The Victorious Opposition (31 page)

“Who, me?” Moss said. Finley laughed.

They walked out to the airstrip together. Major Finley said, “I’ve heard you spend your time getting Canucks off the hook.”

To Moss’ relief, he sounded curious, not hostile. “I do try,” the lawyer answered. “It needs doing. Even if you lost the war, you need decent representation. Maybe you especially need it if you lost the war.”

Sandbagged machine-gun nests protected the field. The soldiers in them looked very alert. Pointing to one of those nests, Finley said, “I’d be happier about having somebody representing the damn Canucks if all of ’em were convinced they
had
lost the damn war. But we both know it isn’t so. That bomb over in Manitoba, and the big one in your town a couple of years ago . . .”

“Oh, yeah,” Moss said. “That one almost caught me. Still, don’t you think things would be worse if the Canadians decided the whole system was rigged against them?”

Shrugging, Finley answered, “Damned if I know. But then, they don’t pay me to worry about politics—which is all to the good, far as I’m concerned.”

Moss only half heard him. By then, they’d come up to the closest Wright 27. The air above the engine mount still shimmered with released heat. Two machine guns on this side of the mount fired through the prop; Moss assumed there were two more on the far side. He’d never flown an aeroplane that carried more than two machine guns. With four, he would have felt like the Grim Reaper in the sky. And yet he knew the armament was nothing out of the ordinary these days.

“You never piloted a machine that wasn’t canvas and wire, did you?” Rex Finley asked, setting an affectionate hand on the blue-painted aluminum skin of the wing.

“Nope,” Moss answered. “Started out in a Curtiss Super Hudson pusher, ended up in our copy of Kaiser Bill’s Albatros. This is all new to me. Looks like a shark with wings. All you’d need to do would be to paint eyes and a mouth full of teeth on the front end.”

“Not a half bad idea,” Finley said. “Well, go on up.”

The fighter, Moss discovered, had a mounting stirrup just in front of the left wing. He used the stirrup to climb up onto the wing. The aeroplane rocked under his weight. If he’d climbed onto the wing of one of the aeroplanes he’d flown in the Great War, though, odds were he would have stuck his foot straight through the doped fabric. The Wright 27 had a closed cockpit, for better streamlining and because the wind at the high speeds at which it flew would have played havoc with a pilot’s vision, goggles or no. After some fumbling, Moss found the latch and slid back the canopy.

“Good thing I haven’t got fat, or I’d never fit in here,” he remarked as he settled himself in the seat.

Major Finley slammed the canopy shut above him. The cockpit smelled of leather and sweat and oil. Its being closed made it feel even more cramped than it really was. The instrument panel bristled with dials. Along with the altimeter, compass, airspeed indicator, inclinometer, and fuel gauge he was used to, instruments monitored engine performance in a dozen different ways, ammunition supply, propellor pitch, and the electrical system. The machine also boasted a wireless set, which had its own profusion of dials.
You’d need to go to college all over again to understand what half this stuff does,
Moss thought dizzily.

But the essentials hadn’t changed. There was the stick, and there was the firing button on top of it. His right thumb found that button with unconscious ease. The gunsight in the fighter made what he’d used during the Great War seem a ten-cent toy by comparison.

He jerked when Finley rapped on the thick—armored?—glass with his knuckles. The base commandant gestured to show he should get out. With an odd reluctance, he nodded. Finley pushed back the canopy. Moss felt like a sardine getting out of its can as he extracted himself.

“What do you think?” Finley asked.

“That’s . . . the cat’s meow, all right.” Moss hesitated, then plunged: “Any chance I could . . . fly it?”

“When was the last time you flew?” the officer inquired.

Moss wished he could lie, but judged that would make things worse, not better. With a sigh, he told the truth: “Not long after the Great War ended.”

Rex Finley nodded. “About what I figured—and I would have kicked you off my field if you’d tried to tell me it was week before last. If you’re going to take another stab at it, I want you to put in some time on trainers before you smash up a Wright machine. Even a trainer nowadays is a hotter crate than anything you’ve ever flown.”

“I’ll do that,” Moss said at once. “Jesus, you bet I will. I figured you’d say you didn’t want anything to do with me.”

“Nope. You were an ace. You knew what you were doing up there,” Finley said. “With any luck at all, you can find it again. And you know what? One of these days, we’re liable to need more people like you again. Or do you think I’m wrong?” Moss wished he could have said yes, but that too would have been a lie.

A
fter her time in Paris and Richmond—especially after her time in Paris—Anne Colleton found St. Matthews, South Carolina, much too small and confining. She did what she could to fight the feeling by making forays into Columbia and Charleston, but that helped only so much. She had to come back to the flat where she’d lived since Red Negroes almost killed her on the Marshlands plantation.

The Confederate government—or maybe it was the Freedom Party—had paid the rent on the flat while she was abroad. She hadn’t had to put her worldly goods into storage and then exhume them when she took up her life in St. Matthews again. That was something, anyhow. Something . . . but not enough.

In Paris, she’d haggled over alliances and foreign affairs in her fluent French. In St. Matthews, people talked about the weather and crops and what they’d heard on the wireless the night before. But for the talk about the wireless, Anne had grown up on such conversation. It seemed all the more stifling now.

When her brother came over to visit one warm, muggy afternoon in late May, she burst out, “If I hear one more word about tractors and combines and harvesters, the loudmouth who says that word is going to be awfully sorry.”

Tom Colleton shrugged. “Sorry, Sis,” he said. “That stuff is important here. It’s important all over the CSA.”

“It’s
boring
,” Anne replied with great sincerity. “All the yahoos bragging about the fancy equipment they’ve got . . . They don’t get that excited about the equipment in their drawers, for Christ’s sake.”

Her brother turned red. “You can’t talk like that around here,” he said, and then, before she could further scandalize him by asking why not, he went on, “Besides, tractors and such-like
are
important. You notice how many niggers have been coming through town lately?”

“I should say I have,” Anne answered. “One more reason to keep guns where I can get at them in a hurry.”

“Yeah, I know. Theft is up. That’s a problem,” Tom said. “But those niggers are sharecroppers who don’t have work any more because the machinery’s doing it instead of them. We don’t need nearly so many people tied down to the land as we did when the Great War started.”

Anne started to say,
And so?
Then she remembered that pushing hard for farm machinery was part of Featherston’s program.

Before she could remark on that, Tom said, “I don’t know what the towns’ll do if all the niggers from the countryside stream into them at once. Do you know? Does the president?”

“If he does, he isn’t telling me,” Anne said.

“No? Too bad. He’d make a lot of friends if he came out and said what he has in mind. This is liable to hurt him when elections come around this fall.”

That made Anne smile. She couldn’t help herself. “Do you think anything will get in the way of the Freedom Party at election time? Anything at all?”

Her brother’s face was a study in astonishment. “But there’ve always been elections,” he said.

“The Freedom Party is in.” Anne might have been an adult reproving a child’s naÏveté. “It’s going to stay in till it gets where it’s going and the Confederate States get where they’re going.”

“Christ!” Tom said. “I don’t think I much care for that.”

“Tom . . .” Now Anne spoke urgently, warning him against disaster. “Do you realize how big a chance you’re taking saying that even to me? If you say it to somebody else—and it could be somebody you trust—you’re liable to end up in more trouble than you’ve ever imagined.”

Tom Colleton started to say something else. Very visibly, he changed his mind. But he couldn’t let it go. He asked, “And you work with these people? You work for these people?” By the way he looked at her, he might have been seeing her for the first time.

But Anne didn’t hesitate before she nodded. “I sure do,” she said. “Because they’re going to take the CSA where I want us to go—right back up to the top.”

“I’d sooner—” Her brother caught himself again. His face twisted. “All right, Sis. I’ll shut up. If I talk too goddamn much, I’m liable to end up in a camp with a big P stenciled on the back of my shirt. Isn’t that right?”

She winced. “Not if you’re talking to me.”

“That isn’t what you said a minute ago.”

“I just wanted to remind you that you need to be careful. And you do.”

“Because if I’m not careful, I
will
end up in a camp.” That was statement, not question. Tom paused to light a cigarette. After a couple of long, angry puffs, he added, “If that’s where the Freedom Party is taking the country, to hell with me if I want to go along. Am I a nigger? Or am I a white man who can stand up on his hind legs and speak his mind if he wants to?”

“We’ve all got to give up something if we’re going to get revenge on the USA,” Anne said soothingly. “The Yankees put up with keeping quiet and doing what they were told and standing in line for rationed goods for thirty years so they could get even with us.”

The coal on that cigarette glowed a fierce, fiery red when Tom took another drag. Smoke fumed from him as he replied, “They didn’t give up elections, did they? They didn’t stop talking when they felt like talking. Even during the war, the Socialists were telling the Democrats to go to the devil. You should’ve heard some of the mouthy prisoners we caught up in Virginia.”

“Yes, they had elections,” Anne said. “They had them, but how much did they matter? From the the Second Mexican War up till they licked us in the Great War, the Democrats won every single time. So they had them. They kept people happy with them. But the elections didn’t really
count
. Maybe the Freedom Party will keep on doing that, so people will stay happy. I don’t know. The Whigs here did.”

“And when the Whigs lost, they got out of office and handed things over to Featherston, the way they were supposed to.” Tom stubbed out the cigarette, then lit another one. “If the Freedom Party loses, will it do the same?”

No,
Anne thought. She decided she didn’t want to be that blunt, so she answered, “I don’t see the Freedom Party losing any time soon. People have work where they didn’t before. I was in Richmond for the Olympics. I saw what a hit they were. People are proud again. They
want
to vote Freedom.”

Before the war, Tom had been content, even eager, for her to do his thinking for him. He wasn’t any more. He was his own man now. Through the haze of tobacco smoke around him—he might have been putting up a smoke screen—he said, “You didn’t answer my question.”

I know I didn’t. You weren’t supposed to notice.
Anne said, “I don’t think the Freedom Party will lose an election for quite a while—not one that’s really important to it, anyway—except maybe in Louisiana, and that hardly counts.”

It still wasn’t a direct answer. It seemed to come close enough. Tom said, “All Featherston needs is a crown, like the one the Emperor of Mexico wears.”

“Think whatever you want,” Anne said wearily. “You care about your family, though. Be careful where you shoot off your mouth. Please.”

“Why? Don’t you have dear old Jake wrapped around your finger?”

Anne’s lips skinned back from her teeth in what was anything but a smile. At that, the question could have been worse; at least he’d asked about her finger and not some other part of her anatomy. She had to hide a small shiver as she answered, “Don’t be stupid, Tom. Anybody who’s ever tried to get Jake Featherston to do what he wants—or what she wants—has ended up either sorry or dead. And before you ask, I think it’s more luck than anything else that I’m still here.”

More than her words, she thought, her tone got through to Tom. His eyes, blue as her own, went wide. He blurted, “Sweet Jesus Christ, Anne, you’re scared to death of him!”

“Anybody who’s met him and who isn’t is a fool,” she said. “Standing up against him is like standing up to a hurricane. You can yell and scream and fight and carry on, but he’ll blow you over just the same.”

He laughed. She’d known he would, and she’d known why. Sure enough, he said, “That’s how people talk about you, you know.”

“Oh, yes.” She waved the words aside for now; she’d assess the hurt later. For the time being, she wanted to make sure she was understood: “But he’s . . . he’s
serious
about things. He’s serious
all
the time. And what he wants, happens. I don’t always know how it does, but it does. Think about it. The Whigs had run things here for as long as the Confederate States were a country. If
they
couldn’t stop Jake Featherston—and they damned well couldn’t—what can? Nothing. Nobody.”

Tom Colleton shook his head in disbelief. “You talk about him like he really is a hurricane. He’s just a man, Sis.”

Anne shook her head, too. “Oh, he’s a man, all right. He sleeps. He eats. He goes to the toilet.” That jerked a startled laugh out of her brother. She went on, “He’ll die one of these days. If that nigger had shot him at the Olympics, he’d’ve died right then. But as long as he’s alive, he’s not
just
a man. For a long time, I thought he was, too. So did a lot of people. Look what’s happened since. We were wrong, every single one of us.”

Another cigarette out of the pack. The scrape and flare of another match. The harsh stink of sulfur before the mellower smell of tobacco smoke. Tom blew a smoke ring up toward the ceiling, maybe to give himself time to think. He said, “I never reckoned anybody could make you talk like that.”