The Victorious Opposition (41 page)

With a martyred sigh, Armstrong carried his three-ring binder and the books he’d brought home the night before out to the kitchen. Annie, who was four, was making a mess of a bowl of oatmeal. Armstrong’s mother had a plate of scrambled eggs and toast and a glass of milk waiting for him. His father was digging into a similar breakfast, except he had coffee instead of milk. “Morning,” he said.

“Morning, Pa,” Armstrong answered. Breakfast resigned him to being up.

Then his father had to go and ask, “Did you get all your homework done?”

“Yes, Pa,” Armstrong said.
As much of it as I understood, anyhow,
he added, but only to himself. His junior year, which had started two weeks earlier, hadn’t been much fun so far. If algebra wasn’t something Satan had invented to torment indifferent students, he couldn’t imagine what it was.

“You’d better keep your grades up, then,” Merle Grimes said.
He
could do algebra. Armstrong gave him a resentful look. His father could do algebra with effortless ease. What he couldn’t do was show Armstrong how he did it.
Because this is how it works,
he’d say, and wave his hands and cast a spell (that was how it looked to Armstrong, anyway) and come up with the right answer. And when Armstrong tried waving
his
hands . . . he’d add when he should have subtracted, or he’d forget what to do with a negative number, or he’d just stare at a problem in helpless horror, with no idea how to start it, let alone finish.

His father got his pipe going and worked his way through the newspaper. He didn’t have to get to the office till half past eight, so he could take his time. Armstrong had to be at Roosevelt High at eight o’clock sharp, or else the truant officer would start sniffing around. That meant he had to gobble his breakfast—no great hardship for a sixteen-year-old boy, but he didn’t like getting up from the table while his old man lingered.

Annie waved good-bye. His mother called, “So long, son,” as he went out the front door. His only answer was a grunt. As soon as he got around the corner, he lit a cigarette. The first drag made him cough. He felt woozy and lightheaded and a little sick; he was just learning to smoke. Then his heart beat harder and he felt more alert. He enjoyed that feeling, even if it wasn’t the main reason he’d started smoking. People he liked smoked. So did people he wanted to be like. That counted for more.

He smoked two cigarettes on the way to Roosevelt, but made sure the pack was out of sight before he got to the campus. Smoking there was against the rules. The principal had a big paddle in his office, and he wasn’t shy about using it.

“Morning, Armstrong,” a boy called.

“Hey, Joe,” Armstrong answered. “Can I get some answers to the algebra from you?”

Joe shook his head. “I don’t know how they do that stuff. I’m gonna flunk, and my old man’s gonna beat hell out of me.”

“Me, too,” Armstrong said dolefully. He still had a couple of periods to go before he had to turn in the math homework, such as it was. He didn’t look forward to English literature, which he had first, with any great enthusiasm, either. Memorizing chunks of
The Canterbury Tales
in the original incomprehensible Middle English wasn’t his idea of fun. But getting walloped because he didn’t do it also wasn’t his idea of fun, so he tried.

English Lit did have one compensation. He sat next to Lucy Houlihan, a redhead who had to be one of the three or four prettiest girls at Roosevelt High. That would have been even better had Lucy had the slightest idea he existed. But she didn’t. She had a boyfriend: Frankie Sprague, the star tailback on the Regiment. Still, she couldn’t shoot Armstrong for looking at her, as long as he didn’t drool too much while he was doing it.

The textbook, naturally, didn’t include “The Miller’s Tale.” Herb Rosen, one of the class brains, had found out about it, and started whispering. By the time the whispers got to Armstrong, they were pretty distorted, but the piece still sounded juicier than anything the class
was
studying. He wondered why they couldn’t read the good stuff instead of boring crap about sweet showers.

A trail of sniggers ran through the class. “The Miller’s Tale” would do that. “And what is so funny?” Miss Loomis inquired. She was a tall, muscular spinster with a baritone voice. She didn’t use a paddle. She wielded a ruler instead, with deadly effect. Nobody said anything. The sniggers didn’t stop, but they did ease. Miss Loomis looked at the students over the tops of her half-glasses. “That will be quite enough of that,” she declared, and got on with the lesson.

As soon as Miss Loomis turned back to the blackboard, Lucy asked Armstrong, “Why
is
everybody laughing?” She hadn’t heard, then. Well, some guys would be shy about saying such things to a girl.

Armstrong wasn’t shy about anything—and having Lucy notice him for any reason at all was a reasonable facsimile of heaven. He gleefully told her everything he’d heard about “The Miller’s Tale.” Odds were, Chaucer wouldn’t have recognized it. It was still plenty to make Lucy turn pink. Armstrong watched the blush in fascination—so much fascination that he didn’t notice Miss Loomis bearing down on him.

Whack!
The ruler scorched his knuckles. He jumped and yelped in pain. Miss Loomis fixed him with a glare that would have paralyzed Jake Featherston. “That will be enough of that,” she said, and marched back up to the front of the classroom.

Lucy, damn her, didn’t even say she was sorry.

He was glad to flee English Lit for government, even though Miss Thornton, who taught it, was almost as big a battle-axe as Miss Loomis. She didn’t look so formidable, being round rather than tall, with a bosom about the size of the USS
Remembrance
. But she was a stickler for detail. And, naturally, she picked on him. “Why is the new Confederate Constitutional amendment so important?” she demanded.

“Uh,” he said, and said no more. He remembered his father saying something about the amendment, but couldn’t remember what to save his life—or his grade.

“Zero,” Miss Thornton said crisply, and wrote it in the roll book. She asked Herb Rosen. Herb didn’t just read Chaucer for fun; he even read textbooks for fun.

“Because now their president can be elected for lots of terms, not just one,” he answered. “It looks like the Freedom Party is setting things up for him to be president for life.”

A girl stuck up her hand. Miss Thornton nodded to her. She said, “I don’t think that’s true. Our presidents can be elected more than once, and nobody’s ever been president for life.”

“That’s because we’ve got a custom of stopping after two terms. Even Teddy Roosevelt lost when he tried for a third one,” Herb said. That touched off a discussion about the role of unwritten custom in government.

Armstrong Grimes listened with no more than half an ear. Somebody was going to be on top, and somebody else was going to get it in the neck. That was how things worked, as far as he could see, and nobody could do anything much about it. The most you could do was try to be the fellow who came out on top.

Miss Thornton left him alone for the rest of the period. But when the class ended, he had to go on to algebra, and he got it in the neck. Mr. Marr, the algebra teacher, had lost his right arm during the war. He’d had to teach himself to write and eat lefthanded. He’d done it, too, and come away convinced that anybody could teach himself to do anything. But Armstrong hadn’t been able to teach himself to do algebra.

He had to go up to the board to try a problem. He butchered it. Mr. Marr glared at him. “If you multiplied one side of the equation by six, why didn’t you multiply the other side by six, too?” he snapped.

“Uh, I don’t know,” Armstrong answered helplessly.

“Well,
that’s
obvious,” Mr. Marr said. “Sit down.” He did the problem himself. When he did it, it looked easy. Multiply, subtract, and what do you know? X equals seven. Armstrong knew he wouldn’t be able to do it himself, not if he lived to be a hundred.

“Not your day today,” somebody said when the bell rang and they escaped to lunch: a period’s worth of freedom.

“No kidding,” Armstrong said. “They can’t teach for beans, and I’m the one who gets in trouble on account of it.” That a lot of the other students in his classes were having no trouble at all didn’t occur to him. Far easier to blame his teachers than himself.

After lunch came chemistry. He’d had hopes for chemistry. If they’d shown him how to make things that blew up, he would have worked hard. But learning that lithium was always +1, oxygen was always -2, and carbon was ±4 left him cold. He staggered through a quiz, and hoped he got a C.

Wood shop went better. His hands had some skill in them, even if he’d never make a big brain. He was making a spice rack for the kitchen, and everything was going about as well as it could. Mr. Walsh stopped and watched him work with a file and sandpaper. The shop teacher nodded. “Not bad, Grimes,” he said. “You keep it up, and you’ll have no trouble finding a job when you get out of high school.”

The only reason Armstrong intended to graduate was that he knew his old man would murder him if he didn’t. He didn’t tell that to Mr. Walsh. If the teacher hadn’t heard it a million times before, he would have been amazed.

At last PE, and Armstrong came into his own. He was stronger and faster than most of the other boys in his class, and he reveled in it. And from PE he went straight to football practice. He was only a second-string defensive end, but he threw himself into every play as if his life depended on it. The harder he practiced, the more playing time he’d get when the game came Friday night.

And there across from him, taking snaps in the single wing, was Frankie goddamn Sprague.
Think you’re going to get your hand under Lucy Houlihan’s blouse, do you?
Armstrong spun past the tackle trying to block him, steamrollered the fullback, and knocked Frankie Sprague right on his ass.

XI

“I
’m off.” Chester Martin blew Rita a kiss and Carl another one. His wife and their son sent kisses through the air back toward him, too. He was glad to get them as he went out the door and headed for the bus stop.

It had rained the day before, the first rain of the season in Los Angeles. The sky was a brilliant blue now, as if the rain had washed it clean. Even late in October, the weather would get up into the seventies. Chester remembered Toledo with a fondness that diminished every year he stayed in California. You couldn’t beat this weather no matter how hard you tried.

A bum slept in a doorway, a blanket wrapped around him. Living here without money was easier than it was in the eastern USA, because people didn’t have to worry so much about shelter. Idly, Martin wondered if Florida and Cuba had more than their share of out-of-work people in the CSA for the same reason.

He needed a southbound trolley today. He was heading down to Hawthorne, a suburb south of the airport and not far from the beach. Mordechai’s crew was running up a pair of apartment buildings. People with jobs kept moving to Southern California, too, and they all needed places to live.

When the trolley rolled up, Martin threw his nickel in the fare box, paid two cents more for a transfer, and then sat down with his toolbox in his lap. Even though that toolbox was a sign he had work to go to, he didn’t stop worrying. The way things were these days, who could? He wondered if he would be able to go on working after Mordechai retired. The foreman with the missing fingers on his right hand had to be past sixty. Whoever replaced him might have new favorites who needed jobs. In a trade without a union, that sort of thing was always a worry.

Posters praising candidates for the upcoming Congressional elections sprouted like toadstools on walls and fences and telephone poles: Democratic red, white, and blue against Socialist red and, here and there, Republican green. Trying to guess who’d win by seeing who had the most posters up was a mug’s game, which didn’t mean people didn’t play it all the time. By the way things looked here, the two big parties were running neck and neck. Outside of a few states in the Midwest, Republicans had a hard time getting elected. Their ideas were stuck between those of the Democrats and the Socialists, and old-timers still associated them with the nineteenth-century disasters the USA had suffered under Lincoln and Blaine.

Martin changed lines on El Segundo. He got off the trolley at Hawthorne Boulevard and walked two blocks south and three blocks east. Mordechai waved to him when he came up, calling, “Morning, Chester.”

“Morning,” Martin answered. About half the crew—who lived all over the Los Angeles area—were already there. It was still only a quarter to eight. Chester didn’t expect many people to show up after eight o’clock. You did that more than once—twice if you were lucky—and some hungry son of a bitch would grab your job with both hands.

This morning, only Dushan came in late. He was plainly hung over. Mordechai said something to him. He nodded in a gingerly way, then got to work. He depended on construction work less than most of the other men, for he could make cards and dice behave the way he wanted them to. That let him—or he thought that let him—get away with showing up late every once in a while.

He buckled down willingly enough, even if the banging of hammers made him turn pale. The fellow working alongside Chester, a big Pole named Stan, said, “Goddamn if Dushan don’t look like a vampire left out in the sun.”

The past few years, there’d been a lot of films about vampires and werewolves and other things that should have been dead but weren’t. That probably put the comparison in Stan’s mind. It was good enough to make Martin nod. All the same, he said, “Don’t let Dushan hear that. He’s from the old country, and he’s liable to take it the wrong way.”

“Let him. I ain’t afraid,” Stan said. He was bigger and younger than Dushan, so he had reason to be confident. Still . . .

“Don’t push it.” Now Chester sounded a plain warning. “Why start trouble?”

“You’re not my grandma,” Stan said. But, to Martin’s relief, he went back to driving nails and let Dushan alone.

It didn’t last. Chester might have known it wouldn’t. Something in him
had
known it wouldn’t. But he couldn’t do anything but watch when the trouble started. He was two stories up, nailing rafters to the roof pole, when Stan got in front of Dushan down on the ground and made as if to drive a stake through his heart.

Dushan looked at him for half a second. Then, his cold face revealing nothing of what he intended, he kicked Stan in the crotch. Had his booted foot gone home as he intended, there wouldn’t have been a fight, because Stan wouldn’t have been able to give him one. But, maybe because of his hangover, the kick got Stan in the hipbone rather than somewhere more intimate.

Stan roared with pain. But he didn’t fall over clutching at himself, which was what Dushan had had in mind. Instead, he surged forward and grappled with the other man. They fell to the ground, slugging and gouging and spitting out a couple of different flavors of guttural, consonant-filled Slavic curses.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Chester descended as fast as he could. He was cursing, too, almost as angry at himself as he was at Stan and Dushan. He’d seen trouble coming, but he hadn’t been able to stop it.

“Fight! Fight!” The shout brought construction workers running, just as it would have brought kids running on a high-school campus. Most of the workers only stood around and watched without trying to break it up. It was entertainment, something to liven up the day, something to talk about over the supper table tonight.

“Come on, let’s get ’em apart,” Chester said. Still enjoying the show, the men at his side looked at him as if he were crazy—till Mordechai got there a few seconds later.

Not much made Mordechai mad. Anything that slowed down work and threatened the job would do the trick, though. Swearing like the veteran Navy man he was, he shoved through the crowd of workers, most of whom were twice his size and half his age. Seeing that, Chester did some pushing and shoving of his own. The two of them grabbed Dushan and Stan and pulled them apart. Once they actually started doing that, they got some belated help from the other men.

Dushan twisted in Chester’s grasp, trying to wade back into the scrap. That might have been more for form’s sake than anything else. He hadn’t been getting the better of it. He had a bloody nose and a black eye and a scraped cheek. He’d hung a pretty good mouse on Stan, too, but the Pole hadn’t taken anywhere near so much damage as he had.

“What the hell happened here?” Mordechai couldn’t have sounded more disgusted if he’d tried for a week.

Dushan and Stan both gave highly colored versions of recent events. Some of the builders who’d been watching supported one of them, some the other, and some gave versions of their own that had very little to do with anything that had really gone on—that was how it seemed to Chester, anyhow.

Mordechai listened for a little while, then threw up his hands. “Enough!” he said. “Too goddamn much.” He used his mutilated right hand to point first to Stan, then to Dushan. Somehow, his two missing fingers made the gesture seem even more contemptuous than it would have otherwise. “You’re fired, and you’re fired, too. Get the fuck out of here, both of you. I don’t want to see either one of your goddamn ugly mugs again, either. And you both blow all of today’s pay.”

A sigh went through the workers. Nobody’d expected anything different. Dushan never changed expression. Stan said, “Fuck you, asshole,” but his bravado rang hollow. Word would get around, and get around quick. He’d have a tough time landing construction work from here on out. He was just an ordinary worker, easily replaceable by another ordinary worker.

If Mordechai had stopped there, nothing more would have come of it. But he was furious, and he held the whip hand. “And the rest of you pussies,” he said, glaring at the men around him, “the rest of you pussies lose half a day’s pay for standing around while all this shit was going on.”

“That’s not fair!” Chester Martin exclaimed. Several other men muttered and grumbled, but he was the one who spoke out loud.

Mordechai glowered. “You don’t like it, you know what you can do about it.”

He meant,
nothing.
But Martin wasn’t a veteran of union strife in Toledo for nothing, or to take nothing lying down. “Yeah,” he said stonily. “I know what I can do about it.”

As soon as people went back to work, he started doing it. He hadn’t done any union agitating for years, but he still knew how. Some of the men didn’t want to listen to him. “You’re gonna get your ass fired, and everybody else’s, too,” was something he heard more than once.

But others were ready to go along. Mordechai had hit too hard when he punished workers for something they hadn’t done. And a lot of the men who’d come to California to find jobs had belonged to unions back East. They remembered the gains they’d made, gains they’d had to throw away to find any work at all out here.

“We’ve got to spread the word,” Chester warned. “If we just strike at this site, they’ll crush us. But if we strike at
all
the building sites around Los Angeles, the bosses will have to deal with us.” He hoped they would, anyhow. And if they didn’t . . . well, he’d gone on strike before.

When he got his pay at the end of the day—half a day’s pay for a whole day’s hard work—he said, “I’m taking this under protest.”

The paymaster shrugged. “Take it and like it or take it and stick it up your ass.” He had a couple of bully boys with pistols behind him to make sure the payroll stayed safe. He could afford to talk tough—or thought he could, anyhow.

Martin thought he was playing into the workers’ hands. Several other men said, “I’m taking this under protest,” too. The paymaster went right on shrugging. He didn’t see the resentment he was raising—either that or, secure in his power, he just didn’t care.

That evening, when Chester told Rita what had happened, she looked at him for a long time before asking, “Are you sure you want to go through with this?” He knew what she meant; now that he had a child, he’d given fortune a hostage.

He sighed. “Do you want me to knuckle under?”

His wife bit her lip. After half a minute’s silence, she said, “No. They’ll own you if you do.” He kissed her. He’d thought—he’d hoped—she would say that. She was a stronger Socialist than he was.

He spent the next few weeks working his shift during the day and agitating during his free time. He talked with workers. He talked with Socialist Party officials. The Socialists gained seats in the House and Senate—and in the California legislature—in the off-year elections. That strengthened his hand. He hoped it did, anyhow.

One morning early in December, he got to the construction site at the same time as a pickup truck. Instead of going in to work, he grabbed a sign from the back of the truck. He wasn’t the only one who did. Inside of two minutes, three dozen
UNFAIR!
signs went up in a picket line. Picketers were hitting other sites all over town, too. “On strike!” Chester and the other men shouted. “Join us!” They cursed a worker who crossed the picket line. Another worker thought better of it.

“You sons of bitches!” Mordechai shouted. “You’ll pay for this!”

“We’ve paid too much for too long already,” Chester answered, wondering how much he would have to pay from here on out.

A
s soon as the engineer waved and the red light in the studio came on, Jake Featherston leaned toward the microphone like a lover toward his beloved. “I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth.” He wondered how many times he’d said that over the years. He always believed it, at least while he was talking.

“Truth is, for the past twenty years and more, the United States of America have been holding on to what doesn’t belong to them. At the end of the war, the USA stole Kentucky and Sequoyah and what they call Houston. The people in those states don’t want to belong to the USA. They’ve made it plain every way they know how that they don’t want to belong to the USA, but the United States government doesn’t want to listen to them.”

He paused to let that sink in, then went on, “If they held fair and honest elections in those places, the people there would show what they wanted. They would show they want to come home to the Confederate States of America. President Smith knows that as well as I do. He’s a clever man, and I reckon he’s an honest man.”

He didn’t think Smith was anything close to clever, and couldn’t have cared less whether he was honest. He did want to butter up the president of the United States. He had his reasons: “I challenge President Smith to allow plebiscites in Kentucky and Sequoyah and what they call Houston. I challenge him to abide by the results of those plebiscites. I challenge him, after the Confederate States win those plebiscites, to let those states come home.”

Featherston banged his fist down on the table. The microphone jumped a little. He loved sound effects like that. They made people pay attention to what he was saying. “President Smith has talked big about what he’d do to restore peace in the stolen states. He’s talked big, but he hasn’t done anything much. He’s even said he’d come to Richmond to hash things out. He’s said that, but he hasn’t done it. I tell him he’s welcome here, and I’d like to talk to him.

“And I tell him one more thing, something he’d better listen to. Back during the war, the USA helped our niggers when they rose up against us. Well, that was wartime, and maybe we can let bygones be bygones on account of it was. But the blacks still don’t know their proper place, and the United States are still sneaking weapons down across the border to ’em. That has got to stop. It’s cost us a lot of lives and it’s cost us a lot of money to keep the niggers in check. We’ve had to bump up the size of the Army. We’ve even had to put guns and bombs on our aeroplanes. It’s been expensive. We could have done better things with that money. We could have, but we didn’t get the chance. And that’s the USA’s fault.”

Inside, he was laughing. Here he was, blaming the United States for what he’d most wanted to do anyhow. The black guerrillas had given him the perfect excuse for rearming. Even the USA hadn’t squawked much about it. Had the guerrillas been white, he thought the USA would have. But the United States loved Negroes hardly more than the Confederate States did. They’d made it very plain they didn’t want the ones who tried to flee to the north.