Erasmus had insisted the Augusta police weren't all bad men. Maybe he was right. Scipio found it harder to believe now. He did nod to the clerk. 'Thank you fo' tryin', suh,' he said. Not all whites were bad. He was reasonably sure of that.
A little while after the sounds of violence ended, Scipio left the toy store and hurried back to the Terry. He got home safe. His daughter did love the doll. Everything should have been fine. And it would have been, if only he could have forgotten what had happened in the white part of town. As things were, he got very little sleep that night.
W hen the train pulled into Abilene, Texas, Jake Featherston knew he was in a different world from the one he'd left. The plains seemed to go on forever. Dust was in the air. This wasn't the narrow, confined landscape of Virginia. No wonder Texans had a reputation for thinking big.
But Texas itself wasn't so big as it had been. Not far west of Abilene, Texas abruptly stopped. What the damnyankees called the state of Houston began. That was why Jake had come all the way out here: to make a speech as close to what he still called occupied territory as he could.
The train stopped. His bodyguards got up, ready to precede him out onto the platform. Looking out there, one of them said, 'It's all right. Willy Knight's there waitin' for us.'
'Hell it's all right, Pete,' another guard said. 'What if that Knight bastard's the one who wants to try and get rid o' the boss?'
Pete, an innocent soul, looked shocked. Jake wasn't. Willy Knight's Redemption League might have swallowed up the Freedom Party instead of the other way round. It hadn't, though, and Knight couldn't be happy that he wasn't the biggest fish in the pond, the way he'd dreamt of being. Still… 'If he wants to put me six feet under, reckon he can do it,' Featherston said. 'This is his part of the country; he can hire more guns than I can bring along. But if you stick your head in the lion's mouth and get away with it, after that the lion knows who's number one. That's what we're gonna do here.'
When Jake stepped out onto the platform, the band struck up a sprightly version of 'Dixie.' People cheered. Jake took off his hat and waved it. Willy Knight stepped forward to shake his hand. As the two Freedom Party leaders met, photographers took pictures. The flashes made Featherston's eyes water.
'Welcome to Texas, Jake-what's left of it,' Knight said, a broad smile on his handsome face.
'Thank you kindly, my friend.' Featherston lied through his teeth. 'We'll see what we can do about getting back what the USA stole from us.'
'How are you going to do that?' a reporter shouted. 'The Yankees won't pay any attention to us.'
'They don't have to pay any attention to the CSA, not as long as the Whigs hold on to Richmond,' Jake answered. 'The Whigs say we lost the war, and so we're stuck-stuck forever. And we are, too, long as we think that way. But even the Yankees knew better. After we whipped 'em, they set up Remembrance Day so they wouldn't forget what happened. The Whigs want to forget-they want to pretend all their mistakes never happened at all. And they want the country to forget. Me, I don't intend to.'
'That's right.' Willy Knight nodded vigorously. 'That's just exactly right. Here in Texas, we live with that every day when we look west and see what the United States did to us.'
The reporters scribbled. Jake sent Knight a sour look. The Texan wanted to be part of the story, too. If you wanted to horn in on this, why'd you invite me out here to the middle of nowhere? Featherston thought. But he knew the answer, knew it all too well. Because you still want to be top dog, that's why, you son of a bitch. Most ways, having ambitious men in the Party was wonderful. They worked hard, for their own good as well as its. But having them here meant Jake could never stop watching his back.
'I'm making my main speech at a park west of town, isn't that right?' he asked Knight, though he also knew that answer. 'Almost within spitting range of what they call Houston. Spitting's not half what they deserve, either.'
'Sure isn't,' Knight said. 'If the people in occupied Texas ever got the chance to vote, they'd come back to the Confederate States in a red-hot minute.'
'Same with Kentucky,' Featherston agreed. 'Same with Sequoyah.' He had mixed feelings about Sequoyah-it was, after all, full of redskins, and he had little more use for them than he had for niggers. (The USA had even less use for Indians; Sequoyah remained occupied territory, while Houston and Kentucky were full-fledged U.S. states.) But Sequoyah was also full of oil and gas, and cars and trucks and aeroplanes meant the Confederate States needed all the oil and gas they could lay their hands on. If the redskins came along, too, then they did, that was all. At least they'd been loyal during the war, unlike the blacks in the Confederacy.
'Take you to the hotel first, if that suits you,' Knight said. 'Give you a chance to freshen up, maybe rest a little bit, before you go out and give your speech. You aren't set to start till six, you know.'
'Oh, yeah.' Jake nodded as they left the platform together. 'That way, it's eight o'clock back on the East Coast-a good time for folks on the wireless web to listen in.' He laughed. 'Who would've reckoned a few years back that we'd have to worry about such things? Times are changing-if we don't change with 'em, we're in trouble.'
'That's what's wrong with the Whigs,' Knight said. 'They're a bunch of damn dinosaurs, is what they are.'
Dinosaurs had been much in the news lately. A team of Japanese scientists in Mongolia had come back with not only spectacular skeletons but also some of the first dinosaur eggs ever seen. They'd sent some of their specimens to the Museum of Natural History in Richmond, where they'd drawn record crowds. Jake liked the phrase, too; it captured exactly what he felt about the Whigs.
He slapped Willy Knight on the back. 'They sure are,' he said. 'You took the words right out of my mouth, matter of fact-I'm aiming to call 'em that very thing tonight.' And so he was, even if he hadn't been a moment before.
'Good,' Knight said, not suspecting Featherston was stealing his figure of speech.
Driving through Abilene was depressing. The town had flourished in the years just before the Great War and, like so much of the Confederacy, languished since. Timber buildings looked sun-blasted; brick ones looked old before their time. As he did all over the CSA, Jake saw men sleeping on park benches and in bushes, and others prowling the streets looking for food or work.
The hotel seemed as gloomy as the rest of the place. Ceiling fans spun lazily in the lobby, stirring the air without cooling it much. The carpet was shabby. The walls needed painting. The clerk behind the registration desk seemed pathetically glad to have anybody come in. 'Welcome to Abilene, sir,' he said as he gave Jake his key.
'Thanks,' Jake replied, in lieu of what he really thought. 'Freedom!'
'Uh, freedom,' the clerk said, but not as if he were a Party man.
Since Featherston was due to speak at six, he and Willy Knight ate an early supper: enormous slabs of steak, a Texas specialty. Texas wasn't dry; they could drink beer without breaking the law. Knight swallowed a big piece of rare meat and then said, 'God damn you, Jake. I thought you were buzzard bait, but you turned out to be right all along. Our time is coming.'
'I always said so.' Featherston cocked his head to one side. 'You reckoned we were going down the drain, and you'd pick up the pieces.'
The mixed metaphor didn't faze the former head of the Redemption League. 'Damn right I did. This party was drying up and blowing away four years ago.' He cut off another chunk of steak. By the way he did it, he would sooner have stuck the knife into Featherston. 'Amos Mizell and I, we were ready to get on another horse. The Party did jussst well enough'-he stretched the word into a long hiss-'to keep us on board. But now-'
Jake finished for him: 'Now we're back in business.'
'We are.' Knight nodded. 'Hell with me if we're not. I'd take my hat off to you if I was wearing it. All through everything, you said this was going to happen one of these days. You said so, and you were right.'
'You bet I was,' Featherston said, adding, You stinking bastard, to himself. 'Come November, we're going to pick up a hell of a lot more seats in the House. We'll pick up some in the Senate, too, from states where we got control of the legislature two years ago. And two years from now… Two years from now, by God…' Even in the dimly lit steakhouse, a feral glow shone in his eyes.
'Yeah.' That same glow lit Willy Knight's face. He and Jake nodded to each other. Both men had been hungry, hungry in the spirit, for a long, long time, and at last they thought they could see satisfaction on the horizon.
Softly, Jake said, 'If things go our way two years from now, I'm going to pay back every blue-blooded bastard and every nigger who ever did me wrong. And I'm going to put this poor, sorry country back on its feet again.'
'Yeah,' Knight said again. As with Featherston, he sounded more as if he looked forward to revenge than to
