The Victorious Opposition
Page 9
These days, he wasn’t the only one tramping through the fields. His two older sons, Miguel and Jorge, were big enough to give him real help: one was seventeen, the other sixteen. Before many more years—maybe before many more months—had passed, they would discover women. Once they found wives, they’d go off and farm on their own. Then Rodriguez would have to work his plot by himself again. No—by then Pedro would be old enough to pitch in. Now he enjoyed the extra help.
When the day’s work was done—earlier than it would have been without his sons’ help—he stood at the sink working the pump handle to get water to wash the sweat from his round brown face. That done, he dried himself on a towel prickly with embroidery from his wife and his mother-in-law.
“Magdalena, you know I am going into Baroyeca tonight,” he said.
His wife sighed but nodded. “Sí,” she said. The two of them, Magdalena especially, spoke more Spanish than English. Most Sonorans, especially of their generation, did, even though Sonora and Chihuahua had belonged to the Confederate States ten years longer than either one of them had been alive. Their children, educated in the school in town, used the two languages interchangeably. Schools taught exclusively in English. What the Rodriguezes’ children’s children would speak was something Hipolito wondered from time to time, but not something he could do anything about.
He said, “There’s nothing to worry about now. We have had no trouble holding Freedom Party meetings since Señor Featherston won the election.”
Magdalena crossed herself. “I pray to God you are right. And I still say you have not told me all you could about these times you were shooting at people.”
Since she was right, Rodriguez didn’t answer. He ate his supper—beans and cheese wrapped in tortillas—then walked to Baroyeca, about three miles away. He got to town just as the sun was setting.
Baroyeca had never been a big place. A lot of the shops on the main street were shuttered these days, and had been ever since the silver mines in the mountains to the north closed down a few years earlier. If Jaime Diaz’s general store ever shut down, Rodriguez didn’t know how the town would survive.
Except for the general store and the Culebra Verde, the local cantina, Freedom Party headquarters was the only business in Baroyeca that bothered lighting itself up after sundown. The lamps burned kerosene. Electricity had never appeared here. FREEDOM! the sign on the front window said, and below it, in slightly smaller letters, ¡LIBERTAD!
No matter what Rodriguez had told his wife, an armed guard with bandoleers crisscrossing his chest stood in front of the door. He nodded and stood aside to let Rodriguez go in. “Hola, Pablo,” Rodriguez said. “¿Todo está bien?”
“Yes, everything’s fine,” Pablo Sandoval answered in English. “Nobody gonna do nothin’ to us now.” Peeking out from under one of the bandoleers was his Purple Heart ribbon. Like Rodriguez, like most of the men now entering middle age in Baroyeca, he’d gone north to fight for the Estados Confederados and against the Estados Unidos in the Great War. He’d stayed in the English-speaking part of the CSA for several years before coming home, which went a long way toward explaining why he often used that language.
The Party organizer who’d come down to Baroyeca a few years before, on the other hand, was a native speaker of English but greeted Rodriguez in fluent Spanish: “Hola, señor. ¿Como está Usted?”
“Estoy bien. Gracias, Señor Quinn. ¿Y Usted?”
“I am also well, thank you,” Robert Quinn replied in Spanish. He was and always had been scrupulously polite to the men he’d recruited into the Freedom Party. That in itself set him apart from a lot of English-speaking Confederates, who treated men of Mexican blood as only a short step better than Negroes. Rodriguez hadn’t needed long in the Confederate Army to figure out that greaser was no term of endearment. Good manners alone had been plenty to gain Quinn several new Party members. “¡Libertad!” he added now.
“¡Libertad!” Rodriguez echoed. He nodded to his friends as he took a seat. They’d been in combat together, fighting against the dons who didn’t want to see the Freedom Party taking over Baroyeca and all of Sonora.
Continuing in his good if accented Spanish, Robert Quinn said, “Gentlemen, I have a couple of announcements to make. First, I am glad I see before me men with many sons. President Featherston is beginning a Freedom Youth Corps for boys fourteen to eighteen years old. They will work where work is needed, and they will learn order and discipline. The Party and the state of Sonora will join together in paying the costs of uniforms. Those will not cost any Party member even one cent.”
A pleased buzz ran through the room. Rodriguez’s friend, Carlos Ruiz, put up his hand. Quinn nodded to him. He said, “Señor, what if boys who come from families where there are no Party members want to join this Freedom Youth Corps?”
“This is a good question, Señor Ruiz.” Quinn’s smile was not altogether pleasant. He said, “In English, we say johnny-come-latelies for those who try to jump on the caboose when the train is rolling away. These boys will be able to join, but their families will have to pay for the uniforms. This seems only fair, or do you think differently?”
“No, Señor Quinn. I like this very much,” Ruiz replied. Rodriguez liked it very much, too. For as long as his family had lived in these parts, they’d had to make do with the dirty end of the stick. This time, though, he’d actually backed a winner. Not only that, backing a winner was proving to have its rewards. By the smiles on the faces of the other Freedom Party men, their thoughts were running along the same lines.
“Some of you already know about our next item of business,” Quinn said. “You saw, when the pendejos who fought for Don Joaquin shot up our headquarters here last year, that we could not rely on the guardía civil to keep such troublemakers away from us. The present members of the guardía civil have . . . resigned. Their replacements will be Freedom Party men.”
“Bueno,” Rodriguez said. His wasn’t the only voice raised in approval, either. Putting Freedom Party men in those places did a couple of things. It made sure the people who enforced the law would do that the way the Party wanted, as for so many years they’d done it the way the local mine owners and big landowners wanted. And, unless Rodriguez missed his guess, it would also make sure several Freedom Party men now down on their luck had jobs that paid enough to live on. Indeed, what point belonging to the winning side if you couldn’t reap any benefits from it?
Knowing smiles around the room said he wasn’t the only man to have figured that out, either. It’s good to know, he thought. One thing you could say about an old patrón: when trouble came, he looked out for the men who backed him. Now we see the Freedom Party does the same thing. We can rely on these people. They won’t use us and then walk away.
Underscoring that very point, Robert Quinn said, “Baroyeca is our town now. Sonora is our state. We have to make sure nobody takes them away from us, and we have to show people who haven’t joined the Freedom Party yet that they’d be smart if they did.”
Several men stirred at that. Carlos Ruiz put their worries into words: “Why do we want all these—what did you call them in English—johnnies-come-lately in the Party? What good are they? They would only be followers. They never fought for the Party. They never shed their blood for it. Who needs them?”
“You will always be special to the Freedom Party,” Quinn promised. He tapped the pin he wore in his lapel. “You men who were Party members before President Featherston was inaugurated will be able to wear pins like this one. They will show you followed the Freedom Party before that was the popular thing to do. The others, the latecomers, will have a black border on the pins they wear.”
“Not bad,” Hipolito Rodriguez murmured. Most of the other Party men nodded. We deserve to be singled out, Rodriguez thought. Carlos is right. We paid our Party dues in blood.
But Quinn went on, “Still, the Freedom Party has room for more than just us. The Freedom Party is for everyone in the Estados Confederados. Everyone, do
you hear me? The Party is here to help all the people. It is here for all the people. And it is here to make sure all the people do all they can to make the Estados Confederados a better country, a stronger country. We will need all our strength. All of you who are old enough fought in the war. We were stabbed in the back then. If we ever have to fight again, we will win.”
Rodriguez hadn’t hated the United States before the Great War. He’d rarely thought about the USA before the war. Down here in southern Sonora, the United States had seemed too far away to worry about. Even Confederate states like Alabama and South Carolina had seemed too far away to worry about.
Things were different now. Men from the United States had spent a couple of years doing their level best to kill him. He knew he’d survived the war at least as much by luck as because he made a good soldier. Then, when the fighting finally ended, the men from the United States had taken away his rifle, as if he and his country had no more right to defend themselves.
Was he supposed to love the USA after that? Not likely!
“We’ll all be in step together,” Quinn said. “We’re marching into the future side by side. One country, one party—all together, on to . . . victory.”
One country . . . one party? Not so long ago, in this very room, Carlos had asked what would happen when the Freedom Party lost an election after gaining power. Robert Quinn had thought that was very funny. Hipolito hadn’t understood why, not at the time. Now . . . Now maybe he did.
“¿Hay otro más?” Quinn asked. Nobody said anything. Quinn nodded briskly—an English-speaker’s nod. “All right. If there is no other business, amigos, this meeting is adjourned. Hasta luego.”
Stars shone down brightly when Rodriguez and the other Freedom Party men left Party headquarters. The wind blew off the mountains to the northeast. It was as chilly a wind as Baroyeca ever knew, though up in Texas during the war Rodriguez had discovered things about winter he’d never wanted to know. He wished he’d brought along a poncho; the walk back to the farm would be less than delightful. Of course, the walking itself would help keep him warm.
Some of the Freedom Party men headed for La Culebra Verde, from which light and the sounds of a guitar and raucous singing emerged. “Come on, amigo,” Carlos Ruiz called. “One won’t hurt you, or even two or three.”
“Too much work tomorrow,” Rodriguez said. His friends laughed at him. They probably thought that, while a beer or a tequila, or even two or three, wouldn’t hurt him, Magdalena would. And, though he had no intention of admitting it to them, they were probably right.
Cincinnatus Driver pulled over to the curb, hopped out of his elderly Ford truck with the motor still running, and trotted to the corner to buy a copy of the Des Moines Herald-Express from the deaf-mute selling them there. The fellow tipped his cap and smiled as Cincinnatus gave him a nickel, and smiled wider when the Negro hurried back to the truck without waiting for his change.
He flipped the paper open to the inside pages and read whenever he had to stop for a sign or a traffic cop or one of the red lights that had sprung up like toadstools the past few years. The stories that concerned him most didn’t make it to the front page. That was full of the anti-U.S. riots convulsing Houston, the United State carved from west Texas at the end of the Great War. What Cincinnatus wanted to know more about weren’t world-shaking events, and they didn’t have anything directly to do with Des Moines, either. Sometimes several days would go by without one of the stories that worried him turning up.
Today, though, he found one. The headline—it wasn’t a big headline, not on page five—read, PARTY OF 25 NEGROES TURNED BACK AT BORDER. The story told how the blacks—men, women, and children, it said—had tried to cross from Confederate Tennessee into U.S. Kentucky, and how Border Patrol and National Guard units had forced them to go back into the CSA. They claimed intolerable persecution in their own country, the reporter wrote, but, as their entrance into the United States would have been both illegal and undesirable, the officers of the Border Patrol rejected their pleas, as is longstanding U.S. policy.
He’d made plenty of deliveries to the Herald-Express. If he’d had that reporter in front of him, he would have punched the man—a white man, of course—right in the nose. He came down on the clutch so clumsily, he stalled his truck and had to fire it up again. That made him realize how furious he was. He hadn’t done anything like that since he was learning how to drive back before the Great War.
But, as he rolled north toward the railroad yards, he realized he shouldn’t be mad at the reporter alone. The fellow hadn’t done anything but clearly state what U.S. government policy was and always had been. Back when the border between the USA and the CSA ran along the Ohio River, U.S. patrols had shot Negroes who were trying to flee to the United States while they were in the water. The USA had only a handful of blacks, and wanted no more. A lot of people here would have been happier without the ones they already had.
Cincinnatus’ laughter had a sour edge. “They was stuck with me and the ones like me, on account of they couldn’t no way get Kentucky without us,” he said. He was glad to live under U.S. rather than C.S. rule, especially now that the Freedom Party called the shots down in the Confederacy.
The race riots sweeping through the CSA were the main reason Negroes were trying to get out, of course. Jews had run away from Russian pogroms to the USA. Irishmen had escaped famines and English landlords. Germans had fled a failed revolution. Poles and Italians and Frenchmen had done their best to get away from hunger and poverty. They’d all found places in the United States.
Negroes from the Confederate States? Men and women who had desperately urgent reasons to leave their homes, who already spoke English, and who were ready to work like the slaves their parents and grandparents (and some of them, as youths) had been? Could they make homes for themselves here?
No.
He supposed he should have been glad U.S. military authorities hadn’t chased Negroes south into Confederate territory as they advanced during the war. For a moment, he wondered why they hadn’t. But he could see reasons. The Confederates could have got good use from the labor of colored refugees. And if anything could have made Negroes loyal to the CSA, getting thrown out of the USA would have been it. U.S. officials, for a wonder, had been smart enough to figure that out, and so it hadn’t happened.
Here were the railroad yards, a warren of tracks and switches and trains and fragments of trains scattered here and there over them, apparently—but not really—at random. A couple of railroad dicks, billy clubs in their hands, pistols on their hips, recognized Cincinnatus and his truck and waved him forward. “Mornin’, Lou. Mornin’, Steve,” he called to them. They waved again. He’d been coming here a long time now.
As he bumped over railroad crossings toward a train, he watched the two dicks in his rear-view mirror. They were chasing a ragged white man who’d been riding the rails and was either switching trains or getting off for good. Cincinnatus would have bet the fellow was bound for somewhere else, probably somewhere out West. Not many folks wanted to stay in Des Moines. Even if this poor bastard had had that in mind, he wouldn’t by the time Steve and Lou got through with him.
There stood the conductor, as important a man on a freight train as the supercargo was on a steamboat. Cincinnatus hit the brakes, jumped out of his truck, and ran over to the man with the clipboard in his hand. “Ain’t seen you in a while, Mr. Navin,” he said, touching the brim of his soft cloth cap. “What you got for me to haul today?”
“Hello, Cincinnatus,” Wesley Navin said. Cincinnatus wondered how many conductors came through Des Moines. However many it was, he knew just about all of them. By now, they knew him, too. They knew how reliable he was. Only a handful of them refused to give him business because he was colored. Navin wasn’t one of those. He pointed down the train to a couple of boxcars. “How you fixed for blankets and padding? I’ve got a shipment of flowerpots here, should be enough for this town for about the next hundred years.”
“Let me have a look here. . . .” Navin consulted the all-important clipboard. “Six.”
“Where they at?” Cincinnatus asked. The conductor read off the addresses. Cincinnatus spread his hands, pale palms up. “You runnin’ me all over creation. I got to ask four dollars. Oughta say five—I might not make it back here to git me another load today.”
“Pay you three and a quarter,” Navin said.
“My mama didn’t raise no fools,” Cincinnatus said. “I get my ass over to the riverside. I get honest pay for honest work there.”
“You’re the blackest damn Jew I ever seen,” Navin said. Cincinnatus only grinned; that wasn’t the first time people had said such things about him. Still grumbling, the conductor said, “Well, hell, three-fifty. Since it’s you.”
“Don’t do me no favors like that,” Cincinnatus told him. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere till I don’t lose money on the way, and you ain’t got there yet.”
They settled at $3.75. A few years earlier, that wouldn’t have been enough to keep Cincinnatus in the black. But he was more efficient now than he had been—and prices on everything had come down since money got so tight.
He loaded what seemed like nine million flowerpots into the back of the Ford, using ratty old blankets to keep one stack from bumping another. Anything he broke, of course, he was stuck with. He winced every time the truck jounced over a pothole. He’d done a little thinking before leaving the railroad yard with the flowerpots. The couple of minutes he spent probably saved him an hour of travel time, for he worked out the best route to take to get to all six nurseries and department stores. That was part of what being efficient was all about.
It let him get back to the railroad yard just past two in the afternoon: plenty of time to get more cargo and deliver it before sundown. With the sun setting as he finished the second load, he drove home, parking the truck in front of his apartment building. When he walked into the apartment, his daughter Amanda was doing homework at the kitchen table, while Elizabeth, his wife, fried ham steaks in a big iron spider on the stove.