"That's right," the Attorney General said. "But then we've got all these other niggers we're roping into war production work, and they just live wherever they've been living when they aren't at the plant."
"So?" Featherston said with a shrug. "They'll get theirs sooner or later, too. The more work we can squeeze out of 'em beforehand, the better."
"I agree with you there," Ferdinand Koenig said. Hardly anyone dared disagree with the President of the CSA these days. Koenig went on, "I've been thinking, though-there might be a neater way to do this."
"Tell me what you've got in mind," Jake said. "I'm listening."
"Well, Sarge, the word that really occurs to me is consolidation," Koenig said. "If we can find some kind of way to put the war work and the camps together, the whole operation'll run a lot smoother. And then, when some of these bucks get too run down to be worth anything on the line…" He snapped his fingers.
Featherston stared. Slowly, a grin spread across his face. "I like it. I like it a hell of a lot, matter of fact. Get it set up so it doesn't disrupt everything else going on too much, and we'll do it, by God."
As Saul Goldman had a little while before, Koenig took a notebook from an inside jacket pocket and wrote in it. He said, "I'll have to see exactly what needs doing. Whatever it is, I'll take care of it. It does seem to be a way to kill two birds with one stone."
"You might say that," Jake answered. "Yeah, you just might. But we'll do a hell of a lot more killing than that." He threw back his head and laughed like a loon. He was not a man to whom laughter came often. When it did, the fit hit him hard.
"Damn right we will." Koenig got to his feet. "I won't bother you any more, Sarge. I know you've got the war with the USA to run. But I did want to keep you up to date on what we're doing."
"That's fine." Featherston laughed again. "Oh, hell, yes, Ferd. That's just fine. And the war with the USA and the war against the niggers go together. Don't you ever forget that."
Down in southern Sonora, Hipolito Rodriguez could have thought the new war against the USA nothing but noise in a distant room. No U.S. bombers appeared over the small town of Baroyeca, outside of which he had his farm. No U.S. soldiers were within a couple of hundred miles, and none seemed likely to come any closer. Peace might have continued uninterrupted… except that he had one son in the Army and two more who might be called to the colors at almost any time. For that matter, he was only in his mid-forties himself. He'd fought in the last war. It wasn't unimaginable that they might want to put butternut on his back again.
He didn't want to leave his farm. He even had electricity these days, something he couldn't have imagined when he left Sonora the first time. That went a long way toward making the place a paradise on earth. Electric lights, a refrigerator, even a wireless set… what more could one man need?
One evening when the war was still very new, he kissed his wife and said, "I'm going into town for the Freedom Party meeting."
Magdalena raised an eyebrow. "Do you think I didn't know you were going to?" she asked. "You've been going as many weeks as you can for more than fifteen years now. Why would you change tonight?"
They spoke Spanish between themselves, a Spanish leavened with English words absorbed in the sixty years Sonora and Chihuahua had belonged to the CSA. Their children used more English, an English leavened with many Spanish words from the 350 years Sonora and Chihuahua had belonged first to Spain and then to Mexico. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren might one day speak an English more like that heard in the rest of the Confederacy. Thinking about that occasionally worried Rodriguez. Most of the time, though, it lay too far beyond the horizon of now to trouble him very much.
Out the door he went. He still hadn't had a letter from Pedro since the shooting started. There was a worry much more immediate than any over language. He also hadn't had a telegram from the War Department in Richmond. That made him think everything was all right, and that his youngest son was just too busy to write. He hoped so, anyway.
Baroyeca lay in a valley between two ridge lines of the Sierra Madre Occidental. The westering sun shone brightly on them, burnishing their peaks and gilding them. From lifelong familiarity, Rodriguez hardly noticed the mountains' stern beauty. The wonders of our own neighborhoods are seldom obvious to us. What he did notice were the men coming out of the reopened silver mine, the railroad that had closed in the business collapse but was running again, and the poles that carried electricity not only to Baroyeca but also to outlying farms like his. Those, to him, were the real marvels.
He lived about three miles outside of town. The power poles ran alongside the dirt road. Hawks sat on the wires, looking for rabbits or mice or ground squirrels. He had never understood why they didn't get electrocuted, but they didn't. Some of them let him walk by. Others flew away when he got too close.
The country was dry-not disastrously dry, not with water coming down out of the mountains, but dry enough. Somewhere off in a field, a mule brayed. In the richer parts of the Confederate States, tractors did most of the field work that horses and mules had done since time out of mind. Around Baroyeca, a man with a good mule counted for wealthy. Hipolito had one.
The town could have been matched by scores of others in Sonora and Chihuahua. The alcalde's house and the church stood across the square from each other; both were built of adobe, with red tile roofs. Baroyeca had one street of business. The most important of those, as far as Rodriguez was concerned, were Diaz's general store and La Culebra Verde, the local cantina. Down near the end of the street stood Freedom Party headquarters.
It had both freedom! and?libertad! painted on the big window out front. The Freedom Party had always been scrupulous about using both English and Spanish in Sonora and Chihuahua. That was one reason it had prospered. The Whigs used to look down their snooty noses at the citizens they'd acquired in the states they bought from the Empire of Mexico. Even the Radical Liberals had dealt with the rich men, the patrones, and expected them to deliver votes from their clients. Not the Freedom Party. From the start, it had appealed to the people.
Rodriguez went in. Robert Quinn, the Party representative in Baroyeca, nodded politely. "Hola, Senor Rodriguez," he said in English-accented Spanish. "?Como esta Usted?"
"Estoy bien, gracias," Rodriguez answered. "And how are you, Senor Quinn?"
"I am also well, thanks," Quinn said, still in Spanish. Not only had he learned the language, he treated people who spoke it like anyone else. The Freedom Party didn't care if you were of Mexican blood. It didn't care if you were a Jew. As long as you weren't black, you fit right in.
Carlos Ruiz waved to Rodriguez. He patted the folding chair next to him. Rodriguez sat down by his friend. Ruiz was a veteran, too. He'd fought up in Kentucky and Tennessee, where things had been even grimmer than in west Texas. He too had a son in the Army now.
Quinn waited another fifteen minutes. Then he said, "Let's get started. For those of you without wireless sets, the war news is good. We are driving on Columbus, Ohio. The town will fall soon, unless something very surprising happens. In the East, our airplanes have bombed Washington and Baltimore and Philadelphia and New York. We have also bombed the oil fields in Sequoyah, so los Estados Unidos will not get any use from the state they stole from us. We are going to beat those people."
A pleased murmur ran through the Freedom Party men. A lot of them had fought in the Great War. Hearing about things happening on U.S. soil instead of a massive U.S. invasion of the Confederate States felt good.
"You will also have heard that the Empire of Mexico has declared war on the United States," Quinn said. Another murmur ran through the room. This one was half pleased, half scornful. Sonorans and Chihuahuans, these days, looked at Mexicans the way a lot of white Confederates looked at them: as lazy good-for-nothings living in the land of perpetual manana. That might not have been fair, but it was real.