmhouse kitchen. They both looked very proud. They wore identical broad-brimmed cloth hats, short-sleeved cotton shirts, sturdy denim shorts, socks, and stout shoes. They also wore identical proud smiles.

Hats, shirts, and shorts were of the light brown color the Confederate Army, for no reason Hipolito Rodriguez had ever been able to understand, called butternut. On the pocket above the left breast of each shirt was sewn a Confederate battle flag with colors reversed: the emblem of the Freedom Party.

“I will miss your work,” Rodriguez told his two older sons. “I will miss it, but the country needs it.”

“That’s right, Father,” Jorge said. “And they’ll pay us money—not a lot of money, but some—to do the work.”

“I’ll help you, Father,” Pedro—the youngest son—said. He wasn’t old enough to join the Freedom Youth Corps yet, and had been sick-jealous of his brothers ever since they did. Being useful on the farm wasn’t much consolation, but it was what he had, and he made the most of it.

“I know you will.” Rodriguez set a hand on his shoulder. “You’re a good boy. All of you are good boys.”

“Sí,”
his wife said. She probably hadn’t followed the whole conversation, most of which was in English, but she got that. In Spanish, she went on, “I’ll miss you while you are gone.” The tears in her eyes spoke a universal language.

“Father was right,” Miguel said importantly. “The country
does
need us, so you shouldn’t cry. We’ll do big things for Sonora, big things for Baroyeca. I hear”—his voice dropped to an excited whisper—“I hear we are going to put in the poles to carry the wires to bring electricity down from Buenavista. Electricity!”

Instead of being impressed, Magdalena Rodriguez was practical: “We already have poles to bring the telegraph. Why not use those?”

Miguel and Jorge looked at each other. Plainly, neither one of them knew the answer. Just as plainly, neither one wanted to admit it. At last, Jorge said, “Because these poles are
special
, Mother.” He might not even have noticed switching back to Spanish to talk to Magdalena.

“Come on, boys,” Hipolito said. “Let’s go into town.” His sons had grumbled that they were almost grown men, that they were going off to do men’s work, and that they didn’t need their father escorting them to Baroyeca. He’d explained he was proud of them and wanted to show them off. He’d also explained he would wallop them if they grumbled any more. They’d stopped.

Before they left, he made sure his own Freedom Party pin was on his shirt. They trooped out of the farmhouse together. Neither the crow that fluttered up from the roof nor the two lizards that scuttled into a hole seemed much impressed. Before long, Rodriguez’s sons were less delighted, too. “My feet hurt,” Miguel complained. Jorge nodded.