American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold Read online

  “I do my best,” Bartlett answered. He had an engaging grin, one that let him say things a dour man could never have got away with.

  The bell over the front door jangled. A customer came in. “Help you with something, sir?” Reggie asked.

  “Yes. Thanks. Chilly out there.” The man came up to the counter. Bartlett wished he hadn’t. His breath was so dreadful, he might not have used a toothbrush since before the Great War. Maybe, if God were kind, he’d ask about one now, or about mouthwash. But no such luck; he said, “What have you got in the way of rat poison?”

  You could breathe on them, Reggie thought. That’d do the job, the way the Yankees’ chlorine killed the rats in the trenches on the Roanoke front. No matter how engaging his grin, though, he knew he couldn’t get away with that. Life in Richmond was too civilized for such blunt truths. “Here, let me look,” he said, and pulled up a bright yellow box with an upside-down rat with X’s for eyes on the front of it. “This ought to do the job.”

  “It’ll shift ’em, will it?” the man asked, breathing decay into Reggie’s face.

  “Sure will, sir.” Reggie drew back as far as he could, which wasn’t nearly far enough. “Rats, mice, even cockroaches. You put it down, they eat it, and they die.”

  “Reckon I can manage that.” The customer dug a hand in his pocket. Coins jingled. “How much?”

  “Twenty-two cents,” Bartlett said. The man gave him a quarter. He solemnly returned three pennies.

  “Thanks.” The fellow put them in his pocket. He took the box of rat poison and headed out the door. “Freedom!” Without waiting for an answer, he left the drugstore.

  Reggie’s boss looked up from the pills, which he was removing from the mold. “You showed fine patience there,” he said. “I don’t know if I could have done the same. I could smell him all the way over here.”

  “You could give a man like that a straight flush in a poker game, and he’d still find a way to lose,” Bartlett said. “No wonder he’s a Freedom Party man.”

  “His money is as good as anyone else’s,” Harmon said. “In fact, you can gloat if you like, because his money’s going into my pocket, and into yours, and neither one of us can stand Jake Featherston.”

  “We’re not fools. I hope to God we’re not fools, anyway,” Reggie answered. “The only thing Featherston can do is make a speech that sounds good if you’re a sorry so-and-so who can’t add six and five without taking off your shoes.”

  “I’m not going to try to tell you you’re wrong—you ought to know that.” Harmon looked at the clock on the wall. “Just about quitting time. Why don’t you knock off a couple of minutes early? Call it a bonus for the way you dealt with that fellow.”

  “Thank you kindly. I don’t mind if I do.” Bartlett put on his coat and his fedora. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “See you then.” Jeremiah Harmon was busy making more pills. Reggie sometimes wondered if he ever went home at night.

  The man with slit-trench breath had been right: it was chilly outside. Bartlett wished he’d brought along a pair of earmuffs. As he hurried toward the trolley stop a couple of blocks away, he went past some posters that hadn’t been pasted to a half ruinous wall when he walked by it on the way to work that morning.

  VOTE FREEDOM IN 1925! they shouted in red letters on a white background. Below that, in smaller type, they added, Jake Featherston talks straight. Every Wednesday on the wireless. The truth shall set you free.

  “And when will you ever hear the truth from that son of a bitch?” Reggie muttered. He’d heard Jake Featherston on the stump in the very earliest days of the Freedom Party. He hadn’t liked what he heard then, and he hadn’t liked anything he’d heard from Featherston or the Freedom Party since.

  Only difference is, Featherston was a little snake then, and he’s a big snake now, Bartlett thought. But even a big snake could lose some hide now and then. Reggie hooked his fingernails under the top of one of those posters and yanked. As he’d hoped, most of it tore away. The fellows who’d hung the posters had done a fast job, a cheap job, but not a good one. They hadn’t used enough paste to stick them down tight. Whistling “Dixie,” he ripped down one poster after another.

  He hadn’t got all of them, though, before a raucous voice shouted, “Hey, you bastard, what the hell you think you’re doing?”

  “Taking down lies,” Reggie answered calmly.

  “Them ain’t lies!” the man said. He was about Reggie’s age, but shabby, scrawny, still wearing a threadbare butternut uniform tunic that had seen a lot of better years. Veterans down on their luck swelled the ranks of the Freedom Party. This one snarled, “You touch another one o’ them posters, and I’ll beat the living shit out of you.”

  “You don’t want to try that, buddy,” Bartlett said. Down came another poster. The shabby veteran howled with rage and trotted toward him. Thanks to the wounds Reggie had taken in Sequoyah, he wasn’t much good either at fisticuffs or running away. He’d had run-ins with Freedom Party men before, too.

  During the war, a .45 had been an officer’s weapon, nothing to speak of when set against the Tredegar rifles most ordinary soldiers carried. These days, the .45 in a hidden holster on Reggie’s belt put him in mind of an extra ace up his sleeve. He took it out and pointed it at the onrushing would-be tough guy. His two-handed grip said he knew exactly what to do with it, too.

  The Freedom Party man skidded to a stop in the middle of the street, so abruptly that he flailed his arms and rocked back on his heels. The barrel of the .45 had to look the size of a railroad tunnel as Reggie aimed it at his midriff. “I told you, you don’t want to try that,” Reggie said.

  “You’ll pay for this,” the scruffy veteran said. “Everybody’s gonna pay for fucking with us. You’re going on a list, you—” He decided not to do any more cussing. Running your mouth at a man with a pistol when you didn’t have one of your own wasn’t the smartest thing you could do. Even a Freedom Party muscle man could figure that out.

  “Get lost,” Bartlett told him. He gestured with the .45 to emphasize the words. “Go on down to the corner there, turn it, and keep walking. You do anything else, you’ll be holding up a lily.”

  Face working with all the things he dared not say, the other man did as he was told. Bartlett finished tearing down the posters, then went on to the trolley stop. His only worry was that the Freedom Party man had a weapon of his own, one he hadn’t had a chance to use. But the fellow had talked about beating him up, not shooting him. And he didn’t reappear.

  Up came the trolley, bell clanging. Reggie tossed a dime into the fare box and took a seat. The dime should have been five cents; prices weren’t quite what they had been before the war. But they weren’t what they had been afterwards, either—he wasn’t paying a million dollars, or a billion, for the privilege of riding across town to his flat.

  Nobody on the trolley car had the slightest idea who he was or what he’d just done. That suited him fine, too. He had a chance to relax a little and look out the window. Before long, the trolley passed more of those VOTE FREEDOM IN 1925! posters. Reggie’s lip curled. He couldn’t rip them all down, however much he wished he could.

  Seven and a half years after the Great War ended, not all the destruction U.S. aeroplanes had visited on Richmond was yet repaired. Plenty of burnt-out and bombed building fronts stared at the street through window frames naked of glass; they might have been so many skulls peering out through empty eye sockets. The damnyankees made my home town into Golgotha, Bartlett thought. One of these days, we’ll have to pay them back. But how?

  He shivered, though the crowded trolley was warm with humanity. That was how the Freedom Party thought, and how it got its members. Haven’t you had enough of war? he asked himself. Asked that way, he could hardly say no.

  He got off at the shop nearest his flat. For supper, he fried up a ham steak and some potatoes. After he did the dishes—he was a fussy, neat bachelor—he read for a while and went to bed. He wouldn
’t have minded a wireless set, so he could listen to music or a football game, but not on the salary of a druggist’s assistant.

  The next day did bring a chilly drizzle. Work at the drugstore went much as the previous day had. He didn’t bother telling his boss about the fuss over the posters. Jeremiah Harmon had no use for the Freedom Party, no, but Reggie didn’t want him fussing like a mother hen, which was just what he would have done.

  “Hey, you!” somebody called to Reggie when he walked to the trolley stop that evening. It was the veteran he’d quarreled with. He wore a disreputable hat to keep the rain off his face.

  His hand went to the .45. “Told you I didn’t want you bothering me,” he said.

  “No bother, pal,” the fellow said. He pasted on a smile as he came up to Bartlett, and he made sure he kept his hands in plain sight. “We’ve all got to live and let live, ain’t that right?”

  Reggie stared. “That’s not how you talked yesterday,” he said, his voice hard with suspicion. “What’s wrong with you now?”

  “Not a thing,” the Freedom Party man said. “I just got a little hasty, is all. You went through some of the things I did, you’d get hasty, too.”

  “I went through plenty myself,” Bartlett said. “You want to go through it again? That’s what that damn Featherston’s got in mind.”

  “No, pal. You don’t understand at all,” the veteran said. He still had on the same ancient tunic he’d worn the evening before.

  Noticing that, Reggie didn’t notice the footsteps coming up behind him till they stopped. That made him notice, and made him start to turn, his pistol coming out of the holster. Too late. He heard three shots. Two slugs hammered him in the chest. The next thing he knew, he was on the ground, reaching for the .45 that had fallen from his fingers.

  The veteran scooped it up. “Nice piece,” he said, and then, grinning, “Freedom!” Reggie heard him as if from far away, and further every moment. He didn’t hear the man and his friend running away at all, or anything else ever again.

  * * *

  Three guards came up to Cincinnatus Driver’s cell. Two of them stood in the corridor, their pistols aimed at his midsection. The third opened the cell door. “Come along,” he said.

  “Where you takin’ me?” Cincinnatus asked.

  “That ain’t none o’ your business, boy,” the guard snapped, for all the world as if Kentucky were still part of the CSA, not the USA. “Come along, you hear?”

  “Yes, suh.” Cincinnatus got up off his cot and came. He’d quickly learned how far he could go with these guards before they stopped talking and started persuading him by other means. One beating had been plenty to drive the lesson home: not just the beating itself, but how much they enjoyed giving it to him. If they ever decided to beat him to death, they would do it with smiles on their faces.

  “Hands behind your back,” the guard told him. He obeyed. The guard clicked handcuffs onto his wrists. They were cruelly tight, but Cincinnatus kept his mouth shut about that, too. Complaining just got them tightened more.

  The guards marched him along the corridor. He recognized some of the men sitting or lying in their cells. Some, black like him, were Reds. Others, whites, were men who’d been Confederate diehards during the war and probably belonged to the Freedom Party nowadays. Maybe some of the other prisoners recognized him, too. If so, no one gave a sign.

  “This way,” one of the guards told him. They led him across the exercise yard he normally saw for an hour a week, down another corridor, and into an office. A tall, backless stool sat in front of the desk. Luther Bliss sat behind it. The guards slammed Cincinnatus down on the stool, hard.

  “Here we are again,” the head of the Kentucky State Police said.

  “Yes, suh,” Cincinnatus said. “I want a lawyer, suh.” He hadn’t tried that one in a while. The worst the other man could tell him was no.

  Bliss’ smile never touched his hunting-dog eyes. “If you was still in Des Moines, maybe you could have one,” he answered. “But this here’s Kentucky, and the rules are different here. This is one of the reclaimed states, and we aren’t about to put up with treason or rebellion. You mess around with that stuff and you get caught, we take care of you our own way.”

  “I wasn’t messin’ around with nothin’ here,” Cincinnatus said bitterly. “I was just livin’ my life up in Iowa till you got that sorry Hadrian nigger to write that lyin’ letter to get me down here in the first place. You call that fair . . . suh?”

  “I had you once before,” Luther Bliss replied in meditative tones. “I had you, and I was going to squeeze you, and Teddy Roosevelt made me turn you loose. He made me pay you a hundred dollars out of my own pocket, too. I have . . . a long memory for these things, Cincinnatus.”

  Cincinnatus hadn’t forgotten that, either, though Bliss hadn’t mentioned it till now. “Do Jesus, Mr. Bliss, you want your hundred dollars back, I’ll pay it to you. Just let me wire my wife an’—”

  Bliss shook his head. “I get paid back with interest.”

  “I’ll pay you interest. I got the money. I done pretty good for myself up there.”

  “I don’t want your money. I get paid back my kind of interest.”

  He was what he was. His kind of interest involved pain and misery. That was what he dished out. That was what the people who told him what to do wanted him to dish out. If, every once in a while, he dished them out to people who didn’t really deserve them, the people who told him what to do probably didn’t mind. They might even figure he deserved a little fun on the job.

  Like a hunting dog taking a scent, Luther Bliss leaned forward. “Enough chitchat. About time we get down to business, I reckon.”

  Before Cincinnatus could brace himself, one of the guards slapped him in the face. He tumbled off the stool and also banged his funny bone on the floor as he fell. “Why’d he do that, Mr. Bliss?” he said, slowly climbing to his feet. “I ain’t done nothin’ to nobody.”

  “You lie. Everyone lies.” Luther Bliss sounded sad but certain. Policemen got used to people lying to them. Maybe they even got to where they expected it. Secret policemen probably heard and expected even more lies than any other kind. Bliss pointed to the stool. “Sit your nigger ass back down, Cincinnatus. You got to tell the truth when I ask my questions.”

  “You didn’t ask me no questions,” Cincinnatus said reproachfully. “Joe there, he jus’ hauled off an’ hit me.”

  “That’s for all the lies you’ve already told me, and to remind you not to tell me any more,” Luther Bliss answered. Again, his smile never reached his eyes. “You ought to be thankful we’ve gone easy on you so far.”

  “Easy!” Cincinnatus exclaimed. “He damn near knocked my head off.” A few months in jail—and years of sparring before then—had given him and the secret policeman an odd sort of camaraderie. He could, up to a point, speak his mind without making Luther Bliss any more likely to do something dreadful to him.

  Bliss nodded now. “He just thumped you a bit. Worse we’ve done, we’ve beaten you up. That ain’t so much of a much, Cincinnatus, believe you me it ain’t. It’s a new age we’re livin’ in. Electricity’s everywhere. You take an ordinary car battery and some wires, and you clip ’em to a man’s ears, or to the skin of his belly, or maybe to his privates. . . .”

  Cincinnatus didn’t want to show fear. But his mouth went dry at the thought of electricity trickling through his balls. Would he ever be able to get it up again after something like that? Please, Jesus, don’t let me find out!

  Meditatively, Bliss went on, “Other nice thing about that is, it doesn’t leave any marks. You niggers don’t show bruises as much as a white man would, but even so. . . .” He leaned forward. “I reckon you already told me everything you know about Kennedy and Conroy and the rest of those goddamn diehards.”

  “Mr. Bliss, I done sung like a canary ‘bout them bastards.” There Cincinnatus spoke the truth. He owed no loyalty to the white men who’d done all they could to help the C
onfederate cause in Kentucky. They might have killed him or betrayed him to U.S. authorities, but they’d had no great hold on his loyalty. As far as he could see, any Negro who backed the Confederates from anything but compulsion was some kind of idiot.

  The secret policeman pointed to him. “You’re still holding out, though, when it comes to Apicius and the rest of the Reds. Like calls to like. Just like the diehards, you coons stick together.”

  “Do Jesus, how can I know what they’re up to when I moved away years ag—” Cincinnatus got that far before the guard belted him again. This time, he was braced for it, and didn’t fall off the stool. He tasted blood in his mouth.

  “You don’t expect me to believe anything like that, do you?” Luther Bliss sounded sad, like a preacher contemplating sinful mankind. “I ain’t stupid, Cincinnatus, no matter what you think.”

  “I never reckoned you was.” Again, Cincinnatus told the exact truth. Fear of Bliss had helped him decide to leave Kentucky, but he’d never thought the other man was dumb. Just the opposite: he didn’t care to live under Bliss’ magnifying glass for the rest of this days. Living under his thumb, though, was even worse.

  “You get letters. You know what’s going on here,” the secret policeman said.

  “Not hardly,” Cincinnatus told him. “Don’t hardly know that many folks what can read an’ write. You keepin’ tabs on me all the time like I reckon you been doin’, you know that’s true.”

  For a moment, he thought he’d got through to Bliss. The man’s eyes narrowed. He looked thoughtful. But then, a moment before he spoke, Cincinnatus realized he was playing a part. He was building up hope in his captive only to dash it: “Well, sonny, so what? Long as you’re here, you’ll pay for everything you done anyways.”

  Cincinnatus would have been more devastated if he’d had more hope to lose. He wanted to tell Bliss where to head in. A couple of times, back in the days when he was still free, he had told Bliss where to head in. He’d enjoyed it mightily then, too. But he was paying for it now.