American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold

by Harry Turtledove

  “Well, it’s what I meant—a calahamity is.” The lawyer held up his glass. The colored bartender hastened to refill it. Braxton Donovan nodded regally. “Thank you kindly, Ptolemy.”

  “You’re welcome, suh,” Ptolemy said, professionally polite, professionally subservient.

  “Tell me, Ptolemy,” Donovan asked in his rolling baritone, “what is your view of the Freedom Party?” He might have been encouraging a friendly witness on the stand.

  “Don’t like ’em for hell, suh,” Ptolemy said at once. “Somebody should ought to do somethin’ about ’em, you wants to know what I thinks.” He polished the top of the bar with a spotless white towel.

  “This country is in a bad way when some not so small fraction of the electorate can’t see what’s obvious to a nigger bartender,” Braxton Donovan said. He took a pull at his freshened drink. “Still and all, better a not so small fraction than a large fraction, as was so a few years back.”

  “Yes,” Potter agreed. “And I believe Ptolemy here really does have no use for the Freedom Party—it’s in his interest not to, after all, when you think about what Featherston has to say about blacks. But even so . . . Jeb Stuart III had a colored servant whose name, if I remember right, was also Ptolemy. Jake Featherston suspected the fellow was a Red—he was serving under Stuart in the First Richmond Howitzers. He told me about this servant not so long before the uprisings began.”

  “And so?” Donovan asked. “Your point is?”

  “Jeb Stuart III pulled wires with his father to make sure that Ptolemy didn’t have any trouble.” Clarence Potter finished his whiskey at a gulp. “And he was a Red, dammit, as became abundantly clear when the pot boiled over. Young Stuart died in combat—let himself be killed, they say, so he wouldn’t have to face the music. His father’s revenge was to make sure Featherston never rose above the rank of sergeant. Petty, I suppose, but understandable.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” the lawyer asked.

  “A couple of reasons,” Potter answered. “For one, we can trace the rise of the Freedom Party to such small things. And, for another, a white man’s a fool if he takes a Negro’s word at face value. Look what happened to Jeb Stuart III.” He swung around on the stool so that he faced the bartender. “Ptolemy!”

  “Yes, suh? ‘Nother drink, suh?” the black man asked.

  “In a minute,” Potter said. “First, tell me something—what were you doing when the rebellion came in 1915?”

  “Me, suh?” For all they showed, Ptolemy’s eyes might have been cut from stone. “Nothin’, suh. Stayin’ home mindin’ my business.”

  “Uh-huh.” Potter knew what that meant. It meant the bartender was lying through his teeth. Every Negro in the CSA claimed to have stayed at home minding his own business during the Red rebellion. If all the blacks who said they had actually had stayed at home, there would have been no rebellion in the first place.

  Ptolemy said, “Suh, it was a long time ago nowadays, an’ it’s all over an’ done with. Ain’t no way to change what happened. Onliest thing we can do is pick up the pieces an’ go on.”

  “He’s right,” Braxton Donovan said. Potter found himself nodding. The Confederate States, and everybody in them, did have to do that. Saying it, though, was easier than doing it. Donovan took a half dollar out of his pocket and slid it across the bar to Ptolemy. “Here you are. Buy yourself a drink.” A few hundred years before, kings had tossed out largess to peasants with that same sort of offhanded generosity.

  “Thank you, suh.” Ptolemy made the coin disappear. He did fix a drink for himself. By its pale amber color, it held a lot more water than whiskey. And the bartender nursed it, raising it to his lips every now and then but not doing much in the way of real drinking. Potter had known very few men who worked behind a bar and did much in the way of pouring down what they served. Too easy, he supposed, for a man who worked around whiskey all the time to come to like it too well.

  Having been generous to one beneath him—or so he plainly felt—Braxton Donovan swung his attention back to Potter. “I have a question for you, sir,” he said, “speaking of the Freedom Party.”

  “Ask it, then,” Potter answered.

  “I’ve heard you knew Roger Kimball while he was still alive,” the lawyer said.

  Clarence Potter nodded. “And so I did. That’s the best time to get to know a man—while he’s still alive, I mean.”

  “Indeed. And in fact.” Donovan nodded grandly. “Now, sir, the question: while he was still alive, did Kimball ever hint to you that he’d torpedoed the USS Ericsson after we’d yielded to the damnyankees?”

  “Never once, never in the slightest way,” Potter replied at once. “We were acquaintances, you understand, not friends—he liked Jake Featherston as much as I loathe the man. But I would say he didn’t tell his friends, either. He was, in my opinion, a first-class son of a bitch, but he knew how to keep a secret—by keeping it, at all times and everywhere. If his exec hadn’t spilled the beans, I don’t think anyone would ever have known.”

  “Poetic justice, what he got,” Donovan said.

  “Yes, I think so, too,” Potter agreed. “If he hadn’t come to a sudden demise, he would have been a sore spot between us and the USA, and we can’t afford to give them excuses to kick us around. They’re too liable to do it even without excuses, though Sinclair has taken a milder line than Teddy Roosevelt did.”

  “I quite agree,” Donovan said. “I despise the Socialists and all they stand for—they set a bad example for our people, at the very least—but their foreign policy is . . . well, as you said, gentler than Roosevelt’s.”

  “Now I have a question for you,” Potter said. Braxton Donovan looked cautious, but could hardly do anything but nod. Potter asked, “Why are you so interested in the late, unlamented Roger Kimball?”

  “Idle curiosity,” Donovan answered.

  “Shit,” Potter said crisply. All of a sudden, his metal-framed spectacles didn’t make him seem mild and ineffectual any more. When he went on, “I deserve a straight answer,” the implication was that he’d do something unpleasant if he didn’t get one.

  Braxton Donovan could have bought and sold him. Donovan owned enough property that the disastrous postwar inflation hadn’t wiped him out. They both knew it. Most of the time, in the class-conscious Confederate States, it would have mattered a great deal. Now, somehow, it didn’t. The lawyer flinched, muttered something under his breath, and gulped his drink. “Fill it up,” he told the bartender.

  “Yes, suh.” Ptolemy did. Ice clinked as he built Donovan a fresh one.

  The lawyer sipped from the new whiskey. Clarence Potter waited, patient and implacable as a father waiting up for a son out too late. At last, Donovan said, “You know Anne Colleton?”

  “Personally? No,” Potter said. “But I know of her. Who doesn’t, in this state? What’s she got to do with anything?”

  “She and Kimball were . . . friends during the war, and for a while afterwards,” Braxton Donovan answered, suggesting by the pause that they’d been more than friends. “Any dirt I can get on him will stick to her.”

  “Wait a minute.” Potter held up a hand. “Wait just a minute. Didn’t she help get the Yankee woman who punched Kimball’s ticker for him out of jail and back to the USA?”

  “Oh, yes.” Donovan’s silver pompadour was so securely in place, it didn’t stir a hair as he nodded. “They broke up unpleasantly. I think it was over politics—he stayed in the Freedom Party, and she was one of the rats who left the sinking ship.” His lip curled.

  “Why tar her, then?” Potter asked. “If she’s back to being a Whig, don’t you want her to keep on being one? If you drive her into Featherston’s arms again, aren’t you just asking for trouble? She’s a high-powered woman, no two ways about it.”

  “That’s the point,” Donovan said. “She’s talking like a Whig again, yes, but she’s trying to pull us to the right till you can’t tell us from the yahoos in white shirts and buttern
ut pants who run around yelling, ‘Freedom!’ She wants to have another go at the United States—wants it so bad, she can taste it.”

  Potter pondered that. “We’d have to be damn lucky to win it. They beat us and they hurt us. And even if we do lick them, that just sets up another war ten, twenty, thirty years further down the line. I wish I could say something else—I fought those bastards from the very first day to the very last, and I’d’ve kept on fighting if we hadn’t folded up. But come on, Donovan. A good big man won’t always lick a good little one, but sure as hell that’s the way to bet. And I don’t think we can afford to lose again.”

  “I don’t want to fight them again, either,” Donovan said. “I fought plenty in the last war, too, and I am plumb satisfied. And I don’t want her voice in the Whig Party.”

  “There may be something to that,” Potter allowed. “On the other hand, there may not. You want to think twice about going after her. Maybe you want to think three times.”

  “I know what I’m doing.” Braxton Donovan certainly sounded confident. Potter wondered if that was the whiskey talking. He also wondered how Donovan not only didn’t fall over but kept on sounding coherent. The man had to have a sponge in place of a liver. Donovan went on, “She’s not quite the force she used to be, anyhow, on account of she’s ten years older than she used to be, same as the rest of us. But it hurts women more.” He finished the latest drink. “One more of the same, Ptolemy.”

  “Comin’ right up, suh,” the Negro said. As he made the next whiskey, Potter studied him and, covertly, Donovan. He wondered if the lawyer really knew as much as he thought he did. Not too many people came away happy after they bumped up against Anne Colleton.

  Which meant . . . Potter finished his own drink. He didn’t ask for a fresh one, not right away. Instead, he did some quiet thinking. He came closer to agreeing with Donovan than with Anne Colleton. Nothing was stupider, though, than backing a loser, which he judged Donovan likely to be. How much of a deal can I cut? he wondered. And should I?

  VII

  As far as Cincinnatus Driver was concerned, the worst part of prison was getting used to it. After a while, Luther Bliss stopped interrogating him, which meant he didn’t get beat up very much any more. Hardly anything happened to him any more, in fact. He sat in his cell with nothing to do, except for the one hour a week when he was led out to exercise, as a beast might have been.

  Outside the gray stone walls of the prison, time was passing. What did Elizabeth think, back in Des Moines? What did Achilles think? How big was the boy these days? Cincinnatus struggled to remember his face. Did Amanda remember him at all? He was starting to doubt it.

  Only the weather told him the season of the year. He never saw a newspaper, or anything else with print on it. He began to wonder if he still remembered how to read and write. That thought provoked him to bitter laughter. Read and write? Hell, I’m startin’ to wonder if I still recollect how to talk. Days at a time would go by when he never said a word to anyone.

  The guards did not encourage conversation, which would do for an understatement till a bigger one came along. When they gave orders, it was always, “Come here, nigger,” “Go there, boy,” or “Stand aside, nigger.” They didn’t want to hear Cincinnatus say, “Yes, suh.” They just wanted him to do as he was told. He did it. He’d tried not doing it a couple of times. The results of that had proved more painful than they were worth.

  He’d also tried protesting that he was a citizen of the United States, and nobody, not even Luther Bliss and the Kentucky State Police, had any business holding him like this. The results of that had proved even more painful than those of the other.

  If I wasn’t colored, they wouldn’t be able to get away with it, no matter what they think I done. That had run through his mind more times than he could count. He did his best not to dwell on it. Its truth was all too obvious. He’d thought things would be better in the USA than they had been when Kentucky was part of the CSA. Maybe not.

  But, in spite of all this, maybe. In the Confederate States, Negroes who made trouble often just stopped living. However much Luther Bliss wanted Cincinnatus on ice, he hadn’t dug a hole and put his body in it. Sometimes Cincinnatus wondered why not.

  On a hot, muggy afternoon in what he reckoned was the middle of summer, three guards came to his cell door. Two of them drew pistols and pointed them at him, while the third turned a key in the lock and opened the cell. Then that fellow jumped back and yanked his pistol from its holster, too. “Come along with us,” one of the guards said.

  “Where?” Cincinnatus’ voice creaked with disuse, and with fear. This wasn’t exercise time or mealtime. Maybe that hole in the ground waited for him after all.

  “Don’t give us no back talk, boy, or you’ll be sorry for it,” the guard snapped. “Get moving.”

  Cincinnatus did, thinking, They can kill me here as easy as anywhere else, and then take my body wherever they need to. He wanted to run. His legs had that light-as-a-feather feel panic could bring. He was sure he could outrun these three big-bellied white men. But he was also sure it would do him no good. Nobody outran a bullet.

  They took him not to the room where they’d questioned him before but to an office in one of the prison’s corner towers. He supposed it was the warden’s office, but the man behind the desk was, inevitably, Luther Bliss. Bliss had light brown eyes, like a hound dog’s. At the moment, those eyes were as sad as a hound dog’s, too.

  When Cincinnatus came in, the chief of the Kentucky State Police turned to the other man in the room, an older fellow who sat in a chair off to one side. “See, Mr. Darrow? Here he is, sound as a dollar.”

  “Whose dollars are you talking about, Bliss?” the old man—Darrow?—demanded. “The Confederates’, after the war?”

  Oh, sweet Jesus, Cincinnatus thought. Bliss is going to lock him up and throw away the key. But Bliss didn’t do anything except drum his fingers on the desktop. If he was angry, he didn’t show it past that—which made Cincinnatus take another long look at the man named Darrow.

  He had to be close to seventy. His skin was grandfather-pink. His jowls sagged. He combed thinning iron-gray hair over the top of his head to make it cover as much ground as it could. But his gray-blue eyes were some of the sharpest—and some of the nastiest—Cincinnatus had ever seen.

  After coughing a couple of times, he pulled his wallet from a vest pocket. He looked down at a photograph in it, then over to Cincinnatus. “You are Cincinnatus Driver,” he said, sounding surprised. “I wouldn’t’ve put it past this sneaky son of a bitch”—he pointed to Luther Bliss—“to try to sneak a ringer by me, but I guess he figured I’d spot it.”

  Again, the world didn’t end. All Bliss said was, “I resent that, Mr. Darrow.”

  “Go right ahead,” the other white man said cheerfully. “I intended that you should.”

  Plaintively, Cincinnatus said, “Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?”

  “My pleasure,” said the old man with the ferocious eyes. “I’m Clarence Darrow. I’m a lawyer. I’ve got a writ of habeas corpus with your name on it. That means you get out of jail. If you’ve got any brains, it also means you get the hell out of Kentucky.”

  “My God.” Cincinnatus understood the words, but he wasn’t sure he believed them. He wasn’t sure he dared believe them. He said, “I didn’t think nobody could get me out of here.”

  “Sonny, there’s something you have to understand: I’m a good lawyer.” Darrow spoke with a calm certainty that compelled belief. “I’m a damn good lawyer, matter of fact. This petty tyrant here”—he pointed at Luther Bliss again, and again Bliss didn’t rise to it—“kept thinking I wasn’t, but he’s not so smart as he thinks he is.”

  “I know who’s my country’s friend and who ain’t,” Bliss said. “What do I need to know besides that?”

  “How to live by the rules you say you’re protecting,” Clarence Darrow answered. The head of the Kentucky State Police snapped his fingers
to show how little he cared about them. Darrow had been blustery before. Now he got angry, really angry. “What’s the point of having a country with laws if you get around ’em any time you happen not to care for ’em, eh? Answer me that.”

  But Luther Bliss was not an easy man to quell. “This here’s Kentucky, Mr. Darrow. If we played by the rules all the time, the bastards who don’t would get the jump on us pretty damn quick, and you can bet on that. Half the people in this state are Confederate diehards, and the other half are Reds.”

  He exaggerated. From what Cincinnatus remembered of the days before he’d moved north, he didn’t exaggerate by much. Darrow said, “If nobody in this godforsaken place wants to live in the USA, why not give it back to the Confederates?”

  Cincinnatus gaped—he’d never heard anyone except a diehard say such a thing. Mildly, Bliss replied, “You know, Mr. Darrow, advocating return to the CSA is against the law here.”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised,” Darrow said. “Wouldn’t be one bit surprised. The law it’s against is unconstitutional, of course, not that you care about the Constitution of the United States.”

  “Here’s your nigger, Mr. Darrow.” Bliss’ air of calm frayed at last. “Take him and get the hell out of here. Or don’t you think I could fix up a cell with your name on it right next to his?”

  “I’m sure you could,” Darrow said. “And I’m sure you could make it very unpleasant for me. But I’m sure of something else, too—I’m sure I could make it even more unpleasant for you if you did.”

  By the sour look on Luther Bliss’ face, he was sure of the same thing. It didn’t make him very happy. “Get out,” he repeated.

  “Come along, Mr. Driver,” Clarence Darrow said. “Let’s get you back to civilization, or what passes for it in the United States these days.” He grunted with effort as he heaved himself to his feet. Cincinnatus needed a heartbeat to remember the surname belonged to him. He hadn’t grown up with it, and people didn’t use it very often. And nobody’d called him by it since he’d landed here. Dazedly, he followed the white lawyer.