In the Balance

When he heard that, when he understood it through bad grammar and twisted syntax, Yi Min smiled beatifically. Liu Han stared in disbelieving horror at the little devil, who seemed pleased at his own cleverness. she’d wondered what could be worse than coming to this strange, unpleasant place. Now she knew.

Bobby Fiore picked up a rock, chucked it at a crumpled piece of paper forty or fifty feet away. He didn’t miss by more than a couple of inches. His chuckle was sour. Chucking rocks was as close as he’d come to taking infield since the Lizards grabbed him. He didn’t even dare do that near the perimeter of the camp. The last time anybody’d thrown a stone at a Lizard, five people were shot immediately afterward. That stopped that.

One of the Lizards’ whirligig planes racketed in from the northwest. It landed at their encampment, right outside the fence that cut off the peninsula on which sat Cairo, Illinois. Fiore found another rock, chucked it too, let out a new chuckle more sour than the old. He’d never expected to come back to-to come down to-Cairo again. He’d played there in the Class D Kitty League in-was it 1931 or 1932? He didn’t remember any more. He did remember it had been a funny kind of town. It still was.

A levee surrounded the place to protect it from floods on the Mississippi and the Ohio, at whose confluence Cairo sat. Over the top of the eastern barrier, Fiore could see magnolias and gingkos. They gave the town a Southern atmosphere that seemed out of place for Illinois. Also Southern was the feel of good times now long gone. Cairo had thought it would end up as the steamboat capital of the Mississippi. That didn’t happen. Now it was just a Lizard prison camp.

He supposed it made a good one. Because it had water on three sides, the Lizards had just wrecked the Mississippi highway bridge and run up their fast fences across the neck of Cairo Point. They didn’t have gunboats in the river, but they did have soldiers, with machine guns and rockets on the levee and on the far shores. A couple of boats were supposed to have snuck across at night, but a lot more than a couple got sunk.

Fiore mooched along till he came to the Lizards’ fence. It wasn’t exactly barbed wire; it was more like long strips of narrow, double-edged razor blade. It did the same job as barbed wire, though, and did it just as well.

On the far side-on the free side-of the fence, the Lizards had run up guard towers. They looked the same way, say, Nazi prison-camp guard towers would have looked. A soldier in the nearest one swung the muzzle of his machine gun toward Fiore.

“Go, go, go!” he said. It might have been the only word of English he knew. As long as he had that machine gun, it was certainly the only one he needed.

Bobby went, went, went. You didn’t disobey a prison guard, not more than once. Fiore’s shoulders sagged as he walked slowly down Highway 51, back toward town. The United States had been going to kick Japan’s and Germany’s asses. Everybody knew it. Everybody felt good about it. And then, suddenly, without the least warning in the world or out of it, a prison camp-probably a lot of prison camps-right in the middle of the U.S.A.

It wasn’t so much that it didn’t seem right. It was more as if it didn’t seem possible. From the top of the world to sitting in a prison camp like a Pole or an Italian or a Russian or a poor damned Filipino. Americans weren’t supposed to have to go through this kind of nonsense. His parents had left the, old country to make sure they never went through this kind of nonsense. And here it came to them.

He tramped down the middle of the highway, wondering how, his parents were; he hadn’t heard word one about Pittsburgh since the Lizards came. When he got into Cairo, Highway 51 changed its name to Sycamore Street Fiore kept walking on the white, dashes of the center line. No cars were running, though a couple of burned-out shells remained of ones that had tried. Only a handful of men in their nineties remembered the last time war visited the United States at home. It was here again, all uninvited.

A colored man came up Sycamore toward Fiore. The fellow was pushing a cart that looked as if it had started life as a baby buggy. An old cowbell held on with a bent coat hanger clanked to announce his presence. As if that wasn’t enough, he sang out every few steps: “Tamales! Git yo’ hot tamales!”

“What are you charging today?” Fiore asked as the hot-tamale man drew near.

The Negro pursed his lips. “Reckon a dollar apiece’ll do.”

“Jesus. You’re a goddamn thief, you know that?” Fiore said. The hot-tamale man gave him a look that in other times he never would have taken from a Negro. His voice was cool and distant as he answered, “You don’t want none, friend, there’s plenty what does.”

“Shit.” Fiore unbuttoned the flap on his hip pocket, dug out his wallet. “Give me two.”