The Victorious Opposition (16 page)

“I’s sorry.” He’d said that before, a great many times. It had done him exactly no good. He said something else he’d said before: “Don’t much want to talk about none o’ this on account of all dat ol’ stuff still mighty dangerous. Anybody know too much . . .” He made a rattling noise deep in his throat, the sort of noise a man might make after the noose didn’t break his neck and he hung, slowly strangling, on the gallows. “Dat why.”

Bathsheba let out a small, exasperated hiss. “I ain’t no sheriff. I ain’t no
po
lice. I ain’t no
goddamn
Freedom Party stalwart.” She invested the swear word with infinite bitterness. “I love you. I love what I know of you, anyways. Turns out that ain’t near as much as I reckoned it was, an’ I don’t quite know what to do about that. But do Jesus, Xerxes!” Scipio still hadn’t told her his real name. That shamed him, but he didn’t intend to do it, not even when Bathsheba added, “You know I never do nothin’ to hurt you.”

He did know that. He was as sure of it as he was of his own name—and he hoped no one else was sure of his name. Even so, he said, “Some things, dey too dangerous to say to anybody. Some things, you gits used to keepin’ quiet. Dat’s what I done.”
That’s what I’ll keep on doing, as much as I can.

Before Bathsheba could reply, an old man rose with a low groan from his cot and shuffled slowly and painfully toward the outhouses in back of the church. Their pungent reek filled the neighborhood. After a while, the old man came back. He groaned again when he lay down. A couple of minutes later, someone else got up. That reminded Bathsheba they weren’t alone. They hadn’t been alone together for more than a few minutes at a time since the riots. Scipio wasn’t so young as he had been, but enough time had gone by since then to leave him acutely aware of that.

Bathsheba said, “All right. We don’t finish now. But this ain’t done, an’ don’t you think it is.” She rolled over on her side, facing away from him. By her breathing, she soon slept. Scipio didn’t, not for a long, long time.

C
hester Martin and the skinny man who cadged handouts near his apartment looked at each other. The other man turned away. He hadn’t shown up at the building site Martin suggested, and Martin hadn’t given him a dime since it became clear he wouldn’t show up. Martin saved his money for people who at least tried to help themselves.

The summer sun beat down on him as he walked on to the trolley stop. By late August, the worst heat was usually over in Toledo. Here in Los Angeles, he’d discovered, it was only beginning. It could stay ungodly hot—though not muggy—all the way into October.

He nodded to the other regulars at the trolley stop. This was a different crowd; he was getting up earlier than he had before, because his work these days was farther away. Go thirty miles in Toledo and you were almost to Sandusky. Go thirty miles from your apartment here and you hadn’t even got out of the city limits.

Clang!
Up came the trolley. Chester paid his fare and got two transfers. The first line took him west, past downtown. The second took him north, into Hollywood. And the last one carried him up over the Cahuenga Pass, into the San Fernando Valley.

The Valley, as people called it, was full of orange and walnut groves, wheat fields, and truck gardens. It wasn’t full of houses. The farmland was so fine, Martin had trouble seeing why anybody would want to build houses on it. That, however, wasn’t his worry, any more than grand strategy had been in the Army. Here, as there, he got his orders and did what he was told.

A couple of long streets sliced their way from east to west across the floor of the Valley: Ventura Boulevard near the southern mountains and Custer Way two or three miles farther north. Ventura Boulevard was the shopping district, such as it was. More and more houses with clapboard sides were going up near Custer Way. Martin had to lug his toolbox most of a mile from the last trolley stop to get to the tract where he worked.

“Morning, Chester,” said Mordechai, the foreman. He looked at his watch. “Five minutes early.”

“You didn’t expect me to be late, did you?” Chester said. “Not me, not when you looked me up to let you know you had work for me.”

After pausing to light a cigarette, the foreman blew a meditative smoke ring. It didn’t last long, not with a little breeze stirring the air. “Well, that’s
why
I got hold of you,” Mordechai said. “I thought you were somebody I could count on. Some of these fellows . . .” He shook his head. “It’s like they’re doing you a favor if you tell ’em there’s work.”

Martin had some strong feelings about that. Not all of them, he suspected, were feelings Mordechai wanted him to have. He wished labor unions in the building trades were stronger. For that matter, he wished they existed at all. Bosses held absolute sway over who worked and who didn’t, over how many hours and for how much money. As far as Chester was concerned, that was wrong as wrong could be. He’d accommodated himself to it because he
was
working. But that didn’t mean it was right or fair.

And yet he had to admit that coin did have two sides. There
were
men who acted as Mordechai said. He could see why a boss wouldn’t want them around. Where did you draw the line? Who decided? How? Those were all good questions—all political questions, to Chester’s way of thinking. Again, he didn’t suppose Mordechai would see them that way.

But he didn’t figure he’d change the world this morning—and probably not tomorrow, either. Mordechai pointed him to the nearest house. “You know what needs doing. Take care of it.”

“Right.” Martin liked a foreman who said things like that. Some of them told him which nail to pound first, for heaven’s sake. If he’d had his druthers, he would have pounded a nail—no, by God, a railroad spike—right up . . .

He chuckled. He would have liked to swing a sledgehammer that particular way. Dushan looked over at him. “What is funny?” he asked in his clotted accent.

“Nothing, really,” Chester answered. He started driving nails in a way that didn’t bother Mordechai. By the pained look on Dushan’s face, it did bother him. Had he stayed out too late the night before and had a few drinks too many? It wouldn’t have been the first time since Chester got to know him.

The Croat or whatever he was had revived somewhat by lunchtime: enough to lure a few suckers into a card game and likely pick up more money than he made in formal wages. To nobody in particular, Mordechai said, “When I was in the Navy, we’d have guys on the gun crew come in hung over on days where we were shooting. I don’t ever recollect anybody dumb enough to do it more than once, though.”

“I believe that, by God,” Chester said. “Christ, it’d feel like blowing your head off, wouldn’t it?”

“Now that you mention it, yes,” the foreman said, in a way that suggested he knew exactly what he was talking about, and wished he didn’t.

At the end of the day, Martin lined up in front of the paymaster, who handed him a five-dollar bill. As always, John Adams looked constipated. Chester didn’t care. As long as the bill bought him five dollars’ worth of whatever he needed, he wouldn’t complain.

He sat through the long trolley ride without complaining, too, though the sun was low in the west when he finally got off near his apartment. Maybe that made it cooler here. He didn’t think that was all, though—the Valley seemed hotter than the rest of Los Angeles.

As soon as he came in the door, he knew something was wrong: Rita never had been able to hide what she was thinking. Chester asked, “What is it, sweetheart? And don’t tell me it’s nothing, because I can see it’s something.”

“It’s something.” She took a letter from the cut-glass bowl on the hutch and handed it to him. “It’s from your sister.”

“What’s Sue up to?” Martin asked, and then, before she could answer, “It’s not my folks, is it?”

“No, thank God,” his wife answered. “But your brother-in-law’s lost his job.”

“Oh, hell.” Chester took the letter before adding, “Excuse me, sweetie.” He tried hard not to talk like somebody who’d just escaped from the trenches. He read through the letter and shook his head. “That’s rough. I thought the plate-glass plant would keep Otis forever. And they’ve got little Pete to worry about. Damn, damn, damn.” He excused himself again.

“We’ve got to do whatever we can for them,” Rita said.

Chester put down the letter and gave her a kiss. Sue and Pete and Otis Blake weren’t kin of hers at all, except through him. He would have hesitated a little before saying what she’d just said, because money was still tight for them, too. “You’re a brick, Rita,” he told her.

She shrugged. “They helped out when your dad lost his job. What goes around ought to come around. And we can afford . . . some.”

“Some, yeah. We’ve paid off what we owe Pa for the train tickets and all, anyhow. But there’s still all the money he and my ma gave us to help us keep a roof over our heads when we were both out of work. Be a long time before we pay all that off—they carried us for a long time.”

“They probably don’t expect us to ever pay all that back,” Rita said.

He nodded. “I know. But I don’t always do what people expect, even when the people are my own folks. I don’t really believe I’m back on my feet till I don’t owe anybody anything.”

His wife smiled at him. “I know how stubborn you are. If I don’t, who would? You get all over town. Have you seen any plate-glass places that are looking for people? Have you seen any plate-glass places at all?”

“Not very many.” He frowned, trying to remember. “No, not very many at all. It isn’t a big thing here, the way it is back in Toledo. How come?” He read the letter again. “Oh. I missed that. They’re thinking of coming out here.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “No, I haven’t seen much along those lines. I’m not saying there isn’t anything, ’cause I haven’t looked. But nothing’s jumped out at me, either. I wonder what else Otis can do.”
I wonder if I’ll have to carry him till he finds out.
He didn’t say that. Saying it might make it likelier to come true.
Don’t give it a canary,
some guys in the Army had said. He didn’t want to.

Rita said, “It would be funny, somebody owing us money instead of the other way around.” That was an indirect way, a safe way, of getting at what Chester hadn’t wanted to come right out and say. No canaries—
why canaries?
Martin wondered—flew.

After supper, they played double solitaire and slapped each other’s hands grabbing the cards. A lot of the fellows at work didn’t talk about anything but what they’d heard on the wireless the night before. Chester would have liked to have a wireless set himself. They were a lot cheaper than they had been only a few years before. If he kept working steadily, he could start saving for one—if that money didn’t have to go to his brother-in-law instead.

How do you get ahead?
he wondered.
Christ, how do you even stay where you are?
Socialists talked about capitalism pushing the bourgeoisie down into the proletariat. He’d never been bourgeois (a steelworker in Toledo? not likely!), but he knew what being declassed was all about just the same. It had frightened him into abandoning Socialism and voting Democratic—once. He didn’t think he would do that again.

Rita started yawning before nine-thirty. That disappointed Chester, who’d hoped to persuade her to play something more exciting than double solitaire. She gave back a rather wan smile when he slipped an arm around her waist. Still, despite another yawn, she didn’t say no. But she did yelp when he started playing with her breasts. “Careful,” she said. “They’ve been awfully sore lately.”

“Sorry, hon,” he said. “I know they get that way sometimes when it’s right before your. . . .” He paused and thought back. “When
was
your last time of the month?” He didn’t always keep close track, but he did think she hadn’t had to mess with pads for quite a while now.

Sure enough, she said, “Early last month—I’m late. I didn’t want to say anything till I was sure, but I’m pretty sure now.”

“A baby?” That squeak in Chester’s voice was fear, all right. On top of everything else, how were they supposed to feed a baby? He wasn’t even sure this apartment building allowed them. “How did that happen?”

“The usual way, I’m pretty sure,” Rita answered. “We can call him Broken Rubber Martin.” Chester laughed. He hadn’t thought he could. And he almost forgot about other things till Rita said, “Aren’t you going to go on? It feels nice, as long as you don’t squeeze too hard.”

“Does it?” Chester did go on. By the small sounds his wife made, it did feel nice. Before too long, he started to reach into the nightstand drawer for a safe. That made him laugh again. Why lock the barn door if the horse was long gone? He went ahead without one. And that felt mighty nice, too. No matter how good it felt, though, he started worrying again the second they finished. Rita fell asleep right away. He worried for a long time.

C
larence Potter looked into the mirror over the sink in his apartment. He thought he looked pretty sharp: polka-dot bow tie, white shirt with blue pinstripes, cream-colored linen jacket to fight the summer heat and humidity of Charleston, straw boater cocked at a jaunty angle. Then he let out a sour laugh. How he looked wouldn’t matter a dime’s worth when he got to the Whig meeting tonight. Nobody there would listen to him. Nobody there ever did.

He sometimes wondered why he kept going. Pigheadedness, he supposed. No, more than pigheadedness these days. He also had the feeling that somebody had to do something about the Freedom Party. If the Whigs didn’t, if they couldn’t, he didn’t see anyone else who could.

That cool linen jacket also concealed a shoulder holster. Nobody had tried to give him a hard time yet. But he knew he was on a Freedom Party list. The Party was thorough, if not always swift. Some people had already disappeared. Potter didn’t intend to go quietly. If the stalwarts wanted him, they would have to pay the price for him.

Out the door he went, whistling. No one lurked at the bottom of the stairs or, when he checked, out on the street. He nodded to himself. They were less likely to drop on him away from his flat, because they had more trouble knowing exactly where he was then. If they didn’t want him now, they likely wouldn’t for the rest of the day. Whistling still, he walked on toward Whig headquarters.