Rodriguez had one advantage the animals didn't. It was an edge he hadn't had for very long. He sometimes had to remind himself to use it. When he felt worst, he could go back to the house, open the refrigerator, and pour himself a big glass of cold, cold water. The luxury of that seemed more precious than rubies to him. He wouldn't drink the water right away. Instead, he would press the chilly, sweating glass against his cheek, savoring its icy feel. And when he did drink, it was as if the water exorcised the demons of heat and thirst at the very first swallow.
He made sure he filled the pitcher up again, too. He could go out to the fields again, come back in a couple of hours, and find more deliciously chilly water waiting for him. It wasn't heaven-if it were heaven, he wouldn't have had to go out to the fields in the first place. But the refrigerator made life on earth much more bearable.
Magdalena enjoyed the cold water no less than he did. Once they both paused for a drink at the same time. "Is it true," she asked him, "that in parts of los Estados Confederados they have machines that can make the air cold the same way as the refrigerator makes water cold?"
"I think it is," Rodriguez answered cautiously. "I think that's what they call air conditioning. Even in the rich parts of the country, they don't have it everywhere, or even very many places."
"I wish we had it here," his wife said.
He tried to imagine it: going from the back oven of a summer to winter just by opening and closing a door. It was supposed to be true, but he had trouble believing it. He said, "Electricity is one thing. This air conditioning is something else. It's very fancy and very expensive, or so they say."
"I can still wish," Magdalena said. "I wished for electricity for years before we got it. I wished and I wished, and here it is. Maybe if I do enough wishing, we will have this air conditioning, too, one of these years. Or if we don't, maybe our children will. With all the changes we've seen, you never can tell."
"You never can tell," Rodriguez agreed gravely. "As for me, what I wish for is an automobile."
"An automobile," his wife breathed. She might have been speaking of something as distant and unlikely as air conditioning. But then her eyes narrowed. "Do you know, Hipolito, we could almost buy one if we wanted to badly enough."
"Yes, that occurred to me, too," he answered. The motorcar they could get for what they could afford to spend wouldn't be anything fancy: a beat-up old Ford or some Confederate make of similar vintage. But even a beat-up old auto offered freedom of a sort nothing else could match. Rodriguez went on, "The only times I was ever out of the valley were to fight in the last war and to go to Hermosillo to help get President Featherston a second term. It's not enough."
In a small voice, Magdalena Rodriguez said, "I've never been outside this valley at all. I never really thought about what was going on anywhere else till we got the wireless set. But now… If I can hear about the world outside, why can't I see it?"
For years, even trains had stopped coming to Baroyeca. They were back again, now that the silver (and, perhaps not so incidentally, lead) mines in the hills above the little town had reopened. But traveling by train was different from hopping into an auto and just going. Trains stuck to schedules, and they stuck to the rails. In a motorcar, you could go where and when you wanted to go, do whatever you wanted to do…
You could-if they let you. Rodriguez said, "I think this would be something for after the war. We might buy a motorcar now, si. But whether we could buy any gasoline for it is a different question."
Rationing hadn't meant much to him. It still didn't, not really. He'd even stopped worrying about kerosene. With electricity in the house, the old lamps were all packed up and stored in the barn. But gasoline, these days, was for machines that killed people, not for those that made life easier and more pleasant.
"If we had an automobile to go with electricity… Ten years ago, only the patrones had such things, and not all of them," Magdalena said.
"That was before the Freedom Party took over," Rodriguez answered. "Now ordinary people can have the good things, too. But even if I had a motorcar, I wouldn't be a patron. I would never want to do that. To be a patron, you have to like telling others what to do. That has never been for me."
"No, of course not." Magdalena's voice had a certain edge to it. She might have been warning that if he thought he could tell her what to do, he had better think again.
Since he didn't have an automobile, he walked into Baroyeca for the next Freedom Party meeting. He would have grumbled if he'd had to walk because his motorcar was in the garage. Because he'd never done anything but walk, he didn't grumble at all. He took the journey for granted.
A drunken miner staggered out of La Culebra Verde as Rodriguez came up the street toward Freedom Party headquarters. The man gave him a vacant grin, then sat down hard in the middle of the dirt road. Rodriguez wondered how many drunks had come out of the cantina and done the exact same thing. He'd done it himself, but no more than once or twice. Miners drank harder than farmers did. They might have worked harder than farmers did, too. Rodriguez couldn't think of anyone else for whom that might be true. But to go down underground all day, never to see the sun or feel the breeze from one end of your shift to the other… That was no way for a man to live.
He walked past Diaz's general store. A storekeeper, now, had it easy. If Diaz wasn't sitting in the lap of luxury, who in Baroyeca was? Nobody, not that Rodriguez could see. And yet Jaime Diaz complained about the way things went almost as if he tilled the soil. He wasn't too proud to act like anybody else.
"Good evening, Senor Rodriguez," Robert Quinn said in Spanish when the farmer came into the headquarters. "Good to see you."
"Gracias, senor. The same to you," Rodriguez answered gravely. He nodded to Carlos Ruiz and some of his other friends as he sat down on a second-row folding chair. The first row of chairs, as usual, was almost empty. Not many men were bold enough to call attention to themselves by sitting up front.
Freedom Party headquarters filled up with men from Baroyeca and peasants from the surrounding countryside. Some of them had walked much farther to come to town than Rodriguez had. "Freedom!" they would say as they came in and sat down-or, more often, "?Libertad!"
Quinn waited till almost everyone he expected was there. Then, still in Spanish, he said, "Well, my friends, let's get on with it." When no one objected, he continued, "This meeting of the Freedom Party, Baroyeca chapter, is now in session."
He went through the minutes and old business in a hurry. Hipolito Rodriguez yawned a little anyhow. He hadn't joined the Freedom Party for the sake of its parliamentary procedure. He'd become a member because Jake Featherston promised to do things-and kept his promises.
As quickly as Quinn could, he turned to new business. "I know we'll all pray for Eduardo Molina," he said. "He can't be here tonight-he just got word his son, Ricardo, has been wounded in Ohio. I am very sorry, but I hear it may be a serious wound. I am going to pass the hat for the Molinas. Please be generous."
When the hat came to him, Rodriguez put in half a dollar. He crossed himself as he passed it along. He could have got bad news about Pedro as easily as Eduardo Molina had about Ricardo. What happened in war was largely a matter of luck. So many bullets flew. Every so often, one of them was bound to find soft, young flesh.
A man at the back of the room brought the hat up to Robert Quinn. It jingled as the Freedom Party organizer set it down beside him. "Gracias," he said. "Thank you all. I know this is something you would rather not have to do. I know it is something some of you have trouble affording. Times are not as hard as they were ten years ago, before we came to power, but they are still not easy. But all of you understand-but for the grace of God, we could have been taking up a collection for your family."