Return Engagement (20 page)

A
fter the Second Mexican War, Philadelphia became the de facto capital of the USA for one simple reason: it was out of artillery range of the CSA. During the Great War, Philadelphia hadn’t quite come within artillery range of the CSA, either. Confederate bombers had visited the city every now and then, but they hadn’t done much damage.

That was then. This was now. Flora Blackford had already come to hate the rising and falling squeal of the air-raid siren. Confederate bombers came over Philadelphia every night, and they weren’t just visiting. They seemed bound and determined to knock the town flat.

Hurrying down to the cellar of her apartment building after the latest alarm, Flora complained, “Why didn’t they move the government to Seattle?”

“Because then the . . . lousy Japs would bomb us,” said a man ahead of her.

She scowled. The stairwell was dark. No one noticed, not even Joshua beside her. She’d been in Los Angeles in 1932, campaigning with her husband in his doomed reelection bid, when Japanese carrier airplanes came over the city. It had been only a pinprick, but it had let the last of the air out of his hopes.

Someone else on the stairs said, “Japan hasn’t declared war on us yet.”

“Yeah? And so?” another man replied. “Confederates didn’t declare war on us, either. Slant-eyed so-and-sos are probably just waiting till they’ve got a big enough rock in their fist.”

That made more sense than Flora wished it did. But she couldn’t brood about it, not right then. Bombs started coming down. She took them more seriously than she had when the war began. Every time she went out during the day, she saw what they could do.

Into the cellar. It filled up fast. Fewer people bothered about robes and slippers than they had that first night. As long as you weren’t naked, none of your neighbors would give you a second look. They had on pajamas and nightgowns, too. They hadn’t combed their hair or put on makeup, either. Quite a few of them hadn’t had baths. If you hadn’t, it didn’t matter so much. Nobody was going to get offended.

The floor shook under Flora’s feet. “They’re after the War Department again,” Joshua said. “That’s where most of the bombs are coming down.” He pointed like a bird dog.

And Flora could tell he was right. The knowledge brought horror, not joy. Learning how to tell where bombs were falling was nothing she’d ever wanted to do. “Damn Jake Featherston,” she said quietly.

“Amen,” said somebody behind her. Half a dozen other people rumbled agreement.

She guessed they were damning him for bombing Philadelphia and routing them out of bed again. She damned Featherston for that, too. But she had bigger reasons. She damned the President of the CSA for murdering hope. In the time the Socialists held the Presidency of the USA after the Great War, they’d been reluctant to spend money on weapons. They’d thought the world had learned its lesson, and that nobody would try to kill anybody any more any time soon. Better to set things to rights inside the United States than to flabble about the Confederate States.

After all, the CSA had suffered even more than the USA in the Great War. The Confederates wouldn’t want to risk that again, would they? Of course not! You’d have to be a madman to want to put your country through another round of torment.

As long as the Whigs ruled in Richmond, cool heads prevailed. The Whigs did what they could to rebuild. The Confederate States enjoyed a modest prosperity. The United States weren’t sorry to see that prosperity—or its modesty. The Freedom Party howled outside the door, but who was mad enough to invite it in?

Then came the worldwide collapse. Where cool heads had failed, hotheads prevailed. No one in the USA had imagined Featherston could actually win an election. Flora knew she hadn’t. The very idea had struck her as
meshuggeh.

But, crazy or not, Featherston had gone about doing what he’d promised all along he would: getting even. If anyone in power in the USA had believed he would be giving orders one day, War Department budgets would have looked different through the 1920s.

A few Democrats had screamed bloody murder about the way the budgets looked. They’d proved right, even if some of their own party reckoned them reactionaries at the time. They had been reactionaries. Some of them, crowing on the floor of Congress now, were still reactionaries, and proud of it. But even reactionaries could be right once in a while. After all, a stopped clock was right twice a day.

Those Democrats, damn them, had picked something important to be right about. Flora hated admitting they had been right all the more because she thought them wrong about so many other things.

She’d been wrong here. She hated admitting that, too. She’d done it, though. It hadn’t won her much respect from the Democrats. She hadn’t expected it to.

“I think the AA is hotter than it was when the war started,” Joshua said, bringing her back to the here and now.

“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “I hope you are.”

“I’m not sure
I
hope I am,” her son answered. “If the Confederates get shot at more, they won’t hit their targets so much.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” Flora said.

Joshua shrugged. “Well, maybe. But if they don’t hit their targets, they’d want to hit
something
before they get out of here. That means they’re liable to drop their bombs any old place.”

“Oh, joy,” Flora said.

Not far away, a man muttered, “Oh, shit,” which amounted to the same thing.

Flora had already accused her son of belonging to the General Staff. He got proved right here with alarming speed. A stick of bombs came down right in the neighborhood. Flora didn’t know all that much about earthquakes, but this felt the way she imagined an earthquake would. She cast a frightened eye at the ceiling, wondering if it would stay up.

It did. The lights went out for a couple of minutes, but then they came back on. Everybody in the cellar let out a sigh of relief when they returned. “Isn’t this fun?” a woman said. Several people laughed. With a choice between laughing and shrieking, laughing was better.

After that, the bombs hit farther away. The Confederate bombers lingered over Philadelphia for more than an hour. Their bases weren’t far away. Antiaircraft guns and searchlights and fighters hunting through the black skies of night were not enough to drive them off or even to slow them down very much. Every so often, one or two of them would crash in flames. What was that, though, but the cost of doing business?

The all-clear sounded. Yawning and sleepily cursing the Confederates, people went up to their flats. The air in the stairwell smelled of sweat and smoke.

Fire-engine sirens wailed, some nearer, some farther away. Flora had just opened the door to the flat she shared with Joshua when a big boom only a few blocks away made things shake all over again. “That was a bomb!” she said indignantly. “But the Confederates went away.”

“Time fuse.” Her son’s voice was wise. “That way, people and stuff come close, and then it blows up.” He did his teenaged best to sound reassuring: “Don’t worry, Mom. We’ve got ’em, too.”

“Oh, joy,” Flora said again, in the same tone and with the same meaning as she’d used down in the cellar. Wasn’t that a lovely piece of human ingenuity? It lay there quietly to lure more victims into the neighborhood, then slaughtered them. And the USA and CSA both used such things. Whoever had invented them had probably got a bonus for his talents.

She would have liked to give him what he really deserved. The Geneva Convention probably outlawed that, though.

Lying down, she looked at the alarm clock’s luminous dial, the only light in the bedroom. Half past three. She said something more pungent than
Oh, joy
under her breath. It could have been worse. She knew that. It could have been better, too.

She yawned and stretched and tried to get comfortable and also tried to free her mind from the fear she’d known. That wasn’t easy. She looked at the alarm clock again—3:35 now. Why did the dots by the numbers and the lines on the hour and minute hands glow? Radium—she knew that. But why did radium glow? Because it did; that was all she knew. Somewhere, there were probably scientists who could give a better explanation. She hoped so, anyhow.

She yawned again. Somewhat to her surprise, she did fall back to sleep. More often than not, she couldn’t. She wasn’t the only one doing without, either. Half the people in Philadelphia seemed to be stumbling around with bags under their eyes these days. If the Confederates cut off coffee imports, the city would be in a bad way.

When the alarm went off not quite three hours later, she felt as if another bomb had exploded beside her head. The first time she tried to make it shut up, she missed. The second time, she succeeded. Yawning blearily, she got out of bed.

Coffee, for the time being, she had. She made herself a pot. Joshua’s snores punctuated the wet
blup-blup
of the percolator. He didn’t have school and he didn’t have a job. He could sleep as long as he wanted. Flora marveled at that as she fried eggs to go with the coffee. Sleep as long as you wanted? Till Joshua, no one in her family had ever been able to do that. What else could more clearly mark an escape from the proletariat?

She dressed, went downstairs, and hailed a cab. The driver was a man with a gray mustache and only two fingers on his left hand. “Congress,” she told him.

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, and put the elderly Buick in gear. “You a Congressman’s wife, ma’am?”

“No,” Flora said. “I’m a Congresswoman.”

“Oh.” The cabby drove on for a little while. Then he said, “Guess I just killed my tip.” Flora said neither yes nor no, though the same thought had crossed her mind. The driver went on, “Any way you can make ’em pass a law to get me back into the Army? I can still shoot in spite of this.” He held up his mutilated hand. “Stinking recruiting sergeants just laugh at me, though.”

“I’m sorry,” Flora told him. “I can’t do much about that. The Army knows what it needs.” There was something strange for a Socialist to say. It was true all the same, though. They rode the rest of the way into downtown Philadelphia in glum silence.

Every day, Flora saw more damage to the city where she’d lived the second half of her life. A woman sat on the sidewalk with three little children and a dog. The children clung to odds and ends of property—shoes, framed pictures, and, ridiculously, a fancy china teapot. Flora knew what that meant: they’d lost everything else. They weren’t the only ones, or anything close to it.

“Here you are, lady,” the cab driver said, pulling to a stop in front of the Congressional building. “Fare’s forty cents.”

Flora gave him a half dollar. She hurried up the stairs. Even as she did, though, she wondered why. Congress wouldn’t change things much now. It was up to the men in green-gray and butternut.

C
hester Martin and Harry T. Casson approached the table from opposite sides. Chester wore his usual workingman’s clothes. Casson was natty in a white summer-weight linen suit. The builder could have bought and sold the labor organizer a dozen times without worrying about anything but petty cash.

Despite their differences, they sat down side by side. Martin stuck out his hand. Casson shook it. Flashbulbs popped, even though nothing much had happened yet. Casson reached into an inside pocket and took out a sheet of paper and some glasses. Setting those on his nose, he looked at the waiting reporters and said, “I’d like to read a brief statement, if I might.”

“Why are you making this deal with the construction workers’ union?” a reporter called.

“Well, that’s what the statement’s about,” the builder said. He glanced down at the typewritten sheet. “In this time of national emergency, the only enemy we have is our foreign foe. There is no place now for strife between labor and capital. Since that is obviously true even to those who have disagreed about other issues before, I have decided to sign a contract with the union at this time. Peace at home, war with the Confederate States and their allies.” He folded the paper and looked at Chester. “Mr. Martin?”

“We’ve been working toward this moment for a long time.” Chester had no notes. He felt like a hick next to the smooth Casson, but they sat here as equals. “A fair wage for a day’s work and decent working conditions are all we ever wanted. With this contract, I think we’re going to get ’em.”

Harry T. Casson pulled a gold-nibbed fountain pen from his breast pocket. He signed all four copies of the contract, then ceremoniously offered Chester the pen.

“No, thanks. I’ve got my own.” Martin had a plain steel nib, but it was plenty good enough for signatures. After he signed, he stuck out his hand again. Casson shook it. The flash photographers took more pictures.

“This is a great day for Los Angeles!” one of the reporters said.

He worked for the
Times.
“It’d be a better day, and it would have come sooner, if your paper hadn’t spent the last I don’t know how many years calling us a pack of lousy Reds,” Chester said. “I bet you don’t print that—I bet you pretend I never said it—but it’s true just the same.”

“I’m writing it down,” the reporter said. Men from the other, smaller, papers in town were writing it down, too. It would show up in their rags. Whether or not the guy from the
Times
put it in his piece, Chester’s bet was his editor would kill it before it saw print.

“How much will this help the war effort?” asked a man from the
Torrance Daily Breeze,
a paper that had given labor’s side of the class struggle a much fairer shake.

Chester nodded to Harry T. Casson, as if to say,
You know more about that than I do.
Chester wasn’t shy about admitting it, not when it was true. The builder said, “We hope it will help quite a bit. We think everything will go better now that we’re all pulling in the same direction.”

“Will the other builders settle with the union?” asked the reporter from the
Breeze.

“I can’t speak for them,” Casson said, which was half true at most. “I hope they will, though. We’ve had too much trouble here for too long.”