The Disunited States of America

by Harry Turtledove

  “Oh, boy,” Justin said in a hollow voice. “Junk food and sandwiches and frozen dinners. Yum, yum.” Some of what this alternate’s Virginia used for junk food grossed him out. Mr. Brooks had had to explain where pork rinds came from. Once Justin knew, he didn’t want to eat them any more, even if he didn’t think they were bad before. Mr. Brooks said people in the home timeline ate them once upon a time. People in the home timeline had done all kinds of disgusting things once upon a time. They’d kept slaves. They’d worn furs. Pork rinds probably weren’t that bad, but they weren’t good, either.

  Mr. Brooks understood his expression perfectly. “If you see something in the deli section called ‘head cheese,’ chances are you don’t want that, either,” he said.

  Even the name was enough to make Justin gulp. “You’re so helpful,” he said.

  The grocery was a mom-and-pop. Even in Charleston, there weren’t many chain stores here. Because this North America was split up into so many states, corporations couldn’t get enormous the way they did in the home timeline. Things were more expensive than in the home timeline, but there was more variety here.

  “Mornin’,” the grocer said when they walked in. He knew who they were. Everybody in Elizabeth knew who they were by now.

  “Mornin’,” Justin and Mr. Brooks answered together.

  “You’ll have heard Irma passed on day before yesterday?” The man’s voice held a certain amount of doubt. They were strangers, so who could say for sure what they’d heard?

  “Yes,” Mr. Brooks said. “We heard that.” Justin nodded. You didn’t just walk in and buy what you wanted in a place like this, the way you would in the home timeline. Oh, you could, but that would mark you as not just a stranger but a foreigner. People from states like Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York did abrupt, rude things like that. If you were a Virginian, you chatted with the storekeeper for a while.

  “Hope you gents are doing all right,” the grocer said.

  “Well, now that you mention it, so do we,” Mr. Brooks said dryly.

  “Just a little, yeah,” Justin added.

  “I believe it,” the grocer said, chuckling. “I ate over at the diner a couple of times myself the last two weeks, and Irma’s been in and out of here, too.”

  Why was he laughing, then? Justin had trouble understanding it. The only thing that occurred to him was that laughing at fear was better than giving in to it. Not needing to fear would have been better still.

  “You know what’s worst about the whole thing?” Mr. Brooks said. “What with the travel ban and the worry about getting crowds together, there are no games on TV. If you’re stuck in a motel the way we are, they help make the time go by.”

  “Or even if you’re not stuck in a room,” said the man behind the counter. “I was a pretty fair rounders player in the old days, if I say so myself.” Justin judged that would have been forty years, thirty kilos, and three chins ago. The grocer went on, “I know how the game’s supposed to be played, and I like watching it when it’s played right.”

  “Sometimes, I bet, you like watching it when it’s played wrong,” Mr. Brooks said. “Then you can tell them what a bunch of fools they are, and how they don’t deserve to wear the uniform.”

  The grocer laughed again. “There is that. Yes, sir, there is that.”

  Now that the social rituals were satisfied, Justin and Mr. Brooks could go on into the store and get what they wanted. They had an old microwave oven, a gift from the Snodgrasses, in their room so they could nuke frozen dinners. (Here, though, it was a radio range, and you zapped things instead of nuking them.) Frozen dinners in this alternate were even less exciting than they were in the home timeline, but they did give the illusion of sitting down to something cooked instead of eating sandwiches all the time.

  Mr. Brooks was buying some bread and Justin was getting some canned chicken and canned fruit when another customer walked into the store. “Mornin’, Charlie,” the grocer said.

  “Mornin’, Mr. Kerfeld,” answered the janitor who was, as far as Justin knew, the head of the one and only black family in Elizabeth.

  “How are you today?” the grocer said.

  “Not too bad, sir. Not too bad,” the black man answered.

  “Wife and kids doing well?”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you. Terrible thing, this sickness, isn’t it?”

  “It really and truly is, Charlie. You heard Miss Davis died?”

  “I did. It’s a shame, Mr. Kerfeld, and that’s the truth. She was a nice lady, a mighty nice lady.”

  “That’s a fact.”

  Their chat was almost the same as the chitchat Justin and Mr. Brooks had had with the grocer—almost, but not quite. Yes, there was the ritual of gabbing a while before getting down to business. But Mr. Kerfeld had spoken with Mr. Brooks and Justin as equals. They were whites, the same as he was. The janitor, by contrast, called him mister and sir, while the grocer used the African American’s first name. The waitress was Irma to whites, but Miss Davis to Charlie.

  In the home timeline, racism lingered even after more than two centuries had passed since the Civil War. It didn’t just linger here—it was alive and well. In most of the Southern states, whites still oppressed blacks, even if blacks were legally free. In Mississippi, where the black majority had risen in revolt, it was the other way around. And most of the states that had only a few Negroes didn’t want any more. It seemed sad and scary to someone who’d grown up knowing better.

  Charlie seemed to accept things. But what else could he do? If he fussed, the law would land on him like a ton of bricks. Under his politeness, though, what was he thinking? In his shoes, Justin would have hated Mr. Kerfeld and every other white person he saw. If the janitor didn’t, why not?

  If he did, on the other hand, what could he do about it? Blacks had rebelled in several states besides Mississippi, and got crushed every time. If they tried it again in Virginia, weren’t they bound to fail again? Of course they were … unless, perhaps, Ohio gave them a hand. Ohio wouldn’t do that from the goodness of its heart—oh, no. But Ohio might do it to give an enemy a hard time.

  One thing that hadn’t happened in this alternate was a peaceful civil-rights movement. Negroes here hadn’t set out to persuade whites that they were as good as anybody else. Justin wondered why not. Maybe their being crammed into the Southern states and not spread across the continent had something to do with it. And maybe the history of uprisings left whites and blacks too distrustful of each other to look for common ground.

  More questions than answers, Justin thought unhappily. Things often worked that way out among the alternates. Crosstime Traffic tried to keep an eye on so many of them, it hadn’t had the chance to study them all as well as it might have.

  “You ready, Justin?” Mr. Brooks asked. He couldn’t know what Justin was worrying about.

  “Yeah,” Justin said. “I guess so.”

  They talked with the grocer a little more as they paid for their food. “Take care, now,” Mr. Kerfeld said when they walked out.

  The air felt hot and sticky. Clouds built up in the west. “Rain coming,” Mr. Brooks remarked.

  “I guess so,” Justin said, and then, softly, “Do you suppose anyone here but Charlie knows what his last name is?”

  “People know,” Mr. Brooks answered. “They just don’t care. There’s a difference.” Justin nodded. But didn’t that make it worse, not better?

  Six

  Lightning flashed, not far enough away. Beckie counted vampire bats. She’d barely counted two of them before thunder boomed, loud as a cannon’s roar. Rain came down in buckets.

  “Wow!” she said. “You hardly ever see this in California.”

  “This isn’t anything special,” Gran said. “Why, when I was a little girl … When was that storm, Ethel? You know the one I mean—the bad one. Was that in ’36? Or was it ’37?”

  “It was ’37, I think,” Mrs. Snodgrass answered, so of course Gran decided it must have happened in 2036
. They went back and forth, back and forth. Either way, it was more than forty years before Beckie was born, so she didn’t worry about it a whole lot. Another flash of lightning strobed across the sky. This time, the thunder came even sooner. The Snodgrasses’ house shook.

  “You don’t want to see the lightning and hear the thunder at the same time. That’s real bad news,” Mr. Snodgrass said. He glanced at his wife and Gran. One of his gingery eyebrows rose a little. Was he thinking they were the lightning and the thunder? Beckie wouldn’t have been surprised.

  Water drummed on the roof. No, you didn’t get rain like this in Los Angeles. It came down, and it kept on coming. Nine zillion raindrops danced on the growing puddles in the back yard. Beckie wondered how often the Snodgrasses’ house got flooded. They didn’t seem antsy, so maybe it didn’t happen as much as she guessed it might.

  Mr. Snodgrass had other worries on his mind. “Hope we don’t get tornadoes,” he said.

  “Bite your tongue, Ted!” his wife exclaimed. Mr. Snodgrass really did stick out his tongue and make as if to chomp down on it. Mrs. Snodgrass rolled her eyes before she went on, “We haven’t had a twister tear through Elizabeth for as long as anybody can recollect. But remember the one that got Palestine? What year was that, Ted? Was it ’71? Or ’72?”

  “Well, I reckoned it was ’73 myself, but I’m not gonna get all hot and bothered about it,” Mr. Snodgrass answered, a dig plainly aimed at his wife and Gran. Mrs. Snodgrass rolled her eyes again. Gran didn’t even notice she’d been zinged. Beckie might have known—had known—she wouldn’t. None so blind as those who will not see, Beckie thought.

  More thunder boomed and rumbled, this time a little longer after the lightning that lit up the front room with a white-purple flash. Beckie could imagine funnels forming in weather like this. “What do we do if there is one?” she asked.

  “We go down cellar and say our prayers,” Mrs. Snodgrass answered. “If God is listening, it’ll stay away from us. If He’s not …” She screwed up her face into what was meant for a smile. “If He’s not, I expect He’s got somebody else He needs to save more than us. His will be done.”

  She sounded as if she meant it. People here took their religion more seriously than they did in California. Back home, Gran went to church but Mom and Dad didn’t, or not very often. In Elizabeth, almost everybody seemed to. Beckie had gone since she came here—with the Snodgrasses and her grandmother going, staying away would have made her seem rude and weird. At seventeen, she felt the need to fit in. She didn’t think she was getting much out of going—the preacher was a bore. But people smiled and nodded just to see her there. That counted, too.

  Another flash of lightning lit everything up for a moment. As Beckie blinked, she counted bats again. Halfway between five and six of them, the thunder crashed. “That’s more like it,” she said. “A mile away, or pretty close.”

  “About what I figured myself,” Mr. Snodgrass said. “I bet that one came down on Jephany Knob. A lot of times after a thunderstorm you’ll see trees knocked down up there. It draws lightning, sure enough.”

  High ground did. Beckie knew that. She’d seen pictures of trees blasted during thunderstorms. She tried to imagine what they’d smell like. What was the odor of hot sap? She didn’t know, but she wanted to find out. “After the rain stops—if the rain ever stops—I’d like to have a look up there,” she said. Look wasn’t all of what she meant, but saying something like I want to have a sniff up there would only make everybody think she was strange.

  “Well, you can do that,” Mr. Snodgrass said.

  “I don’t want you going up there by yourself,” Gran said.

  Beckie started to say everything would be fine. What she wanted to say was that Gran was an old foof who belonged back in the twentieth century, or maybe the nineteenth. Before she could get the words out, Mr. Snodgrass said, “Myrtle’s right, Rebecca. There may be snags up there. There may be rattlers, too—there usually are.”

  And there may be people with guns, Beckie remembered. She swallowed whatever protest she might have made and nodded instead. “Okay, I won’t,” she said. “Maybe Justin will want to go up there with me.”

  That didn’t make Gran any happier—but then, what did? “I don’t know what that boy has in mind,” she said, but that wasn’t what she meant. She meant she knew just what Justin had in mind, and she didn’t like it one bit.

  “Don’t be silly, Gran,” Beckie said.

  “I’m not being silly. Don’t you wish you could say the same?” The look Gran gave her meant her grandmother thought she had the same thing in mind as Justin did. The only thing Beckie had in mind right then was picking up a lamp and bashing Gran over the head with it. She didn’t, but it sure was tempting.

  “Justin’s a nice enough fella,” Mr. Snodgrass said.

  “Yes, and a whole lot you know about it,” Gran said.

  “Oh, I recollect, I do,” he answered. “I may not be young any more, but I’m not dead yet, either, not by a long chalk. Isn’t that right, sweetie?” He turned to his wife for support.

  “Men,” Mrs. Snodgrass sniffed. By the way she made it sound, half the human race was in big trouble if she had anything to say about it. Mr. Snodgrass mimed being cut to the quick. His wife laughed, but she wasn’t kidding—or not much, anyhow.

  The high-topped running shoes Justin had worn when he came up to Elizabeth were good enough for almost anything. Oh, he’d get stares if he went to a fancy dinner in them, but he doubted anybody in Elizabeth had ever set out that fancy a dinner. They weren’t hiking boots or anything, but he felt more than sure-footed enough in them to climb Jephany Knob.

  “How you doing?” he asked Beckie.

  “I’m fine,” she answered. Just then, her foot came down on some slick mud. She almost took a pratfall, but a wild flail of her arms and a helping hand from Justin kept her upright. “Thanks,” she said.

  “Sure,” he said. “You helped keep me from landing on my can a couple of minutes ago.” He didn’t much want to let go of her hand, but he did. Right now, she was a girl he knew, not a girlfriend. He knew Mr. Brooks wouldn’t want her to turn into a girlfriend. Romances between Crosstime Traffic people and locals almost always turned out badly.

  “It’s nice, isn’t it?” she said. “The air feels … washed clean.”

  Justin nodded. Now that the rain had moved through, the nasty humidity was down. Everything smelled green—almost like spring but not quite so sweet, because fewer flowers were in bloom.

  No sooner had that thought crossed Justin’s mind than a wisp of breeze brought a new odor with it. His nose wrinkled. So did Beckie’s. That sickly-sweet smell was unmistakable. They both said the same thing at the same time: “Something’s dead!”

  It had to be something good-sized, too, or the stink wouldn’t have been so obvious. Feeling a little—a very little—like Daniel Boone, Justin followed the breeze up the knob.

  “Look!” Beckie pointed. “There’s a tree down.” Her laugh sounded shaky. “When the storm was bad a couple of days ago, I wondered if a tree would get hit, and what hot sap smelled like. But that’s not sap.”

  “No.” Now Justin shook his head. “It’s a dead bear or …” His voice trailed away. He saw what he’d hoped he wouldn’t see. “Are you sure you want to look? It’s a dead man.”

  “It’s Charlie!” Beckie said. In and around Elizabeth, the black man stood out, all right. “He must have run over by the tree when the lightning started coming close, and … .”

  “That’s the worst thing you can do,” Justin said. “People are supposed to know it is, too, but they do it anyway.”

  “What’s that by him?” Beckie asked.

  Justin took a closer look. However much he wished it would, that didn’t change a thing. “It’s a gun,” he answered.

  “It’s not just an ordinary gun, is it?” Like him, Beckie seemed to be doing her best not to say what desperately needed saying. She went on, “I mean, it’s not a squirre
l gun or a deer gun on … .”

  “No, it’s not any of those.” Then, because he had no choice, Justin said the thing he had to say: “It’s an assault rifle.” Guns made for shooting game could be works of art in their own right. Guns made for shooting people were ugly and functional. This one, of metal and plastic with a big, fat magazine, was no exception. It was an infantryman’s weapon, not the kind a janitor out hunting had any business carrying.

  And why would Charlie have gone hunting in the middle of a thunderstorm that had everything in it but the crack of doom? Justin couldn’t think of any good reason. He had no trouble coming up with piles of bad ones, though.

  “What are we going to do?” Beckie said in a small voice.

  “Why are you asking me?” Justin snapped. He wasn’t angry at Beckie—he was angry at himself. The question had several obvious answers, and he didn’t want to think about any of them.

  Beckie sent him a hurt look. “You’re the Virginian. You know what you’re supposed to do when something like this happens.”

  “Something like this?” He laughed harshly. “Nobody ever wants to run into something like this.”

  That was true. It was also one of the biggest understatements of all time. He especially didn’t want to have to deal with this mess, because he wasn’t a real Virginian—not from this alternate, anyhow. If he were, he would have reacted without even thinking. He was sure of that. A black man with an assault rifle? What could that mean but an uprising against the whites who’d ruled this Virginia as long as there’d been a Virginia here? And what else could you do about it but report it to the authorities and turn them loose on all the African Americans for kilometers—no, for miles—around?

  Because he was from the home timeline, Justin didn’t see things the way a local would have. He knew the blacks here were oppressed. He sympathized with them for wanting to do something about it. He didn’t want to get shot himself, though, any more than an ordinary white Virginian here would have.