Settling Accounts Return Engagement: Book One of the Settling Accounts Trilogy

by Harry Turtledove

  “Then I will. Muchas gracias, señor. Freedom!”

  Back before the Freedom Party rose to power, the alcalde’s office had been a sleepy place. It had been a center of power, yes, but a small one. The dons, the big landowners, were the ones who’d given the orders. But the Party had broken them; Rodriguez had been in a couple of the gunfights that turned the trick. These days, the alcalde and the guardia civil took orders from Hermosillo and from Richmond, which meant from the Party. If those orders sometimes came through Robert Quinn, they did so unofficially.

  All the same, the clerk to whom Hipolito Rodriguez spoke seemed unsurprised to see him. The man had the paperwork ready for him to fill out. He even had a voucher for a railroad ticket, though not the exact date. A telephone call to the train station took care of that. “You leave for Texas day after tomorrow. The train goes out at twenty past ten in the morning. You must be here by then.”

  “I will.” Rodriguez knew the train often ran late. But it didn’t always, and he didn’t think he could get away with taking a chance here. In the last war, the Army had been very unhappy with people who ran late.

  “One other thing,” the clerk said. “How is your English? You will have to use it when you go to the northeast.”

  They’d both been speaking the English-laced Spanish that remained the dominant language in Sonora and Chihuahua. Rodriguez shrugged and switched to what he had of real English: “I do all right. Learn some when I fight before, learn some from niños, learn some from wireless. No is muy good, but is all right.”

  “Bueno,” the clerk said, and then, “That is good.” His English was smoother than Rodriguez’s—almost as good as, say, Robert Quinn’s Spanish. He went on in the CSA’s leading language: “Be on the train, then, the day after tomorrow.”

  Rodriguez was. His whole family—except for Pedro, who was in Ohio—came with him to the station to say good-bye. He kissed everybody. The train pulled in two minutes early. He’d hoped for more time, but what you hoped for and what you got too often had little to do with each other. He climbed on board, showed the conductor the voucher, and took a seat by the window. He waved to his wife and children till the train chugged off and left them behind.

  He hadn’t gone this way since he headed off for basic training more than half a lifetime before. He’d been jammed into the middle of a crowded car then, and hadn’t had much chance to look out. Now he watched in fascination as the train climbed up through the Sierra Madre Occidental and then down into the flatter country in Chihuahua.

  Some Chihuahuans got on the train as it stopped at this town or that one. They and the Sonorans jeered at one another in the same mixture of Spanish and English. To English-speaking Confederates, Sonorans and Chihuahuans alike were just a bunch of damn Mexicans. They knew how they differed, though. Rodriguez made as if he were playing an accordion. Norteño music, with its thumping, German-based rhythms and wailing accordions, was much more popular in Chihuahua than in Sonora, though some musicians from the northern part of his state played it, too.

  More things than the music changed when the train got into northern Chihuahua. Rodriguez started seeing bomb damage. Once, the train sat on a siding for most of a day. Nobody gave any explanations. The men going into the Veterans’ Brigades hadn’t expected any—they’d been in the service before, after all. Rodriguez’s guess was that the damnyankees had managed to land a bomb, or maybe more than one, on the tracks.

  Eventually, the train did start rolling again. When it went over a bridge spanning the Rio Grande between El Paso del Norte and El Paso, it crossed from Chihuahua into Texas. Rodriguez braced himself. So did a lot of the other middle-aged men in the car with him. They weren’t entering a different country, but they were coming into a different world.

  Some of the men who got on near the Rio Grande were short and dark and swarthy like most of them, and spoke the same English-flavored Spanish. But some—and more and more as the train rolled north and east—were big, fair, light-eyed English-speakers. They eyed the men already aboard with no great liking. They thought of Rodriguez and his kind as greasers and dagos—not quite niggers, but not white men, either. Rodriguez remembered his soldier days, and threatening to kill a white man who’d called him names once too often. He wondered if he’d have to do it again.

  Then one of the Texans peered through bifocals at one of the men who’d got on the train in Chihuahua. “Luis, you stinking son of a bitch, is that you?”

  The other fellow—Luis—stared back. “Jimmy? Sí, pendejo, is me.” He got up. The two men embraced and showered each other with more affectionate curses in English and Spanish.

  “This little bastard drug me back to our lines after I got hit on a trench raid over in Virginia—drug me on his back, y’all hear?” Jimmy said. “I coulda bled to death or been a prisoner for a coupla years, but he done drug me instead. Doc patched me up, an’ I was back in the line in three weeks.”

  “Then he save me,” Luis said in English no better than Rodriguez’s. “He—¿como se dice?—he kick grenade away before it go off.”

  “Hell, I was savin’ my own ass along with yours,” Jimmy said. “It wasn’t nothin’ special.”

  After that, none of the other white men in the car acted rude toward the brown men they rode with. Rodriguez didn’t know what they were thinking. He doubted that had changed much. But so what? A man’s thoughts were his own business. What he did, he did in public.

  When the train stopped in Fort Worth, the conductor shouted, “All out for guard training here!”

  Rodriguez had to push past his seatmate on the aisle. “Excuse, please. Is me.” He grabbed his denim duffel bag from the rack above the seats, slung it over his shoulder, and went up the aisle to the door. A good many others, some brown like him, others ordinary Texans, got out, too.

  Stretching his legs on the platform felt good. A man in a uniform of military cut but made from gray rather than butternut spoke in a loud voice: “I am Assault Troop Leader Billy Joe Hamilton. I have the honor and privilege to be a Freedom Party guard. Freedom!” The last word was a fierce roar.

  “Freedom!” Rodriguez and his comrades echoed.

  Assault Troop Leader Billy Joe Hamilton sneered at all of them impartially, caring no more for white than for brown. “y’all have a lot to learn, and you won’t learn some of it till you get to a real camp,” he said. “Come on, now, let’s get you off to where you’re supposed to be at, get your paperwork all done, and then we’ll see what the hell we got in you. Follow me.” He did a smart about-face and marched off the platform.

  “Ain’t it nice they’re so glad to see us?” Jimmy didn’t bother to keep his voice down. Assault Troop Leader Billy Joe Hamilton’s back got even stiffer than it was already; Rodriguez hadn’t thought it could. The Freedom Party guard didn’t stop or turn around, though.

  Buses waited outside the station. The recruits for the Veterans’ Brigades filled two of them. Rodriguez got into the second one. The cloud of black, stinking smoke that belched from the tailpipe of the first almost asphyxiated him. If the Confederate States weren’t using it for poison gas, they should have been. His own bus coughed out the same sort of fumes, but he didn’t have to breathe those. Gears grinding, the bus groaned into motion.

  Decatur, Texas, was about forty miles northwest of Fort Worth. Getting there took an hour and a half—not bad, not as far as Rodriguez was concerned. The town was bigger than Baroyeca, but not very big. It stood on what the locals called a hill. To Rodriguez, who knew what mountains were supposed to be, it seemed like nothing more than a swell of ground, but he saw no point in arguing.

  On the flat land below Decatur stood a compound surrounded by barbed wire. There was a ramshackle barracks hall inside; a guard tower with a machine gun stood at each corner. The guard towers were manned. Negroes wandered inside the barbed-wire perimeter. Outside the compound were neat rows of butternut tents.

  Assault Troop Leader Billy Joe Hamilton said, “This here is Training Cam
p Number Three. y’all are gonna learn to take care of nigger prisoners by taking care of the stinkin’ sons of bitches. Ain’t no better way to learn than by doin’ what you got to do. Am I right or am I wrong?” When the men didn’t answer fast enough to suit him, he donned an ugly scowl. “I said, Am I right or am I wrong?”

  He may have a funny rank because he is a Party guard and not a soldier, but he is nothing but a top sergeant, thought Rodriguez, who remembered the breed well. “You are right, Assault Troop Leader!” he shouted along with the rest of the veterans. By the way some of them smiled, they were remembering their younger days, too.

  The paperwork was about what Rodriguez expected: fitting pegs into slots. He had to ask for help two or three times; he spoke more English than he read. He didn’t feel bad or embarrassed about it. Others from Sonora and Chihuahua were doing the same thing, some more often than he.

  He got a gray uniform like Hamilton’s but plainer. He got a pair of shiny black marching boots. He got a submachine gun, but no ammunition for it yet. And he got assigned to a cot in one of those tents. His tentmate turned out to be a Texan named Ollie Parker. “You ain’t no nigger-lover, are you?” Parker demanded. Rodriguez shook his head. Parker, who’d looked worried, relaxed. “In that case, I reckon we’ll get on just fine.”

  Rain poured from the night sky. Scipio put on his galoshes and his raincoat and took his umbrella out of a wastebasket at the Huntsman’s Lodge. He’d get wet walking home anyway. He knew that ahead of time, and knew how inconvenient it was. He also knew he couldn’t do anything more than he’d already done.

  “See you tomorrow, Xerxes,” Jerry Dover said.

  “Reckon so,” Scipio answered, although, since it was half past one, his boss would really see him again later today.

  He slid out the door and started for the Terry. The thick, black clouds overhead only made it darker than it would have been otherwise—which is to say, very dark indeed. He tried to stride carefully, feeling with each foot as well as stepping. He didn’t want to walk off the curb and fall in the gutter or land in a pothole and sprain his ankle.

  He’d got almost to the Terry when a flashlight beam stabbed into his face from up ahead. He gasped in surprise and fear. With the raindrops drumming down on his umbrella, he hadn’t heard anyone up there. And, coming out of the gloom, the beam felt bright as a welder’s torch.

  “What the hell you doin’ out after curfew, nigger?” The voice that snapped the question belonged to a white man.

  Scipio realized the raincoat hid the tuxedo that told without words what he did. “Suh, I waits table up at de Huntsman’s Lodge,” he answered. “I jus’ git off work a few minutes gone by.”

  By now, just about every cop in Augusta had stopped him at one time or another. From behind the flashlight, this one said, “Show me you got on your fancy duds under that there raincoat.”

  “Yes, suh. I do dat.” Scipio shifted the umbrella from his right hand to his left and used his right to undo the top couple of buttons on the coat and tug it wide so the policeman could see the wing collar and bow tie beneath it.

  “It’s him, all right,” another policeman said. “I almost blew the bastard’s head off a few weeks ago.” Scipio still couldn’t see anything but the dazzling beam of light and the raindrops falling through it. He heard more cops muttering agreement. How many were out there? He got the idea there were quite a few.

  “Whereabouts exactly you live, uncle?” asked the policeman behind the flashlight.

  After giving his address, Scipio buttoned the raincoat to keep out the November chill. “How come you wants to know dat, suh?” he asked. “I ain’t done nothin’ wrong.”

  “You’re out after curfew. We wanted to jug you, we sure as hell could,” the cop said, and the cold of a winter from much farther north took root in Scipio’s vitals. But the white man went on, “You just get your sorry black ass home, then. This here ain’t got nothin’ to do with you.”

  “This here what?” Scipio inquired.

  “Cleaning out transients and terrorists.” Abruptly, the flashlight beam winked out. Green and purple afterimages danced in front of Scipio’s eyes. Aside from them, he couldn’t see a thing. He’d hardly been able to before, but this was even worse. “Come on through,” the policeman told him. “Come on. You’ll be fine.”

  Had he ever heard a white man say something like that before? Maybe, but not for a long time. Since the Freedom Party took over? He wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t.

  And the cop didn’t lie. Nothing happened to him when he went by however many white men stood out there in the rain. No colored night runners tried to redistribute the wealth, either. The Negroes had enough sense to stay in where it was dry. Scipio had already unlocked the front door to his apartment building before he started wondering why the police didn’t. He shrugged. They’d let him alone. If they got rid of some of the predators who preyed more on their own kind than on whites, he wouldn’t shed many tears.

  He slipped into bed without waking Bathsheba. He was awakened an hour or so later himself, though, by harsh barks that effortlessly pierced the patter of the rain on the windows. Bathsheba woke, too. “Do Jesus!” she said. “What’s that?”

  “Guns,” Scipio answered, and told her of the policemen in the Terry. He finished, “Reckon some o’ dem terrorists an’ transients don’t fancy gettin’ cleaned out.”

  “How fussy the police gonna be, figurin’ out who is one o’ them bad folks and who ain’t?” his wife asked.

  Scipio hadn’t thought about that. How often were cops fussy when they dealt with blacks? Not very. But he said, “Dey didn’t run me in.”

  Bathsheba laughed. “Oh, you is real dangerous, you is.”

  That infuriated Scipio. He brought up the educated white man’s voice he hardly ever used: “Once upon a time, more than a few people believed I was.”

  “Oh.” Bathsheba laughed again, this time nervously. “I done forgot about that.”

  He returned to the dialect of the Congaree to say, “Somewhere in South Carolina is folks who don’t never forget.” Anne Colleton hadn’t forgotten. She might have kept after him if the Yankees’ bombers hadn’t put an end to her career. She couldn’t be the only one in that part of the state who refused to give up the hunt, either.

  More gunfire split the night. In spite of it, Scipio yawned. By now, he knew more about gunfire than he’d ever wanted to learn. This wasn’t getting any closer. As long as it stayed away, he wouldn’t get too excited about it. Gunfire or no gunfire, he fell asleep.

  When he woke, watery sunshine was trying to get through the blackout curtains. Bathsheba had gone off to clean white men’s houses. Scipio put on dungarees and an undershirt and went out to fix breakfast for himself.

  His son was in there washing everyone else’s breakfast dishes. Cassius liked that no better than any other thirteen-year-old boy would have, but he did it when his turn came up. He looked back over his shoulder at Scipio. “Noisy in the nighttime,” he said.

  “Sure enough was,” Scipio agreed.

  “You know what was goin’on?” By the eager bounce in Cassius’ voice, he wished he’d been a part of it, whatever it was. Scipio had named him for the Red rebel who’d led the Congaree Socialist Republic to its brief rise and bloody fall. This Cassius didn’t know to whom he owed the name, but he seemed to want to live up to it.

  He also seemed surprised when Scipio nodded and said, “Cops goin’after riffraff in de Terry. You don’ want to mess wid no police. Buckra gots mo’ guns’n we. You always gots to, ‘member dat. You ain’t right if you is shot.” Maybe, just maybe, he could make his son believe it. So many didn’t or wouldn’t, though, and had to find out for themselves. Whites never tired of teaching the lesson, either.

  “What do the ofays call riffraff?” Cassius asked.

  “Dunno,” Scipio admitted. “Dey reckon I weren’t las’ night, though. Dey lets me go on pas’ ’em to git here. I finds out when I goes to work.�
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  Cassius’ expression said being passed like that was cause for shame, not pride. But he didn’t push it, which proved he had some sense, anyhow. Then, as if to show he didn’t have much, he said, “I could go out now an’ take a look.”

  “You could stay here, too, and you gwine stay here,” Scipio said. “Mebbe still trouble out dere. We already gots enough troubles. Don’t need to go lookin’ for mo’.”

  “Nothin’ happen to me.” Cassius was sure as could be.

  “I say you stay here. You hear me?” Scipio sounded as firm and fatherly as he could. Cassius was getting to the age where they butted heads. Scipio knew that sort of thing happened. But he didn’t want his son disobeying him here. The way things were in the CSA these days, this was a matter of life and death. Scipio hated clichés. He hated them all the more when they were literally true.

  Some of his urgency must have got through to his son, for Cassius nodded. “I hear you, Pa.”

  “Good. Dat’s good. You is a good boy.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Scipio hoped they wouldn’t make things worse. They might have with him when he was Cassius’ age.

  When it was time to head for the Huntsman’s Lodge, Scipio put on his boiled shirt and black bow tie, his tuxedo jacket and satin-striped trousers. Not trusting the weather, he carried his raincoat and umbrella. But it was clear and sunny outside. The rain had washed the mugginess out of the air. It was the kind of crisp, cool fall day Augusta didn’t get very often. Scipio savored the breeze against his cheek. The only thing he missed was the sharp smell of burning leaves, but after last night’s downpour a man would have to drench them in gasoline to get them to burn.

  As he usually did, he skirted the bus stop where the auto bombs had gone off. He hadn’t gone much farther toward the white part of town when he stopped in astonishment. By the way things looked, the Augusta police hadn’t just been after transients and terrorists in their raid the night before. Doors hung open in house after house, tenement after tenement. Not a shop near there was doing business. A stray dog whined and ran up to Scipio, looking for reassurance on the empty, quiet street.