The Victorious Opposition (65 page)

And it was coming. He could see it coming, in the most literal sense of the words: a row of poles stretching out along the road from Baroyeca that ran alongside his farm. Every day, the Freedom Youth Corps planted more of them, as if they were some crop that would grow.

Electricity had come to the town a few years earlier. That it should come to the farms outside of town . . . Rodriguez hadn’t been sure he would live to see the day, but here it was, and he was going to take advantage of it. He’d had the money to pay an electrician to wire the house before the poles reached it. He’d had enough to buy electric lamps and the bulbs that went with them, too. And he’d had enough for a surprise for Magdalena. The surprise waited in the barn. (He also dreamt of buying an automobile, and a tractor to take the place of the mule. He knew that was and would stay a dream, but savored it anyhow.)

The day came when the poles reached and marched past his house. That turned out to be something of an anticlimax, for the wires that made the poles anything more than dead trees hadn’t yet come so far. Still, looking out at the long shadows the poles cast in the low January sun, he nodded to himself. Those poles were the visible harbingers of a new way of life.

Three days later, the electrical wires arrived. Freedom Youth Corps boys strung them from pole to pole under the supervision of a foul-mouthed electrician from Hermosillo. Even Rodriguez, who’d done his time in the Army, heard some things he’d never run into before. For the boys from the Freedom Youth Corps, this had to be part of their training that they hadn’t expected.

Baroyeca’s electrician was a moon-faced man named César Calderon. He never swore. The day after the wires passed the farmhouse, he came out on a mule that made the one Rodriguez owned seem like a thoroughbred by comparison. He ran a wire from the closest power pole to the fuse box he’d installed on the side of the house. He tested the circuits with a device that glowed when the current was flowing. Seeing it light up made Rodriguez swell with pride.

“¿Todo está bien?”
he asked.

Calderon nodded. “Oh, yes. Everything is fine, exactly how it should be. If you like, you can plug in a lamp and turn it on.”

Fingers trembling, Rodriguez did. He pushed the little knob below the light bulb. The motion felt strange, unnatural, unpracticed. The knob clicked into the new position. The light came on. It was even brighter than Rodriguez had expected.

Magdalena crossed herself.
“Madre de Dios,”
she whispered. “It’s like having the sun in the house.”

Rodriguez solemnly shook hands with the electrician.
“Muchas gracias.”

“De nada,”
Calderon replied. But it wasn’t nothing, and they both knew it. Calderon packed up his tools, climbed onto the mule, and rode away. Rodriguez turned off the lamp and turned it on again. Yes, the electricity stayed even after the electrician went away. Rodriguez had thought it would, but he hadn’t been quite sure. When he lit a kerosene lamp, he understood what was going on: the flame from the match made the wick and the kerosene that soaked up through it burn. But what really happened when he pushed that little knob? The light came on. How? Why? He couldn’t have said.

But even if he didn’t know how it worked, he knew that it worked. And knowing that it worked was plenty. He turned out the lamp again—they didn’t really need it right this minute—and headed out to the barn, telling Magdalena, “I’ll be back,” over his shoulder.

The crate was large, heavy, and unwieldy. He’d brought it to the farm from Baroyeca in the wagon. Now it rested on a sledge. He’d been warned to keep it upright; bad things would happen, he was told, if it went over on its side. He didn’t want bad things to happen, not after the money he’d spent. He dragged the crate out of the barn and toward the farmhouse.

Magdalena came outside. “What have you got there?” she asked.

Hipolito Rodriguez smiled. He’d made a point of coming back from town after sundown, so she wouldn’t see what was in the wagon. “It’s—a box,” he said.

“Muchas gracias,”
Magdalena replied with icy sarcasm. “And what is in the box?”

“Why, another box, of course,” he replied, which won him a glare from his wife. By then, he’d hauled the crate to the base of the steps. He went back to the barn for a hammer, which he used to pull up the nails holding the crate closed. “You don’t believe me? Here, I’ll show you.”

“Show me what?” Magdalena demanded. But then she gave a little gasp, for, just as Rodriguez had planned, the front panel of the crate fell away. She stared at him. “Is that—?”

He nodded. “
Sí,
sweetheart. It’s a refrigerator.”

She crossed herself again. She did that several times a day. It was nothing out of the ordinary. Then she started to cry. That made him hurry up the stairs and take her in his arms, because she hardly ever did it. She sobbed on his shoulder for a few seconds. At last, pulling away, she said, “I never thought we would have electricity. Even when we got electricity, I never thought we would have one of these. And I wanted one. I wanted one so much.” She suddenly looked anxious. “But can we afford it?”

“It wasn’t as much as I thought it would be,” he answered. “And it isn’t supposed to use that much electricity. Look.” He wrestled off the rest of the crate. That done, he opened the refrigerator door. “In the freezer compartment, it even makes its own ice in little trays.”

“What will they think of next?” Magdalena whispered. “A few years ago, I don’t think there was any ice in all of Baroyeca. Who in the whole town had ever seen ice?”

“Anyone who’d gone north to fight
los Estados Unidos
.” Rodriguez shivered at the memory. And he’d only been in Texas. The men who’d fought in Kentucky and Tennessee had had it worse. “I have seen ice,
por Dios,
and I wish I hadn’t.”

“You’d seen God make ice,” Magdalena said with a snort. “Had you ever seen people making ice?”

“Even the people had it up there,” he said. “They’re richer than we are. But we’re gaining. I know we are. I didn’t used to think so, not before the Freedom Party won. Now I’m sure of it.”

“Electricity,” his wife said, as if the one word proved everything that needed proving. As far as Rodriguez was concerned, it did.

He went back and closed the refrigerator’s door. Then, grunting with effort, he picked up the machine and carried it up the stairs. It wasn’t any taller than his navel, but it was plenty heavy. He’d found that out getting the crate into the wagon in the first place. When he set it down on the porch, the boards groaned under the weight. “Open the door for me, please,” he said, and Magdalena did.

The kitchen wasn’t far.
A good thing, too,
Rodriguez thought. He set the refrigerator against the wall near an outlet and plugged it in. It started to hum: not loudly, but noticeably. He hadn’t known it would do that. He cocked his head to one side, listening and wondering how annoying it would be. Would he get used to it, or would it start to drive him crazy? He didn’t know, but he expected he’d find out.

Magdalena came in to stare at the new arrival in the kitchen. “Is it cold yet?”

“I don’t know.” Rodriguez opened the door and stuck his hand inside. “It feels cooler, anyhow, I think.” He took out the ice-cube trays. “Fill these with water. We’ll see how long they take to freeze.”

“All right.” Magdalena did. Carefully, she put the trays back into the freezer compartment, closed its door, and closed the refrigerator door. The hum, which had got louder with the door open, quieted down again. “Not too bad,” Magdalena murmured, and Hipolito nodded; he’d been thinking the same thing. She went on, “We have lamps. We have this wonderful refrigerator.” She pronounced the unfamiliar word with care. “Do you know what I would like next, when we can afford it?”

“No. What?” Rodriguez hadn’t begun to think about what might come after the refrigerator.

But Magdalena had. “A wireless set,” she said at once. “That has to be the most wonderful invention in the whole world. Music and people talking here inside our own house whenever we want them—what could be more marvelous?”

“I don’t know.” Rodriguez hadn’t heard the wireless all that often himself. It had brought returns from the last election to Freedom Party headquarters. The cantina had a set, too, one that usually played love songs. He shrugged. “If you want one, I suppose we can do that one of these days. They aren’t too expensive.”

“I
do
want one,” Magdalena said emphatically. “If we have a wireless set, we can hear everything that happens as soon as it happens. We wouldn’t be on a farm outside a little town in a state most of
los Estados Confederados
don’t care about. We would be in New Orleans or Richmond itself.”

Rodriguez laughed. “Now I understand,” he said. “You want the wireless set so you can catch up on gossip all over the world.”

His wife poked him in the ribs. He squirmed. He wasn’t usually ticklish, but she’d found a sensitive spot. She said, “And you never gossip at all when you visit
La Culebra Verde
.”

“That’s different,” he declared. Magdalena didn’t say anything, which made him wonder how it was different. He tried his best: “Men talk about important things.”

Magdalena laughed in his face. Evidently his best wasn’t good enough. But she let him down easy, asking, “Is it ice yet?”

“Let’s find out.” He opened the refrigerator door. The air that came out was definitely chilly now. The water in the ice-cube trays was still water, though. He touched it with a fingertip. “It’s getting colder.”

Magdalena touched it, too. She nodded and closed the door. They stood there in front of the refrigerator, listening to the soft hum of the future.

XVII

I
n the officers’ mess on the USS
Remembrance
, Commander Dan Cressy nodded to Sam Carsten. “Well, Lieutenant, you called that one,” the exec said.

“Called which one, sir?” Sam asked. The carrier was rolling, but not too badly. He had no trouble staying in his chair.

“There are reports of Confederate soldiers assembling near the borders of Kentucky and Houston,” Cressy answered. “What do you want to bet they’ll be marching in as soon as we finish pulling out, just the way you said they would?”

“Sir, if you think I’m happy to be right, you’re wrong,” Sam said. “What happens if they do go in?”

Commander Cressy shrugged. “I don’t know. I hope President Smith does. He’d better. Somebody had better, anyhow.”

“If they go in, won’t it take a war to get them out?” That was Lieutenant Commander Hiram Pottinger, Carsten’s superior on the damage-control party.

Nobody in the officers’ mess said anything for some little while after that. They knew what war meant. Not many of them besides Sam had served in the Great War, but they’d all been through the inconclusive Pacific War against Japan.

“A lot will depend on what happens in Europe,” Commander Cressy said.

“France is starting to whoop and holler about Alsace and Lorraine,” Sam said meditatively. “I saw an
Action Française
riot before those boys came to power. I don’t think they’ll take no for an answer. They’re just as sure they’ve got God on their side as Jake Featherston is.”

“And the Russians are squawking about Poland, and they’re starting to squawk about the Ukraine, too,” Cressy said. “And the limeys are growling at the micks, and ain’t we got fun?”

Sam sighed. He wished for a cigarette, but the smoking lamp was out. “We’re going to hell in a handbasket all over again,” he said. “Didn’t anybody learn anything the last time around?”

“I’ll tell you one thing we didn’t learn,” the
Remembrance
’s exec said. “We didn’t learn to make sure the sons of bitches who lost took so many lumps, they couldn’t get back up on their feet and have another try. And I’m afraid we’re going to have to pay for it.”

Lieutenant Commander Pottinger said, “They’ve learned something in South America, anyhow. Argentina and the Empire of Brazil are cuddling up, even if Argentina and Chile are yelling again.”

“Sir, that’s good news for Britain, not for us,” Carsten said. “If there is a war, it means Brazil will let Argentina ship food through its territorial waters and then make the short hop across the Atlantic to French West Africa, same as happened the last time.”

“How do you know so much about that?” Commander Cressy asked, as if to say,
You’re a mustang, so you’re not supposed to know much of anything.

“Sir, I was there, in the
Dakota
,” Sam answered. Cressy was a young hotshot. He had more book learning and learned faster than anyone Sam had ever seen. If war did come, he would likely have flag rank by the time it was done, assuming he lived. But he did sometimes forget that people could also learn by good, old-fashioned experience.

The other side of the coin was, Sam had only been a petty officer then. Officers also had the unfortunate habit of believing that men who weren’t didn’t know anything. (Petty officers, of course, were just as sure that officers’ heads either had nothing in them or were full of rocks.)

“We can lick the Confederates,” Pottinger said. “We did it before, and this time we won’t have to take on Canada, too.”

Everyone in the mess nodded. Somebody—Sam didn’t see who—said, “Goddamn Japs’ll try and sucker punch us in the Pacific when we’re busy close to home.”

More nods. Sam said, “They did that in the last war—the last big war, I mean. I was there for that, too.”

Something in his tone made Commander Cressy’s gaze sharpen. “The
Dakota
was the ship that went on that wild circle through the Battle of the Three Navies, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, sir,” Carsten said. “One of the hits we took jammed our steering, so all we could do
was
circle—either that or stand still, and the Japs or the limeys would have blown us out of the water if we had.”

“You’ve had an . . . interesting career, haven’t you?” the exec said.

“Sir, I’ve been lucky,” Sam answered. “Closest I came to buying a plot was from the Spanish influenza after the war. That almost did me in. Otherwise, hardly a scratch.”

“They tried taking the Sandwich Islands away from us in the Pacific War.” Hiram Pottinger went on with the main argument: “Odds are the bastards will try it again. And if they do, the Pacific coast had better look out.”

Nobody argued with him. After the wake-up call the Japanese had given Los Angeles in 1932, nobody could. They’d built their Navy to fight far out into the Pacific, and so had the United States. If the two countries ever went at each other with everything they had . . .

“If we go at the Japs full bore, instead of doing a half-assed job of it the way we did the last time, we’ll lick ’em,” Sam said.

Commander Cressy nodded. “If we could do that, we would,” he said. “But if we’re at war with Japan any time soon, we’re also likely to be at war with the Confederate States. And if we’re at war with the CSA, we aren’t going to be able to hit the Japs with everything we’ve got. And they’ve built up a tidy little empire for themselves since the last war.”

That was true enough. Japan had owned Chosen, Formosa, and the Philippines going into the Great War. Since then, she’d gained a lot of influence in China and quietly acquired Indochina from France and the oil-rich East Indies from Holland. In the aftermath of defeat, Britain hadn’t been able to do anything but grumble and hope she could hold on to Malaya and Singapore if she ever got on Japan’s bad side. But, since the limeys and the Japs both worried about the USA, they put up with each other.

“If they hit us again, those sons of bitches are going to put a rock in their fist,” somebody predicted gloomily.

“Well, gentlemen, that’s why we wear the uniform.” Commander Cressy got to his feet. He was always sharply turned out. Sam envied him the knife-edged creases in his trousers. His own clothes were clean, but they weren’t what you’d call pressed. Neither were those of anybody else in the officers’ mess—except the exec’s. Cressy nodded to the other men and left, ignoring the ship’s motion with the air of a man who’d known worse.

Sam stayed long enough to drink another cup of coffee. Then he left the mess, too. As often happened, the officers’ bull session went aimless and foolish without Cressy’s sharp wit to steer it along. The exec also had the rank to make that wit felt. Sam thought he might have done some steering, too, but he was junior in grade, too damn old, and a mustang to boot. Nobody would take him seriously.

More than a little wistfully, he went up to the flight deck. He wished he had more to do with sending airplanes off into battle. That was why he’d wanted to serve on the
Remembrance
in the first place. He’d done good work, useful work, in damage control since returning to the ship as an officer. He knew that. He was even proud of it. But it still wasn’t what he wanted to be doing.

Mechanics in coveralls had the cowl off a fighter’s engine. They were puttering with a fuel line, puttering and muttering and now and then swearing like sailors.
Funny how that works,
Carsten thought, smiling at the bad language that flavored the conversation the way pepper flavored scrambled eggs.

The fighter itself was a far cry from the wire-and-canvas two-deckers that had flown off the
Remembrance
when Sam first came aboard her. It was a sleek, aluminum-skinned one-decker with folding wings, so the belowdecks hangar could hold more of its kind. Because of the strengthening it needed to cope with being sent forth with a kick from a catapult and landing with an arrester hook, it was a little heavier and a little slower than a top land-based fighter—a little, but not much.

Carsten looked out to sea. As always, destroyers shepherded the
Remembrance
on all sides. The way things were these days, you just couldn’t tell. If the Confederates or the limeys wanted to use a submersible to get in a quick knee in the nuts, those destroyers were the ones that would have to make sure they couldn’t. He’d served aboard a ship not much different from them. Compared to the
Remembrance
, they were insanely crowded. They were also much more vulnerable to weather and the sea. But they did a job no other kind of vessel could do.

For that matter, so did the
Remembrance
herself. With her aircraft, she could project U.S. power farther than any battleship’s big guns. All by herself, she could make the Royal Navy thoughtful about poking its nose into the western Atlantic. Because of that, Sam was surprised when, half an hour later, the carrier suddenly picked up speed—the flight deck throbbed under his feet as the engines began working harder—and swung toward the west. Like any good sheepdogs, the destroyers stayed with her.

“What’s going on, sir?” Sam called to the officer of the deck.

“Beats me,” that worthy replied.

She kept on steaming west all the rest of that day and into the night. By the time the sun came up astern of her the next morning, rumor had already declared that she was bound for Boston or Providence or New York or Philadelphia or Baltimore to be scrapped or refitted or to have the captain court-martialed or because she was running low on beans. Sam didn’t believe the skipper had done anything to deserve a court-martial. Past that, he kept an open mind.

She turned out to be heading for the Boston Naval Yard. The powers that be admitted as much before she’d been steaming west for a day. They remained close-mouthed about why she’d been called in to port early in her cruise. Maybe she really was running low on beans. Sam couldn’t have proved she wasn’t. Sailors hoped for shore leave while she stayed in port.

When she came in, a tugboat guided her into Boston harbor. By the way the tug dodged and zigged, Carsten suspected the minelayers had been busy. That saddened him, but didn’t surprise him very much.

More tugs nudged the
Remembrance
up against a quay. It was snowing hard, the temperature down close to zero. That didn’t keep a swarm of electrician’s mates and machinist’s mates led by several officers from coming aboard and going straight to work. By all appearances, the refit rumor had been true.

But what were the technicians fitting? Sam couldn’t figure it out on his own, and nobody seemed willing to talk. Whatever it was, it involved some funny-looking revolving installations atop the island, and a bunch of new gear inside the armored command center. After a little while, Sam stopped asking questions. Whenever he did, people looked at him as if he were a traitor. He went on about his own business and watched from the corner of his eye. Sooner or later, he figured, he’d find out.

L
ucien Galtier stretched uncomfortably as he shooed another hen off the nest to see if she’d laid. She hadn’t; his fingers found no new egg. The hen clucked at the indignity. Galtier went on to the next nest. He grunted when he reached into it. The grunt was part satisfaction, for he found an egg there, and part unhappiness, for he still couldn’t get rid of the tightness in his chest.

No help for it. Even if he had pulled something in there, the work didn’t go away. He finished gathering eggs, fed the animals and mucked out their stalls, and did everything else in the barn that needed doing. Then he picked up the basket of eggs, pulled his hat down on his forehead, lowered the earflaps and tied them under his chin, pulled the thick wool muffler Nicole had knitted up to cover his mouth and nose, and left the barn.

That first breath of outside air was as bad as he’d known it would be. He might have inhaled a lungful of daggers. It was cold inside the barn with the animals’ body heat and an oil heater warming things up and with the wooden walls keeping out wind and snow. Outside, in the space between the barn and the farmhouse, it was a good deal worse than merely cold.

Snow blew horizontally out of the northwest. It had a good running start by the time it got to his farm. It stung his eyes and tried to freeze them shut. Despite hat and muffler and heavy coat and sweater and stout dungarees and woolen, itchy long johns, the wind started sucking heat from his body the instant it touched him.

In the swirling white, he could hardly see the house ahead. He’d known worse blizzards, but not many. If he missed the house, he’d freeze out here. That happened to a luckless farmer or two every winter in Quebec.

Lucien didn’t miss. He staggered up the stairs, opened the kitchen door, lurched inside, and slammed it shut behind him.
“Calisse!”
he muttered. He shook himself like a dog. Snow flew everywhere. The stove was already hot, but he built up the fire in it and stood in front of it, gratefully soaking up the warmth.

Only after he’d done that did he worry about the clumps of melting snow on the floor. He cleaned up as best he could. Then he went back to the stove and made himself a pot of coffee. He gulped it down as hot as he could stand it. He wanted to be warm inside and out.

Outside, the wind kept howling. He watched the blowing, swirling whiteness and sent it some thoughts that weren’t compliments. There was supposed to be a dance tomorrow night. If the blizzard went on roaring, how would anybody get to it?

He turned on the wireless set in the front room. The wireless was a splendid companion for a man who lived by himself. It made interesting noise, and he didn’t have to respond unless he wanted to. Music poured out of the speaker. Right now, though, he didn’t care for music. He changed the station. He wanted to find out whether they were going to get another foot and a half of snow before tomorrow night.

But the wireless stations blathered on about what they were interested in, not about what he was interested in. That was the drawback of the marvelous machine. He didn’t have to respond to it unless he wanted to, but it didn’t have to respond to him at all.

He went from station to station for the next twenty minutes, until the top of the hour, and not one of them seemed the least bit interested in the weather outside. For all they cared, it could have been summer out there, with blue sky and warm sun. It could have been, but he knew it wasn’t.