The Victorious Opposition (72 page)

“I’d say we owe you more than a suitcase, Major Moss,” Trotter told him. “I’ve taken the liberty of checking the train schedules. . . .” He paused to see if that would annoy Moss. It didn’t; he knew the commandant was only doing his job. When he nodded, Trotter continued, “Next train from Toronto to Chicago gets into London at 4:34 this afternoon.”

“That’s what the schedule says, anyway,” Moss observed dryly. If the train was within half an hour of that, it would be doing all right.

Trotter nodded. “Yeah, that’s what it says. And a train from Chicago to Mount Vernon goes out at half past nine tomorrow night. You’ll have to kill some time in Chicago, but if you’re from there it shouldn’t be too bad.”

“Maybe,” Moss said. He didn’t want to see his family. He’d had enough trouble with them at the funeral. But Captain Trotter didn’t need to know about his difficulties there. His family had thought he was crazy to marry Laura Secord, and they’d seemed offended when the union didn’t fall apart in short order. But he could find ways to spend time in Chicago without having anything to do with them. He could, and he intended to.

“Good luck,” Trotter said.

Moss didn’t laugh in his face. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why. If he’d had anything remotely approaching good luck, his wife and daughter would still be alive, and he wouldn’t be wearing U.S. uniform again. But he hadn’t, they weren’t, and he was. “Thanks, Captain,” he said, very much as if he meant it.

W
hen Hipolito Rodriguez walked into Freedom Party headquarters in Baroyeca, the first thing he saw was a new map on the wall. It showed the Confederate States as they were now, with Kentucky and what had been called Houston back in the fold. The lands the United States had seized in the Great War and not yet returned—chunks of Virginia, Arkansas, and Sonora—had a new label:
Unredeemed Territory.
That same label was applied to Sequoyah, even though the plebiscite there had gone against the CSA.

Part of Rodriguez—the part that had hated
los Estados Unidos
ever since their soldiers tried to kill him during the Great War—rejoiced to see that label on Sequoyah. A lingering sense of fairness made him wonder about it, though. Pointing to the map, and to Sequoyah in particular, he asked Robert Quinn, “Is that truly the way it should be?”

“
Sí, Señor
Rodriguez.
Absolutamente,
” the local Freedom Party leader answered. “The election in Sequoyah was a shame and a sham. Since the war,
los Estados Unidos
sent so many settlers into that state that the result of the vote could not possibly be just. Since they had no business occupying the land in the first place, they had no business settling it, either.”

“Is this what
Señor
Featherston says?” Rodriguez asked.

Quinn nodded. “It certainly is. And it is something more than that. It is the truth.” A priest celebrating the Mass could have sounded no more sure of himself.

Rodriguez eyed the map again. Slowly, he nodded. But he could not help saying, “If
Señor
Featherston tells this to the United States, they will not be happy. They thought the plebiscite settled everything.”

“Are you going to lie awake at night flabbling about what the United States think?” Quinn dropped the English slang into the middle of a Spanish sentence, which only strengthened its meaning.

But Hipolito Rodriguez gave back a shrug. “It could be that I am,
señor,
” he said. “Please remember, I have a son who is in the Army. I have two more sons who could easily be conscripted.” Since he was only in his mid-forties himself, he was not too old to put the butternut uniform on again, but he said nothing about that. He was not afraid for himself in the same way as he was afraid for his boys.

“How long have you wanted revenge against the United States?” Quinn asked softly.

“A long time,” Rodriguez admitted. “Oh,
sí, señor,
a very long time indeed. But now it occurs to me, as it did not before, that some things may be bought at too high a price. And is it not possible that what is true for me may also be true for the whole country?”

“Jake Featherston won’t let anything go wrong.” Quinn spoke with utmost confidence. “He’s been right before. He’ll keep on being right. We’ll have our place in the sun, and we’ll get it without much trouble, too. You wait and see.”

Rodriguez let that certainty persuade him, too—certainty, after all, was a big part of what he’d been looking for when he joined the Freedom Party.
“Bueno,”
he said. “I hope very much that you are right.”

“Sure I am,” Quinn said easily. “Why don’t you just sit down and relax, and we’ll go ahead with the meeting.”

Falling back into that weekly routine did help ease Rodriguez’s mind. Robert Quinn went through the usual announcements. There were more of those than there had been in the old days, for the Party had more members in Baroyeca now. Rodriguez and the other veterans of the hard times couldn’t help looking down their noses a little at the men who had joined because joining suddenly looked like the way to get ahead. No denying, though, that some of the newcomers had proved useful.

Once the announcements were done, the Party men sang patriotic songs, mostly in Spanish, a few in English. As they always did, they finished with “Dixie.” Then Quinn said, “Now there is something I want you men to think about when you go home tonight. It is possible—not likely, mind you, but possible—that
los Estados Unidos
will give us a hard time about our rightful demands against them. If that does happen, we may have to take a very firm line with them. If we do, they’ll be sorry. You can bet your bottom dollar on that. And you can bet
los Estados Confederados
won’t back down again.”

Applause filled the crowded room. Rodriguez joined it, even though that wasn’t exactly what Quinn had told him before the formal meeting started. Then he’d sounded as if he didn’t think the United States would fight. Of course, he was a politician, and politicians had a habit of telling people what they wanted to hear. But Rodriguez hadn’t thought Freedom Party men did that sort of thing.

Then Quinn said, “I’ll tell you something else, too, friends. During the last war, the
mallates
stabbed us in the back. We would have licked
los Estados Unidos
then if those black bastards hadn’t betrayed us. Well, that isn’t going to happen this time,
por Dios.
Jake Featherston will clamp down on them good and hard to make sure it doesn’t.”

He got another round of applause, a louder one this time. Rodriguez pounded his callused palms together till they hurt. He didn’t care what happened to the Confederacy’s Negroes, as long as it was nothing good. He’d got his baptism by fire against the black rebels in Georgia in 1916, before his division went to fight the damnyankees in Texas. He’d hardly seen a Negro since he got out of the Army. If he never saw another one, that wouldn’t break his heart.

“As long as we stand behind Jake Featherston a hundred percent, nothing can go wrong,” Quinn said. “He knows what’s what. This country will be great again—great, I tell you! And every one of you, every one of us, will help.”

More applause. Again, Hipolito Rodriguez joined it. Why not? Seeing the Confederate States back on their feet was another reason he’d joined the Freedom Party. One more was that Robert Quinn had never treated him like a damn greaser, an English phrase he knew much too well. The Party had nothing against men from Sonora and Chihuahua. It saved all its venom for the
mallates
.

Why shouldn’t it?
Rodriguez thought.
They deserve it. We never tried to hurt the country. We’ve been loyal.
He scorned the men from the Empire of Mexico who sneaked into the CSA trying to find work, too. If any people deserved to be called greasers, they were the ones.

Robert Quinn held up a hand. “Before we call it a night and go home, I’ve got one more announcement to make. I’ve been trying to push this through for a long time, but I haven’t had any luck till now. I heard from the state Party chairman the other day. Now it’s certain: the silver mine in the hills outside of town is going to open up again next month. And, even though this part isn’t so sure, it does look like the railroad will be coming back to Baroyeca.” He grinned at the Freedom Party men. “Remember, you heard it here first.”

This time, he got something better than applause. He got delighted silence, followed by a low, excited buzz. The mine had been closed ever since the collapse, and the railroad had stopped coming to Baroyeca not much later. Rodriguez wondered what had made the authorities change their minds after so long.

Two men sitting in the next row back answered the question for him. One of them remarked, “Need plenty of
plata
to fight a war.”

“Sí, sí,”
the other agreed. “And where there’s a little silver, there’s always a lot of lead. Need plenty of lead to fight a war, too.”

“Ahh,” Rodriguez murmured to himself. He liked seeing how things worked. He always had. Maybe the authorities hadn’t decided to reopen the mine from the goodness of their hearts alone. Maybe they’d seen that they would need silver and especially lead.

Well, what if they had? It would still do the town a lot of good. If the railroad came back, prices at Diaz’s general store would drop like a rock. Shipping goods in by truck on bad roads naturally made everything cost more. After the train line shut down, the storekeeper had been lucky to stay in business at all. Plenty of other places in town hadn’t.

“Three cheers for
Señor
Quinn!” somebody shouted. The cheers rang out. Quinn stood there, looking suitably modest, as if the news hadn’t been his doing at all. Maybe it really hadn’t, not altogether. But he deserved some credit for it.

When the Party meeting did end, several men headed over to
La Culebra Verde
to celebrate. Rodriguez thought of what Magdalena would say if he came home drunk. Sometimes, after he had that thought, he had another one:
I don’t care
. Then he would go off to the Green Snake and see how much
cerveza
or, more rarely, tequila, he could pour down. When he did that, Magdalena had some very pointed things to say the next morning, things a headache often did not improve.

Tonight, he just started out into the countryside beyond Baroyeca. The new line of poles supporting the wires that carried electricity made sure he couldn’t get lost even if he were drunk. The sky was black velvet scattered with diamonds. A lot of stars seemed to be out tonight.

One of them, a bright red one, startled him by moving. Then he heard the faint buzz of a motor overhead.
“Un avion,”
he muttered in surprise. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen an airplane above Baroyeca. It was flying south. He wondered where it was going. Off to scout the border with the Empire of Mexico? That seemed most likely. But wouldn’t it do better to scout the border with the USA?

Maybe other airplanes were doing that. Rodriguez hoped so. When he fought up in west Texas, the only airplanes he’d seen had belonged to the United States. The Confederate States, stretched too thin, hadn’t been able to deploy many on that distant, less than vital front.

Would things be any different in a new war? Yes,
los Estados Confederados
had Kentucky and Houston back again, so that Texas was whole once more. Maybe they’d even get back the other territory they had lost in the Great War. But that map on the wall of Freedom Party headquarters still said
los Estados Unidos
were bigger, and bigger still meant stronger in a long, drawn-out fight.

Maybe Jake Featherston knew something he didn’t. He hoped so. He couldn’t see what it might be, though. With one son in the Army, with two more likely to be called up, he also couldn’t help worrying.

When he got back to the farmhouse, he smiled at the fine white electric light shining out through the windows. Magdalena had left a lamp burning—no, not burning: she’d left a lamp
on
—for him. She’d waited up for him, too. He didn’t say anything about the growing threat of war. Instead, he talked about the silver mine’s reopening and the likely return of the railroad to Baroyeca.

His wife smiled. She nodded. And then she said, “This is all very good, but I still hope there will be peace with
los Estados Unidos
.”

Rodriguez realized he wasn’t the only one worrying.

C
hester Martin passed a newsboy on his way to the trolley stop. The kid had a stack of the
Los Angeles Times
in front of him as tall as the bottoms of his knickers. He waved a paper at Chester and shouted out the morning’s headline: “Smith says no!”

Usually, Chester walked right past newsboys. That was enough to stop him, though. “Oh, he does, does he? Says no to what, exactly?”

The newsboy couldn’t tell him. They’d told the kid what to yell before they turned him loose, and that was it. He yelled it again, louder this time. “Smith says no!” For good measure, he added, “Read all about it!”

“Give me one.” Chester parted with a nickel. The newsboy handed him a paper. He carried it to the stop. As soon as he got there, he unfolded it and read the headline and the lead story. Al Smith had said no to Jake Featherston. The Confederates weren’t going to get back the pieces of Sonora and Arkansas and Virginia they’d lost in the war—or Sequoyah, either.

Smith was quoted as saying, “The president of the Confederate States personally promised me that he would make no more territorial demands on the North American continent. He has taken less than a year to break his solemn word. No matter what he may feel about his promise, however, I am resolved to hold him to it. These territories will remain under the administration and sovereignty of the United States.”

“About time!” Martin said, and turned the paper over to read more.

Just then, though, the trolley came clanging up. Chester threw another nickel in the fare box and found a seat. His was far from the only open copy of the
Times
as the streetcar rattled away.

A man of about Martin’s age sitting across the aisle from him folded his newspaper and put it in his lap with an air of finality. “There’s going to be trouble,” he said gloomily.