The Victorious Opposition (62 page)

Chester didn’t. He went through October and into November unsure and unhappy. Autumn in Los Angeles was nothing like what it had been in Toledo. It was the one season of the year where he might have preferred his old home town. Trees didn’t blaze with color here. Most of them didn’t even lose their leaves. The air didn’t turn crisp and clean, either. It rained once, toward the end of October. That was the only real way to tell summer was gone for good. The Sunday before the election, it was back up to eighty-one. That wouldn’t have happened in Toledo, but there was nothing wrong with sixty-one, either. Forty-one and twenty-one were different, to say nothing of one. Los Angeles might see forty-one as a low. Twenty-one? One? Never.

Picketing was a lot easier when you weren’t freezing while you carried a sign. Chester and his fellow construction workers kept on getting help from the local Socialist Party. He did grumble about the plebiscite with Party men, but never very loudly. Like most people, he was shy about biting the hand that fed him. The Socialists probably wouldn’t have dropped support for his young, struggling union if they knew he might vote for Taft, but why take chances?

Houses and apartment buildings and factories and shops went up all over Los Angeles and the surrounding suburbs, but not many went up without pickets around the construction sites. The
Los Angeles Times
kept screaming that the pickets were nothing but a bunch of dirty Reds who ought to be burned alive because hanging was too good for them. But the
Times
screamed that about everything it didn’t like, and it didn’t like much. Strikers and cops began to learn to get along, if not to love one another. Even the insults and cries of, “Scab!” as men crossed the picket line came to have a certain ritualistic quality to them.

November 5 dawned bright and clear, though the day plainly wouldn’t reach the eighties. “What are you going to do?” Rita asked at breakfast.

“Vote.” Martin reached for the pepper shaker and spread pungent black flakes over his fried eggs.

Rita made an irritated noise. “How?”

“Oh, about like this.” He mimed picking up a stamp and making an X on a ballot with it.

“Thank you so much.” Somehow, no sarcasm flayed like a spouse’s. His wife asked a question he couldn’t evade: “Who are you going to vote for?”

“To tell you the truth, honey, I won’t know till I get inside the voting booth,” Chester answered.

“If you don’t vote for Al Smith, you’ll end up sorry,” Rita said. “You were when you didn’t vote for Blackford eight years ago.”

“I know I was. I think Coolidge might have been better than Hoover, but we’ll never know about that, will we?” He spread butter and grape jam on a piece of toast, then started to throw out the empty jam jar.

“Don’t do that,” Rita said. “I’ll wash it out and use it for a glass. Jelly glasses are better for Carl—they don’t hold as much as real ones, and they’re thick, so they don’t break as easy if he drops them.”

“All right,” Martin said with his mouth full. He put the jam jar back on the table. When he finished the toast, he gave Rita a quick, greasy kiss, stuck a cloth cap on his head, and hurried out the door. Rita took a deep breath, as if to call something after him, but she didn’t. She must have realized it wouldn’t change his mind.

The polling place was in the auditorium of an elementary school three or four blocks from the apartment. Chester got there as it opened. As always, the child-sized chairs made him smile. Once upon a time, he’d fit into seats like those. No more, no more. He gave his name and address to the white-mustached man in charge of the list. The man matched it against the entry, then handed him a ballot. “Take any empty voting booth,” he droned. How many times had he said that, and in how many elections? How many more would he say it today?

There it was, the big question, right at the top of the ballot. Smith or Taft? Taft or Smith? Chester ignored the Republicans’ candidate. Not many people outside of his native Indiana cared about the businessman they’d nominated, which meant they weren’t about to win with Willkie. Besides, how could a Wendell hope to prevail against the brute simplicity of Al and Bob? Smith or Taft? Taft or Smith?

Chester stamped the X by Taft’s name, hoping he was doing the right thing. Had he voted for Smith, he would have had the same hope, and would have been just as unsure of himself.
It’s done, anyhow,
he thought, and went down the rest of the ballot in a hurry. Most of the candidates he voted for were Socialists. That salved his conscience, at least a little.

He carried the finished ballot back to the table where he’d got it. Another old man took it, folded it, and thrust it through the slot in the ballot box. “Mr. Martin has voted,” he intoned, the words as formal and unchanging as any this side of the Mass.

Having voted, Chester Martin hurried to the trolley stop. He rode across town to Westwood, not far from the Pacific and even closer to the southern campus of the University of California. Orange groves were going down, houses were going up, and union labor, as usual in Los Angeles, was being ignored.

“Hey, Chester!” another organizer called as he came up. “You vote yet?”

“Sure did, before I came here,” Martin answered. Westwood wasn’t bright and sunny. Fog lingered here, and probably wouldn’t burn off till midmorning. “How about you, Ralph?”

“I’ll take care of it on the way home,” Ralph answered. “Who’d you vote for?” He winked and laughed uproariously. He was sure he already knew, which meant Chester didn’t have to tell him. Under the circumstances, that came as something of a relief.

The strikers carried their picket signs around and around the construction site. They stayed on the sidewalk. Once, at a different site, a man had stumbled and gone onto what would be a lawn. The cops nabbed him for trespassing. Not here, not today.

“Scabs!” the picketers shouted—along with other things, even less complimentary—when workers crossed the picket line and went into the construction site. They had to watch what they said, too. The police had been known to run strikers in for public obscenity. Still, endearments like “You stinking sack of manure!” got the message across.

Most of the strikebreakers went in with their heads down. Watching them cross the picket line was one thing that made Chester glad he’d chosen this side. He had yet to see a scab who didn’t act as if his conscience bothered him. A man might go and decide he had to eat any way he could, but he seldom seemed happy about it.

One of the scabs here, a big man on whom the picketers had showered a lot of abuse, finally got fed up and shouted back: “Wait till the Pinkertons get into town, you bastards! They’ll kick your asses but good!”

Not one but two foremen ran up to the strikebreaker. They both started cussing him up one side and down the other. The cops didn’t jug them for the language they used, any more than they’d arrested the scab.

Chester didn’t stop marching or yelling. But he sure as hell did prick up his ears. If the bosses were bringing in Pinkerton men, they were going to try breaking the union. The more notice he had about that, the better he could fight back, because the Pinkertons, notorious union-busters, fought dirty, really dirty. If he’d been one of those foremen, he would have cussed out that scab, too, for tipping the other side’s hand.

At lunch, Ralph came up to him and said, “Pinkertons, is it? Well, there’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.”

“You bet there will,” Chester said. “We can lick ’em, though. They’re bastards, sure as hell, but we can lick ’em. And if we do, what have the bosses got left to throw at us? Soldiers? Whose side would they be on?”

“Pinkertons.” Ralph made a disgusted face. “I fought those fuckers years ago, in Pittsburgh. Never thought I’d see their ugly mugs again.”

Martin nodded. “Same with me in Toledo. They’re goons, all right. You think we’re going to back down, though? I sure as hell don’t. I’ve got brass knucks, and I can always get a .45 if it looks like I need one.”

The other union man looked worried. “You gotta be careful with that, though. You pull it, the cops have the perfect excuse to blow you to kingdom come.”

“I know. I know. Like I said, I did this before,” Chester said. “But I know something else, too—if they get us on the run, we’re in trouble. I don’t aim to let that happen.”

C
incinnatus Driver refused to buy a paper as he steered his truck toward the railroad yard. He was too disgusted to want to hear anything more about Al Smith’s reelection than he had the night before on the wireless. He’d stayed up till the West Coast returns came in, and poured down three cups of coffee to try to make up for not enough sleep. Taft, behind in the race, had needed to sweep the Coast to win enough electoral votes to overtake the president. He’d won in California, but lost Oregon and Washington—and the election.

They’re gonna hold the plebiscite,
Cincinnatus thought dolefully.
They’re gonna hold it, and the Confederate States are gonna win.
That meant he had to get his mother and father out of Kentucky before it left the USA and returned to the CSA. He knew what being a Negro in the Confederate States was like—and it was bound to be even worse now, under Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party, than it had been before the Great War.

He wished his mother were in better shape than she was. He could have sent his father and her train fare, and they would have ended up in Des Moines not long afterwards. As things were, with her sinking ever deeper into her second childhood, he knew he would have to go down to Covington to help his father bring her out. Elizabeth wouldn’t like it—he didn’t like it himself—but he saw no way around it.

He pulled into the railroad yard at a quarter to seven, yawning despite all the coffee. When he jumped out of his trunk and hurried over to see what cargoes he could pick up, first one railroad dick and then another waved to him. He was accepted here. He belonged. He never remembered belonging in Covington—certainly not in any part of it where he bumped up against white men. The first conductor whose train he approached greeted him with, “Hey, Cincinnatus. How you doing?”

“Not bad, Jack,” he answered. He never would have called a white man in Covington by his first name. “What you got?”

But Jack felt like gabbing. “Four more years of Smith,” he said. “I’m happy. My son got conscripted not long ago, and I don’t want him getting shot at. I saw too goddamn much of that myself twenty-five years ago.”

That gave Cincinnatus a new slant on things. He’d been shot at during the Great War, too, if only as a truck driver behind the lines. But he didn’t have to worry about Achilles getting conscripted. The USA didn’t conscript Negroes, any more than the CSA did. If war came, Achilles would be as safe as anybody. Even so, Cincinnatus said, “You won’t find anybody colored who wants to go back to livin’ in the Confederate States.”

By the way Jack blinked, he’d no more thought about that than Cincinnatus had worried about conscription. The white man said, “I don’t suppose there’s enough colored folks to change the vote, though.”

Cincinnatus grimaced. That was painfully true. Not wanting to dwell on the likely fate of Kentucky (and Houston, and perhaps Sequoyah, but Kentucky mattered most to him), he asked again, “What you got here?”

“Furniture,” Jack said, and Cincinnatus’ eyes lit up. He and Jack haggled for a while, but not too long. He loaded the truck as full as he could, then roared off for the shops taking delivery. If he got rid of everything in a hurry, he thought he could be back for another equally profitable load by lunchtime.

He was, too. Plenty of things held back a colored man: fewer in the USA than in the CSA, but still plenty. Adding laziness on top of everything else would only have made matters worse. Cincinnatus was a lot of different things. Whatever he was, though, he’d never been afraid of hard work.

His back ached when he pulled up to the apartment building that night, but the money in the pocket of his overalls made the ache seem worthwhile. He opened the mailbox in the lobby, crumpled up the advertising circulars, and winced when he saw a letter with a Covington postmark and the sprawling handwriting of his father’s neighbor. News from Covington was unlikely to be good. Because he wished he didn’t have to find out what the letter said, he carried it upstairs without opening it.

When he walked in, Amanda was doing homework. He smiled at her.
Gonna have me two high-school graduates soon,
he thought proudly.
That ain’t bad for a Kentucky nigger who never went to school at all.

From the kitchen came the crackle and the mouth-watering smell of frying chicken. Cincinnatus went in to say hello to Elizabeth, who was turning pieces with long-handled tongs. After a quick kiss, she asked, “What you got there?”

“Letter from Covington.”

“Oh.” She understood his hesitation, but asked the next question anyhow: “What’s it say?”

“Don’t know yet. Ain’t opened it,” he said. The look his wife sent him was sympathetic and impatient at the same time. He tore off the end of the envelope, took out the letter, unfolded it, and read. By the time he got to the end, his face was as long as the train from which he’d taken off furniture.

“What is it?” Elizabeth asked.

“I got to git down there. Got to do it quick,” Cincinnatus said heavily. “Neighbor says my mama, she start wanderin’ off every chance she get. Pa turn his back on her half a minute, she out the door an’ lookin’ for the house where she growed up. Can’t have that. She liable to git lost for good, or git run over on account of she go out in the street and don’t look where she goin’.” Stress and the thought of Covington made his accent thicken.

Elizabeth sighed. Then hot fat spattered, and she yipped and jerked back her hand. She said, “I reckon maybe you do, but, Lord, I wish you didn’t.”

“So do I, on account of Ma and on account of I don’t want to go back to Kentucky, neither,” Cincinnatus said. “But it ain’t always what you want to do. Sometimes it’s what you got to do.” He waited. Elizabeth sighed again, then reluctantly nodded.

He bought a round-trip train ticket, knowing he would have to get one-way fares for his parents in Covington. He sent the neighbor down there a wire to let him know when he’d be getting into town. Then he stuffed a few days’ clothes and sundries into a beat-up suitcase and went to the railroad station to catch the eastbound train.