The Victorious Opposition (34 page)

“Only one,” Ruiz answered. “We gave him a set of lumps and sent him home.”

Rodriguez walked inside to cast his ballot. He voted the straight Freedom Party ticket. The way the ballot was printed, that was easy. Voting for the Whigs or the Radical Liberals was much harder. He put the completed ballot in the box. “Hipolito Rodriguez has voted,” intoned the clerk in charge of the box. Hearing his name spoken so seriously always made him feel important. Another clerk wrote a line through his name on the registration roster so he couldn’t vote twice.

He wondered how much difference that made. The people who would count the ballots were Freedom Party men. Back in the days when Sonora had been in the Radical Liberals’ pockets, Rodriguez had often wondered how much announced counts had to do with real ones. He still did. The Freedom Party seized advantages whenever and however it could.

After voting, he took his sons to Freedom Party headquarters. Robert Quinn had seen them before, but not lately. “
Por Dios, Señor
Rodriguez, you did not tell me you were raising football players,” he said in his deliberate Spanish. “Where did you get these enormous young men?”

Miguel and Jorge both stood even taller and threw back their shoulders to make them look wider. They liked the idea of being football players. The new U.S.-style game, with forward passing, had really caught on in Sonora since the Great War. Some open ground, goal posts, and a ball were all you needed.

Miguel said, “All the good food we got in the Freedom Youth Corps helped us finish growing.” He’d said the same thing to Rodriguez not long after coming home, and in the same—English—words. Rodriguez guessed he’d heard it a lot in the Corps. Hastily, though, Miguel added, “We eat well at home, too,” and Jorge nodded. Their mother had been hurt when they praised the food they’d eaten in the Freedom Youth Corps.

Quinn nodded now. “I’m sure you do,” he said, still in Spanish. He bent over backwards not to seem to be ramming English down anyone’s throat. In that, he and other Freedom Party men in Sonora were the opposite of a lot of English-speakers Rodriguez had known. The Freedom Youth Corps operated mostly in English, but the younger generation was already more at home in the language of most of the Confederate States. Quinn went on, “And what will you do now that you’ve been discharged from the Corps?”

“Help Father on the farm for now, sir,” Jorge said.

“I wish we could do something more for the country, though,” Miguel said.

“It could be the day will come when you can,” Quinn answered smoothly.

Miguel wants to be conscripted. That’s what he’s saying, though he doesn’t even know it.
The realization struck Rodriguez like a thunderbolt. And Jorge was nodding.
I’ll talk with them,
their father thought.
He
hadn’t wanted to be conscripted. But when his time came, during the war, the government was shooting young men in Sonora who refused to report. He’d gone in and taken his chances with Yankee lead. He was still here, so he supposed he’d done the right thing.

Robert Quinn went on, “Meanwhile, of course, doing things for the
Partido de Libertad
is almost the same as doing things for
los Estados Confederados
. Your father is a good man, a patriotic man. You’ll follow in his footsteps, eh?”

Miguel and Jorge both nodded then. Rodriguez said, “I will tell you what I am. I am a man who is lucky in his sons.”

“There is no luck better than that,” Quinn said. “Do you want to grab a club and take the afternoon shift on watching the polling place? Bring your boys along; let them see how it’s done. Then come back here. Now that we have electricity, I’ve got a wireless set to let us hear returns.” He pointed to the box on his desk.

“Good,” Rodriguez said, nodding to the wireless almost as if it were a person. “We will see you here, then, after the polls close. Come on, boys.”

Out they went, and back to the
alcalde
’s house. When Miguel and Jorge saw that one of the men outside the polling place with their father was Felipe Rojas, who’d shown them the ropes when they joined the Freedom Youth Corps, they were very impressed. When they saw that Rojas didn’t roar at their father like the wrath of God, but treated him as an equal and a friend, they were even more impressed. Rodriguez carefully concealed his amusement.

And then his amusement dried up and blew away, for here came Don Gustavo, his old
patrón
, straight for the polling place. Don Gustavo’s name was on the list Felipe Rojas held. He came up to the Freedom Party men as if he were still a great power in the land, the power he’d been before 1933. His white shirt and string tie, his sharply creased black trousers and wide-brimmed black felt hat, his silver belt buckle and patent-leather shoes, all declared that he was no peasant, but a person of consequence. So did his thin little mustache and his prominent belly.

“Buenos días,”
he said, affably enough. “Excuse me, please, for I am going to vote.” He had nerve. He’d come without bodyguards. More than once, the men loyal to him had come up against those who followed the Freedom Party. They’d come off second best every time, and paid a heavy price in blood. Now Don Gustavo was doing his bold best to pretend none of that had ever happened.

No matter how bold that best was, it wasn’t going to get him into the polling place. “Freedom!” Felipe Rojas said in English. “You would do better,
señor,
to go home and stay there in peace.”

Don Gustavo’s nostrils flared angrily. “You speak of freedom, and yet you say I am not free to vote?”
He
stuck to Spanish, and Spanish of almost Castilian purity. His face was fiery red. Scorn came off him in waves. His hand slid toward his pocket. By the way the pocket sagged, a small pistol hid there.

Hipolito Rodriguez tightened his grip on his club. “Don’t do that,
señor,
” he said. “You may shoot us. You may even march in there and vote. But if you do, you are a dead man. Your family will die with you. The
Partido de Libertad
knows how to take revenge. Do you doubt it?”

He waited. Slowly, the high color faded from Don Gustavo’s cheeks and forehead, leaving him almost corpse-pale. He’d seen how the Freedom Party struck back. “Damn you,” he said. The Party men answered not a word. Don Gustavo’s shoulders sagged. He turned and walked away.

“¡Bueno, papa!”
Jorge said softly. Hipolito Rodriguez was only a peasant doing his best to make a living from a farm that could have been bigger and could have been on better land, but for the moment he felt ten feet tall.

Felipe Rojas took a pencil from a trouser pocket and checked Don Gustavo’s name off on the list of those who weren’t going to vote. The tiny sound the pencil point made on the paper was the sound of a system centuries old, a system that had endured under the flag of Spain, the flag of Mexico, and the flag of the Confederate States, falling to ruin.

“He backed down, did he?” Quinn said when the Freedom Party men returned to Party headquarters. “He’s not a hundred percent stupid, then, is he? He knows things have changed in Sonora, and changed for the better, too.”

The sound of the wireless set was another sound of change. The announcer, who spoke mostly English, but an English larded with Spanish words and turns of phrase, told of one Freedom Party victory after another in Congressional races and in state and local elections. The whole Confederacy lined up behind President Featherston and the party he’d built.

Well, almost the whole Confederacy. Rodriguez said, “He does not talk about the elections in Louisiana.”

Robert Quinn frowned, as if he wished Rodriguez hadn’t noticed. “Louisiana is . . . a problem,” he admitted. “But the Freedom Party solves problems. You can count on that.”

T
he
Remembrance
was a great ship. Her displacement matched that of any battleship in the U.S. Navy. All the same, the storm in the Atlantic flung the aeroplane carrier around like a toy boat in a bathtub also inhabited by a rambunctious four-year-old. Sam Carsten was glad he had a strong stomach. Plenty of sailors didn’t; the air in the ship’s corridors carried a faint but constant reek of vomit.

Somewhere off to the east lay the coast of North Carolina. The
Remembrance
and her aeroplanes were supposed to be keeping an eye on what the Confederates were up to. In weather and seas like this, she could neither launch aeroplanes nor land them once launched. About all she could do was pick up this, that, and the other thing in the wireless shack.

When Carsten wasn’t on duty, he spent a fair amount of time hanging around in the shack finding out whatever he could. A lot of the wireless traffic coming out of the CSA was in Morse, which he understood only haltingly. A lot of it was in code, which not even the sailors taking it down understood. But every now and then they tuned in to stations from Wilmington or Elizabeth City or Norfolk up in Virginia. Those fascinated him. Up until about the time his father was born, the USA and the CSA had been one country. Half an hour of listening to Confederate wireless was plenty to show him they’d gone their separate ways since the War of Secession.

Oh, the music the Confederates played wasn’t that much different from what he would have heard on a U.S. station. Even there, though, the Confederates’ tunes often had wilder rhythms to them than any band in the USA would have used. Carsten had heard people say that was because a lot of musicians in the CSA were Negroes. He didn’t know if it was true, but he’d heard it.

In between songs, the advertisements were all but identical to their U.S. equivalents. That made perfect sense to him. People trying to separate other people from their money probably sounded the same regardless of whether they were speaking English or Italian or Japanese or Hindustani. A hustler was a hustler, no matter where he lived.

But when the news came on, Sam knew he was hearing voices from another country. For one thing, all the stations carried the same stories, word for word. Sam had thought so, and the men in the wireless shack confirmed his impression. The broadcasters were all getting their scripts from the same place. And, by the way things sounded, that place was a Freedom Party office somewhere in Richmond.

As far as the wireless was concerned, the Freedom Party could do no wrong. Jesus might have walked on water, but, if you listened to the smooth-voiced men in the wireless web, Freedom Party officials from President Featherston down to Homer Duffy, the dogcatcher in Pig Scratch, South Carolina, walked on air, and choirs of angels burst into song behind them whenever they deigned to open their mouths and let the masses benefit from their godlike wisdom.

That especially held true when the announcers introduced a speech by Jake Featherston. To listen to them, Moses was coming down from Mount Sinai to enlighten an undeserving and sinful people. It wasn’t just an act, either, or Carsten didn’t think it was. They meant it, and they expected everybody listening to feel the same way.

“I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth,” the Confederate president would say in his harsh accent, and then he’d spew out lies and hate. If he spoke in front of an audience, people would go nuts, whooping and hollering and cheering to beat the band. If he was by himself for a talk, the broadcaster would sugarcoat it afterwards.

“Do the Confederates really believe the crap that guy puts out?” Sam asked after a particularly virulent tirade from Featherston about colored terrorists.

One of the yeomen in the wireless shack shrugged. “If they say they don’t, sir, they end up slightly dead,” he answered. “Or more than slightly.”

“Besides,” the other yeoman added, “they can’t say anything against the government, not in public they can’t.”

“Is it a country or a jail?” Carsten asked.

“Near as I can tell, sir,” the second yeoman said, “it’s a jail.”

The more time Sam spent in the wireless shack, the more he was inclined to agree with the man who monitored signals coming out of the CSA. The other thing he noticed was that everybody on the wireless sounded happy about being in jail. If people in the Confederate States were unhappy about anything that was going on in their country, they didn’t say so where any large number of other people had the chance to hear them.

When Carsten remarked on that, one of the yeomen said, “You’re close, sir, but you’re not quite right. When you hear ’em talk about Louisiana, you’ll think the devil lives there.”

Little by little, Sam discovered the man was right. It took a while. The men who read the news didn’t like talking about Louisiana, any more than Sam’s mother had liked talking about the facts of life. Sometimes, though, they couldn’t help it. They sounded as if they were gloating when they noted how the state militia there was having trouble putting down Negro uprisings within its borders. Whenever Governor Long made a speech the broadcasters couldn’t ignore, they went out of their way to heap scorn on it. They even seemed to celebrate when the New Orleans Tigers, the number-one football team in the state, lost to elevens from Atlanta or Richmond.

“Why do the rest of the Confederate States hate Louisiana?” Carsten asked in the officers’ mess one day at suppertime.

“You’ve noticed that, have you, Lieutenant?” Commander Dan Cressy said.

“Uh, yes, sir,” Sam replied, more than a little nervously: Cressy was the
Remembrance
’s executive officer, answerable to no one aboard the carrier except Captain Stein. Attracting his attention could be good or could be anything but, depending on why you attracted it.

“Anyone else here notice it?” Cressy inquired, sipping his coffee. He had a long, thin, pale, highly intelligent face, and a pair of the coldest gray eyes Sam had ever seen. Like any good exec, he acted like a son of a bitch so the skipper didn’t have to. A lot of people said he wasn’t acting. Rumor had it that he translated Latin poetry in his quarters. Carsten had no idea if that particular rumor was true. Commander Cressy waited, but none of the other officers in the mess said anything. He set down the thick white china mug and nodded to Sam. “Very good, Lieutenant. You’re dead right, of course; Louisiana is the pariah of the CSA. How did you come to realize that?”