The Victorious Opposition Read online

  He already knew, in broad terms. But Ferdinand Koenig was the man with the details. “Jails are filling up all over the country,” he answered. “Several states—Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia—have dragged in so many of those fuckers, the jails won’t hold ’em any more. They’re building camps out in the country for the overflow.”

  “That’s good. That’s damn good,” Jake said. “We’ve got a lot of things left to do in this country, and we’ll need people for hard work. Nobody’s going to say boo if a bunch of prisoners go sweat all day in the hot sun, eh?”

  “Not likely.” Koenig, who was a big, blocky man, contrived to make himself look not just fat but bonelessly fat. “Render all the lard out of those porky Whig bastards who never did any honest work in their lives.”

  Featherston nodded emphatically. “You bet. And getting those camps built now’ll come in handy, too. We’ll have plenty of uses for places like that.” He nodded again. “Yes, sir. Plenty of uses.” He saw a piece of paper sticking out of a pile on his desk, pulled it free, and grinned. “Oh, good. I was afraid I’d lost this one. I’d’ve felt like a damn fool asking the secretary of agriculture to send me another copy.”

  “What is it?” Koenig asked.

  “Report on the agricultural-machinery construction project,” Featherston answered. “Won’t be long before we’ve got tractors and harvesters and combines coming out of our ears. Gives us practice making big motor vehicles, you know?” He and Koenig chuckled again. “Helps farming along, too—don’t need near so many people on the land with those machines doing most of the work.”

  The attorney general smiled a peculiar smile. “Yeah,” he said.

  IV

  Colonel Irving Morrell was elbow-deep in the engine compartment of the new barrel when somebody shouted his name. “Hang on for a second,” he yelled back without looking up. To Sergeant Michael Pound, he said, “What do you think of this carburetor?”

  “Whoever designed it ought to be staked out in the hot sun, with a trail of honey running up to his mouth for the ants to follow,” Pound answered at once. “Maybe another honey trail, too—lower down.”

  “Whew!” Morrell shuddered. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Sergeant: I may come up with nasty ideas, but you have worse ones.”

  Someone yelled his name again, adding, “You’re ordered to report to the base commandant immediately, Colonel! Immediately!”

  That made Morrell look up from what he was doing. It also made him look down at himself—in dismay. He wore a mechanic’s green-gray coveralls whose front was liberally smeared and spattered with grease. He’d rolled up the coveralls’ sleeves, but that only meant his hands and forearms had got filthy instead. He wiped them on a rag, but that was hardly more than a token effort.

  “Can’t I clean up a little first?” he asked.

  The messenger—a sergeant—shook his head. “Sir, I wouldn’t if I were you. When Brigadier General Ballou said immediately, he meant it. It’s got to do with the mess down in Houston.”

  Sergeant Pound, who’d kept on guddling inside the engine compartment, poked his head up at that. “You’d better go, sir,” he said.

  He had no business butting into Morrell’s affairs, which didn’t mean he was wrong. After the war, the USA had made a United State out of the chunk of Texas they conquered from the CSA. Houston had always been the most reluctant of the United States, even more so than Kentucky, and looked longingly across the border toward the country from which it had been torn. Since the Freedom Party triumphed in the Confederacy, Houston hadn’t been reluctant—it had been downright insurrectionary. It had a Freedom Party of its own, which had swept local elections in 1934 and sent a Congressman to Philadelphia. Every day seemed to bring a new riot.

  Tossing the rag to the ground, Morrell nodded to the messenger. “Take me to him. If it’s got to do with Houston, it won’t wait.”

  Brigadier General Charles Ballou, the commandant at Fort Leavenworth, was a round little man with a round face and an old-fashioned gray Kaiser Bill mustache. Morrell saluted on coming into his office. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said. “I apologize for the mess I’m in.”

  “It’s all right, Colonel,” Ballou said. “I wanted you here as fast as possible, and here you are. I believe you know Brigadier General MacArthur?”

  “Yes, sir.” Morrell turned to the other officer in the room and saluted once more. “Good to see you again, sir. It’s been a while.”

  “So it has.” Daniel MacArthur returned the salute, then sucked in smoke from a cigarette he kept in a long holder. He made an odd contrast to Ballou, for he was very long, very lean, and very craggy. He’d commanded a division under Custer during the war, which was where he and Morrell had come to know each other. He’d had a star on each shoulder even then; he was only a handful of years older than Morrell, and had been the youngest division commander and one of the youngest general officers in the U.S. Army. Since then, perhaps not least because he always said what he thought regardless of consequences, his career hadn’t flourished.

  Brigadier General Ballou said, “MacArthur has just been assigned as military commandant of Houston.”

  “That’s right.” Daniel MacArthur thrust out a granite jaw. “And I want a sizable force of barrels to accompany me there. Nothing like armor, I would say, for discouraging rebels against the United States. Who better than yourself, Colonel, to command such a force?”

  His voice had a certain edge to it. He’d tried to break through Confederate lines with infantry and artillery alone. He’d failed, repeatedly. With barrels, Morrell had succeeded. Does he want me to fail now? Morrell wondered. But he could answer only one way, and he did: “Sir, I am altogether at your service. I wish I had more modern barrels to place at your disposal, but even the obsolete ones will serve against anything but other barrels.”

  MacArthur nodded brusquely. He stubbed out the cigarette, then put another one in the holder and lit it. “Just so,” he said. “How many barrels and crews can you have ready to board trains and move south by this time three days from now? We are going to put the fear of the Lord and of the United States Army in the state of Houston.”

  “Yes, sir.” Morrell thought for a bit, then said, “Sir, I can have thirty ready in that time. The limit isn’t barrels; it’s crews. The modern ones need only a third as many men as the old-fashioned machines.”

  “Thirty will do,” MacArthur said. “I’d expected you to say twenty, or perhaps fifteen. Now I expect you to live up to your promise. You may go, Colonel.” He’d always had the sweetness and charm of an alligator snapper turtle. But, if you needed someone to bite off a hand, he was the man for the job.

  Fuming, Morrell left Brigadier General Ballou’s office. Fuming still, he had thirty-two barrels ready to load onto flatcars at the required time. Daniel MacArthur’s cigarette and holder twitched in his mouth when he counted the machines. He said not a word.

  The trains left on time. People started shooting at them as soon as they passed from Kansas to Sequoyah, which had also belonged to the CSA before the war. Sequoyah had been a Confederate state; it was not a state in the USA. It was occupied territory. The United States did not want it, and the feeling was mutual.

  Before long, Morrell put men back in the barrels as the train rattled south and west. They could use the machine guns to shoot back. More shots came their way in the east, where the Five Civilized Tribes had dominated life in Confederate times. The United States weren’t soft on Indians, as the Confederate States had been—especially not on Indians who’d looked to Richmond rather than Philadelphia.

  But, bad as Sequoyah was, it didn’t prepare anybody for Houston. The train was two days late getting into Lubbock because of repeated sabotage to the tracks. Signs screamed out warnings: SABOTEURS WILL BE SHOT WITHOUT TRIAL! “Maybe they can’t read here,” Sergeant Pound suggested after one long, long delay.

  Then they passed a trackside gallows with three bodies dangling from it. One of
the bodies had a Confederate battle flag draped over it. That was what Morrell thought at first, anyhow. Then he realized the colors were reversed, which made it a Freedom Party flag, not one from the CSA.

  He’d seen plenty of YANKS OUT! graffiti when he was stationed up in Kamloops, British Columbia. Those were as nothing next to the ones he saw as the train slowed to a stop coming into the Lubbock railroad yard. LEAVE US ALONE! was a common favorite. CSA! was quick and easy to write. So were the red-white-red stripes and the blue X’s that suggested Confederate flags. LET US GO BACK TO OUR COUNTRY! was long, and so less common; the same held true for HOUSTON WAS A TRAITOR! But the one word seemingly everywhere was FREEDOM!

  “Good Lord, sir!” Sergeant Pound said, eyeing the graffiti with much less equanimity than he’d shown rolling past the hanged Houstonians. “What have we got ourselves into?”

  “Trouble,” Morrell answered. That was the only word that came to mind.

  “We will advance into downtown Lubbock,” Brigadier General MacArthur declared as the barrels came down off their flatcars. “I have declared full martial law in this state. That declaration is now being published in newspapers and broadcast over the wireless. The citizens of Houston are responsible for their own behavior, and have been warned of this. If anyone hinders your progress towards or through the city in any way, shoot to kill. Do not allow yourselves to be endangered. Is that clear?”

  No one denied it. Daniel MacArthur climbed up onto the turret of one of the modern barrels (to Morrell’s relief, MacArthur didn’t choose his). He struck a dramatic pose, saying, Forward! without words. The barrels rumbled south, toward central Lubbock.

  They couldn’t advance at much above a walking pace, because most of them were slow, flatulent leftovers from the Great War. Morrell knew the handful of modern machines could have got there in a third the time. Whether that would have done them any good was another question.

  Lubbock didn’t look like a town that had seen rioting. It looked like a town that had seen war. Blocks weren’t just burnt out. They were shattered, either by artillery fire or bombardment from the air. The twin stenches of sour smoke and old death lingered, now weaker, now stronger, but never absent.

  Not many people were on the streets. The eyes of the ones who were . . . In Canada, plenty of people had hated and resented American soldiers for occupying the country. Morrell had thought he was used to it. But, as with the graffiti, what was on the faces of the people here put Canada in the shade. These people didn’t just want him gone. They didn’t even just want him dead. They wanted him to suffer a long time before he died. If he ever fell into their hands, he would, too.

  No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a shot rang out from an apartment building that hadn’t been wrecked. A bullet sparked off the barrel Daniel MacArthur was riding, about a foot from his leg.

  At the sound of the shot, all the men and women on the street automatically threw themselves flat. They knew what was coming. And it came. Half a dozen barrels opened fire on that building, the old ones with their side-mounted machine guns, the new with turret cannon and coaxial machine guns. Windows vanished. So did a couple of big stretches of brick wall between the windows as cannon shells struck home. Glass and fragments of brick flew in all directions. People on the street crawled out of the way; they knew better than to get up and expose themselves to the gunfire.

  Through it all, Daniel MacArthur never moved a muscle. He had nerve and he had style. Based on what Morrell remembered from the Great War, none of that surprised him. Did MacArthur have brains? Morrell wasn’t so sure there.

  Only after the front of the apartment building was wrecked did the brigadier general wave the barrels forward once more. They make a desert and they call it peace, Morrell thought. But no one fired any more shots before the armored detachment reached its perimeter in the center of town.

  Once they got there, MacArthur summoned reporters from the Gazette and the Statesman, the two local newspapers. He said, “Gentlemen, here is something your readers need to know: if they interfere with the U.S. Army or disobey military authority, they will end up dead. And, having died, they will be buried in the soil of the United States, for they cannot and will not detach this state from this country. All they can do is spill their own blood to no purpose. Take that back to your plants and print it.”

  They did. The same message went out over the wireless, and in the papers in El Paso and other towns in Houston. Contingents of Morrell’s barrels, along with infantrymen and state police, reinforced it. The rioting eased. Morrell was as pleased as he was surprised. Maybe Brigadier General MacArthur was pretty smart after all. Or maybe someone on the other side of the border had decided the rioting should ease for the time being. Morrell wished like hell that hadn’t occurred to him.

  Miguel and Jorge Rodriguez stood side by side in the farmhouse kitchen. They both looked very proud. They wore identical broad-brimmed cloth hats, short-sleeved cotton shirts, sturdy denim shorts, socks, and stout shoes. They also wore identical proud smiles.

  Hats, shirts, and shorts were of the light brown color the Confederate Army, for no reason Hipolito Rodriguez had ever been able to understand, called butternut. On the pocket above the left breast of each shirt was sewn a Confederate battle flag with colors reversed: the emblem of the Freedom Party.

  “I will miss your work,” Rodriguez told his two older sons. “I will miss it, but the country needs it.”

  “That’s right, Father,” Jorge said. “And they’ll pay us money—not a lot of money, but some—to do the work.”

  “I’ll help you, Father,” Pedro—the youngest son—said. He wasn’t old enough to join the Freedom Youth Corps yet, and had been sick-jealous of his brothers ever since they did. Being useful on the farm wasn’t much consolation, but it was what he had, and he made the most of it.

  “I know you will.” Rodriguez set a hand on his shoulder. “You’re a good boy. All of you are good boys.”

  “Sí,” his wife said. She probably hadn’t followed the whole conversation, most of which was in English, but she got that. In Spanish, she went on, “I’ll miss you while you are gone.” The tears in her eyes spoke a universal language.

  “Father was right,” Miguel said importantly. “The country does need us, so you shouldn’t cry. We’ll do big things for Sonora, big things for Baroyeca. I hear”—his voice dropped to an excited whisper—“I hear we are going to put in the poles to carry the wires to bring electricity down from Buenavista. Electricity!”

  Instead of being impressed, Magdalena Rodriguez was practical: “We already have poles to bring the telegraph. Why not use those?”

  Miguel and Jorge looked at each other. Plainly, neither one of them knew the answer. Just as plainly, neither one wanted to admit it. At last, Jorge said, “Because these poles are special, Mother.” He might not even have noticed switching back to Spanish to talk to Magdalena.

  “Come on, boys,” Hipolito said. “Let’s go into town.” His sons had grumbled that they were almost grown men, that they were going off to do men’s work, and that they didn’t need their father escorting them to Baroyeca. He’d explained he was proud of them and wanted to show them off. He’d also explained he would wallop them if they grumbled any more. They’d stopped.

  Before they left, he made sure his own Freedom Party pin was on his shirt. They trooped out of the farmhouse together. Neither the crow that fluttered up from the roof nor the two lizards that scuttled into a hole seemed much impressed. Before long, Rodriguez’s sons were less delighted, too. “My feet hurt,” Miguel complained. Jorge nodded.

  “This happened to me when I went into the Army,” Rodriguez said. “Shoes pinch. Up till then, I hadn’t worn anything but sandals.” He looked down at his feet. He wore sandals now. They were more comfortable than shoes any day. But comfort wasn’t always the only question. “For some of what you do, for working in the mountains, sandals won’t protect your feet. Good shoes like those will.”

 
; “They’ll give us blisters,” Jorge said. Now Miguel was the one who nodded in agreement.

  “For a little while, yes,” Rodriguez answered. “Then your feet will toughen up, and you’ll be fine.” He could afford to say that. His feet weren’t the ones suffering.

  When they came to Baroyeca—Jorge limping a little and trying not to show it, for his shoes pinched tighter than Miguel’s—Rodriguez led them to the town square between the alcalde’s house and the church, as he’d been instructed to do. There he found most of the boys in the area, all standing solemnly in ranks that weren’t so neat as they should have been. One of the new members of the guardía civil, a man who’d been a sergeant during the war, was in charge of them.

  “¡Libertad, Hipolito!” he called. “These are your boys?”

  “My older ones, Felipe,” Rodriguez answered. “¡Libertad!”

  “They’ll do fine,” Felipe Rojas said. “They won’t have too much nonsense to knock out of them. Some of these little brats . . .” He shook his head. “Well, you can guess which ones.”

  “A lot of them will be ones whose fathers don’t belong to the Party,” Rodriguez predicted. Felipe Rojas nodded. Rodriguez eyed the youths. He couldn’t tell by the uniforms; those were all the same. But the stance gave away who was who a lot of the time, that and whether a boy looked eager or frightened.

  The bell in the church struck nine. Rodriguez let out a sigh of relief. He’d been told to get here before the hour. He hadn’t realized he’d cut it so close.

  A few minutes later, another boy tried to join the ranks in the square. Rojas ran him off, shouting, “You don’t deserve to be here! You can’t even obey orders about when to come. You’re a disgrace to your uniform. Get out! Get out!”

  “But, señor—” protested his father, who was not a Party man.

  “No!” Rojas said. “He had his orders. He disobeyed them. You helped, no doubt. But anyone who doesn’t understand from the start that the Freedom Youth Corps is about obedience and discipline doesn’t deserve to be in it. Get him out of here, and you can go to the devil with him.” The boy slunk away, his face a mask of misery. His father followed, hands clenched into impotent fists. He was not the least important man in Baroyeca, but he’d been treated as if he were.