Unlike most of the colonies the Freedmans’ Bureau planted, the one in Toussaint, Arkansas, had prospered. Partly because of its isolation—none of their white neighbors really wanted the land—and partly because of the Davids. In Toussaint the Davids owned the hardware store, and the grocery, and the pharmacy. And the lumber yard, the feed store, and the town’s one office building. And probably the traffic light, too.
And they still gave their kids French names, and sometimes sent their kids to France for an education. Even if, as in Arlette’s case, it was summer school in Toulouse.
But Nick wanted her here. He craved her presence. He yearned for her. He needed his daughter in his life, not as just a tantalizing, infuriating ghost he could only hear on the telephone. And besides, he didn’t have a job now. He could spend time with her, not like before, when he was working and barely saw his family at all.
He had rented a two-bedroom apartment, more than he could afford, so that she could have a nice room when she spent the summer with him. Along with the bed with the graceful rococo scalloped headboard, the chest of drawers, the giltedged mirror with the decals of roses along the borders. All money he could not afford to spend. And now he would be expected to pay for half of the cost of Arlette’s trip to France.
“How did things go with Lockheed-Martin?” Arlette asked, almost as if she was reading his mind.
“Same story in Colorado as everywhere else.” Nick tried to keep his voice cheerful. “Over two hundred applicants for the same job, and the ones already laid off from Lockheed get priority over the ones that got laid off from Boeing, McDonnell and Hughes.”
If only, he thought, we could get a nice juicy war started. Not a bad war, he immediately corrected, not with a lot of casualties or anything. Just some murdering old dictator that needs removing. It wasn’t like there weren’t plenty to go around. One lousy dictator, and the defense dollars would start flowing again.
“You’ll find a place, Daddy,” Arlette said.
“Oh yeah,” Nick said. “Sooner or later, baby, somebody’s gonna want an engineer.” I hear Burger King is hiring, he thought.
And with unemployment running out along with his bank account, it would probably come to that soon. Omar Paxton chose to take the oath under the statue of the Mourning Confederate in front of the courthouse. It was just as well he did it outdoors: there were so many reporters clustered around that they would never have fit inside Judge Moseley’s office. Some of the boys turned up with rebel flags to provide a colorful and ideologically significant background, and Wilona was there to stand beside him, wearing white gloves, a corsage, and the pearls that her great-aunt Clover had left her in her will. Trying to ignore the constant whirring and buzzing of the cameras, which sounded louder than the cicadas in the surrounding blackjack oaks, Omar put his hand on the judge’s well-worn Bible and swore to uphold the laws of the State of Louisiana and Spottswood Parish, and added a “So help me God!” for the benefit of his friends and of the media. Rebel yells rang out from the crowd. Confederate flags waved in the air, the sunshine turning their color a brilliant red. Judge Moseley held out his hand.
“Good luck there, Omar,” he said.
Omar shook the hand. “Thank you kindly, Mo,” he said. Moseley’s little waxed white mustache gave a twitch. Only certain people in the parish were high enough in caste to call the judge by his nickname, and Omar had just announced that he considered himself among them.
Omar put on his hat and turned to face the crowd of people. He waved to Hutch and Jedthus and a few of the others, and then turned to kiss Wilona on the cheek. People in the crowd cheered. He beamed down at the crowd, and waved some more, and encouraged Wilona to wave with a white-gloved hand. He looked into the lens of a network cameraman.
Got you all, you bastards, he thought.
After the media storm and the court challenge and the recount, after the governor had called him a reptile and the Party had disavowed his very existence, Omar Bradley Paxton had finally taken the oath of office and was ready to begin his term as sheriff of Spottswood Parish.
“Do you plan to make any changes in the department?” a reporter shouted up. Omar smiled down at him. Little weevil, he thought. “I don’t anticipate any major changes,” he said.
“Maybe we’ll save the people some tax dollars by putting regular gas in the patrol cars, ’stead of premium.”
The locals laughed at this. Omar’s predecessor had been prosecuted, though not convicted, for taking kickbacks for keeping Pure Premium in all the county’s cars.
The next question was shouted up by a little red-haired lady reporter with a voice like a trumpet. “Will there be any change in the style of law enforcement here in Spottswood Parish?”
“Well, ma’am,” tipping his hat to the lady, “we do plan to continue giving tickets to speeders and arresting drunks.”
More laughter. “What I meant,” the woman shouted up, “was whether the department will change its racial policy?” Omar’s ears rang with her shrill tones.
“Ma’am,” Omar said, and tried not to clench his teeth, “the racial policies of the department and the parish are determined by law. You have just heard me swear to uphold and enforce that law. I would be in violation of my oath were I to make any changes upholding illegal discrimination.” Take that, you little red-haired dyke, he thought.
“Do you plan,” shouted a foreign-accented voice, “to resign your position as King Kleagle of Louisiana?” Omar recognized a German reporter, one of the many foreigners who were putting their pfennigs into the local economy as they covered his story. He couldn’t help but smile.
“The voters of Spottswood Parish knew I belonged to the Klan when they elected me,” he said.
“Obviously they decided that my membership in the world’s oldest civil rights organization was not an important issue. I can think of no reason why I should resign at this point, not after the voters and the courts have validated my candidacy. My family has lived in this parish for seven generations, and people knew what they were getting when they elected me.”
Rebel yells whooped up from the crowd. Confederate flags waved at the election of the first admitted Klan leader of modern times.
Up your ass, you kraut-eating Dutchman, Omar thought, and smiled.
“God damn,” Judge Chivington muttered. “Where did all these good-looking Klansmen come from?
Back when I grew up in Texas, none of ’em had chins, and they all had puzzel-guts and weighed three hunnerd pounds. And that was just the women.”
The President cast a professional eye over Omar Paxton’s chiseled features.
“David Duke’s good looks came from a plastic surgeon,” he said. “He looked like a little weasel before Dr. Scalpel and Mr. Bleach made him a blond Aryan god. But this gent,” nodding at the evening news,
“I believe he just has good genes.”
“The man was made for television,” sighed Stan Burdett, the President’s press secretary, who, with his bald head, thin lips, and thick spectacles, was not.
“He was made for givin’ us shit,” the judge proclaimed. “That fucking weevil could cost us Louisiana in the next election.”
“We kicked him out of the Party,” the President offered.
“We’ll be lucky if he don’t take half the Party with ’im.”
The President sat with his two closest friends in one of the private drawing rooms in the second floor of the White House. He had never been comfortable with the formal displays of antiques and old paintings so carefully arranged in much of the public White House—he felt uneasy living in a museum, and privately cursed Jacqueline Kennedy, who had found most of the antiques and furniture in storage and spread them throughout the house, so that every time he turned around he was in danger of knocking over a vase once owned by Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes, or a pot that James Monroe might have pissed in. So he had filled his own apartments with far less distinguished furniture, comfortable pieces which, even if they might date from the Eisenhower Administration, were scarcely refined. Even Jacqueline Kennedy couldn’t reproach him for putting his feet up on this couch.