And there she sat, at a table against the far wall, talking animatedly with several local big shots. Scipio hadn’t seen her for twenty years or so, but he had not the slightest doubt. She’d aged very well, even if he wouldn’t have called her beautiful any more. And she still sounded as terrifyingly self-assured as she ever had, maybe even more so.
As befit its status as a fancy place to eat, the Huntsman’s Lodge was dimly lit. Scipio didn’t think she recognized him. He was just another colored waiter, not one serving her table. He thanked heaven he hadn’t let Jerry Dover talk him into taking the headwaiter’s post. Then he would have had to escort her party to the table, and she would have been bound to notice him.
Even now, he wasn’t sure she hadn’t. She always held her cards close to her chest. He didn’t want to go anywhere near that table. He didn’t want to speak, for fear she would know his voice. He spent as much time as he could in the kitchens. The cooks gave him quizzical looks; he didn’t get paid for roasting prime rib or doing exotic things with lobster tails.
His boss knew it, too. “What the hell you doing hiding in there, Xerxes?” Jerry Dover demanded indignantly. “Get your ass out and wait tables.”
“I’s sorry, suh,” Scipio answered. “But I gots to tell you, I’s feelin’ right poorly tonight.”
Dover didn’t say anything for a little while. His eyes raked Scipio. “You know,” he remarked at last, “there’s niggers I’d fire on the spot, they tried to use that kind of line on me.”
“Yes, suh,” Scipio said stolidly. Firing was the least of his worries right now.
“You ain’t one of ’em, though. You never tried shirking on me before,” the restaurant manager said. He astonished Scipio by reaching out to put a palm on his forehead. “You don’t have a fever. At least it isn’t the grippe. You need to go home? Go on, then, if you’ve a mind to.”
“I thanks you kindly, suh.” As he had years before with John Oglethorpe, Scipio needed to remind himself that white men could be decent. He found it especially remarkable now, with the Freedom Party in the saddle for the past seven years. Things were set up to give whites every excuse to be bastards, and a lot of them didn’t need much excuse. “Somehow or other, I finds a way to pay you back.” He felt like the mouse talking to the lion in the fable. But the mouse actually had found a way to do it. How could he?
Dover only shrugged. He wasn’t worrying about it. “Get the hell out of here,” he said. “You got your reasons, whatever they are. I’ve known you for a while now. You don’t fuck around with me. So get.”
Scipio got. He wasn’t used to being out on the street so early. He made a beeline for the Terry. The sooner he got into his own part of town, the safer he’d feel.
Then he heard a gunshot down an unlit alleyway, a scream, and the sound of running feet. Maybe he wasn’t so safe in the Terry after all. Whites preyed on blacks, but blacks also preyed on one another. He wondered why. His own people had so little. Why not try to rob whites, who enjoyed so much more? Unfortunately, an answer occurred to him almost at once. If a Negro robbed a white, the police moved heaven and earth to catch him. If he robbed another Negro, they yawned and went about their business.
“Hey, nigger!” A woman’s voice, all rum and honey, called from the darkness. “You in your fancy clothes, I show you a good time like you ain’t never seen.” Scipio didn’t even turn to look. He just kept walking. “Cocksuckin’ faggot!” the woman yelled after him, all the sweetness gone.
Bathsheba stared when Scipio came into the apartment so early. “What you doin’ here?” she demanded. “I jus’ put the chillun to bed.”
He’d been trying to figure out what to tell her ever since he left the Huntsman’s Lodge. “Once upon a time, you asked me how I came to be able to speak like this,” he answered in soft, precise, educated white man’s English. Bathsheba’s eyes went wide. The only time he’d ever spoken like that in her hearing was to save their lives in the rioting not long after the Freedom Party took over. Now he had to tell the truth, or some of it. In that same dialect, he went on, “A long time ago, I was in the upper ranks of one of the Socialist Republics we tried to set up. Someone came into the restaurant tonight who knew me in those days. I’m not certain whether she recognized me, but she might have. She’s . . . very sharp.” Seeing Anne Colleton forcibly reminded him how sharp she was.
“You learn to talk like dat on account of you was a Red?” Bathsheba asked.
Scipio shook his head. “No. I was useful to the Reds because I could already talk like this. I . . . I was a butler, a rich person’s butler in South Carolina.” There. Now she knew—knew enough, anyhow.
He waited for her to shout at him for not telling his secret years before. But she didn’t. “If you was a big Red, no wonder you don’t say nothin’,” she told him. “What we do now?”
“Dunno.” He fell back into the slurred speech of the Congaree Negro. Talking in that other voice took him off to a world that had died in fire and blood and hate—but also a world where he’d grown to manhood. The contrasts terrified him. “Mebbe nuttin’. Mebbe run fas’ as we kin.”
“How?” Bathsheba asked, and he didn’t have a good answer for her. Passbooks were checked these days as they’d never been before the war. Any black without a good reason for being where he was—and without the papers to back up that reason—was in trouble. People talked about camps. No one knew much about them, though; they were easy to get into, much harder to leave.
Even so, he said, “Better we takes de chance. They catches me . . .” He didn’t go on. If they caught him and realized who he was, he wouldn’t last ten minutes. No trial. No procedure. They’d just shoot him.
Bathsheba was still staring at him. His wife clucked sadly, a sound of reproach: self-reproach, he realized when she said, “I shoulda pussected what you was.” He needed a heartbeat or two to figure out that she meant suspected. She went on, “If you was a Red, you had to hide out. And you was smart, gettin’ out o’ the state where you was at.”
“I weren’t no Red, not down deep, not for real an’ for true,” Scipio said. “But dey suck me in. I don’t go ‘long wid dey, dey shoots me jus’ like de buckra shoots me.” That was the truth. Cassius and Cherry and the rest of the Reds on the Marshlands plantation had been in deadly earnest. Confidence in their doctrine had sustained them—till rifles and what little else they got from the USA ran up against the whole panoply of modern war, and till they discovered their oppressors wouldn’t vanish simply because they were called reactionaries.
Bathsheba’s mind went in a different direction. Suddenly, she said, “I bet Xerxes ain’t even your right name.”
“Is now. Has been fo’ years.”
“What your mama call you?”
“Scipio,” he said, and wondered how long it had been since he’d spoken his own name. More than twenty years; he was sure of that.
“Scipio.” Bathsheba tasted it, then slowly shook her head. “Reckon I like Xerxes better. I’s used to it.” She sent him an anxious look. “You ain’t mad?”
“Do Jesus, no!” he exclaimed. “You go an’ forget you ever hear de other one. Dat name get around, de buckra after we fo’ sure. Dey still remembers me in South Carolina.” Was that pride in his voice? After all these years, after all that terror, after being sure at the time that he was walking into a disaster (and after proving righter than even he’d imagined), was that pride? God help him, it was.
His wife gave him a kiss. “Good.” She was proud of him, too, proud of him for what had to be the stupidest thing he’d ever done in his life. Madness. It had to be madness. There was no sensible explanation for it. But no sooner had that thought crossed his mind than Bathsheba said, “Every once in a while—Lord, more’n every once in a while—them white folks deserves a whack in the chops, they truly does.”
And that did make sense. When things were bad, you tried your best to make them better. How didn’t matter much. “Let’s go to bed,” he said.
“How you mean dat?” Bathsheba asked.
Now he kissed her. “However you wants, sweetheart.”
He went up to the Huntsman’s Lodge the next day with a certain amount of apprehension. He checked the autos parked near the restaurant with special care. None of them looked as if it belonged to either the police or Freedom Party goons. He had to go to work. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t eat, and neither would his family. In he went.
Jerry Dover met him just inside the door. “Go home,” the manager said bluntly. “Get the hell out of here. You’re still sick. You’ll be sick another couple of days, too.”
Scipio blinked. “What you say?”
“Go home,” Dover repeated. “Damn Freedom Party woman asking all kinds of questions about you.”
Ice congealed in Scipio’s belly. He might have known Anne Colleton would spot him. Did she ever miss a trick? “What you say to she?” he asked, already hearing hounds baying on his trail.
“I told her you ain’t who she thinks you are. I told her you been working here since 1911,” Jerry Dover answered. His eyes twinkled.
“God bless you, Mistuh Dover, but when she catch you in de lie—”
“She ain’t gonna catch me.” Dover grinned at him. “I showed her papers from back then to prove it.”
“How you do dat?” Now Scipio was all at sea.
Still grinning, the manager said, “ ’Cause a nigger named Xerxes did work here then. He was only here a couple months, but those were the papers I showed her. Bastard stole like a son of a bitch. That’s why they canned his ass. I heard one of the owners bitching about it not too long after we hired you. The name stuck in my head, and so I watched you close after that, but old Oglethorpe was right—you’re first-rate. Anyway, this here gal like to shit, I’ll tell you. You don’t ever want to tell that one she’s wrong. She ain’t got no wedding ring, and I can see why.”
That made a perfect thumbnail sketch of the Anne Colleton Scipio had known. She would have thought she had him at last—and then she would have seen her hope snatched away. No, she wouldn’t be happy, not even a little bit. “God bless you, Mistuh Dover,” Scipio said again.
“Go home,” Jerry Dover repeated once more. “She may come back and try to raise some more trouble for you. I don’t want that. I need you here too bad. And don’t get your bowels in an uproar. I’ll pay your wages.”
Home Scipio went, in a happy daze. Safe—really safe—from Anne Colleton at last! He was back in the Terry before he realized this wonderful silver lining had a cloud. Maybe he was free of Anne Colleton. But now Jerry Dover had a hold on him. Miss Anne had been far away. Dover was right here in town. If he ever decided to go to the police . . . Scipio shivered, but he kept on walking.
“I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth,” the president of the Confederate States said into the microphone as soon as the engineer behind the glass wall gave him the high sign. “And the truth is, folks, that Kentucky is ours again and Texas is whole again and our country is a long way back towards being what it’s supposed to be again.
“The people spoke, and the Yankees had to listen. The people said they were sick and tired of being stuck in the USA. They came back where they belonged. The Stars and Bars are flying in Lubbock and San Antonio and Frankfort and Louisville. We took back what was ours, because that was how the people wanted it.”
He didn’t say anything about losing the plebiscite in Sequoyah. The papers and the wireless in the CSA hadn’t said much about it, either. People got the news he wanted them to have, slanted the way he wanted it to go. Oh, his coverage wasn’t perfect. By the nature of things, it couldn’t be. Too many people could also pick up wireless stations from across the U.S. border. But not a lot of them did. Confederates and Yankees had disliked and distrusted one another for a long time now.
“Here and there along the border, the Yankees are still holding on to what’s ours: in Sonora, in Arizona, in Arkansas, and right here in Virginia,” Jake continued. “Al Smith tried to make me promise I wouldn’t talk about those things if we had the elections last month, but I don’t call that an honest kind of promise. No, sir, folks, I don’t call it honest at all, not even a little bit. He was saying, ‘I’ll give you back some of what’s yours if you forget about the rest of what’s yours.’ Now you tell me, friends—is that fair? Is that right?”
Bang! He slammed his fist down on the table, a favorite trick of his. “I tell you it’s not fair! I tell you it’s not right! And I tell you that the Confederate States of America deserve to be whole again! The CSA will be whole again! This here that we’ve done now is only the beginning. We don’t want trouble with the United States. We don’t want trouble with anybody. But we want what’s ours, and we’re going to get it!”
He ended just as the light went red. This wasn’t one of his long speeches, only a little one to remind people that he’d got back two of the states the Whigs had lost. He stood up, stretched, and left the studio.
As always, Saul Goldman waited for him outside in the hallway. “Good speech, Mr. President,” the director of communications said. “I don’t think you can make a bad one.”
“Thanks, Saul,” Featherston answered. “We have a lot of things to take care of over the next few weeks. You’ve got the incident simmering?”
“Oh, yes.” The little Jew nodded. “We’ll have something worked up if they don’t take care of things for us. They’re liable to, you know.”
Jake nodded. “Hell, of course I know. But we’ll be able to get the story out the way we want it if it’s our incident to begin with.”
Bodyguards came up alongside of Saul Goldman. Goldman nodded to them in an absent-minded way. He didn’t take security as seriously as he should have. Of course, nobody was gunning for him, either. Featherston didn’t have the luxury of making that assumption. He nodded to the men in the butternut uniforms. They carried submachine guns at an identical angle. Their expressions were also identical: tough and watchful. Jake was watchful, too, though he tried not to let it show. Party stalwarts had tried to bump him off once. Could he really trust Party guards? If he couldn’t, could he trust anybody in the whole wide world?
The guards led him out into the street. They spread out before he got into his new armored limousine. With Virgil Joyner shot dead, his driver was new, too. He missed Virgil. He missed anybody who’d known him in the old days and stuck with him through thick and thin. Harold Stowe, the new man, was probably a better driver than Joyner had been. Jake didn’t care. The man was—and acted like—a servant, not a drinking buddy.
“Back to the Gray House, Harold,” Featherston said. Harold. He sighed to himself. Stowe didn’t even go by Hal or Hank or anything interesting.
“Right, Mr. President,” the driver said, and put the limousine in gear. Jake sighed again, a little louder this time. Virgil Joyner had called him Sarge. He’d had the right, too. Not many people did, not any more.
Climbing Shockoe Hill was hard work for the heavy limousine. There’d been an ice storm the night before. Despite rock salt on the road, the going was still slippery. They crawled to the top in first gear.
When he strode back into the presidential residence, his secretary met him just inside the door. “You know you’re scheduled to meet with Lieutenant General Forrest in ten minutes, don’t you, sir?” she said, as if sure he’d forgotten.
“Yes, Lulu, I do know that,” he said. “Let me go to the office and look at a couple of things, and I’ll be ready for him.”
An officer named Nathan Bedford Forrest III should have raised Featherston’s hackles. He’d campaigned against all the Juniors and IIIs and even VIs who clung to power in the CSA by virtue of what their ancestors had done, and who hadn’t done anything much on their own. But, for one thing, the first Nathan Bedford Forrest had been as much of a self-made son of a bitch as Jake was, and he’d been proud of it, too. And, for another, his great-grandson wasn’t a Great War General Staff relic. He’d been too young even t
o fight in the trenches from 1914 to 1917. He was a hell of a soldier now, though, with notions of how to use barrels as radical as his illustrious ancestor’s ideas about horses. Featherston liked the way he thought.
At the moment, though, Forrest looked worried. “Sir, if the Yankees decide to jump us for moving troops into Kentucky and west Texas”—he wouldn’t call it Houston, refusing to recognize the validity of the name—“they’ll whip us. They can do it. If you don’t see that, you’ll land the country in a hell of a mess.”
“I never said they couldn’t,” Featherston answered. “But they won’t.”
Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked exasperated. The first officer to bear the name had been a rawboned man who looked a bit like Jake Featherston. His descendant had a rounder face, though he kept his great-grandfather’s dangerous eyes. They looked all the more dangerous when he glowered. “Why won’t they? You’ve promised to keep those states demilitarized, and you’re going back on your solemn word. What better excuse do they need?”
“If they attack me for moving my men into my states, they’ve got a war on their hands,” Jake said calmly. “I’m telling you, General, they don’t have the stomach for it.”
“And I’m telling you, Mr. President, you’ll take the country down in ruins if you’re wrong.” The first Nathan Bedford Forrest had had a reputation for speaking his mind. His great-grandson took after him.
“To hell with the country,” Featherston said. Nathan Bedford Forrest III gasped. Jake went on, “I’ve got twenty dollars of my own money against twenty dollars of yours, General. The damnyankees won’t move.”
Forrest frowned. “You sound mighty damn sure of yourself, Mr. President.”
“I am mighty damn sure of myself,” Jake Featherston answered. “That’s my job. Suppose you let me tend to it while you tend to yours.”
“I am tending to my job,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “If I didn’t point out to you that we’re liable to have a problem here, I wouldn’t be tending to it. The damnyankees outweigh us. They’re always going to outweigh us. Remember how much trouble the Germans had against the Tsar’s armies in the Great War? That wasn’t because one Russian was as good a soldier as one German. It was because there were a hell of a lot of Russians. There are a hell of a lot of soldiers in the USA, too.”
The Victorious Opposition Page 61
