The Disunited States of America Page 4

  “Of course not,” Mr. Brooks said. “But what if we can’t stop it, either?”

  The fish hatchery down by Palestine was less exciting than Beckie hoped it would be. There was the Kanawha River. There were ponds next to the river where they raised the baby fish. They had nets that lifted the fish from the ponds and put them into the river. The people who worked with the fish were excited about what they did. They wouldn’t have done it if they weren’t. Beckie could see that.

  But she didn’t care if they were excited. So they were going to put trout and bluegills and crappies—she didn’t bust up at the name, but keeping her face straight wasn’t easy—into the Kanawha? Big deal. They were doing it so people farther downstream could catch them and eat them. Beckie wasn’t a vegetarian, but the idea of catching her own fish didn’t thrill her.

  So she listened to the enthusiastic people in the tan uniforms, and then she started back to Elizabeth. Maybe the uniforms were part of what turned her off, too. Lots of people in Virginia wore them. You didn’t have to work for the government, though the fishery people did. The man who fixed the Snodgrasses’ air conditioner wore a uniform. So did the servers who sold stuff at Elizabeth’s one diner. If you came from California, it was pretty funny.

  In California, nobody but soldiers and sailors and cops wore uniforms. In California, a uniform meant somebody else got to tell you what to do. Californians liked that no more than anyone else, and less than most people. In Virginia, though, a uniform seemed to mean you got to tell other people what to do. It was weird.

  It’s not weird. It’s just foreign, Beckie thought as she followed the loop of the Kanawha back toward Elizabeth. The river was foreign, too. You couldn’t walk alongside a rippling river in Los Angeles. Most of the time, there wasn’t enough water in L.A. Every few winters, there was too much.

  Down by the stream, under the trees a lot of the time, it didn’t seem so hot and sticky. The fishery people didn’t just have uniforms. They had bow ties! Back in California, her father said he wore ties at weddings, funerals, and gunpoint. He was kidding, but he was kidding on the square. And most men in California felt the same way. Oh, the prime minister would put on a tie when a foreign dignitary showed up. A few conservative businessmen still wore them, and the jackets that went with them, but that only proved how conservative they were. Why be uncomfortable when you didn’t have to?

  That was how people in California looked at things, anyway. Here in the eastern part of the continent, they had different ideas. They dressed up for the sake of dressing up, the way people out West had up into the middle of the twentieth century. Beckie wondered what had made them change their minds there. Whatever it was, she liked it.

  Up in a tree, a little gray bird with a black cap hung upside down from a branch and said, “Chickadee-dee-dee!” in between pecks at bugs. Beckie had already found she liked chickadees. They didn’t live around Los Angeles. Too bad.

  A highway ran right by the Kanawha. In California, the road would have leaped over the river so it could go straight. People did things differently here. Where the river looped, the road looped, too. You needed more time to get where you were going, but the highway didn’t take such a big bite out of the landscape.

  Oh, people here did what they had to do. Beckie had looked at the Charleston airport on the Virginia computer network. If she and Gran needed to fly out of here, she wanted to know what it would be like. The Virginians had had to hack the tops off a couple of mountains so planes could take off and land there. Flat space in this part of the state was mighty hard to come by.

  A car roared past on the highway. Signs warned drivers to slow down and be careful. Nobody paid much attention to those signs. People drove as if the roads were as wide and straight as the ones in California. They drove that way—and they paid for it. On the way to the fish hatchery, Beckie had walked past a couple of wrecks. She was coming up to one of them now. She shook her head. The car hadn’t made a curve. It went off the road and straight into a tree. The flat tires and the rust on the fenders said it had been there a long time.

  She wondered what had happened to the driver. By the way the windshield was scarred, nothing good. She hoped he’d lived, anyhow.

  Why do I think it was a he? she wondered. Women could also crash cars. But guys were more likely to, here or in California or, for that matter, in Europe. Testosterone poisoning, Beckie thought with a scornful sniff. Women didn’t usually do things like tromp on the gas to see how fast the car would go. She’d been in a car with a guy who did that, just for the fun of it. Nothing bad happened that time—it didn’t always, or even most of the time. But she tried not to ride with him any more.

  There was Jephany Knob, now due north of her and about as close as she could get unless she felt like crossing the highway and picking her way to it through the woods. She didn’t. It stuck up and it had a funny name, and that was about it.

  Or so she thought, till she noticed a couple of people up near the top of the knob. What were they doing up there? Why would you want to climb the knob, anyhow? To watch birds? People here didn’t seem to do that, or not so much as they did in California.

  But they did hunt. Hunting struck her as even stranger than fishing. Wild turkeys and grouse and squirrels and deer were a lot smarter than fish. Maybe that was why she felt wronger—was that a word?—about killing them.

  Here, though, people didn’t hunt just for the sport of it, if there was such a thing. They hunted for the pot. Beckie’d liked Brunswick stew till Mrs. Snodgrass told her the meat in it was squirrel. Then she almost lost dinner. Gran never turned a hair. All she said was, “Goodness, I don’t remember the last time I ate squirrel.”

  It wasn’t bad, if you didn’t think about what it was. It didn’t taste like rabbit, which Beckie had had before. It didn’t taste like anything but itself, not really. If she and Gran stayed at the Snodgrasses’ a while longer, they would probably have it again. I can eat it, Beckie thought. I guess I can, anyway.

  One of the people on Jephany Knob saw her, too. He pointed her way. His friend stopped whatever he was doing and looked at her, too. The first man raised a rifle to his shoulder. He fired—once, twice. The bullets cracked past Beckie’s head, much too close for comfort.

  With a small shriek, she scurried behind a tree. He was trying to kill me, she thought. He was. What’s he doing? Did he think I was a deer? Or did he know I was a person? Is that why he aimed at me? She had no answers. She wished she had no questions. Now she knew what was worse than being bored: being scared to death.

  No more shots came. Peering out ever so cautiously, she saw that the other man was yelling at the one with the gun. It wasn’t aimed her way any more. She hoped it was all just a crazy mistake. Even so, she crawled away from there and stayed under cover as much as she could all the way back to Elizabeth.

  When Justin heard that Virginia and Ohio really had declared war on each other, he waited for missiles to start flying or guns to start going off or computers to start catching viruses or … something. When nothing happened—and when nothing went right on happening—he almost felt cheated.

  “Chances are not much will happen,” his mother said. “Virginia declared war on Ohio to make a lot of people farther east happy.”

  “But those aren’t the people who border Ohio,” Justin said.

  “I know,” Mom answered. “But they’re the white people in the parts of Virginia with lots of African Americans. They’re the ones who think Ohio is giving African Americans guns. So they’re the ones who want to do something about their neighbors.” She set a bone down on her plate. “This is good chicken, Randy.”

  “Thanks,” Mr. Brooks answered. “I’d take more credit for it if I didn’t buy it around the corner.”

  “It’s good anyhow,” Justin said. It was hot and greasy and salty—what more could you want from fried chicken? His plate already held enough bones to build a fair-sized dinosaur. But he didn’t want to talk chicken—he wanted to talk poli
tics. “Why did Ohio declare war on Virginia, then?”

  “If somebody pokes you, won’t you poke him back?” Mom answered. That made the two squabbling states sound like a couple of six-year-olds.

  “Besides, Ohio really is running guns,” Mr. Brooks added.

  “It is?” That wasn’t Justin—it was his mother. She sounded astonished.

  “Sure,” Mr. Brooks said calmly. “The more trouble Virginia has, the better off Ohio is. The folks in Ohio can see that as well as anybody.”

  “How long have you been running this shop?” Mom asked slowly.

  For a second, Justin thought Mom was changing the subject. Then he realized she wasn’t. She’d found a polite way to ask, Have you been here so long, you’re starting to think like a Virginian?

  Mr. Brooks understood her. “It’s a fact, Cyndi,” he said. “I don’t have anything good to say about segregation. Who could? Black people here … Well, who’d blame them for feeling the way they do about whites? But a race war won’t make things better. Besides, they’re bound to lose—a lot more whites here than blacks. And even if they win, what do they get? Another Mississippi.” He grimaced. “That’s no good, either.”

  “But why would Ohio want to touch off a civil war in Virginia?” Justin asked.

  “A lot of it has to do with the coal trade,” Mr. Brooks answered. “There’s coal on both sides of the border here, but Ohio started mining it before Virginia did. Virginia works cheaper than Ohio, and she’s taking away some of the markets Ohio’s had for a while. Ohio doesn’t like that.”

  “It would be nice if Ohio were giving the African Americans guns because it wanted them to get their rights,” Justin said.

  Mr. Brooks nodded. “Yeah, it would be nice, but don’t hold your breath. The people in Ohio don’t like Negroes much better than the people in Virginia do. Oh, they don’t have laws holding them down in Ohio, but that’s mostly because Ohio hasn’t got enough Negroes to make laws like that worth bothering about. There aren’t a lot of Negroes in this alternate except in the old South.”

  “How come?” That wasn’t Justin—he knew the answer. It was Mom.

  “In the home timeline, blacks moved north and west in the twentieth century. They did factory work in the World Wars, things like that,” Randolph Brooks said. “That didn’t happen here. They would have had to cross state lines, and the states that didn’t have many didn’t want any more.”

  Justin decided to show off a little: “And a lot of states were on the Prussian side in the First World War—the Great War, they still call it here. They had lots of German settlers, and they didn’t like the way England was pushing them around. So here they fought the war on both sides of the Atlantic, and it was almost twice as bad as it was in the home timeline.”

  “That’s how it worked, all right.” Mr. Brooks eyed him for a minute, then glanced over at Mom. “He’s a smart fellow.”

  “He must get it from his father.” Mom’s voice had a brittle edge. She and Justin’s dad were divorced a couple of years earlier. Mom wasn’t over it yet, and neither was Justin. Neither was Dad, come to that. Whenever Justin saw him, he said things like, I sure wish your mother and I could have got along.

  Every time Justin heard that, he wanted to scream, Then why didn’t you? He’d asked Dad once (carefully not screaming). All he got back was a shrug and, Sometimes things don’t work out the way you want them to. Mom said almost the same thing in different words. What it boiled down to was that they couldn’t stand each other any more, even if they both wished they still could. That didn’t do Justin any good. He’d needed a long time to see that, no matter how hard he wished they would, they weren’t going to get back together again.

  “Wherever he gets it from, it’s a good thing to have.” Mr. Brooks didn’t notice how Mom sounded. Or maybe he did, and just didn’t let on. A lot of politeness boiled down to not saying anything you could be sorry for later.

  Mom said something along those lines: “Brains are like anything else. What you do with them matters more than how many you’ve got.”

  “That’s a fact,” Mr. Brooks agreed. Grown-ups always said stuff like that. They could afford to. They’d already gone through college and got themselves settled in life. When you were getting ready for SATs and wishing you hadn’t ended up with a B- in sophomore English, you wanted all the brains in the world. But then Mr. Brooks added, “I will say one thing for being smart—it lasts longer than being strong or being good-looking … most of the time, anyway.”

  He was looking at Mom when he tacked on the last few words. She kind of snorted, but Justin could see she was pleased. As for Justin, he found himself nodding. Oh, a handful, a tiny handful, of guys got rich playing sports. But even the very best of them were washed up at forty—and wasn’t that a sorry fate, with the rest of your life still ahead of you? And time turned the homecoming queen and her court ordinary, too.

  If you were sharp, though, you stayed sharp your whole life long. Sooner or later, you’d pass a lot of people who got off to faster starts than you did. If you could stand being the tortoise and not the hare …

  There was the rub. Shakespeare was almost five hundred years dead now, but he still had a word for it. Who wanted to wait for a payoff if there was a chance of getting a big one right away? Justin knew he wasn’t good-looking enough for that to matter to him. Oh, he wasn’t bad, but you had to be better than not bad if you were going to make it on looks.

  He was big and he was strong. He was a backup tight end on his high-school football team, a backup guard on the basketball team, and the right-handed half of a platoon at first base on the baseball team. He did okay at all his sports, no more than okay at any. He wasn’t in line for an athletic scholarship, let alone a pro career.

  It would have to be brains, then. When he got back to the home timeline after this stretch at Crosstime Traffic, he was heading for Stanford. Comparative history was a subject that hadn’t existed before transposition chambers were invented. These days, you could either use it for the company or teach once you got your degree. You weren’t likely to get movie-star rich, but you were pretty sure to do all right.

  Mr. Brooks said something. Woolgathering the way Justin was, he missed it. “I’m sorry?” he said.

  “I said, how would you like to go out into the boonies with me tomorrow?” Mr. Brooks repeated. “I’ve got a customer for an 1861 Oregon goldpiece, only he’s got car trouble and he can’t get down to Charleston. We’ve been doing business ever since I opened up here, so I don’t mind getting in the car for him. There’s always a lot of handselling in coins and stamps, even in the home timeline.”

  “Sure, I’ll come. Why not?” Justin said. “Be nice to see a little more of this alternate than what’s across the street from the shop.”

  “Okay, then—we’ll do that,” Mr. Brooks said. To Justin’s mother, he added, “Most of the trip’s on the state highway. Hardly any on the little back roads.”

  “The state highway is bad enough,” Mom said. Roads in this part of Virginia had to wiggle and twist and double back on themselves. Otherwise, the mountain country wouldn’t have any roads at all. From what Justin had seen in West Virginia in the home timeline, the roads there were all twisty, too. Mom looked at him. “I don’t know … .”

  “It’ll be all right,” Justin said.

  “Should be,” Mr. Brooks agreed. “I’ve made the trip a few times. As long as you pay attention, there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “I always worry,” Mom said. “That’s what mothers are for.” But she didn’t tell them no.

  Three

  Beckie paced around the Snodgrasses’ back yard, looking for the spot that gave her the best cell-phone reception. It wasn’t good anywhere in this back-of-beyond little town, but there was one place … .

  She found it. Her mother’s voice came in loud and clear. Beckie wished it didn’t, because Mom was saying, “I want you to get out of there and come home as soon as you can. The war—�
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  “Everything’s fine, Mom,” Beckie said. “Nobody’s shooting, nobody’s dropping bombs, nobody’s doing anything but yelling.”

  “I never would have let you go if I’d known the trouble would blow up like this,” Mom said.

  “There isn’t any real trouble,” Beckie said again. “It’s all in the papers and on TV, mostly. Nothing’s going on, honest.”

  Her mother didn’t want to listen to her. “You should head for home as soon as you can.”

  “Why are you telling me?” Beckie asked, starting to lose patience. “I can’t do anything about it by myself—I won’t be of legal age for another year. Do you want me to get Gran?”

  She figured that would nip the idea in the bud, and she was right. “I can’t talk to my mother! She won’t pay any attention to me,” Mom said. From everything Beckie had seen, that was true. Beckie wondered if, when she was all grown up herself, she would say the same kind of thing about Mom. She hoped not. She really didn’t think so, either. Mom wasn’t quite so boneheaded stubborn as Gran—most of the time, anyhow.

  For now … “If I can’t fix that stuff myself and you don’t want to try to talk Gran into doing it, what other choices are there? Pitching a fit is silly. Why don’t you settle down and relax?”

  “Because you’re in the middle of a war, and I’m worried about you!” Mom exclaimed.

  “I’m not in the middle of a war. I’m in the middle of nowhere.” Beckie wasn’t about to tell her mother about whoever’d almost taken a shot at her from Jephany Knob. She hadn’t told anybody about that. It might have been a dumb mistake. She thought it probably was. And even if it wasn’t, it couldn’t have anything to do with the war … could it? To keep from worrying about that, she went on, “You wouldn’t believe how tiny and dead this place is.”

  “Sure I would. I know what my own mother’s like,” Mom said. That might not be very nice, which didn’t mean it wasn’t so.