“Burning that bridge before we get to it. Annie, you need any money?”
“Least of my problems. Let’s have a couple belts, a good meal, and Rosita and me will get to work inventing a Merchant Marine.”
“You have fun, I have some serious writing to do.” Already I could feel the words lining up in my brain, clamoring to get out. You got to listen to those damn words. If you don’t, they might turn on you, and then where you be?
>>>>>>>
Top of the page, the new flag. Think hard about incorporating the new flag into our banner-head. Headline; Proclamation of the Establishment of the State of Pacifica. Left column, the details, capitol in Bellingham, list of states included. Dalny, Baikal, Sakhalin Island, Alaska, Yukon, Vancouver Free Port, Seattle Free State.
Right column; Provisional President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Provisional Vice President, Winston S. Churchill. Constitutional Congress scheduled for June 15, 1931, in Vancouver Free State. Below the fold, biographies of Roosevelt and Churchill. It almost wrote itself.
Second page, a recap of the dissolution of the Union, formation of the New Confederacy, Battle of Minneapolis, largest tank battle in history. The siege of Hartford. Secession of the State of Deseret.
Editorial, “The Texas Question.” My job. Shut up and start pounding those damn keys. In your spare time, send a runner over to Chung’s with the new flag design, clip on a note, “Billy, not to tell you your business, but if you know a seamstress...”
>>>>>>>>
We had it rapped out and pasted up well before midnight, sent it off, and rewarded ourselves with a small ration of booze and an improvised feast. Then, just about the time I was considering a little shut-eye before the papers arrived at dawn, the thought struck me, that we were actually creating a national holiday. Great. Hurray for us. What was the date? May 27th 1931. Or it would be… look at the clock… in about forty-three minutes. Oh, fuck. I picked up the phone, called Peaches. “Hey, Peaches, we are going to announce the Proclamation of the State of Pacifica in a few hours, when the next edition hits the street. You get the word yet?”
“Fuck no. Don’t spring a surprise on an old lady, would ya? I might get a fucking heart attack.”
“I just got the word a few hours ago, I guess Arbuthnot slipped up, shit is a little hectic, you know what I mean? I’ll have somebody run up the copy, and I’ll teletype what I have as soon as I hang up. This might get a little out of hand.”
“No shit.” I could almost hear her brain churning. “I’ll set off a few rocket clusters. But keep your head down, some of these assholes are just bound to blaze away with every gun they got, you know what I mean?”
“I hadn’t thought of that. But sure. Rocket clusters. Good idea. Keep a few in reserve, the asshole IB boys might want to send over a few bombers to rain on our parade.”
“If they have any left. How far away is that Portland place?” She asked.
“I don’t know for sure. Three hundred miles?”
“I got an atlas, I’ll check. Okay, thanks for the warning. All hands on deck, elbows and assholes and tin hats. This is going to be fun. If we get to bed by noon, it will be a miracle.”
Smart damn woman, old Peaches. We all came up in a hard school, but she was an honor student. I called Arbuthnot, we set six in the morning as the official distribution time, then sent up the copy to Crazy House, and called Billy Chung, had him run off a few thousand paper copies of the new flag, and get that ready to go as a single sheet broadside. Might as well make a few pennies, for all our hard work.
>>>>>>>>
It was worse than crazy; it was fucking insane. We set off a couple rocket cluster drums to get everybody’s attention, and then hit the streets with every vehicle we could scrounge. Phelps out-did us, he had the Coastal Defense batteries fire a few star shells straight up, and tested the Air Raid sirens. We caused a hell of a commotion. People boiled out into the streets in their nightclothes, some with less, and we shoveled out the papers and the paper flags. Billy Chung had printed the proclamation on the back of the flag fliers and somehow found a few thousand sticks to paste them to. By the time we got to Maple Tree Square, the sun was all the way up, and they had two or three brass bands pumping away. There were barrels of beer on the curbs, and the hilarity was getting damn near out of hand. People waved those silly flags until they shredded, and literally danced in the streets. There was a good chance that no work got done all day anywhere.
We had not forgotten the buckets this time, and we had literal buckets full of change in the backs of the trucks. Five gallons of nickels is quite a load even for a strong man.
They did send a few big bombers, some kind of Gotha copies and a very few zepps over to ruin our day, but General Earhart was ready for them, smoked a couple, which just led to more jubilation in the streets. We didn’t get to sleep at noon, we didn’t get to sleep at all. Young George Olsen shot roll after roll of film, so we had to boil all that down to printable dummies. Even that crazy Russian blue movie proprietor, Demetri, showed up at the Express office with a stack of 8x10s for us. “Hey, I live here too, you know?”
“Shit. Thanks. Have a drink, I think it’s a party.”
“I got some film footage too. I’m going to make a news-reel, this is too good to pass up. I might even have to go legit, you know what I mean? There has to be a market, if we are a real country, right?”
“Demetri, these photos are really decent; you want to work as a photographic stringer for the Express? George was here first, but there should be plenty of work for both of you. You two work it out. You have a better darkroom than we do for sure. Deal?”
“Sure. Pleased to meet you, George, you been a Vanc for long?” The two of them collared a vodka bottle and drifted into a corner. Good enough.
>>>>>>>>
We did get a little sleep, in shifts, but monitoring the radio was a full-time job. The Proclamation set off a storm of reaction all over the world. Nobody except the Japanese knew how to act, and they had all this stuff planned in the first place. The Reich’s response was muted, we had been their enemy, but parts of our nation had signed legit peace treaties with them, so we were official. And we were not at war with them. The Nipponese were, but not officially. EUAC was polite, wished us well, had words to say about societies made up out of many different peoples, noticed that we had no points of friction except California. Seeing as how they were doing the same thing we were, hammering a new nation together out of scraps, the least they could do was to play nice. Franco wished us well, we had nothing he wanted, and the Portuguese were also playing jigsaw puzzles, assembly thereof.
The People’s Provisional Government of China, the PPGC, was polite, if not very interested in what the round-eyes were up to. Again, they had enough on their agenda without messing in our business. As far as they were concerned, the Baikal Republic was just another name for Mongols and Russians, they could possibly have cared less, but they would have to have tried real hard.
As for our continent, the Mormons nodded hello, and there was nobody else in good enough shape to even notice. A few hours later Herbert Hoover and Indian Charlie Curtis surfaced in New York City, spouting defiance in all directions like Moby fucking Dick. Herbert could speak, whatever his wounds were, but he did not sound much like a Quaker from some of things he called Tolson. They called on the New York State Police to mobilize and form a cadre of a resistance militia called the New Minutemen, but you could bet that their call was met with loathing and apathy, at best. As their legitimate governor was now the Provisional President of a foreign country, apathy was the best that could be expected. That pooch had been screwed too many times.
With amazing speed, General Lejeune assembled a couple of brigades, and sent out a call for a march on Washington, to “Evict the perverse usurper and regicide,” which seemed a little florid, even for a Confederate. I remembered that VMI Cadets had been in the forefront of the First Civil War, and been gloriously slaughtered for their bravery. SSS units f
rom all over the East answered Lejeune’s call to arms, but Tolson did not back down. He couldn’t, I guess. The nearest Regular Army units that could get free to respond, were in the Buffalo New York area, fighting there had stabilized across the St Lawrence, so he had a few free units. Whether they would respond, or be any good if they did respond, was an open question. I felt I needed new words to describe this situation. Cluster-fuck was orders of magnitude too weak for this reality. When profanity fails you, you know the shit is deep. Even sailors were scraping the bottoms of their wells of foulness.
>>>>>>>
The next morning, Thursday, things were back to normal, the new normal. Businesses were open, and it looked like a lot of seamstresses and sign painters had been working all night, the new Pacifica flags were everywhere you looked, more going up all the time. We made a quick shopping trip, laid in a bunch of housekeeping and office supplies, had a real breakfast with a real waiter, and went back to the gristmill.
The Reich War Machine was grinding away, the first real news this morning was that Minneapolis had fallen, and a column was headed for Chicago, with another for St. Louis. Small cities in the path of the onslaught were declaring themselves “Open Cities” or outright trying to join the Reich. The first thing they did to pledge allegiance was to lynch any Jews or Negroes that might have accidently survived up until now. A new word was heard on the Reich puppet radio stations, “Blitzkrieg,” Lightning War. Shock followed shock. Tsaritsyn must have been cranking out the tanks, we heard reports of new models, and they were flowing across the Atlantic right into “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.” I could have felt bad that all the mavericks and outcasts were now the backbone of my new nation of Pacifica, but somehow, I could not manage to raise the energy.
The next domino to fall was a big one. A new clear channel station came on the air, out of Houston, Radio KTEX. The had a bombshell to drop. The Texas Legislature had decided to neither join the Confederacy, or go it alone as a nation, instead, they coppered their bets and petitioned to join the Anglo-German Reich as a Province, as was their right as true Aryans. There had been a lot of German immigration to Texas, in the last century, and a lot of Endless War European refugees had settled there recently. It might work, they did have seaports, and the Anglo-German Navy ruled the Atlantic and probably the Caribbean.
It didn’t take the rest of the day for reports of atrocities to flood in, and before dark, our time, EUAC had declared war on Texas, and the Reich. Feeling their oats, were they? They really had no choice, either; they could not ignore genocide on their boarders, and genocide was underway all over Texas. A quick look at the Atlas and use of a piece of string gave me twelve hundred miles from Minneapolis to Houston. At fifty miles a day, it was less than a month to link up the Reich and Texas. I didn’t know if the EUAC had any tanks or planes, and they sure couldn’t have much of a navy, so there was not much they could do about the whole mess. Maybe they could put enough troops across the Rio Grande to rescue some of their people, but Northern Mexico was a mess, even if Patton had pulled all his troops out to fight the Germans and the Brits.
Fuck it. History could take care of itself for a few hours. Thinking about history made me think about Barbara, and I wondered if she was back in Dalny yet. Probably not. I could ask, but that would do little except piss Hilda off, which I didn’t need right now. She was right, she was a full-grown woman, not a kid, and I was beginning to appreciate the difference. I was not going to bullshit her, that was obvious, I needed to keep all open and aboveboard or suffer the consequences. “Hey, Hilda, you want to take a night off, and do something fun?”
“Do they have fun anymore?” There was a real good question.
I considered the options. “They have movies, but I think they haven’t made any new ones for a year or so. Dinner? Dancing? I dance like a drunk elephant? Bowling? Go up and see what they are doing at Crazy House?”
“Let’s just work. We need to stay on the job, things are moving very fast.”
“Easy to see who the grownup is around here. As you wish.”
“I know this burg a little better than you, why don’t you hold the fort, and I will run get us a nice meal, a decent bottle of wine, and be right back.”
“You could get us ten pounds of shrimp or something, and feed the whole mob for the price of a restaurant meal… Ask Chan, he might have an idea or two.”
“Good thinking. Boost company morale.”
>>>>>>>>>
We had crab legs from Alaska, something new for me, so that was a treat, and then back to the shit and slime mills. The Chinese curse is “may you live in interesting times,” and these qualified. Lejeune had mobilized, and launched an attack down the Lee Highway, headed right to the Capitol, with the first skirmish at some place called Sperryville.
A new strong signal came on the air, WRVA in Richmond. They had always been there, had been a strong VBS station, but changed allegiance, cranked up the power at night, and were now billed as the "Voice of Virginia." They claimed to be broadcasting with 100,000 watts from a base of operations near the Virginia State Capitol. They didn’t seem to have a whole lot of news or organization, they played “Dixie” a lot, and read bulletins from the Confederate State House, the old Virginia Capitol.
They had immediate competition from WCAP, the flagship station of the Victory Broadcast Service in DC, who had a rapid format change, and were Investigation Bureau all the way. With two dueling mouthpieces, and the party line being improvised on the fly at a hundred thousand watts, censorship was weaker than it might have been, and you could gain a lot of information reading between the lines, as it were. Patton had been the glue binding the Union together, and without him, it was coming apart like a cheap novel in the rain. None of it really mattered, not with the Anglo-Germans ripping the heart out of the country, but the bastards were too involved with settling seventy-year-old scores to unite in the face of the real threat.
Tolson apparently thought he could out-general Lejeune, which was an unfunny joke. Lejeune was a real soldier, rough and as hard as they came, and if he hadn’t been up in VMI, Patton’s soft spot, he probably would have been sent to China with the rest of the competent soldiers. WRVA claimed that active duty and retired Marines from all over the country were flocking to the new colors, and as the USMC had major bases in Jacksonville, North Carolina, Parris Island, South Carolina, Quantico and Arlington, Virginia, with a big barracks in Washington, D.C., it looked like the South was about to rise up all over Nazi-costumed Tolson and his pretty uniformed play-boys. I didn’t know how the Mo-reens and the Snakes would get along after the war was won, but a plague on both their houses. Sorry, best I can do.
Who could have imagined that this could happen to our poor country? You felt a savage itch to do something, anything to help, but you knew in the same second that there was nothing to be done, nothing more than you were doing already. I could write, barely fly an airplane, shoot a Springfield, but none of it seemed enough. Thousands of people were dying right this minute, all over my former homeland, while I sat, wiping butter off my chin.
On the other hand, going hungry would not help anybody. Shouldering a rifle and marching down to the attack towards Portland was not in the cards either. Fuck it, just feeling guilty because you were not slogging through the shit someplace was not going to do a lick of good, and just spoil my digestion. I had paid enough dues to join any club on earth, no matter how exclusive. Fuck it, hand off the command desk to Charles, take my lady to bed, and count my blessings. I hadn’t been shot at for whole weeks, I had nothing to complain about, now, did I?
>>>>>>>
The morning brought more shocks to my atrophied sense of correctness. The fine citizens of Washington DC knew how to count, at least, and faced with the SSS coming from the west and the Marines coming from the east, had revolted in the night, stormed the White House and the Investigation Bureau Headquarters in the Treasury Building on 15th Street, and hanged anybody they could lay hands o
n from light poles all up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. It was assumed that Clyde Tolson was one of those hanged, but there had been so much confusion, no one seemed to be certain. Apparently the bodies were not in good enough shape to identify, but chances were good.
The President of this Board of Commissioners, the governing body of the District of Columbia, a certain Cuno Hugo Rudolph, declared Martial Law. Whether he had the authority to do any such thing was a moot point. The deed was done, the Board of Commissioners was made up of three members, of which one would be elected as President of the Board. Rudolph was from Baltimore, was a banker or something, and declared the city open, ordered the several police departments to keep the peace. The Second Civil War was over. The South won. WRVA played every record of Dixie they had in their Library, and WCAP just urged calm.
Next problem. It was obvious that any resistance to the Anglo-Germans was not in the cards, and it was only a matter of time before the Reich Navy, the Kaiserliche Marine, sent capital ships into the East Coast harbors and made it official. The Reich would have gained another fifty or seventy million more good Aryans, and everybody else could go pound sand up a rat’s ass with a pickle fork.
Which was interesting enough, for a slow day, but a familiar Pierce Arrow pulled up to the front door, and, as usual, even more trouble stepped out, and walked up to our door. Arbuthnot and somebody in a US Navy Uniform with lots of braid that looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him… And then I could.
Brown Bear Blues Page 8