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A much smaller proportion simply had their sentences confirmed.
Then there were those to whom Maynes offered some manner of deal in order to get them out of the forage bag, as it were. There was a good deal of outright corruption in these deals; wealth and holdings were transferred to the Maynes business empire.
Temptation would come any man’s way in such a position. Maynes succumbed easily to temptations of all sorts, but in particular he was a ravenous consumer of females. With these, he had the most distressing taste and habits, but examples of that will come farther into this narrative.
For all that, he had little interest in personal wealth. Bribes and so on went into the family banks and vaults—down to pairs of pearl earrings and single gold coins. He spent freely, held lavish dinners at the conclusion of business visits, and would drop in on parties and shower the hosts with gifts of food and drink.
Once, I held down a guard—he’d been caught sleeping on duty—while Maynes rubbed horseradish in his eyes. The poor fellow howled while I held him down and Home handled the head.
Whippings held a special place in his brand of justice. Maynes considered a good horsewhipping an honorable way to atone for fault. More often than not, once those who’d been whipped on Maynes’s orders found themselves restored to their former positions, and with objective evidence of increased diligence and effort, a promotion would be given. Maynes, more than once, said to his travel team, “The lash draws the bad out.”
• • •
My wrasslin’ partner, Home, was not good company. He is not pleasant to remember, and even less pleasant to write about, but I am assured, my reader, that there is interest in what sort of person carried the everyday dirty work of the Kurian Order.
Home frequently spoke of the future, once he’d been ten years carrying a gun.
This requires some explanation. Like much of the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic East of that time, the Georgia Control system was utilized for ease of organizing the patchwork of Kurian principalities. In order to be an organ of the Kurian Order, one had to be permitted to carry and handle firearms, a difficult matter in the Kurian Zone (in the free territories, by contrast, it was a matter of basic survival; only fairly powerful rifles or automatic weapons gave one a chance against a Reaper). Once an individual passed the testing, obtained three letters of recommendation, and presented a clean work record, the procedure for the temporary permit began through the local police or New Universal Church organization (I understand in some places this also involved a substantial payoff, at least as far as the police were concerned, but most of the churchmen were too terrified of their thoughts being read to become corrupt in this pedestrian manner). For a year the individual remained on the provisional permit, and the authorities watched him, judged his marksmanship and firearm security, and of course made sure he returned expended cartridge casings. In my days as a guerilla, expended brass was almost like being handed fresh ammunition.
After obtaining the provisional permit, the holder received a renewal every five years, though of course it could be revoked for neglect.
Why was a gun permit so important? Jobs in the security services, the military and paramilitary organizations, even teaching and transport and broadcasting and field utility work, required weapons to be carried while on duty. The Kurian Order had vulnerable points everywhere and enemies both “domestic” and “foreign”—if not the resistance forces, a fellow Kurian might decide to tamper with his neighbor’s territory in the hope of acquiring control over it. I am convinced that roughly half of the attacks and deaths in the Georgia Control were caused by Kurians warring on other Kurians and scapegoating resistance forces in doing so.
But back to Home. He had his life all planned out. He was in his third year of armed service and looking forward to his first renewal.
Here’s a sample of his talk. I heard many variations, but it kept to this basic rhythm.
“I won’t go independent until I’ve ten years under my belt. Sure, I can take off at five, but chances are I’ll just get shuffled back to the bottom of the deck. With ten years armed service, I’ll be in a position to negotiate. Of course, fifteen might be better, or twenty—now that’s a man who can be trusted—but the way I figure, fifteen years, they might look at me and decide I’ve lost ambition, I’m getting set in my ways, just looking for somewhere where I can make myself comfortable and keep out of the way. At ten, they’ll be thinking, ‘He’s still young. Ambitious. Let’s give him the ball and see how far he runs.’ That’s what I’ve been waiting for, the chance to be given the ball. I’ll be doing broken-field running all the way to that brass ring.
“Now, where will I try for? One of those zones where they let the AS* have multiple wives. I’ll find me some big-hipped Ohio gal for the babies, maybe get a little Asian to do my hair and keep the place organized, and a Latin for the cooking. A little salsa on the kitchen t
able and in the bedroom. Figure on a baby every two years for the white girl, then the others maybe only two kids each. That’s what the old squids like to see, just as much as a good service record. Lots of kids. They look at me, yeah, good work record, but a lot of guys have a good work record. A good work record and ten or eleven kids, they’re going to want to make an example out of me, mention me in the church bulletins and newscasts. Look at all the good stuff that happens to this kind of citizen.”
Home was conscientious enough with his firearms (he carried his pistol and a shotgun every day, with two full reloads of ammunition for each; his father had served armed and told him every time he’d fired his weapon it had been at a range of fifteen feet or less). He didn’t brandish them in the aggressive manner of some Coal Country security I’d seen, or make a show of setting the shotgun where it could instantly be picked up everywhere he went. Maynes seemed to enjoy his presence and I suspect gave him regular positive reviews and increases in salary. He stayed strictly sober and did not spend much, even though he was frequently admitted with Maynes to the few special stores for privileged citizens.
As for MacTierney, he came from just the kind of large family Home dreamt of starting.
He did not speak much of his parents or siblings, but I can make a few guesses based on what he did tell me. The family strategy was to survive by placing the kids in several different careers important to the Coal Country, so there would be numerous avenues of influence. MacTierney wanted to be a railroad man. He had loved trains since he was a child, and that seemed to be in the cards until his eldest brother, who had gone into the security services, died behind the wheel in a training accident. The family demanded that he step into his brother’s place (it seemed the other alternative offered to him was the Church, but he found the strict discipline and rituals off-putting, and he disliked working with blood and filth, which many clerical novitiates end up handling when involved with hospital and poverty-relief work).
I believe MacTierney’s father, in his earlier life, erred in some grave manner and believed himself to be on a list for R & R* as soon as all his children were on their own. He perhaps intended his progeny to alter the general opinion by going into the Kurian Order and excelling in their positions. They all tried very hard for places in the Youth Vanguard and half of them made it. MacTierney spoke of having no fewer than three sisters enter the Church (one became a foster womb for one of Maynes’s married cousins; she dwelled in the White Palace and could be seen in her white New Universal Church habit, heavily pregnant—she was always giving MacTierney tidbits from the rich diet she enjoyed during pregnancy).
MacTierney did not much care for his job, but he was levelheaded for his age, not easily riled, and seemed to form an instant sympathy with the locals of all classes. I saw him calm more troublesome situations, and he frequently did Maynes’s job for him, handling the confidential paperwork Maynes did not have time to read. I believe he was assigned to Maynes more to protect the locals from Maynes than to protect Maynes from the locals. He was always stepping in before a situation would get out of control.
For example, we were dispatched to a motorized vehicle scrapyard on a call. The owner of the yard, whose wife had recently run off with a wealthy liquor distributor, had been caught stripping copper wire out and selling it on the black market and his business was being taken away (though he would be allowed to work there as the assistant for the new director for an indeterminate amount of time). The scrapyard had a small gas tank where fuel from wrecks and whatnot was drained and preserved, and he’d climbed up on the tank, opened the cap, and stood there with dynamite shoved in his belt and a butane cigarette lighter, threatening suicide.
We’d driven down a small hill. The scrapyard, covering several acres, yawned beneath.
“Crapaheenie, we’re all going to end up smelling like gas,” Maynes said. “Hickory, better back the van up the hill.”
MacTierney had a word with one of the employees, grabbed the keys to the van, and hurried off to the adjacent town. He returned in less than ten minutes with the director’s children from the care center.
“Clement, your kids need you; you know that. You’re their whole world, and nobody in this yard wants to see them have their whole world go up in a big orange-and-black ball. Mr. Maynes is here, he’ll see to it that these kids don’t lose their father, too.”
• • •
As for Maynes, I could understand why the family didn’t want him lounging around the White Palace. One moment, he was lively and pleasant; an hour later, he could be depressed and despondent. He was often like a depressing philosophical maxim brought to life: if it existed, he could find some fault worthy of complaint.
He believed he had the worst job in all the Coal Country (an interesting claim in a land where about ten to fifteen percent of the men worked underground, choking on coal dust and squinting through eyes swollen from conjunctivitis, particularly from a man being chauffeured around the land in a comfortable converted bus stocked with Kentucky bourbon and Canadian whiskey).
