Liberating Atlantis Read Online Free Page B

deadly glare. “You’ll pay for this,” she said. She wasn’t his mistress, which didn’t make her wrong.

II
    The morning after: one of the more noxious phrases in the English language. It must have seemed pretty noxious to Henry Barford. He’d come downstairs the afternoon before to view the catastrophe. Unless you were dead, you couldn’t help coming to take a look at something like that. He hadn’t been dead, but a wobble in his walk said he’d already been tight. He’d looked, shaken his head, and gone back to his bedroom. And he’d finished the serious business of getting drunk.
    And now, on the morning after, he was suffering on account of it. His skin was the color and texture of old parchment. Red tracked the yellowish whites of his eyes the way railroads were starting to track the plains of Atlantis east of the Green Ridge Mountains (only a few reached across them; the southwest was the USA’s forgotten quarter). His hands shook. His breath stank of stale rum and of the coffee he’d poured down to try to counter the stuff’s effects. His uncombed hair stood up in several directions at once.
    He looked at Frederick with a certain rough sympathy on his face. The Negro felt at least as bad as the white man. But what Frederick knew was fear for the future, not regret for the past.
    “Well, son,” Henry Barford rasped, “I am afraid you are fucked.”
    “I’m afraid so, too, Master Henry,” Frederick agreed mournfully. He was a year or two older than the man who owned him, but that had nothing to do with the way they addressed each other. The brute fact of ownership made all the difference there.
    “Matter of fact,” Barford continued, “I am afraid you fucked yourself.”
    “Don’t I know it!” Frederick said. “That God-damned floorboard! Take oath on a stack of Bibles piled to the ceiling, sir, I didn’t know the end had come up.”
    “I believe you,” Henry Barford said. “If I didn’t believe you, you’d be dead by now—or more likely sold to a swamp-clearing outfit, so as I could get a little cash back on your miserable carcass, anyways.”
    Frederick gulped. Slaves in that kind of labor gang never lasted long. The men who ran the gangs bought them cheap, from owners who had good reason for not wanting them any more. They fed them little and worked them from dawn to dusk and beyond. If that didn’t kill them off, the ague or yellow fever or a flux of the bowels likely would. And even if those failed, the swamps were full of crocodiles and poisonous snakes and other things nobody in his right mind wanted to meet.
    Barford paused to light a cigar: a black, nasty cheroot that smelled almost as bad as his breath. He sighed smokily. “I believe you,” he said again. “But no matter how come it happened, what matters is, it did happen. My wife, she’s mighty mad at you—mighty God-damned mad.”
    Frederick hung his head. “I’m sorry, Master Henry. I’m sorrier’n I know how to tell you. I tried to apologize to Mistress Clotilde last night, but she didn’t want to listen to me. Honest to God, it was an accident.” He hated crawling. If he wanted to save his own skin, though, what choice did he have?
    “One more time, Fred—I believe you,” Barford said. “What I believe right now . . . don’t matter one hell of a lot. Something like that happens when we’re sitting down to dinner by our lonesomes, maybe you can say ‘I’m sorry’ and get away with it. Maybe. Shit goes wrong. I know that. Everybody knows that. When you go and ruin somethin’ Clotilde’s had her heart set on for months, now, and when you make her look bad in front of all of her friends . . . And we ain’t even talking about how much all the fancy dresses that got ruined cost, not yet we’re not.”
    How close had he come to selling Frederick—and maybe Helen, too—for whatever he could get? (This was the first time in his life Frederick was halfway relieved none of their children had lived—they