American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold

by Harry Turtledove

  “H asta luego,” Hipolito Rodriguez told his wife. “I’m going into Baroyeca. I’ll vote, and then I’m going to stay to see how the election turns out.”

  Magdalena wagged a finger at him. “And in between times you’ll sit in La Culebra Verde and waste money on cerveza.”

  “If a man can’t have a beer or two with his friends, the world is in a sorry state indeed,” Rodriguez said with dignity.

  “A beer or two, or four, or six.” Magdalena wagged that finger again, but indulgently. “Go on. Have a good time. I will say you’ve never been one to sit in the cantina all the time and come home drunk four days a week. Libertad!”

  “Libertad!” Rodriguez echoed. He put a serape on over his shirt; the weather was about as chilly as it ever got around Baroyeca. He put on a wide-brimmed straw hat, too. It wasn’t raining, but looked as if it might.

  The polling place was in one room of the mayor’s house. More often than not, Rodriguez still thought of the mayor as the alcalde; even though Sonora had belonged to the CSA longer than he’d been alive, the old Spanish forms died hard, especially here in the south.

  He gave his name, signed on the appropriate line in the record book, and took his ballot into a voting booth. He voted for the Freedom Party candidates for Congress, for his state legislature, and for governor of Sonora. When he’d finished, he folded the ballot, gave it to a waiting clerk, and watched till the man put it into a ballot box.

  “Señor Rodriguez has voted,” the clerk intoned, a formula as full of ritual as any in the Mass.

  As Rodriguez left the mayor’s office, Jaime Diaz came towards it. They exchanged greetings. From within, someone called out a warning: “No electioneering within a hundred feet of the polling place.”

  That too was ritual. Rodriguez snorted. “Electioneering!” he said. “All I want to do is say hello.”

  “I can’t chat anyhow,” Diaz said. “I’ve got Esteban back at the general store, and he can’t count to eleven without looking at his toes, so I have to get back there as fast as I can.”

  “We’ll talk some other time, then,” Rodriguez said. “Adios.” He didn’t say, Libertad. The fellow inside had warned him against electioneering.

  When he wandered over to La Culebra Verde, he found it crowded. Many of the men sitting and drinking had worked in the silver mines that went belly-up soon after the stock market sank. These days, the miners didn’t have much to do with their time but sit around and drink. Rodriguez wondered where some of them came up with the dimes they used to buy beer, but that wasn’t his worry. A lot of the miners, he suspected, would spend money on cerveza before they spent it on their families. That wasn’t the way he would have done it, but they wouldn’t care.

  Carlos Ruiz waved to him. He waved back, bought himself a bottle of beer, and joined his friend at a corner table. Ruiz was also a farmer. He might not have a lot of dimes—what farmer ever had a lot of money?—but he did still have some income. “Have you voted?” he asked as Rodriguez sat down across from him.

  “Oh, yes. Libertad!” Rodriguez answered. He kept his voice down, though. Some people came into the cantina to brawl as well as to drink. Arguments over politics gave them a good excuse. Rodriguez had seen enough fighting during the Great War that he never wanted to see any more.

  “Libertad!” Ruiz said, also quietly. “I think we are going to do very well this year.”

  “I hope so,” Rodriguez said. “A pity, though, that it takes trouble to show people what they should have been doing all along.”

  His friend shrugged. “If you’re fat and happy, do you want to change? Of course not. You keep on doing what you always did. After all, that’s what made you fat and happy, sí? You need a jolt to want to change.”

  “Much truth in that,” Rodriguez agreed. “But the whole country got a jolt in 1917. Too many people try to pretend it never happened. Ah, well—así es la vida.” He shrugged, too, and took a pull at the beer.

  The question that had occurred to Rodriguez was also on the minds of the out-of-work miners. One of them asked the man behind the bar for another beer, saying, “You know I’ll pay you soon, Felipe.”

  Felipe shook his head. “Lo siento, Antonio, but if you pay me soon you’ll get your beer soon, too—as soon as you pay me, as a matter of fact. I can’t carry people, the way I could when times were better. I hardly make enough money to keep this place open as is.”

  Rodriguez had his doubts about that. If a cantina couldn’t make money, what could? Probably nothing. After all, what did hard times do? They drove men to drink.

  “My wife is going to get a job any day now,” Antonio whined. “I’ll have the money. By God, I will.”

  Women’s jobs in Baroyeca were even harder to come by than those for men. There was, of course, one obvious exception. Somebody behind Antonio—Rodriguez couldn’t see who—said, “She’ll have a nice, comfortable time of it, too, working on her back.”

  Rodriguez didn’t think the man who made the crack intended Antonio to recognize his voice, either. Coming from nowhere in particular, a gibe like that might be tolerated. But Antonio whirled, shouted, “Chinga tu madre!” and threw himself at another miner. They rolled on the floor, cursing and clawing and pounding at each other.

  Felipe kept a club under the bar. Rodriguez had seen him take it out before, mostly to brandish it for effect. He’d never seen a sawed-off shotgun come out from under there before. Men dove away from the two battling miners.

  “Enough!” Felipe yelled. Antonio and his foe both froze. The bartender gestured with the shotgun. “Take it outside. Don’t come back, either—and that goes for both of you. Out—or else I blow holes in you.”

  Out they went. Rodriguez realized he was holding his beer bottle by the neck, ready to use it as a club or break it against the table for a nastier weapon. He’d also scooted back his chair so he could dive under the table if he had to. Across from him, Ruiz was just as ready to fight or take cover. Very slowly and carefully, Rodriguez set down the bottle. “Some of the things we learned in the war don’t want to go away,” he remarked sadly.

  “You’re right,” Ruiz said. “It’s terrible that we should remember all the best ways to kill the other fellow and keep him from killing us.”

  As Felipe made the shotgun disappear, Rodriguez nodded. “Of course, most of the men who didn’t learn those ways are dead now,” he said. “And a lot of the ones who did learn are dead, too. A shell from the yanquis didn’t care who it killed.”

  “Oh, yes.” His friend nodded. “Oh, yes, indeed.” Ruiz’s face twisted, as at some memory that wouldn’t go away. Rodriguez didn’t ask him about it. He had memories of his own. Every once in a while—not so often as right after the war, when it would happen every week or two—he would wake up from a dream shuddering and drenched with sweat. Sometimes he would remember what he’d seen in his sleep. Sometimes the details would be gone, but the horror would remain. He didn’t scream very often any more. That made him glad and Magdalena, no doubt, gladder.

  Not wanting to think about such things, he got up, bought himself another beer, and got one for Carlos Ruiz as well.

  “Muchas gracias, amigo,” Ruiz said when he brought it back.

  “De nada,” Rodriguez answered. He sipped from the beer, then asked the bartender, “Qué hora es?”

  Felipe wore a big brass pocket watch on a chain. It could have been a conductor’s watch—a thought Rodriguez wished he wouldn’t have had, since the railroad came to Baroyeca no more. The bartender made a small ceremony out of pulling it out and checking it. “Son las cuatro y media,” he answered, and made another ceremony of returning the watch to his pocket.

  Half past four. Rodriguez nodded. “Gracias,” he said. Sure enough, by the lengthening shadows outside, the sun was getting low in the west.

  Ruiz said, “Pretty soon we can go over to Freedom Party headquarters. The trains may stay away, but the telegraph still comes. We can find out what’s happening in the elections, es
pecially since the polls in the east of los Estados Confederados close earlier than they do here. Let me buy you a beer to pay you back for the one you so kindly got me, and then we’ll see what we see, eh?”

  Rodriguez was glad to let his friend buy him a beer. He was a little elevated—not drunk, but a little elevated—as he and Ruiz walked down the street to the shopfront that said FREEDOM! and ¡LIBERTAD!

  A couple of men were already there. “Hola, amigos,” Robert Quinn said in his accented Spanish as Rodriguez and Ruiz came in. Three more men followed right behind them. Quinn went on, “Libertad! I wish we had a wireless set here. This town needs electricity, por Dios.”

  “If the mines had stayed open . . .” Rodriguez began, and then shrugged, as if to say, What can anyone do?

  But Quinn didn’t have that attitude. “Let the Party come into power, and we’ll do something about the mines. We’ll do something about all sorts of things. That’s why you’re here, right? You believe in doing things, not in sitting around and waiting for them to happen.”

  Is that why I’m here? Rodriguez wondered. He thought he was here mostly because he couldn’t stand the United States and wanted revenge on them. But if that required doing other things, then it did, that was all.

  A messenger from the telegraph office came in with a sheaf of flimsy yellow papers. “Gracias,” Quinn told him, and gave him a dime. He went through the telegrams in a hurry. Then he let out a banshee whoop of a sort Rodriguez hadn’t heard since his days in the trenches. Some of the men there had called the battle cry a Rebel yell. “We’re winning,” Quinn said. “Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida—wherever I have returns, we’re picking up seats in Congress and in the state legislatures. And our men running for governor are ahead in South Carolina and Florida, and the race in Virginia is still very close. Libertad!”

  “Libertad!” the Freedom Party men shouted. Rodriguez couldn’t wait for results to start coming in from states closer to Sonora.

  To while away the time, Quinn pulled a whiskey bottle out of a desk drawer. He took a pull himself, then passed it around. Rodriguez had always thought whiskey tasted nasty. He still did, but that didn’t keep him from swigging when the bottle got to him. “Ahh!” he said. The stuff might taste bad, but he liked what it did.

  More telegrams came in. So did more people. The Freedom Party didn’t look as if it would win the governorship of Virginia after all, but it gained a Senator from Mississippi and another from Tennessee. Before long, it also picked up two more Congressmen in Alabama, a Senator from Arkansas, and several Congressmen from eastern Texas. “Will we have a majority?” Rodriguez asked. Even a few weeks before, the question would have seemed unimaginable. Now . . .

  Now, to his disappointment, Robert Quinn shook his head. “No, I don’t think so,” he answered. “But we’re still doing better than anybody thought we could.” He pulled out a fresh bottle of whiskey and led the Party men in a new shout of, “Libertad!”

  An hour or so later, returns from Chihuahua started arriving. The Freedom Party men in Baroyeca cheered: their candidate for governor there was well ahead of the Radical Liberal incumbent. And in Sonora itself, two more Congressional districts swung to the Party. As Rodriguez had known he would be, he was very late getting home that night. But he hadn’t known—he’d had no idea—how happy he would be making that long walk in the dark.

  Lucien Galtier parked his motorcar in front of the house where his daughter Nicole lived with Dr. Leonard O’Doull. Nicole opened the door at his knock and gave him a hug. “Hello, Papa,” she said. “It’s always good to see you.”

  “Is it?” Galtier said. “I don’t want to make a nuisance of myself.” Since Marie died, he’d started visiting his children as often as he could. For one thing, he was lonely. For another, he was sure he was the world’s worst cook. Any evening where he didn’t have to eat what he turned out was an evening gained.

  Nicole made a face at him. “Don’t be silly. You know you’re welcome here.”

  As if to underscore that, little Lucien came running up shouting, “Grandpère!” When Galtier picked up his namesake, the boy threw his arms around his neck and gave him a big, sloppy kiss.

  “You’re growing up,” Galtier told him. “You’re heavier every time I try to lift you.” He turned to his daughter. “It must be that you keep feeding him.”

  She snorted. “You sound like Georges. He must get his foolishness from you. Now come in, for heaven’s sake. Sit down. Relax.”

  “This is a strange word for a farmer to hear.” But Galtier wasn’t sorry to sit down on the sofa. Leonard O’Doull walked in a moment later, with glasses of applejack and fine Habana cigars.

  “I thank you very much,” Galtier said, accepting the brandy and the tobacco. He raised his glass in salute. “To your good health!”

  “And to yours,” his son-in-law answered. They both drank, as did Nicole. The applejack went down soft and sweet as a first kiss. Little Lucien ran off to play. O’Doull asked, “And how are you, mon beau-père?”

  Lucien shrugged. “As well as I can be, I suppose. It is not easy.” That was as much as he would say. It would also do for an understatement till he found a bigger one, which might come along . . . oh, a hundred years from now.

  Dr. O’Doull looked sly. “But of course you have all the pretty ladies for miles around looking in your direction now that, however unfortunately, you are a single man once more.”

  He probably meant it for a joke. In fact, Galtier was almost sure he meant it for a joke. But that didn’t mean it held no truth. He’d been amazed how many widows and maiden ladies had come to call on him, to say how sorry they were that Marie was gone . . . and, sometimes quite openly, to size him up. He’d been even more amazed that a couple of farmers, both in the most casual, offhand way imaginable, had brought up their marriageable daughters with him. True, he wasn’t an old man—he wouldn’t see sixty for a few years yet—but what would he do with an eighteen- or twenty-year-old girl? Oh, there was one obvious answer, but he couldn’t even do that so often as he had when he was younger. And, if he were to have a wife younger than his youngest daughter, wouldn’t making love to her feel like molesting a child? Some men his age, no doubt, would have thought themselves lucky to get offers like those. He didn’t.

  Making a production out of lighting his cigar meant he didn’t have to answer his son-in-law. Once he had it going, once he’d savored the fine, mild smoke, he asked, “And how is it with you here?”

  “Not too bad,” O’Doull answered. Nicole nodded. Galtier did, too, in approval. The American sounded more like a Quebecois with each passing year. It wasn’t just his accent, though the years had also meant that Rivière-du-Loup supplanted Paris in his French. But Americans, from everything Galtier had seen, liked to brag. Not too bad was about as much as a man from this part of the world was ever likely to say. Dr. O’Doull went on, “I wish I could do more about influenza and rheumatic fever and a dozen other sicknesses, but I don’t know of any other doctors anywhere else in the world who wouldn’t say the same thing.”

  “Your glass is empty, Papa,” Nicole said, and then did something to correct that.

  “Pour me full of applejack, yes, and how will I go home?” Galtier asked, not that he didn’t want the freshened glass. “The one advantage a horse has over an automobile is that the horse knows the way.”

  “You can sleep here. You know you’re welcome,” his daughter said.

  He smiled. He did know that. He’d even done it once or twice, on nights when he’d been too drunk to find the door, let alone to fit the Chevrolet’s key into the ignition. He might even have slept better here than at home, and that wasn’t because he’d been drunk. Trying to sleep alone in a bed where he’d had Marie beside him for so long . . . He grimaced and took a quick nip from the brandy. No, that wasn’t easy at all.

  To keep from brooding about that empty bed back at the farmhouse, he asked his son-in-law, “What do you think of the state
of the world?”

  That was a question usually good for a long, fruitful discussion. Galtier got one this time, too, but not of the sort he’d expected. The corners of Dr. O’Doull’s normally smiling mouth turned down. He said, “Right this minute, mon beau-père, I like the state of the world not at all.”

  “And why not?” Galtier leaned forward, ready to argue with what ever O’Doull said.

  “Because I read the newspapers. Because I listen to what they say on the wireless,” O’Doull replied. “How could anyone like it when the Freedom Party doubles its vote in the Confederate States? They hold more than a third of the seats in the Confederate Congress now, and heaven only knows what they’ll do next.”

  With a shrug, Lucien said, “This, to me, is not so much of a much. The Confederate States are a long, long way from Rivière-du-Loup.”

  His son-in-law looked startled. “Yes, that’s true,” he said after a momentary hesitation. “I still think of myself as an American some ways, I suppose. I’ve been here more than fifteen years now, so it could be that I shouldn’t, but I do.”

  “It is not so bad that you do,” Galtier said. “A man should know where he springs from. If he does not know what he was, how can he know what he is?”

  “You sound like a Quebecois, all right.” Leonard O’Doull smiled.

  “And why should I not?” Lucien replied. “By the good God, I know what I am. But tell me, mon beau-fils, why is this Freedom Party so bad for the United States?”

  “Because it is the Confederate party for all those who don’t want to live at peace with the United States,” O’Doull replied. “If it comes to power, there will be trouble. Trouble is what its leader, this man Featherston, stands for.”

  “I see.” Galtier rubbed his chin. “You say it is like the Action Française in France, then? Or that other party, the one whose name I always forget, in England?”