The Disunited States of America Read online

  “Beckie Royer,” Justin said.

  “From California.” That was Agent Tyler. In the home timeline, people from states like Virginia sometimes looked down their noses at Californians—and vice versa. It seemed all the more true here, where the two states really were separate countries instead of just acting that way.

  Justin only nodded. He couldn’t very well deny that Beckie was from California. “Nice-looking girl,” Agent Madison remarked, as if cutting him some slack. He nodded again. Madison asked, “Why did you go up onto the knob?”

  “Just to have something to do. It was nice to get out after the rain.” Justin made a face. “If I knew we’d find a body up there, we would have gone somewhere else, believe me.”

  He got a thin smile from Madison, a stony stare from Jefferson, and a dirty look from Tyler. “How did you find the body?”

  “We smelled it.” Justin would never forget that odor for the rest of his life. “He must have been dead a couple of days by then. The smell led me to the body, and I saw the gun by it. That’s when I called the sheriff.” They couldn’t think there was anything wrong with that … could they?

  “You were not on Jephany Knob while the thunderstorm was at its peak?” Senior Agent Jefferson asked.

  “You’d have to be nuts to go up there then,” Justin said. “It wasn’t just raining cats and dogs—it was raining cougars and wolves.”

  That got him another smile from Agent Madison. But Agent Tyler said, “Clark didn’t care about the weather.”

  “No, sir,” Justin agreed, “but he should have, shouldn’t he?”

  The VBI men only grunted. In the background, Mr. Brooks coughed once or twice. Justin supposed that meant he shouldn’t rattle the agents’ cages. Part of him knew the coin and stamp dealer was giving him good advice. Part of him insisted their cages needed rattling—after all, they were trying to rattle his.

  “How do you feel about Virginia’s social system?” Senior Agent Jefferson asked.

  I hate it. I think you deserve every pound’s worth of trouble you’ve brought on yourselves, Justin thought. Sometimes the truth wasn’t the best answer. If he told the truth here, they would haul him off to an unpleasant jail and do even more unpleasant things to him. He didn’t like being a hypocrite, now or any other time. But the question rubbed his nose in the fact that you couldn’t always say what you thought.

  And so he gave what he thought was a casual response: “The same as anybody else does, I guess.” It wasn’t even completely a lie. Anybody else from the home timeline was likely to feel the same way he did.

  Jefferson’s face showed none of what he thought. He probably made a dangerous poker player. “Doesn’t it bother you that Rebecca Royer plainly believes in the pernicious doctrine of Negro equality?” he asked.

  No, it doesn’t bother me, because I do, too. Again, Justin didn’t say what he thought. Instead, he just shrugged. “She’s from California. What can you expect?”

  That was the right answer. All three VBI agents nodded. “Kid’s got some sense,” Agent Madison muttered.

  “Why do you hang around with her, then?” Agent Tyler asked.

  Now Justin looked at him as if he wasn’t very bright. “We don’t spend a whole lot of time talking about politics,” he said. Let them use their imagination to figure out what he and Beckie did talk about.

  Agent Madison snickered, then tried to pretend he hadn’t. Agent Tyler turned a dull red. Senior Agent Jefferson, grinding as a glacier, said, “Miss Royer states that the two of you are just friends.”

  “Well, yeah,” Justin admitted, and his sorrowful tone of voice made Madison snicker again. Justin went on, “But there’s no law that says I can’t keep trying, is there?”

  “Maybe California has one—I don’t know.” Jefferson tried a smile himself. It didn’t look quite natural on his face. He changed the subject: “Are you acquainted with Irma Davis?”

  “Not any more—she’s dead,” Justin blurted.

  “Well, yes. But were you acquainted with her?”

  “Sure. She was the waitress at the diner across the street. Uncle Randy and I would eat breakfast over there all the time till she, uh, got sick.”

  “So you have been exposed to the biological agent Ohio wickedly unleashed on our innocent population?” Jefferson sounded as if he’d listened to too many Virginia newscasts.

  “We hope we haven’t,” Mr. Brooks said before Justin could reply. No matter which of them said it, that was no lie.

  “So do we,” Agent Madison said. They weren’t wearing gas masks and protective gear, the way the paramedics who put Irma in the ambulance had been. Maybe they had nostril filters that didn’t show, but those could do only so much. Getting ordered to Elizabeth wouldn’t have made the agents jump up and down with glee. Justin wondered if they’d have to get decontaminated after they drove away. He also wondered if that would help.

  “What will you do in case of Negro unrest?” Jefferson asked.

  “Hope things settle down before too many people get hurt,” Justin answered. That seemed to satisfy the VBI men. Justin was afraid he knew why: when they thought about people, they didn’t include African Americans. And the blacks in Virginia were as ready to hate him because he was white as whites would have been if he were black. Did that have any good answers? If it did, he couldn’t see them.

  Seven

  The first time Mrs. Snodgrass sneezed, Beckie didn’t pay much attention. But when she did it four or five times in a row, each sneeze more ferocious than the one before, Beckie said, “Good heavens! Bless you! Are you all right?”

  “I … a-choo! … think so.” Mrs. Snodgrass made a liar out of herself by sneezing three more times. She pulled a tissue from a box on the end table and blew her nose. Then she sank down onto the couch. “I hope I’m all right, anyway. All that sneezing kind of takes it out of you.”

  “I guess it would.” Beckie looked at her. Was she flushed? Beckie thought so, but she wasn’t sure—or maybe she just didn’t want to dwell on what her being flushed might mean.

  Mr. Snodgrass came into the room. “You trying to blow your head off, Ethel?” he asked. That made Beckie smile—her father and mother teased each other the same way. But he stopped teasing when he got a look at his wife’s face. “You okay, sweetie?” Sudden worry roughened his voice.

  “I think so,” Mrs. Snodgrass said again, but she didn’t sound so sure this time.

  Mr. Snodgrass walked over, stooped, and pressed his lips to her forehead. Beckie’s mom would do that when she or one of her brothers or her sister wasn’t feeling well. The lines between Mr. Snodgrass’ eyebrows and the ones that bracketed the sides of his mouth got deeper and harsher. All at once, he looked like an old man. “You’re warm,” he said. It sounded like an accusation.

  “Well, maybe I do feel a little peaked.” Mrs. Snodgrass screwed up her face and started sneezing again.

  “You reckon I ought to call the doctor?” Ted Snodgrass asked.

  “Now how would you get him to come out to Elizabeth with things the way they are?” His wife blew her nose again, as if to say how silly the idea was.

  Gran walked in gnawing on a roll. She took one look at her cousin and said, “Ethel Snodgrass, are you coming down sick with that stupid plague?” There never was a situation that Gran couldn’t make worse with a few ill-chosen words.

  “Of course not,” Mrs. Snodgrass, and started sneezing again as if it were going out of style.

  “I reckon maybe I will call the doctor,” Mr. Snodgrass said. “Just to stay on the safe side.” He gave Gran a dirty look. Beckie didn’t blame him a bit. He walked into the other room to use the phone. Beckie didn’t blame him for that. He couldn’t want his wife to hear how worried he had to be.

  Beckie couldn’t make out what he was saying, either. She could make out his tone of voice, though. If he wasn’t scared to death, she’d never heard anybody who was.

  She thought of Charlie Clark, and wished she hadn’t.
Talking about death wasn’t the same when you’d seen the real thing. And then she thought about the waitress at the diner. What was her name? Irma, that was it. She was dead, too. Beckie looked at Mrs. Snodgrass, then looked away in a hurry. She didn’t care for any of the directions her mind was going in right now.

  Mr. Snodgrass walked into the front room again. He said, “Well, hon, they’re going to send an ambulance from Parkersburg. Be here in twenty minutes, a half hour, they told me.”

  “That’s silly,” Mrs. Snodgrass said. “It’s nothing but a summer cold.”

  Gran started to say something about that. Beckie kicked her in the ankle, accidentally on purpose. Gran jumped. “You be careful!” she said. “What in the world do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m sorry, Gran,” Beckie said, meek as you please. If Gran got mad at her … well, so what? Gran had got mad at her lots of times, and this wouldn’t be the last one—not even close. However much Gran fussed and fumed, Beckie could deal with it. Poor Mrs. Snodgrass, on the other hand, really had something wrong with her. She wouldn’t need Gran making things worse.

  Mr. Snodgrass nodded to Beckie. “You’re all right,” he murmured. Gran—surprise!—never noticed.

  Beckie started trying to figure out how she felt herself. Was she warmer than she should have been? Did she need to sneeze? To cough? To do anything she wouldn’t normally do? She knew that was silly … in a way. In another way, it wasn’t. When you were with somebody who was all too likely to have a horrible disease, how could you not worry about coming down with it yourself?

  She heard the ambulance’s siren long before it got to the Snodgrasses’ house. Sound carried amazingly far in Elizabeth. In Los Angeles, the constant background noise of cars and machinery and airplanes and everything else that went into a big city muffled and blunted distant sounds. Not here. Here, the background noise was birdsongs and the wind in the trees, and that was about it.

  The ambulance screeched to a stop in front of the house. All up and down Prunty, people would be coming out to stare at it. Beckie was as sure of that as if she could see them herself. What else did they have to do for excitement? And, like her, they had something real to worry about.

  Mr. Snodgrass let the paramedics into the house. They were dressed in what looked like spacesuits. A shame space travel never quite panned out, Beckie thought. Satellites that relayed signals and kept an eye on the weather came in handy. Probes had flown all across the Solar System and men had gone to the moon and Mars. But there didn’t seem to be much room for people anywhere but Earth.

  All that went through Beckie’s mind in less than a second. The lead paramedic hurried over to Mrs. Snodgrass, who’d got visibly sicker while everybody waited for the ambulance. “How do you feel, ma’am?” he asked. Coming from behind his respirator, his voice sounded all ghostly.

  “Cold,” she answered. “Cold and kind of purple. I mean … I don’t know what I mean.” Beckie shivered. That didn’t sound good.

  The paramedic stuck a thermometer tip in Mrs. Snodgrass’ ear. “What’s her temperature?” her husband asked anxiously.

  “It’s just over 104, sir,” the paramedic said. Beckie translated that into the Celsius degrees she was used to. Over forty! That was a high fever. The man went on, “We’ll have to take her in.” He turned to his partner. “Give these people shots, George.”

  “Right,” George said.

  “What kind of shots?” Mr. Snodgrass said.

  “Gamma globulin, made from the blood serum of people who’ve had this thing,” the paramedic answered. “We don’t know how much good it will do, but it won’t hurt you. And you’ve sure as the devil been exposed.”

  Mr. Snodgrass took his shot without a word. So did Beckie, but it wasn’t easy—she didn’t like needles, not even a little bit. Gran kicked up a fuss. Beckie might have known she would—she kicked up a fuss about everything. “They say gramma glofulin isn’t good for you,” she squawked. Beckie was sure she’d never heard of gamma globulin in her life before—if she had, she would have pronounced it better. But her mysterious they had something to say about everything.

  “Look here, ma’am—if you want to get sick, that’s your business,” George said. “But if you get sick and spread it to other people like this pretty little girl here”—he pointed at Beckie with a gloved hand—“that’s Virginia’s business. So I’m going to give you this shot no matter what. It’s the best hope for staying well you’ve got.”

  “They say—” Gran broke off with a yip, because the paramedic did what he’d said he would do. She let him put alcohol on the spot where he’d stuck her. If looks could have killed, though, George would have fallen over on the floor.

  Instead, he and his partner put Mrs. Snodgrass on a stretcher and carried her out. The ambulance shrilled away. Gran watched avidly till it turned the corner on State Route 14 and disappeared. Other people’s catastrophes were meat and drink to her.

  Mr. Snodgrass watched, too, but not the same way. All at once, he looked shrunken and ancient. He’d been spry enough to seem much younger than his years. He suddenly didn’t. They’d crashed down on him like a landslide, and his shoulders slumped under the weight of them. “Are you all right?” Beckie asked softly.

  He shook himself like a man coming out of cold water. Every bit of his attention had been with the ambulance. Now he had to call himself back to the real world, and it wasn’t easy for him. “Am I all right?” He might have been asking himself the same question. After some serious thought, he shook his head. “Well, now that you mention it, no. Ethel and me, we haven’t spent more than a handful of nights apart the past forty-five years. It’ll be powerful strange, lying down tonight and trying to sleep without her lying there next to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Beckie said. “I’m sorry about everything.”

  “I only wish I could have gone with her, but they weren’t about to let me,” he said. “I guess they worried I might come down with it myself. Like I care! If she’s not with me, what difference does it make whether I live or die? But I suppose I might pass it on to other folks if I come down sick, and that wouldn’t be right.”

  How am I supposed to answer him? Beckie wondered. She couldn’t see any way at all. The ambulance siren faded into silence. Mr. Snodgrass still seemed old.

  “Do you think we ought to be doing this?” Justin asked as he and Mr. Brooks walked toward the Snodgrasses’ house. Then he answered his own question: “Well, why not? Way things are, it’s about even money who’s exposing whom to what.”

  Randolph Brooks nodded. “That’s how I look at it, too. What with Irma breathing in our faces every day for who knows how long, we’re not taking any big chances ourselves. And everybody there has already been up close to the virus. Besides, Ted Snodgrass is a friend of mine. These are the least I can do.” He hefted the flowers he was carrying.

  Justin nodded. Before coming to Elizabeth, he’d wondered if people from the home timeline really could make friends with the locals. Now that he’d got to know Beckie, he saw they could. People were people, no matter where they came from. And this alternate’s breakpoint was only a little more than three hundred years old. Folks here still had a lot in common with those from his America.

  The weather had everything in common with his America’s. It was hot and humid. Walking just the few blocks from the motel to the house on Prunty made sweat stand out on his face and made his shirt stick to him as if it were glued to his hide. He wondered how people had lived, he wondered how they’d worked, before air-conditioning was invented. A lot of them hadn’t, or not for very long—doing hard labor in weather like this really could lay you low.

  That was one of the reasons the white colonists imported African slaves into the South. They thought the Negroes could stand the climate better than they could themselves—and if the Negroes were doing the hard work in the fields, they wouldn’t have to. If you thought of people as chattels, as property of the same sort as cattle or sheep, it ma
de good logical sense.

  If.

  African Americans weren’t property any more in this alternate, of course. Even in the states that tried hardest to keep them as slaves, they’d been legally free for two centuries now. But the difference between legally free and legally equal—let alone socially equal—made a gulf as wide as the Grand Canyon. Blacks hadn’t been able to cross it anywhere here—except in Mississippi, where they’d put whites on the wrong side of it. People here had a lot in common with those from his America, yes … but not enough.

  “No wonder Charlie Clark carried a gun,” Justin muttered.

  “No wonder at all—but don’t say that out loud,” Mr. Brooks replied.

  “Don’t say this out loud. Don’t say that out loud.” Justin knew he was losing his temper, but couldn’t seem to help it. “Sure is a wonderful place where we’re staying. Oh, yeah.”

  “Do you want the VBI men knocking on our door again?” the coin and stamp dealer asked. “They will, if you make people in Elizabeth suspicious of you. And if they think you’ve got anything to do with a Negro uprising, all the gloves come off. Can you blame them for thinking like that?”

  You bet I can. Justin started to say it, but a gesture from Mr. Brooks made him hold his tongue. The older man mouthed one word. Bugs. Was somebody aiming a parabolic mike at them right now? Had the VBI men planted tiny microphones in their hotel room? In the Snodgrasses’ home? In their pockets? It could happen in the home timeline. Here? The technology here wasn’t as good, but was it good enough? Justin wouldn’t have been surprised.

  So Mr. Brooks was talking as if other people were listening. And Justin knew he had to do the same—for now, anyway. “No, of course not,” he said. “An uprising would be terrible.” That was true … from a white Virginian’s point of view. Justin’s real opinion was better left unsaid if anyone here was listening.