American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold

by Harry Turtledove

  As the Charleston Whigs droned on, Potter got to his feet and slipped out of their meeting. Nobody tried to call him back. Everybody seemed glad he was going. They didn’t want to hear their grip on things was endangered. They deserve to lose, by God, he thought as he went out into the heat and humidity of a Charleston summer. But then, remembering Jake Featherston’s burning eyes as he’d seen them again and again during the Great War, Potter shook his head. They almost deserve to lose. No one deserves what those “Freedom!”-shouting yahoos would give us if they won.

  Pigeons strutted along the street, cooing gently. They were slow and stupid and ever so confident nobody would bother them. Why not? They’d proved right again and again and again. This one stranger in their midst wouldn’t prove any different . . . would he?

  Clarence Potter laughed. He threw his arms wide. Some of the pigeons scurried back from him. One or two even spread their wings and fluttered away a few feet. Most? Most kept right on strutting and pecking, and paid him no attention whatsoever. “You goddamn dumb sons of bitches,” he told them, laughing though it wasn’t really funny. “You might as well be Whigs.” The birds went right on ignoring him, which proved his point.

  He wondered whether the Radical Liberals would take him seriously. Odds were, they would. The Freedom Party, after all, was replacing them as the Whigs’ principal opposition. But then he wondered if it mattered whether the Rad Libs took him seriously. It probably didn’t. No one except a few dreamers had ever thought the Radical Liberals could govern the CSA. They gave the states of the West and Southwest a safety valve through which they could blow off steam when Richmond ignored them, as it usually did. Closer to the heart of the CSA, the Radical Liberals let people pretend the country really was a democratic republic—without the risks and complications a real change of power would have entailed.

  Why do I bother? Potter wondered as he strode past the pigeons that, fat and happy and brainless, went on pretending he wasn’t there—or, if he was, that he couldn’t possibly be dangerous. Easier just to sit back and let nature take its course.

  But he knew the answer to that. It was simple enough: he knew Jake Featherston. Ten years now since I walked into the First Richmond Howitzers’ encampment. Ten years since he told me Jeb Stuart III’s body servant might be a Red, and since Jeb Stuart III, being III of an important family, made sure nothing would happen to the nigger. Jeb Stuart III was dead, of course. He’d looked for death when he realized he’d made a bad mistake. He’d had plenty of old-fashioned Confederate courage and honor. But he’d taken however many Yankee bullets he took without having the faintest conception of just how bad a mistake he’d made.

  “The whole Confederacy is still finding out just how bad a mistake you made, Captain Stuart,” Clarence Potter muttered. A young woman coming the other way—a young woman in a shockingly short skirt, one that reached so high, it let him see the bottom of her kneecap—gave him a curious glance as she went by.

  Potter was by now used to garnering curious glances. He wasn’t nearly so used to women showing that much leg. He looked back over his shoulder at her. For a little while, at least, he forgot all about the Freedom Party.

  When the steam whistle announcing shift change blew, Chester Martin let out a sigh of relief. It had been a good day on the steel-mill floor. Everything had gone the way it was supposed to. Nobody’d got hurt. You couldn’t ask for more than that, not in this business.

  Instead of heading straight home, he stopped at the Socialist Party hall not far from the mill. A good many men from his mill and others nearby sat and stood there, talking steel and talking politics and winding down from the long, hard weeks they’d just put in. “How’s it going, Chester?” somebody called. Martin mimed falling over in exhaustion, which got a laugh.

  Somebody else said, “They don’t work us as hard as they worked our fathers.”

  “Only goes to show what you know, Albert,” Chester retorted. “My old man’s got one of those soft foreman’s jobs. He hardly even has calluses on his hands any more, except from pushing a pencil. They work me a hell of a lot harder than they work him.”

  “Sold out to the people who own the means of production, has he?” Albert Bauer said—he was and always had been a Socialist of the old school.

  Before Chester could answer that, someone else did it for him: “Oh, put a sock in it, for Christ’s sake. We’re starting to own the means of production. At least, I’ve bought some shares of stock, and I’ll bet you have, too. Go on, tell me I’m a liar.”

  Bauer said not a word. In fact, so many people said not a word that something close to silence fell for a moment. Have that many of us bought stocks? Chester wondered. He had a few shares himself, and knew his father had more than a few: Stephen Douglas Martin had been picking up a share here, a share there, ever since he started making good money when he wasn’t conscripted into the Great War.

  “Funny,” Martin said. “The Party talks about government owning the means of production, but it never says much about the proletariat buying ’em up one piece at a time.”

  “Marx never figured anything like that would happen,” someone said. “Neither did Lincoln. Back when they lived, you couldn’t make enough money to have any left over to invest.”

  “As long as Wall Street keeps going up and up, though, you’d have to be a damn fool not to throw your money that way,” somebody else said. “It’s like stealing, only it’s legal. And buying on margin makes it even easier.”

  Nobody argued with him. Even now, most of the men who left their jobs at the steel mills left only because they were too old or too physically worn or too badly hurt to do them any more. Those were the people for whom the Socialists were trying to push their old-age insurance policy through Congress. But if you could quit your work at sixty-five, or even sixty, and be sure you had enough left to live on for the rest of your days thanks to what you’d done for yourself while you were working . . . If you could manage that, the whole country would start looking different in twenty or thirty years.

  I’ll turn sixty-five in 1957, Martin thought. It didn’t seem so impossibly far away—but then, he had just put in that long, long day at the mill.

  He rode the trolley home, ate supper with his parents and his sister, and went to bed. When the wind-up alarm clock next to his head clattered the next morning, he just turned it off. He didn’t have a moment’s sleepy panic, thinking it was some infernal device falling on his trench. I’ve been home from the Great War for a while now, he thought as he put on a clean work shirt and overalls. But he would take a couple of puckered scars on his left arm to the grave. As it had on so many, the war had left its mark on him.

  When he went into the kitchen, his father was already there, smoking his first cigar of the day. His mother fried eggs and potatoes in lard. She used a wood-handled iron spatula to flip some onto a plate for him. “Here’s your breakfast, dear,” she said. “Do you want some coffee?”

  “Please,” he said, and she poured him a cup.

  His father said, “Saturday today—only a half day.”

  Chester nodded as he doctored the coffee with cream and sugar. “That’s right. You know I won’t be home very long, though—I’m going out with Rita.”

  Stephen Douglas Martin nodded. “You already told us, yeah.”

  His mother gave him an approving smile. “Have a good time, son.”

  “I think I will.” Chester dug into the hash browns and eggs so he wouldn’t have to show his amusement. His folks had decided they approved of Rita Habicht, or at least of his seeing her. They must have started to wonder if he would ever see anybody seriously. But he wasn’t the only Great War veteran in no hurry to get on with that particular part of his life. Plenty of men he knew who’d been through the mill (and, as a steelworker, he understood exactly what that phrase meant) were still single, even though they’d climbed into their thirties. It was as if they’d given so much in the trenches, they had little left for the rest of their lives. />
  He took the trolley past the half-scale statue of Remembrance—who would have looked fiercer without half a dozen pigeons perched on her sword arm—to the mill, where he put in his four hours. Then he hurried back home, washed up, shaved, and changed from overalls, work shirt, and cloth cap to trousers, white shirt, and straw hat. “I’m off,” he told his mother.

  “You look very nice,” Louisa Martin said. He would have been happier if she hadn’t said that every time he went anywhere, but still—you took what you could get.

  He rode the trolley again, this time to the block of flats where Rita lived. She had one of her own. She’d got married just before the war started. Her husband had stopped a bullet or a shell in one of the endless battles on the Roanoke front. Martin had fought there, too, till he got wounded. He’d never met Joe Habicht, but that proved exactly nothing. Rita had had a baby, too, and lost it to diphtheria the day after its second birthday. Women fought their own battles, even if not with guns. Through everything, though, she’d managed to hang on to the apartment.

  She didn’t keep Chester waiting when he knocked on the door. His heart beat faster as she opened it. “Hi,” he said, a big, silly grin on his face. “How are you?”

  “Fine, thanks.” She patted at her dark blond hair. It was a little damp; she must have washed after getting back from her Saturday half day, too. “It’s good to see you.”

  “It’s good to be here,” he said, and leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. “You look real pretty.”

  Rita smiled. “You always tell me that.”

  “I always mean it, too.” But Martin started to laugh. When she asked him what was funny, he wouldn’t tell her. I’ll be damned if I want to admit I sound just like my mother, he thought. Instead, he said, “Shall we go on over to the Orpheum?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Who’s playing there today?”

  “Those four crazy brothers from New York are heading the bill,” he answered.

  “Oh, good. They are funny,” Rita said. “I was in stitches the last time they came through Toledo.” That had been a couple of years before; she and Chester hadn’t known each other then. He wondered with whom she’d seen the comics. That she had a past independent of him occasionally bothered him, though he’d never stopped to wonder if his independent past bothered her. But neither of them had seen anybody else for several months now. That suited Chester fine, and seemed to suit Rita pretty well, too.

  They held hands at the trolley stop. An old lady clucked disapprovingly, but they paid no attention to her. Things were looser now than they had been when she was a young woman. As far as Chester Martin was concerned, that was all to the good, too. He was sorry when the trolley car came clanging up so soon.

  He slid a silver dollar to the ticket-taker at the Orpheum, and got back a half dollar and two yellow tickets. He and Rita went up to the first balcony and found some seats. He took her hand there, too. She leaned her head on his shoulder. When the house lights went down, he gave her a quick kiss.

  A girl singer and a magician led off the show. As far as Martin was concerned, the magician couldn’t have disappeared fast enough. A trained-dog act ended abruptly when the dog, which could jump and fetch and even climb ladders to ring a bell at the top, proved not to be trained in a much more basic way. He got an enormous laugh, but not one of a sort the fellow in black tie who worked with him had in mind. The dancer who came on next got another laugh by soft-shoeing out holding his nose.

  “I wouldn’t have done that,” Rita said, even though she’d laughed, too. “Now he’ll squabble with the man with the dog all the way to the end of the tour.” Chester wouldn’t have thought of that for himself. Once she said it, he realized she was bound to be right.

  At last, after a couple of other acts Martin knew he wouldn’t remember ten minutes after he left the Orpheum, the Engels Brothers came out, along with the tall, skinny, dreadfully dignified woman who served as their comic foil. They were all young men, not far from Chester’s age, but got their name from the enormous, fuzzy beards they wore. One of the beards was dyed red, one yellow, one blue, and the fourth left black. From the balcony, Martin couldn’t tell if the beards were real or fakes. For the comics’ sake, he hoped they were phony.

  The Brother with the undyed beard talked enough for any three men. The one with the yellow beard didn’t talk at all, but was so limber, he seemed to have no bones. The one with the blue beard tried to slap everybody else into line. The one with the red beard spent all his time chasing the tall, skinny woman, who seemed more bewildered than flattered by his attentions.

  At one point, they all started pelting one another with oranges. It might have been trench warfare up there—by the way the Engels Brothers dodged around the prop furniture, they’d been in the trenches—except that the woman kept standing up and getting nailed. By the time they’d finished, the stage was a worse mess, much worse, than it had been after the dog act. But this was a lot funnier, too.

  The Engels Brother with the black beard proved the sole survivor. He looked out at the audience and said, “Orange you glad you aren’t up here?” The curtain came down.

  “That was . . . I don’t know exactly what that was, but I don’t know when I’ve laughed so hard, either,” Rita said as she got up and made her way toward the exit. Since Chester Martin was rubbing at his streaming eyes with his handkerchief, he couldn’t very well argue with her.

  They had supper at a diner across the street from the Orpheum, then took the trolley back to Rita’s block of flats. “I had a wonderful time,” she said as she fumbled in her handbag for the key.

  “I always have a terrific time with you, Rita.” Chester hesitated, then asked, “Can I come in for a minute, please?”

  She hesitated, too. She was careful of her reputation. He’d seen that from the first time he took her out. He liked it. She said, “You’re not going to be—you know—difficult, are you?”

  He would have liked nothing better than to be difficult, but he solemnly shook his head. “Cross my heart,” he answered, and did.

  “All right.” Rita opened the door and flipped on a light. “The place is a mess.” It was, to Martin’s eye, perfectly neat. Rita sat down on the overstuffed sofa. She patted the upholstery next to her, asking, “What have you got in mind?”

  Instead of sitting there, Chester awkwardly went to one knee in front of her. Her eyes got very big. Tongue stumbling, heart pounding, he repeated, “I always have a terrific time with you. I don’t think I’d ever want to be with anybody else. Will you—will you marry me, Rita?” He took a velvet jewelry box from his pocket and flipped it open to show her a ring set with a tiny chip of diamond.

  She stared at him. “I wondered if you were going to ask me that tonight,” she whispered, and then, “The ring is beautiful.”

  “You’re beautiful,” he said. “Will you?”

  “Of course I will,” she answered.

  Afterwards, he wasn’t quite sure who kissed whom first. When he came up for air, he gasped, “You never kissed me like that before.”

  “Well, you never asked me to marry you before, either,” Rita answered.

  He laughed. They kissed again. Heart pounding, he asked, “What else don’t I know?”

  “You’ll find out,” she said. “After the wedding.”

  Scipio paid five cents for a copy of the Augusta Constitutionalist. In one way, that struck him as a lot of money to shell out for a newspaper. In another, considering that he would have paid millions if not billions of dollars when the currency went crazy a couple of years before, it wasn’t so bad.

  “Thanks, uncle,” said the white man who took his money. He didn’t answer. He just opened up the paper and read it as he hurried towards Erasmus’ fish market and restaurant.

  Had he answered, what would he have said? Angry at himself for even wondering, he shook his head as he walked along. White men never called black men mister, not in the Confederate States of America they didn’t. If he held his
breath till they started to, he’d end up mighty, mighty blue. The fellow with the pile of papers at his feet would just have called him an uppity nigger, or maybe a crazy nigger, if he’d complained.

  Maybe the worst of it was, the white man had been trying to be polite. I can’t win, Scipio thought. Why do I bother imagining I could?

  Even more to the point, he wondered why he’d wasted any money on the paper. The headline screamed about a lurid love triangle that had ended in an axe murder. It would have been made to seem a lot more lurid had the parties involved been colored. Or, on the other hand, it might not have made the paper at all in that case. A lot of whites expected Negroes to act that way, and took it for granted when they did.

  Much smaller stories talked about Congressional candidates’ latest promises. Scipio wondered why he bothered even glancing at those. It wasn’t as if he could vote. But the remarks of Eldridge P. Dinwiddie, the Freedom Party candidate in Augusta, did make his eyes widen as if he’d just poured down a couple of cups of Erasmus’ strong, chicory-laced coffee.

  “Too many Red rebels are still hiding in plain sight,” Dinwiddie was quoted as saying. “The Whigs have forgotten all about them. Going after them would remind people of how badly the party that’s in power bungled the war effort. But if you elect me, I’ll make sure they aren’t forgotten and are brought to justice. I aim to see all those nigger traitors hang.”

  Mr. Dinwiddie, wrote the reporter who’d listened to him, received prolonged and vociferous support for his suggestion.

  “Hell wid Mistuh Dinwiddie,” Scipio muttered under his breath. Being one of those fugitive Reds himself, he didn’t care for the notion of getting hunted down and hanged. Here and there, faded posters still offered a reward for his capture.

  But that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead. Every so often, a phrase from the education Anne Colleton had made him acquire floated up out of his memory. This one fit. South Carolina might have been another country. The name on his passbook here in Georgia was Xerxes. Everyone here, even his wife, knew him by that name and no other.