The Disunited States of America Read online

  “You’re right. There are—and California is one of them.” Mr. Brooks sounded grim. A moment later, Justin found out why: “Do you know one of the big reasons those states give Negroes those rights?” He held up a hand. “Wait. I know you do, because you told your mom about it.”

  “Uh-huh,” Justin said unhappily. “Those states can afford to give African Americans equal rights because they’ve only got a few of them.”

  “That’s it,” Mr. Brooks agreed.

  “It’s the end of the twenty-first century,” Justin said. “This alternate’s got a technology that’s close to ours. They know what freedom’s all about—they have the Declaration of Independence even if they don’t have the Constitution. There are free countries in Europe. Why don’t they get it here?”

  “You might as well ask why terrorists in the home timeline don’t get it,” Mr. Brooks replied. “They’ve got free countries for examples, too. But they worry more about being on top than being free.”

  “I guess.” Justin whistled between his teeth—not a cheerful noise. “But have you seen the African American who’s the town janitor here?” He waited for Mr. Brooks to nod, then went on, “Well, I wish I didn’t have to be embarrassed I’m white every time I set eyes on him.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you about that—except not to let him know you’re embarrassed. It could blow your cover,” the older man said. “I’ve talked with him a little. He’s not a bright man—he might be a janitor even in an alternate that didn’t discriminate so much.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to let a white man know he’s got a working brain,” Justin said. “That might be dangerous. It probably is.”

  It was Mr. Brooks’ turn to let out a couple of mournful notes. “You’ve got a point.”

  Justin turned on the TV. Again, the newsman wore a tie nobody in the home timeline would have been caught dead in. “Welcome to the five o’clock news. Casualties from the disease launched by Ohio continue to mount. Here is a hospital scene in Richmond.”

  A tired-looking doctor walked from patient to patient. He wore a real gas mask, not just a surgical mask. An ambulance screamed up to the emergency room with another victim—no, with two. Ambulances here had snakes twined around a staff on the door, not the Red Cross.

  “In spite of travel limits, the disease continues to spread.” The newsman pointed to a map of Virginia. More than half of it was red. He went on, “In Richmond, the consul is vowing revenge against Ohio.”

  A statue of Washington stood in Capitol Square in this Richmond, as one did in the home timeline. But this wasn’t the same statue, and hadn’t gone up at the same time. From the statue, the camera went to the consul’s office inside the Capitol. Most states in this alternate had a consul instead of a president or a governor. It all added up to the same thing, though—this was the man in charge.

  He didn’t look like George Washington. He was a round little man with a bland face. But when he said, “Ohio will pay for the misery she is causing. She will pay more than we do, so help me God,” you had to believe him. He wasn’t the kind of man who kidded around or made jokes.

  A jet plane—no, several jet planes—flew by over the motel, low enough to make the windows rattle, and Justin’s teeth, too. At the same time, the consul said, “As a first step, I have ordered the VAF to strike targets in eastern Ohio. Further countermeasures will be taken in due course.”

  More slowly than Justin should have, he realized the VAF was the Virginia Air Force. More slowly still, he realized he’d just heard it heading into action. “They’re going to blow things up!” he exclaimed.

  “They sure are,” Mr. Brooks said grimly. “And Lord only knows what happens next. Both these states have the bomb.” Lots of states had the bomb in this alternate. So did lots of countries in Europe and Asia. It didn’t get used very often, for the same reason it didn’t get used very often in the home timeline. Once you let that genie out of the bottle, how did you put it back?

  But what this alternate didn’t have were superpowers. Nobody was strong enough to tell anybody else not to do something or else and make the or else stick. Every time a squabble started here, people worried. Caught in the middle of a war, Justin was one of those worried people.

  When the bombers flew over Elizabeth, Beckie didn’t know what was going on. The Snodgrasses didn’t have the TV on. Mr. Snodgrass was looking at some of his coins. Mrs. Snodgrass and Gran were going back and forth about something that had happened when they were both much younger than Beckie was now. They remembered it two different ways.

  Beckie didn’t think it mattered which of them was right, but they both seemed to. Not even the roar in the sky slowed them down. It made Beckie jam her fingers in her ears. When it was over, she said, “Don’t you have laws against low-flying planes here? We sure do back home.” She wished she were back home.

  Her grandmother and Mrs. Snodgrass went on arguing with each other. They didn’t care about jets landing on the roof, let alone flying over it. Mr. Snodgrass looked up from the silver florin he was examining. He spoke in a soft, sad voice: “All the rules go out the window in a war, Rebecca.”

  “In a—? Oh!” She hadn’t even thought of that. California hadn’t been in a real war since more than twenty years before she was born. And that one was fought more with software than with germs or bombs. “Do you really think those were … warplanes?”

  “I don’t know what else they could have been,” Ted Snodgrass answered.

  “And that was when the cat threw up the hairball in his lap,” Gran said triumphantly.

  “It was no such thing,” Ethel Snodgrass said. “How could it be, when he didn’t come over till two days later?”

  Mr. Snodgrass looked from one of them to the other. “Good thing they don’t have bombers, I reckon,” he said to Beckie.

  That held so much truth, it hurt. Beckie started laughing so she wouldn’t start to cry. Gran looked bewildered—she hadn’t heard what Mr. Snodgrass said. Her cousin had. Husbands and wives often listened to each other out of the corner of their ear, as it were. “That’s not funny, Ted,” Ethel Snodgrass said.

  “Well, maybe it isn’t,” he said. He wasn’t the kind of man who got in a fight for the sake of getting in a fight. But he wasn’t the kind of man who backed away when he thought he was right, either. “Don’t you reckon you’re being silly, going on and on about how things happened when Hector was a pup? What difference does it make now?”

  “It makes a difference, all right,” his wife answered, though she didn’t say what sort of difference it made.

  “It sure does,” Gran said. Then she kind of blinked and scratched her head. She wasn’t used to agreeing with anybody about anything.

  The phone rang. “Saved by the bell,” Mr. Snodgrass said, and pulled it out of his pocket. “Hello? … Oh, hello, Mr. Brooks … . Yes, tomorrow morning would be fine … . Ten o’clock? Sure, that’ll work. See you then. Will your nephew be along? … All right. ’Bye now.” He hung up. “That was the coin fella,” he announced.

  “I never would have guessed.” Mrs. Snodgrass could sound a lot like Gran. Anybody would have figured they were related. Mrs. Snodgrass seemed to have a little more style with her sarcasm, though.

  “The young man’ll be along to pass the time of day,” Mr. Snodgrass added to Beckie. His wife might not have spoken, as far as he was concerned. She might not even have been in the same county. He went on, “I expect he’s more interesting than old folks going on about what happened a long time ago. I expect he may even be more interesting than these Georgia shillings from the 1920s.”

  Beckie had no idea how to answer that, so she didn’t try. Gran and Ethel Snodgrass went back to arguing about what had happened a long time ago. Mrs. Snodgrass didn’t stop arguing even when she served up ham and corn on the cob for supper. The food was terrific. It didn’t taste as if it was made in a factory and frozen and came off a supermarket shelf. It tasted as if somebody down the stre
et had raised the hog and smoked the ham and grown the corn. And somebody down the street probably had. Lots of people in Elizabeth had little gardens and kept a few pigs and chickens.

  Dessert was a cherry pie that also never saw the inside of a freezer. Beckie was just finishing up when jets flew over again, this time from west to east. “I hope those are our planes coming home again,” Mr. Snodgrass said. “If they aren’t … Well, if they aren’t we’ve got even more trouble than I was afraid we did.”

  “How will we know if they’re not?” Beckie asked.

  “If you hear things go boom, that’s a pretty good clue,” he answered. He got off zingers even more readily than his wife did, but in a nicer tone of voice.

  And what he said usually had the ring of truth behind it. For the next half hour, Beckie kept cocking her head to one side and listening for bombs going off. She was relieved when she didn’t hear any. Then she wondered if she ought to be relieved. Virginia wasn’t a very free place. But Ohio wasn’t her state, either. She just wished they would have held off on their stupid war till she got home. No doubt that was a selfish attitude, but it was how she felt.

  “Mr. Snodgrass!” she said suddenly.

  “What is it?”

  “Do you have any coins from the days of the old United States?”

  “Yes, I think so. A few. That’s a long time ago now—almost three hundred years since things fell apart.”

  “Could I look at them?” Beckie asked.

  “Well, let me see where I’ve got ’em stashed.” Mr. Snodgrass flipped through an album and took a plastic mount off a page. “Here’s what they call a quarter dollar from 1801, not long before states started breaking away and going off on their own.”

  One side of the silver coin showed a woman with flowing hair—Liberty, she was supposed to be. On the other side, an eagle spread its wings. Beckie sighed. “I was just thinking—it might have been neat if the United States stayed united. We wouldn’t have all these quarrels and wars in that case.”

  “We’d probably have something even worse. Things happen for the best—I’m sure of it,” Mr. Snodgrass said. “Besides, holding that mess together just wasn’t in the cards. The little states wouldn’t admit that they weren’t as important as places like Virginia and Pennsylvania. Imagine—there was a place called Rhode Island. It’s part of Massachusetts now, of course, but in those days you could spit from one side of it to the other, near enough. And it said it had to be as strong in Congress—that’s what they called the United States legislature—as anybody else.”

  “I remember reading about how it got founded—they teach us that even on the West Coast,” Beckie said. “And I know it’s not a state any more. Was that the Second Northeastern War or the Third?”

  “The Second, I think, but don’t hold me to it.” Ted Snodgrass chuckled. “I haven’t studied that stuff in a lot longer than you.” He paused. “I haven’t studied it in school, I should say, but you learn some history if you collect coins, too.” After he got out another album, he showed Beckie a stout silver coin, as big as a five-peso piece back home. “See? It’s a commemorative from 1837, and that means it’s from after the Second Northeastern War.”

  She looked at the coin. COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS, it said, and 2 FLORINS. A bald man with sideburns was identified as John Quincy Adams. On the other side, the coin showed a cannon and the words LIBERATION OF PROVIDENCE. “Did the people who lived in Providence think they were liberated?” she asked, handing it back.

  “Don’t bet on it,” Mr. Snodgrass answered. “If I recollect right, somebody from Rhode Island took a shot at old Adams not long after that.”

  “You’re right!” Beckie exclaimed. “They made a movie about it—I’ve seen it on TV. If the movie has things straight, Adams deserved it.”

  “How often do movies have things straight?” Mr. Snodgrass asked, which was a good question. The answer was, Not very often. He went on, “If that’s so, I’m not surprised we’ve never seen it here. The courts wouldn’t let in a film that showed somebody shooting at a consul or whatever Adams called himself—too likely to give folks nasty ideas, and they get too many already as is.”

  In some states, you could print anything you wanted or say whatever you pleased in movies or on TV or on the radio or online. In others, the censors would land on you with both feet if you tried. Virginia was one of those. What would happen to somebody here who tried to say on the air that Negroes ought to have equal rights? Nothing good—Beckie was sure of that.

  Where you couldn’t publish different ideas, almost everybody had the same ones. But Justin didn’t. Beckie reminded herself of that. He was nervous about admitting it, but he didn’t. He seemed embarrassed to come from this state at all.

  Beckie took a last look at the United States quarter dollar. If you had one government stretching from coast to coast, you wouldn’t need to be embarrassed about where you came from. Maybe a state like that would have fought wars with Quebec and Ontario and Monterrey, but would it have fought as many wars as the real North America had seen? Beckie didn’t think so.

  “Not much point in driving,” Mr. Brooks said. “It’s only a few blocks. Come on—the walk will do you good.”

  “What if somebody knocks us over the head and steals your coins?” Justin asked.

  “I’m a big boy now. I can take care of myself. Besides, even if I can’t, everybody here knows everybody else. Everyone would know who did it as soon as it happened.”

  “But you said before that we’re not from here, so would they tell?”

  “Well, I hope they’re starting to get used to us. I don’t intend to get them mad or anything. I’m not going to rip off Ted Snodgrass, and I don’t expect you to bang the drum for Negro rights where you’ll tick folks here off.” Mr. Brooks eyed Justin over his glasses. “What you say to the young lady from California … Well, be careful about that, too, okay?”

  Justin’s ears heated. “Okay. I’ll try, anyhow.”

  “I suppose that’ll do.” Mr. Brooks grinned, which took a lot of tension out of the air. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  As they walked down to Prunty, they passed three or four people out walking dogs or just walking for exercise. Everyone said hello. Nobody tried to knock the strangers from the big city over the head. Justin felt foolish. He felt even more foolish when one of the dogs licked his hand as he was petting it. “Ollie right likes you,” said the woman who had the mutt on the leash.

  “Uh, I guess he does,” Justin answered. Ollie’s frantically wagging tail said it was a good guess. So did the dog spit on Justin’s fingers.

  Mr. Snodgrass let them in when Mr. Brooks rang the bell. “Mornin’, gents,” he said. “I’ve got the coffee on, and there’s fizzes in the icebox if you don’t care for that.”

  “I’ll have a fizz, thanks,” said Justin, who wasn’t much of a coffee drinker.

  “I’ll get it for you,” Ted Snodgrass said. Beckie walked into the front room then. Mr. Snodgrass chuckled. “No, I’ll let the spry young legs do the job. Rebecca, seems like Mr. Monroe here is perishin’ of thirst. You suppose you might lend him a hand?”

  “Well, I know you’ve got a garden hose …” Beckie said. Mr. Snodgrass snorted.

  “Helpful,” Justin said.

  “That’s me,” Beckie agreed. She went into the kitchen and came back with two fizzes.

  “Thanks,” Justin said when she handed him one. Mr. Snodgrass poured coffee for Mr. Brooks. They started talking about coins. Beckie raised an eyebrow. Justin nodded. The two of them went out into the back yard. “Where’s your grandmother?” Justin asked.

  “She and Mrs. Snodgrass went down to Palestine to shop,” Beckie answered.

  “You didn’t want to go along?” he said.

  She shook her head. “Nope. All they’ll want to look at is clothes for old ladies, and that’s so exciting I can’t stand it.” She yawned. Justin laughed. She went on, “Besides, the less I have to do with Gran, the happier I am, and
you can take that to the bank. I’ve been traveling with her for seventy-four days now, and that’s about seventy-five too many.”

  “Oh,” Justin said, which seemed safe enough.

  Beckie nodded as if he’d said something more. “Yeah, that’s about the size of it,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever get along with Gran again. I mean, I can still put up with her and everything, but that’s not the same as liking her. She’s … sour.”

  Justin didn’t say anything this time. People could talk about their own relatives as if they were swindlers and bank robbers and grouches. If anybody else said the smallest bad thing about the same people, though, they’d rise up like tigers in their defense. Even if Justin thought he was right—no, especially if he thought she was right—keeping quiet about it looked like a good idea.

  “Ever wonder how things might have been?” Beckie asked out of the blue.

  “Huh?” Justin said. Brilliant, he thought. Now she won’t think you’re an idiot. Now she’ll be sure of it.

  But she wasn’t—or it didn’t show if she was, which was good enough. “If things were different,” she said again.

  “What kind of things?” Justin asked. At least that was a better question.

  “All kinds of things,” Beckie answered. “Things from way back when. Last night, Mr. Snodgrass showed me a coin from the United States. I asked him to, because I was thinking about that stuff.”

  “Were you?” Justin said. What he was thinking now was, Uh-oh. It worried him a lot more than Huh? had.

  Beckie nodded seriously. “I sure was. I wondered what it would have been like if all of this were one state—one country, I guess I mean—and not a whole bunch of them.” She waved her arms to show all of this meant everything from sea to shining sea. Except it didn’t mean exactly that here, because nobody ever wrote “America the Beautiful” in this alternate. It came along in 1893, and by then this North America was chopped into more pieces than the chicken in a Chinese chicken salad.