American Empire: Blood and Iron - By Harry Turtledove Page 0,62

show of determination could still make him back down. He bit his lip, then said, “That room in back I reckon you know about.”

“Yeah, I know about that room.” Cincinnatus nodded. “He in there with anybody, or is he by his lonesome?”

“By his lonesome, far as I know,” Lucullus said. “Go on, go on. You barged in before. Barge on in again.” Had his hands been free, he probably would have made washing motions with them to show that whatever happened next was not his fault. As things were, his expression got the message across.

Ignoring that expression, Cincinnatus went down the hall at the back of the Kentucky Smoke House till he got to the door he knew. He didn’t barge in; he knocked instead. “Come in,” a voice from within said. Cincinnatus worked the latch. Apicius Wood looked at him with something less than pleasure. “Oh. It’s you. Reckoned it might be somebody I was glad to see.”

“It’s me.” Cincinnatus shut the door behind him.

With a grunt, Apicius pointed to a battered chair. The proprietor of the Kentucky Smoke House looked as if he’d eaten a great deal of his own barbecue. If that was how he’d got so fat, Cincinnatus didn’t think he could have picked a better way. “Well,” Apicius rumbled, “what we gonna fight about today?”

“Don’t want no fight,” Cincinnatus said.

Apicius Wood laughed in his face. “Ain’t many niggers in this town as stubborn as I am, but you’re sure as hell one of ’em. We don’t see eye to eye. You know it, an’ I know it, too. When we get together, we fight.”

Cincinnatus let out a long sigh. “I ain’t enough of a Red to suit you, I ain’t enough of a diehard to suit Joe Conroy, and I’m too goddamn black to suit Luther Bliss. Where does that leave me?”

“Out on a limb,” Apicius answered accurately. “Well, say your say, so I know what we gonna fight about this time.”

“What you think of the elections?” Cincinnatus asked.

“What the hell difference it make what I think or even if I think?” Apicius returned. “Ain’t like I got to vote. Ain’t like you got to vote, neither. Have to wait till after the revolution for that to happen, I reckon.”

“Maybe not,” Cincinnatus said. “Put ’em together, the Socialists and the Republicans got more seats in the House than the Democrats do. First time the Democrats lose the House in more’n thirty years. They lost seats in the Senate, too.”

“Didn’t lose a one here in Kentucky,” Apicius said. “’Fore they let somebody here vote, they make damn sure they know who he vote for.”

Cincinnatus refused to let the fat cook sidetrack him. “How much you work with the white Socialists before the elections?” he asked.

“Not much,” Apicius said. “Ain’t much to work with. Don’t hardly have no homegrown white Socialists, and every one that come over the Ohio, Bliss and the Kentucky State Police got their eye on him. Don’t want them bastards puttin’ their eye on me any worse than they done already.”

“How hard did you try?” Cincinnatus persisted. “Did you—?”

But Apicius wasn’t easy to override, either. Raising a pale-palmed hand, he went on, “’Sides, them white Socialists ain’t hardly Reds. They’re nothin’ but Pinks, you know what I mean? They jaw about the class struggle, but they ain’t pickin’ up guns and doin’ anything much.”

“What you talkin’ about?” Cincinnatus said. “All these strikes—”

Apicius broke in again: “So what? Ain’t much shootin’ goin’ on, not to speak of. When the niggers in the Confederate States rose up, that was a fight worth talkin’ about. We’d have done the same thing here, certain sure, if the Yankees hadn’t taken us out of the CSA by then. Did do some of it anyways.”

That was true, and Cincinnatus knew it. He also knew something else: “Yeah, they rose up, sure enough, but they got whipped. Reds rise up in the USA, they get whipped, too. Got to be more to the class struggle than shootin’ guns all the blame time, or the folks with most guns always gonna win.”

“Not if their soldiers and their police work out whose side they really ought to be on,” Apicius said. This time, he spoke quickly, to make sure Cincinnatus couldn’t interrupt him: “Yeah, I know, I know, it ain’t likely, not the way things is now. I ain’t sayin’ no different.”

“All right, then,” Cincinnatus said. “If it ain’t all struggle with guns, we—you—ought to be workin’ with the white folks, ain’t