by E. E. Knight
The Coal Country was, as you’ve read, for the most part left in the hands of the Maynes clan and the Church. Trouble with the other Kurian Zones started only once the coal shipments began to fail.
There were dozens of smaller Kurian states east of the Mississippi, of course. Many in the border areas, Memphis for example, were under constant attack from the Free Territory to one side, and attentively watched by larger predatory Kurian Zones at the other, like a lion watching a herd of gazelle in the hope of detecting a limp.
• • •
The employment I was given had one of the three things I needed to make an escape: access to a vehicle.
The second was some familiarity with the area. That would come, in time, driving around with the Maynes bodyguard.
The third required more judgment. I needed an opportunity—an event that diverted the security forces’ attention or made it harder for them to operate. Ideally, a new Kurian arriving or an old one departing would create enough of a shake-up atmosphere that escape would be easier, if for no other reason than that men nervous about being eliminated would be trying to make it to a new territory before they could be selected for destruction.
The payoff for patience would be the opportunity for a clean getaway and knowledge that would make escape more certain.
There was danger in patience, however. Kurian Zones did not communicate much with one another about sappers and guerillas. While they sought them within their own territory, if they happened to move to a neighboring zone, the Kurians saw it as a win-win. They would be causing trouble for a rival, upsetting whatever designs were no doubt being drawn against their neighbor. Their neighbor might also kill the enemy. The elimination of a threat with no effort had its own kind of sweetness, too.
• • •
I finally met my employer during my brief stint of vehicular training. I stood in the Maynes motor pool, a sort of evolutionary chart of a graveled lot, with the functioning automobiles and trucks at one end, lines of machines either being worked on or stripped behind, and then component parts, tires, and glass stacked about rusting racks with blackbirds hanging about as though it were a graveyard.
A motor pool mechanic was taking half the morning briefing me about gasoline pumps and how to get a gas cap off—to tell the truth, I found it a little insulting and tried to cut it short with my “Know how! I do!” routine, but he would not be dissuaded from repeating three times that the gas cap spun one way to take it off, and (“This is very important, son”) turns a different way to put it back on!
Two junkyard dogs added a comical note by chasing after and trying to mount a third, all three of them snapping out their sexual frustration at one another in brief, snarling quarrels. The Maynes family guarded everything, even its garbage heap.
My schoolmarmish instructor went silent as I put the cap back on for the third time. I smelled a burning cigarette.
“So, this is my new block and tackle?” said a voice like a bow saw drawn through soft wood, as if it were the result of too much tobacco on not enough sleep.
“Sure is, Mr. Maynes,” my instructor said, anxiously eyeing the lighted butt. “He’s still being oriented to the White Palace.”
“What’s his name?”
“King, Mr. Maynes.”
“I don’t care for that,” Maynes said. “MacTierney’s been calling him ‘Hickory’; says he’s solid as a walking stick. How about we call him King Hickory?”
“He answers to a lot of names.” The instructor smiled. “Ape. Stoop. Dickface.”
Maynes grimaced. “I’d say you’re lucky he didn’t pop your head off like a milk cap.”
“Dunno. He might be fixed. They fix Grogs in Ohio, right, to keep them calm?”
“I wouldn’t know. But he looks like he might be interesting, or at least fun,” Maynes said. He held up his hand, palm out, and I returned the gesture, smelling alcohol-sweat under his arm. “See you on the bus.”
Maynes was small for a human; most of his family was a little undersized.
In appearance Maynes was what my people would term “wild,” what we call someone so fleshless, his bones are exaggerated. He had high, prominent cheeks, a broad forehead, and a heavy brow; yet he had a smallish, drawn-in chin, and had he been born with a larger nose, some say he would have looked very much like the American president Abraham Lincoln. I only rarely could see the resemblance, as I am not particularly attuned to human physiognomy. He had black hair, a little grizzled about the temples and very curly, like much of his family.
He was frequently dirty out of unavoidable circumstance, being on the road constantly while making his rounds of Maynes holdings under the Conglomerate emblem—the coal mines in particular. He shaved every three or four days unless he was spending a few days lazing around the palace and seemed to believe that a bed-rumpled and road-worn appearance suited him, but I’ve found that the odder the features on a human, the more important it is that he dress neatly with hair growth controlled. He almost always wore a whitish straw hat with a rather broad brim and black band—I am told the style is often called a “Panama.”
His dietary habits were also strange. Like many of his habits, there was an internal logic to it. He ate only whole items: whole tomatoes, whole apples including the core, whole fish (he preferred smallish smelt-sized varieties). He would scrape corn off its cob with a knife and then have the cob ground into powder and placed in his drink. He put either horseradish or vinegar on everything he ate, including hard-boiled eggs still in their shells. He never suffered a bowel complaint.
My employer must have been something of a disappointment to his parents, or perhaps his grandfather, for despite being named for the organizational juggernaut that was his grandsire, he developed into some mixture of health and temperament that made him unsuitable for a dominant role in the Maynes palace. I’m told the brother who followed him and his sister, she being the fourth of seven, are the true heads of the Maynes household now.
So as not to openly disgrace the family, they gave him what you could call a sinecure. He held the title of “appellate judge” at a court of last appeal for those who ran afoul of the Kurian Order as it existed in the Coal Country at the time. His powers seemed chiefly reserved for functionaries of the Maynes empire, but this may have been unavoidable since the Maynes clan had a finger, if not both scooping hands, in every important business in the Coal Country.
My first time out with Maynes was a run to a lumberyard. The two other members of his security team, my “wrasslin’” partners Home and MacTierney, rode with Maynes between them in the cab of a heavy-duty truck. I rode in the back on an old, partly deframed love seat attached to the back of the cab.
Home drove and managed to strike every pothole and rut on the way to the lumberyard. To test me, they had me open the chain-link gate before driving into the wood-filled lot. I managed to swing the gate without knocking myself unconscious or scraping the truck, so MacTierney offered a “Thanks, King” out of the rolled-down truck window.
I grinned and did a quick back-and-forth hop, hoping I wasn’t overplaying the “happy helpful Grog” bit.
Piles of plywood paneling and two-bys and posts filled the gravel-covered lot. Half of the supply was just sitting on the ground, rotting from the bottom up. One would think that the owners of a business calling itself Renaissance Lumber would know better.
The workers came out to greet us, tucking in their pants and rolling down their sleeves to look presentable. Most of them eyed me. A boy still in his teens who was playing with a tape measure gaped openly.
Every business in the Coal Country has a “director,” and at Renaissance Lumber he was a firmly fat pencil chewer and spoke with Maynes as they reviewed a folder full of papers on the hood of the truck. Home leaned against the driver’s-side door, hand on his gun belt like a movie-Western tough. (The White Palace had several television-viewing rooms and its own “channel” I suppose you should call it. They showed movies from a century ago alternating wi
th New Universal Church educational programming—and Noonside Passions, of course.)
“Here’s the thing, Mr. Maynes,” the director said. “We have a lot of spare wood and scraps around. I let everyone help themselves to scrap. Fick and Nathaniel are good men. They both support families. They just got carried away with the lumber duels—and, well, Hammy being knocked out and getting his neck broke was an accident. No bad blood, not here, sir. I get rid of troublemakers right away. It was an accident, not murder. Don’t I have a clean record? Never lost a man to an accident before, and when you think about all the saws around here and the shape they’re in and what we have to do to keep them running, it’s practically a miracle.”
Maynes waved him off. “I understand accidents, Jorge. That time that radial blade took off on you and cut off that long-haired guy’s hand—”
“Despre, his name was,” the director cut in.
“It’s making weapons that’s more the problem than anything.”
“You could . . . You could think of them as sporting gear.”
Maynes chucked for a moment and scratched the day’s growth on his chin. I would prefer someone holding decisions about my life in his hands to look clean and not hung over, but if there was one thing I learned quickly in the Coal Country, it was that you made do and found happiness where you could. Maynes was infinitely preferable to a Reaper. “I suppose I could.”
He looked over the faces of the other workers. They were standing, hats in hands. He walked around the circle of workers. A few tried to put in a good word for their coworkers, currently absent somewhere in jeopardy of their lives, I supposed. “We’re really sorry, Mr. Maynes.” “The stick fighting got carried away.” “We weren’t betting or nothing, just a few pals having some fun after work.” “We thought it was no big deal—a couple of the firemen liked to come to the fights.”
Maynes finished his circuit of the employees and glanced at MacTierney and Home. Home was still modeling as a waiting gunfighter still life. MacTierney shrugged and smiled.
“Right, Jorge,” Maynes finally said. “I’ll get your men out of the cage.”
The lumberyard broke into applause and cheers. Maynes and MacTierney looked pleased; Home simply rested his hand on his holstered pistol.
The Maynes clan was shrewd to choose this specimen of humanity for the task. He had a sentimental streak that made him outright pardon roughly a third of those who came before him. Personal stories brimming with pathos brought tears to his eyes. I have seen him dash off a pardon and reach into his own wallet to hand over currency for clothes to replace prison uniforms, purchase a half steer to feed a hungry family, or otherwise provide comfort to those affected by what Maynes determined to be an injustice.
In another Kurian Zone, newspapers and church bulletins would place the charitable nature of the collaborators just under the masthead. But the Maynes family knew its locals. Those pardoned by Maynes were quietly released back to their loved ones. They knew word that spread across backyard laundry lines and in corner taverns would be much more convincing—and perhaps even be exaggerated.
A much smaller proportion simply had their sentences confirmed.
Then there were those to whom Maynes offered some manner of deal in order to get them out of the forage bag, as it were. There was a good deal of outright corruption in these deals; wealth and holdings were transferred to the Maynes business empire.
Temptation would come any man’s way in such a position. Maynes succumbed easily to temptations of all sorts, but in particular he was a ravenous consumer of females. With these, he had the most distressing taste and habits, but examples of that will come farther into this narrative.
For all that, he had little interest in personal wealth. Bribes and so on went into the family banks and vaults—down to pairs of pearl earrings and single gold coins. He spent freely, held lavish dinners at the conclusion of business visits, and would drop in on parties and shower the hosts with gifts of food and drink.
Once, I held down a guard—he’d been caught sleeping on duty—while Maynes rubbed horseradish in his eyes. The poor fellow howled while I held him down and Home handled the head.
Whippings held a special place in his brand of justice. Maynes considered a good horsewhipping an honorable way to atone for fault. More often than not, once those who’d been whipped on Maynes’s orders found themselves restored to their former positions, and with objective evidence of increased diligence and effort, a promotion would be given. Maynes, more than once, said to his travel team, “The lash draws the bad out.”
• • •
My wrasslin’ partner, Home, was not good company. He is not pleasant to remember, and even less pleasant to write about, but I am assured, my reader, that there is interest in what sort of person carried the everyday dirty work of the Kurian Order.
Home frequently spoke of the future, once he’d been ten years carrying a gun.
This requires some explanation. Like much of the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic East of that time, the Georgia Control system was utilized for ease of organizing the patchwork of Kurian principalities. In order to be an organ of the Kurian Order, one had to be permitted to carry and handle firearms, a difficult matter in the Kurian Zone (in the free territories, by contrast, it was a matter of basic survival; only fairly powerful rifles or automatic weapons gave one a chance against a Reaper). Once an individual passed the testing, obtained three letters of recommendation, and presented a clean work record, the procedure for the temporary permit began through the local police or New Universal Church organization (I understand in some places this also involved a substantial payoff, at least as far as the police were concerned, but most of the churchmen were too terrified of their thoughts being read to become corrupt in this pedestrian manner). For a year the individual remained on the provisional permit, and the authorities watched him, judged his marksmanship and firearm security, and of course made sure he returned expended cartridge casings. In my days as a guerilla, expended brass was almost like being handed fresh ammunition.
After obtaining the provisional permit, the holder received a renewal every five years, though of course it could be revoked for neglect.
Why was a gun permit so important? Jobs in the security services, the military and paramilitary organizations, even teaching and transport and broadcasting and field utility work, required weapons to be carried while on duty. The Kurian Order had vulnerable points everywhere and enemies both “domestic” and “foreign”—if not the resistance forces, a fellow Kurian might decide to tamper with his neighbor’s territory in the hope of acquiring control over it. I am convinced that roughly half of the attacks and deaths in the Georgia Control were caused by Kurians warring on other Kurians and scapegoating resistance forces in doing so.
But back to Home. He had his life all planned out. He was in his third year of armed service and looking forward to his first renewal.
Here’s a sample of his talk. I heard many variations, but it kept to this basic rhythm.
“I won’t go independent until I’ve ten years under my belt. Sure, I can take off at five, but chances are I’ll just get shuffled back to the bottom of the deck. With ten years armed service, I’ll be in a position to negotiate. Of course, fifteen might be better, or twenty—now that’s a man who can be trusted—but the way I figure, fifteen years, they might look at me and decide I’ve lost ambition, I’m getting set in my ways, just looking for somewhere where I can make myself comfortable and keep out of the way. At ten, they’ll be thinking, ‘He’s still young. Ambitious. Let’s give him the ball and see how far he runs.’ That’s what I’ve been waiting for, the chance to be given the ball. I’ll be doing broken-field running all the way to that brass ring.
“Now, where will I try for? One of those zones where they let the AS* have multiple wives. I’ll find me some big-hipped Ohio gal for the babies, maybe get a little Asian to do my hair and keep the place organized, and a Latin for the cooking. A little salsa on the kitchen t
able and in the bedroom. Figure on a baby every two years for the white girl, then the others maybe only two kids each. That’s what the old squids like to see, just as much as a good service record. Lots of kids. They look at me, yeah, good work record, but a lot of guys have a good work record. A good work record and ten or eleven kids, they’re going to want to make an example out of me, mention me in the church bulletins and newscasts. Look at all the good stuff that happens to this kind of citizen.”
Home was conscientious enough with his firearms (he carried his pistol and a shotgun every day, with two full reloads of ammunition for each; his father had served armed and told him every time he’d fired his weapon it had been at a range of fifteen feet or less). He didn’t brandish them in the aggressive manner of some Coal Country security I’d seen, or make a show of setting the shotgun where it could instantly be picked up everywhere he went. Maynes seemed to enjoy his presence and I suspect gave him regular positive reviews and increases in salary. He stayed strictly sober and did not spend much, even though he was frequently admitted with Maynes to the few special stores for privileged citizens.
As for MacTierney, he came from just the kind of large family Home dreamt of starting.
He did not speak much of his parents or siblings, but I can make a few guesses based on what he did tell me. The family strategy was to survive by placing the kids in several different careers important to the Coal Country, so there would be numerous avenues of influence. MacTierney wanted to be a railroad man. He had loved trains since he was a child, and that seemed to be in the cards until his eldest brother, who had gone into the security services, died behind the wheel in a training accident. The family demanded that he step into his brother’s place (it seemed the other alternative offered to him was the Church, but he found the strict discipline and rituals off-putting, and he disliked working with blood and filth, which many clerical novitiates end up handling when involved with hospital and poverty-relief work).