“Damn right it does. I’ve been waiting for it for twenty years,” Jake answered. “Now get the hell out of here. You start feeling unhappy, just remember you’re getting off easy.”
Jeb Stuart Jr. stormed from the office. He slammed the door as he went. Jake laughed. He’d heard a lot of slams since becoming president. This one didn’t measure up to some of the others.
After a moment, Jake called, “Lulu?”
“Yes, Mr. President?” his secretary said.
“Give Saul Goldman a buzz for me, will you?” Featherston was always polite to Lulu, if to nobody else. “Tell him I want to talk with him right away.”
When he said right away to Goldman, the skinny little Jew, who got the Freedom Party’s message out to the country and the world, took him literally. He got to Jake’s office within five minutes. “What can I do for you, Mr. President?”
“General Jeb Stuart Jr. just resigned.” Featherston flourished the sheet of paper with the one-line message. “I’m going to tell you why he resigned, too.” He gave Goldman the story of Jeb Stuart III and Pompey.
Goldman blinked. “You want me to announce that to the country? Are you sure?”
“Damn right I do. Damn right I am.” Jake nodded emphatically. “Let people know why he left. Let ’em know we’ll be cleaning out more useless time-servers soon, too. That’s the angle I want you to take. Reckon you can handle it?”
“If that’s what you want, Mr. President, that’s what you’ll get,” Goldman said.
“That’s what I want,” Jake Featherston declared. And sure as hell, what he wanted, he got.
VII
Jefferson Pinkard stood in line at the Odeum, waiting to buy a ticket. When he got up to the window, he shoved a quarter at the fellow behind it. He took the ticket and walked inside. After a pause at the concession stand, he went into the darkness of the theater, popcorn and a Dr. Hopper in hand.
He sat in the middle of a row, so people going by wouldn’t make him spill the popcorn or the soda. As soon as he was settled, he started methodically munching away. No one else sat very close to him, maybe because of the noise. He didn’t care. He wasn’t there for company. He was there to kill a couple of hours.
The maroon velvet curtains slid back to either side of the stage, revealing the screen. In the back of the theater, the projector began to hum and whir. SMOKING IS PROHIBITED IN THIS AUDITORIUM appeared on the screen, then vanished.
Most of the people in the Odeum came from Fort Deposit. They leaned forward almost in unison, knowing the newsreel was coming up next. Pinkard leaned forward with them. Since coming to work at the Alabama Correctional Camp (P), he’d felt far more cut off from the world around him than he ever had up in Birmingham. If not for wireless and moving pictures, the outside world would hardly have touched this little Alabama town.
“In Richmond, the Olympic Games came to a magnificent conclusion!” the announcer blared. “The Confederate States have shown the world they are on the move again, thanks to President Featherston and the Freedom Party.”
“Freedom!” somebody in the auditorium called, and the chant rang out. Jeff was glad to join it, but it didn’t last; people couldn’t chant and hear what the announcer was saying at the same time.
Confederate athletes with the C.S. battle flag on their shirtfronts ran and jumped and swam and flung javelins. Smiling, they posed with medals draped around their necks. President Featherston posed with them, shaking their hands in congratulations. He turned to face the camera and said, “We’re a match for anybody—more than a match for anybody. And nothing’s going to stop us from getting where we’re going.”
Suddenly, the camera cut away from the athletes. It lingered on the crumpled corpse of a black man, and on the submachine gun half visible under his body. “This stinking, worthless nigger tried to assassinate our beloved president, who sat watching the athletic competition,” the announcer declared. “Thanks to the heroism of a Great War veteran, he paid the price for his murderous folly.”
Another camera cut. The bespectacled white man standing beside Jake Featherston didn’t look like a veteran; he put Pinkard more in mind of a professor. Featherston spoke again: “Those damn blacks—beg your pardon, folks—stabbed us in the back during the war. They’re trying to do it again. This time, though, we’re good and ready for ’em, and we won’t let ’em get away with it.”
Murmurs of agreement ran through the Odeum. Fort Deposit was in the Black Belt, but no black faces had been visible in the theater before the lights went down. Indeed, armed guards outside and on the roof made sure no marauding Negroes would cause trouble while the motion picture played.
At the Olympic closing ceremonies, smartly turned-out Confederate soldiers ringed the stadium, protecting it as the guards protected the theater here. Aeroplanes with the words CONFEDERATE CITRUS COMPANY painted in big letters on their sides streaked low above the stadium. They flew wingtip to wingtip, in formations only professional pilots who were also daredevils would have tried.
They could fight if they had to, Pinkard realized. He wondered if they were Great War veterans, or if they’d picked up their experience flying for Maximilian in the Mexican civil war. That didn’t matter. Wherever they’d got it, they had the right stuff. So did the machines they flew: sleek low-winged metal monoplanes that made the slow, sputtering canvas-and-wire contraptions of the Great War seem like antiques by comparison.
After a moment’s pause, the newsreel shifted subjects. VETERAN STEPS DOWN, a card said. “Jeb Stuart Jr., who first came to prominence in the Second Mexican War more than fifty years ago, has left the Confederate General Staff after revelations about his unfortunate role in failing to prevent the Red uprising of 1915,” the announcer said. On the screen, Stuart looked ancient indeed, ancient and doddering. “President Featherston will soon name a younger, more vigorous replacement.”
Other newsreel snippets showed dams rising in the Tennessee River valley, tractors plowing, and other machines harvesting. “Agriculture makes great strides,” the announcer said proudly. “Each machine does the work of from six to six hundred lazy, shiftless sharecroppers.” The camera panned across shabbily dressed colored men and women standing in front of shanties.
“And in lands stolen from the CSA after the war, in Sequoyah and the part of occupied Texas miscalled Houston . . .” The announcer fell silent. The pictures of dust in dunes, in drifts, in blowing, choking curtains, spoke for themselves. Leaning forward against a strong wind, a man lurched through drifted dust towards a farmhouse with a sagging roof. His slow, effortful journey seemed all but hopeless. So did the wail of a baby on the lap of a scrawny woman in a print dress. She sat on the front porch of a house whose fields lay dust-choked and baking under a merciless sky.
Gloating, the announcer said, “This is how the United States care for the lands they took from their rightful owners.”
“Damnyankees,” a woman behind Pinkard whispered.
After those grim scenes, the serial that followed came as something of a relief. It portrayed a pair of Confederate bunglers who’d ended up in the Army during the war and had escape after unlikely escape. Jeff knew it was ridiculous, but couldn’t help laughing himself silly.
The main feature was more serious. It was a love story almost thwarted by a colored furniture dealer who kept casting lustful looks toward the perky blond heroine. Pinkard wanted to kick the Negro right in the teeth. That the people who’d made the motion picture might want him to react just like that never once crossed his mind.
He rose and stretched when the picture ended, well pleased that the black man had got what was coming to him. Then he left the theater and walked over to the bus that would take him back to the Alabama Correctional Camp (P). The bus was heavily armored, with thick wire grating over the windows. Pinkard wasn’t the only white passenger who drew a pistol before boarding. Here at the edge of the Black Belt, rebellion still sizzled. He wanted to be able to fight back if the Negroes shot up the bus.
His heart thudded in his chest when the machine got rolling.
It reached the Alabama Correctional Camp (P) without taking fire. Jeff breathed a sigh of relief when he got off. Two sandbagged machine-gun nests guarded the front entrance. They were new. Black raiders hadn’t been shy about shooting into the camp, and didn’t seem to care whether they hit guards or prisoners. New belts of barbed wire ringed the place, too. They were as much to keep marauders out as they were to keep inmates in.
Jeff’s white skin was enough to get him past the machine-gun nests unchallenged. At what had been the entrance, another guard carefully scrutinized both him and his identity card. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Toby,” he fumed, “you know goddamn well who I am.”
“Yeah, I do,” the lower-ranking guard said, “but I gotta be careful. There was that camp in Mississippi where one of the prisoners managed to sneak out with a phony card.”
“You ever hear of anybody sneaking in with a phony card?” Jeff demanded. Toby only shrugged. Pinkard let it go. He couldn’t complain too hard, not when the camp needed solid security.
A mosquito bit him on the back of the neck. He swatted and missed. Its buzz as it flew away sounded as if it were laughing at him. The camp lay quiet in the summer night. Snores floated out the windows of the prisoners’ barracks. Men who’d proved too enthusiastic about being Whigs or Rad Libs weren’t going anywhere—except for hasty trips to the latrines.
“What do you say, Jeff?” a guard called as Pinkard headed toward his much more comfortable barracks. “How was the picture?”
“Pretty good, Charlie,” he answered. “Got to do something about those damn niggers, though. That one who took a shot at the president . . .” He caught himself yawning and didn’t go on. Instead, he just said, “Freedom!”
“Freedom!” Charlie echoed. It was a handy word when you wanted to say something without bothering with a real conversation.
Pinkard’s mattress creaked when he lay down. In the warm, muggy darkness, he was some little while falling asleep. He’d laid out the camp with room to grow. The expanded security perimeter had come from that extra room, which was fine. The land was there, for whatever reason. If it hadn’t been, that would have caused a problem. As things were . . . As things were, he rolled over and slept.
Reveille woke him. He got out of bed, put on a fresh uniform, washed his face and shaved, and went out to look at morning roll call and inspection. The politicals were lined up in neat rows. They wore striped uniforms like any convicts, with a big white P stenciled on the chest and back of each shirt and the seat of each pair of trousers.
Guards counted them off and compared the tally to the number expected. When Pinkard saw the count start over again, he knew the numbers didn’t match. The politicals groaned; they didn’t get fed till everything checked out the way it was supposed to. One of them said, “Take off your shoes this time, goddammit!”
Without even pausing, a guard walking by backhanded the talky prisoner across the face. The political clapped his hands to his nose and mouth, whereupon the guard kicked him in the belly. He fell to the ground, writhing.
Jeff ate breakfast with assistant wardens not involved in the count. Ham and eggs and grits and good hot coffee filled him up nicely. When the count finally satisfied the guards making it, the prisoners got the very same breakfast—except for the ham and eggs and coffee.
One of the assistant wardens said, “I hear we’ve got some new fish coming in today.”
“Yeah?” Jeff pricked his ears up. “What kind of new fish?”
“Blackfish,” the other man answered.
“Niggers?” Pinkard said, and the other fellow nodded. Jeff swore. “How the hell are we going to keep ’em separate? Nobody said nothin’ about niggers when we were laying out this place.”
“What the devil difference does it make?” the other fellow said. “Half the bastards we’ve got in here—shit, more than half—they’re already nigger-lovers. Let ’em stick together with their pals.” He laughed.
To Jeff, it wasn’t a laughing matter. “They’ll make trouble,” he said dolefully. He didn’t want trouble—he didn’t want trouble the prisoners started, anyhow. He wanted things to go smoothly. That made him look good.
With a shrug, the other assistant warden said, “They won’t bust out, and that’s all that matters. And how much trouble can they make? We’ve got the guns. Let ’em write the governor if they don’t like it.” He guffawed again. So did Pinkard—that was funny.
Sure enough, the colored prisoners came in a little before noon. Some of them were wounded, and went into the meager infirmary. The rest . . . The rest reminded Jeff of the Red rebels he’d fought just after he got conscripted into the C.S. Army. With them inside it, this camp would need more guards. He was morally certain of that. What, after all, did these skinny, somber Negroes have left to lose?
“Yankees go home! Yankees go home! Yankees go home!”
The endless chant worried Irving Morrell. He stood up in the cupola of his barrel, watching the crowd in the park in Lubbock. Trouble was in the air. He could feel it. It made the hair on his arms and at the back of his neck want to stand up, the way lightning did before it struck. Not enough men here, in the restless—hell, the rebellious—state of Houston; not enough barrels, either. They hadn’t been able to clamp down on things here and make them stay quiet.
What do you expect? he asked himself. We’ve got that long, long border with Confederate Texas, and agitators keep slipping over it. They keep sneaking guns across it, too, not that there weren’t plenty here already.
As if on cue—and it probably was—the crowd in the park changed their cry: “Plebiscite! Plebiscite! Plebiscite!” Morrell’s worry eased, ever so slightly. Maybe they were less likely to do anything drastic if they were shouting for a chance to vote themselves back into the CSA.
From the gunner’s seat, Sergeant Michael Pound said, “By God, sir, we ought to let Featherston have these bastards back. They’d be just as unruly for him as they are for us.”
“I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong, Sergeant, but that’s not what our orders are,” Morrell answered. “We’re supposed to hold Houston, and so we will.”
“Yes, sir.” By his tone, Pound would sooner have dropped the place. Morrell had trouble blaming him. As far as he was concerned, the Confederates were welcome to what had been western Texas. But he didn’t give orders like that. He only carried them out, or tried.
When trouble started, it started very quickly. The crowd was still chanting, “Plebiscite! Plebiscite!” Morrell barely heard the pop of a pistol over the chant and over the rumble of the barrel’s engine. But he realized what was going on when a soldier in U.S. green-gray slumped to the ground, clutching at his belly.
The rest of the soldiers raised their rifles to their shoulders. The crowd, like most hostile crowds in Houston, had nerve. It surged forward, not back. Rocks and bottles started flying. The soldiers opened fire. So did people in the crowd who’d held back up till then.
Morrell ducked down into the turret. “It’s going to hell,” he told Pound. “Do what you have to do with the machine gun.”
“Yes, sir,” the gunner answered. “A couple of rounds of case shot from the main armament, too?”
Before Morrell could answer, three or four bullets spanged off the barrel’s armor plate. “Whatever you think best,” he said. “But we’re going to dismiss this crowd if we have to kill everybody in it.”
“Yes, sir,” Michael Pound said crisply; that was an order he could appreciate. “Case shot!” he told the loader, and case shot he got. He had never been a man to do things by halves.
Despite the gunfire, Morrell stood up in the cupola again. He wanted to see what was going on. A bullet cracked past his ear. The turret traversed through a few degrees, bringing the main armament to bear on the heart of the crowd. The cannon bellowed at point-blank range. Barrels carried only a few rounds of case shot, for gunners seldom got the chance to use it. S
ergeant Pound might have fired an enormous shotgun at the rioting Houstonians. The results weren’t pretty, and another round hard on the heels of the first made them even more grisly.
People ran then. Not even trained troops could stand up to that kind of fire. Sergeant Pound and the bow gunner encouraged them with a series of short bursts from their machine guns. The other barrel in the park was firing its machine guns, too, and the soldiers were pouring volley after volley into the dissolving crowd. Such treatment might not make the Houstonians love the U.S. government, but would make them pay attention to it.
They had nerve, even if they had no brains to speak of. Some men lay down behind corpses and kept shooting at the U.S. soldiers. And a whiskey bottle with a smoking wick arced through the air and smashed on the front decking of Morrell’s barrel.
It smashed, spilling flaming gasoline across the front of the machine. “God damn it!” Morrell shouted in furious but futile rage. What soldiers here in Houston called Featherston fizzes had proved surprisingly dangerous to barrels. Flames spread over paint and grease and dripped through every opening, no matter how tiny, in the fighting compartment. “Out!” Morrell yelled. “Everybody out!” He ducked back into the turret to scream the same message into the speaking tube, to make sure the driver and bow gunner heard him.
Then he scrambled out the cupola and down the side of the barrel. Escape hatches at the bow and on either side of the turret flew open. The rest of the crew got out through them, closely followed by growing clouds of black smoke. “Move away!” Sergeant Pound shouted. “When the ammo starts cooking off—”
Morrell needed no more encouragement. Neither did any of the other crewmen. They put as much ground between them and the doomed machine as they could. Morrell looked back over his shoulder. Smoke was pouring out of the cupola now, too. A moment later, the most spectacular fireworks display this side of the Fourth of July in Philadelphia finished the barrel.
The Victorious Opposition Page 23
