The Victorious Opposition (73 page)

The woman sitting behind him said, “There’d be worse trouble if we gave that Featherston so-and-so what he wants. How soon would he be back trying to squeeze something else out of us?”

“Lady, I spent three stinking years in the trenches,” the man answered. “There isn’t any trouble worse than that.” He looked over at Chester for support. “Aren’t I right? Were you there?”

“Yeah, I was there,” Martin said. “I don’t know what to tell you, though. Looks to me like that guy is spoiling for a fight. The longer we keep ducking, the harder he’s going to hit us when he finally does.”

“Yikes!” The man jerked in surprise. He sent Martin a betrayed look. “Who cares about those lousy little chunks of land?”

“Well, I don’t, not much,” Chester admitted. “But suppose we give them back to him and
then
he jumps on us anyway? We’d look like a bunch of boobs, and we’d be that much worse off, too.”

“Why would he jump on us if he’s got everything he wants?” the man demanded.

Before Chester could say anything, the woman who’d been arguing beat him to it: “Because somebody like that
never
has everything he wants. As soon as you give him something, he wants something else. When you see a little kid like that, you spank him so he behaves himself from then on.”

“How do you spank somebody who’ll shoot back if you try?” the man asked.

“If we don’t spank him, he’ll shoot first,” Chester said. The woman in back of the other man nodded emphatically. They all kept on wrangling about it till first the woman and then the other man got off at their stops.

Chester kept on going down into the South Bay. The area was growing fast; builders wanted to run up lots of new houses. The construction workers’ union was doing its best to stop them till they met its terms. This tract in Torrance had been carved from an orange grove. The trees had gone down. The houses weren’t going up, or not very fast, anyway.

When Martin walked into the union tent across from the construction site, the organizer who kept an eye on things during the night, a tough little guy named Pete Mazzini, wore a worried expression. “What’s up?” Chester asked, grabbing the coffee pot that perked lazily over the blue flame of canned heat.

“I hear they really are gonna sic the goddamn Pinkertons on us today,” Mazzini said.

“Shit,” Chester said, and the other man nodded. “Pinkertons are bad news.” Mazzini nodded again. Martin hadn’t seen Pinkerton goons since the steel-mill strikes in Toledo after the Great War. In a way, fighting them was even worse than fighting cops. A fair number of cops were fundamentally decent guys. Anybody who’d sign up to use a club or a blackjack or a pistol for the Pinkertons had to be a son of a bitch.

“At least I found out.” Mazzini jerked a thumb toward the building site. “Dumb night watchmen over there don’t think about how voices carry once everything quiets down.”

“Good.” Martin had never got more than three stripes on his sleeve during the war, but he’d commanded a company for a while. Now he had to think not like a captain, but like a general. “We’ve got to let the pickets know as soon as they start showing up. They’ll be ready, because we’ve had word the builders might pull this. We’ve got to bring in as many weapons as we can. Not just sticks for the signs, either. We’ll need knives. Guns, too, if we can get ’em in a hurry.”

“We start shooting, that gives the cops all the excuse they need to land on us with both feet,” Mazzini said.

He wasn’t wrong. All the same, Chester answered, “If we let the goons break us, we’re screwed, too. If they break us, we might as well pack it in. You want that?”

“Hell, no,” Mazzini said. “I just wanted to make sure you were thinking about it.”

“Oh, I am. Bet your ass I am.” Martin scratched his chin. “I’m going to call somebody from the
Daily Breeze
. Torrance papers aren’t down on unions the way the goddamn
Times
is. We ought to have an honest witness here. I think I’ll talk to the Torrance cops, too. The builders don’t have them in their pocket, like in L.A. If they know the Pinkertons are going to raise hell ahead of time, maybe they can step on ’em.”

Pete Mazzini looked as if he would have laughed in anybody else’s face. “Good luck,” he said. His shrug declared that he washed his hands of dealing with all police anywhere. “I don’t suppose it can make things any worse.”

Yawning, he agreed to hang around and warn the incoming pickets of the trouble ahead while Chester went to talk with the man from the
Daily Breeze
and the police and make other arrangements. When Chester got back, he said, “Thanks, Pete. You can go home and get your forty winks now.”

Mazzini gave him a look. “Hell, no. If there’s gonna be a brawl, I want in on it. Those bastards aren’t going to lick us as easy as they think they are.” He yawned again, and fixed himself what had to be his millionth cup of coffee.

The reporter from the
Daily Breeze
showed up an hour or so later. He had a photographer with him, which gladdened Chester’s heart. Meanwhile, union backers came up to the men on the picket line, slipped them this or that, and then went on their way. Martin and Mazzini exchanged knowing glances. Neither said a word.

At twenty past eleven, half a dozen autos with Torrance cops in them pulled up by the building site. Martin wondered if they’d known what would go on before he told them. When a reporter from the
Times
showed up five minutes later, he stopped wondering. They had.

At twenty to twelve, two buses that had seen a lot of better years pulled up around the corner. “Here we go,” Chester said softly. It had been a long, long time—half a lifetime—since he’d shot at anybody, but he knew he could. Nobody who’d been through the Great War was likely to forget what gunplay was all about.

Here came the Pinkerton men. They looked like goons: drunks and toughs and guys down on their luck who’d take anybody’s money and do anything because they hadn’t had any real work for such a long time. They carried a motley assortment of iron bars and wooden clubs. One guy even had what Martin belatedly recognized as a baseball bat, something far, far from its New England home. Others, grim purpose on their faces, kept one hand out of sight.
Knife men and shooters,
Martin thought, and made sure he could get at his own pistol in a hurry.

“We don’t want any trouble, now,” said a Torrance policeman with the map of Ireland on his face. He and his pals formed a thin line between the advancing goons and the picketers, who were shaping a line of their own: a skirmish line. Chester warily watched the scabs on the site. If they took his men from behind while the Pinkertons hit them from the front . . . He grimaced. That wouldn’t be good at all.

As if reading his mind, Mazzini said, “I told a couple of our guys to start shooting at the scabs if they even take a step towards us. Some bullets go past their heads, I don’t think they’ve got the balls to keep coming.”

Chester laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment. “Good. Thanks.”

A short, scrawny, ferret-faced man in a loud, snappy suit seemed to be the Pinkertons’ commander. “Time to teach these damn Reds a lesson,” he said in a voice that carried. Low growls rose from his men, as if from a pack of angry dogs. He pointed. “Go get ’em!”

Instead of growling, the goons roared and charged. Some of the Torrance cops swung their billy clubs. Most of them let the Pinkertons go by. The union men roared, too. They were outnumbered, but not too badly. Some of them ran forward to meet the goons head on. A few others hung back, watching the scabs.

“Here we go!” Chester said, an odd note of exultation in his voice. He snatched up a club and waded into the brawl. He didn’t want to start shooting first, but he had nothing at all against breaking a few heads.

He almost got his broken as soon as he started fighting. A goon carrying an iron bar with a chunk of concrete on the end swung it for all he was worth. It hummed past Chester’s ear. He clobbered the Pinkerton before the fellow could take another swing at him.

That scrawny guy in the sharp suit didn’t mix it up along with the strikebreakers he’d brought. He stayed out of the fight and yelled orders. Martin pointed at the man with his club. “Get him!” he yelled to one of the Torrance cops, who’d managed to whack his way clear and was standing on the sidewalk as if it were the sideline of a football game. The cop paid him no attention.

But when the union men started getting the better of the strikebreakers, their boss was the one who first pulled a pistol out of his pocket. Chester tried to shift his club to his left hand so he could grab his own gun, but a goon had hold of his left arm. In desperation, he threw the club instead. He got lucky. It caught the fellow in the sharp suit right in the bridge of the nose.

He let out a howl that pierced the shouts and curses of the brawling men in front of him, dropped the pistol, and clapped both hands to his face. When he took them away a moment later, he had a mustache made of blood.

He bent for the pistol. But the
Daily Breeze
photographer, not content to stay neutral, dashed up and grabbed it. Screaming, “You fucker!” the Pinkertons’ boss jumped on him. They had their own private brawl till the reporter from the local paper weighed in on the photographer’s side. Then the little guy with the gaudy clothes took his lumps.

So did his goons. Thanks to Martin and that photographer, nobody started shooting. Chester knew how lucky that was. The union men drove the toughs back to their buses in headlong retreat. A rock smashed the windshield on one of the buses. Both drivers got out of there a lot faster than they’d come.

The next morning, the
Times
called it “a savage labor riot.” The
Daily Breeze
knew better. So did Chester. He also knew the union had won a round. They wouldn’t see the Pinkertons for a while—but when they did, the other side would be loaded for bear.

IXX

T
he
Sweet Sue
jounced west across the rough waters of the Atlantic, back toward Boston harbor. George Enos Jr. stood near the bow of the fishing boat, thinking about things that had changed and things that hadn’t. He turned to Carlo Lombardi, who was smoking a cigarette beside him. “Back in 1914,” George said, “my old man was coming home from a fishing run. He didn’t have a wireless set on his ship. When he got back into port, he found out that goddamn Serb had blown up the Austrian archduke and his wife, and everything was going to hell.”

Lombardi paused to take another drag before he answered, “We’re lucky. We can find out everything’s going to hell before we get into port. Ain’t life grand nowadays?”

“Yeah. Grand.” George tried to look every which way at once. “Of course, it’s liable not to be the wireless that tells us.”

“How do you mean?” the other fisherman asked, scratching his head.

“If a war starts, you’ve got to bet the Confederates’ll have their submarines up here ahead of time. Only stands to reason, right?” George said. “If they do, first thing we’ll know about it is—
wham!
”

“Fuck,” Lombardi said, and pitched his cigarette into the green water. He eyed George sourly. “You bastard. Now you’re going to have me looking around for a periscope or a goddamn torpedo all the way till we tie up at T Wharf.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been doing that ever since we started back from the Grand Bank,” George said. “That sneaky Confederate son of a bitch torpedoed my father after the last war was done. It’d be just like one of those bastards to nail me before this one even starts.”

“Fuck,” Lombardi said again, and gave George an even more jaundiced once-over. “You better not be a goddamn Jonah, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

“My old man was the one with the bad luck,” George said. The other man thought that over, then slowly nodded. If he didn’t believe it, he kept it to himself. George went on, “Maybe there won’t be a war this time around. Maybe. I keep on hoping there won’t, anyway.”

“I hope for free pussy, too, when I go to a whorehouse,” Lombardi said, lighting another cigarette. “I hope for it, but that ain’t how things work.” He sucked in smoke. “Better not be another war. If there is, the tobacco’ll all be shitty. My pa used to bitch about that all the goddamn time, how lousy the smokes were ’cause we couldn’t get no Confederate tobacco.”

George didn’t remember whether his father had complained about bad tobacco. He’d been too little when George Enos Senior got killed, and his father had been away at sea too much while alive to leave behind a lot of memories. George did recall one night when his father kept asking if he and Mary Jane were ready to go to bed yet. He hadn’t been ready, and his indignation still rankled across a quarter of a century.

All of a sudden, out of a clear blue sky, he started laughing like hell. “What’s so goddamn funny?” Lombardi asked.

“Nothing, not really,” George answered. The other fisherman gave him a particularly fishy stare. He didn’t care. It wasn’t the sort of joke he could explain. Just the same, he suddenly understood
why
his father had kept wanting him to go to bed, which he hadn’t when he was a little boy. He was liable to use that same impatient tone of voice to find out if his own boys were ready to go to sleep so he could be alone with Connie. As a matter of fact, he knew damn well he’d used that tone of voice with them before.

And if a new war does start, and if your boat goes to the bottom, is that what you want them to remember you for?
he wondered. Had the same question ever occurred to his father? Probably not. But then, his father hadn’t known anything about a big war before he found himself in the middle of the biggest one of all time. People living in the USA nowadays didn’t have that excuse.

Neither did people living in the CSA. The Great War had hurt them even worse. They, or at least Jake Featherston, seemed ready—hell, seemed eager—for another round. George wondered why.

He found an answer, too, the same way as he’d found an answer when he thought about his old man.
The Confederates lost. That means they want revenge.
The USA had lost two wars in a row to the CSA. That had made people here twice as serious about getting their own back. Now, after a win, people here thought everything was square. South of the border, they didn’t.

Will there ever be an end? Will both sides ever be satisfied at the same time?
He thought that one over, too. Unlike the other questions, it didn’t have an answer that leaped into sight.

No Confederate submersible or commerce raider challenged the
Sweet Sue
. No dive bomber dropped explosives on her from the sky. She sailed back into Boston harbor as if pulling fish from the sea were the hardest, most dangerous thing to do men had ever invented. In peacetime, it came close. Peacetime, though, felt like summertime. Even as you enjoyed it, you knew it wouldn’t last.

When the
Sweet Sue
tied up at T Wharf, the first officer made the best deal he could with the buyers. Normally, George would have stuck around to find out how good the deal was. His own share of the pie depended on how big a pie he was looking at. Today, though, he drew fifty dollars against whatever the total would be and headed for the apartment where he spent rather less time than he did at sea.

He had to get past all the harborside attractions that tried to separate fishermen from their money and make them forget about their wives. Football games and raucous music blared from wireless sets in saloons. A drunk reeled out of a tavern. He almost ran into George. “Easy, pal,” George said, and dodged.

Music with more of a thump and pound to it, music played by real live musicians, poured out of strip joints. Hearing that kind of music made you think about the girls who’d dance to it, and about what they would—or wouldn’t—be wearing. You could get drinks in those joints, too, but they’d cost twice as much.

If you didn’t want to drink, if you didn’t want to watch, if you wanted to get down to business . . . A swarthy, tired-looking woman about George’s age leaned out of a second-story window and beckoned to him. She wasn’t wearing anything from the waist up. Her breasts drooped. They seemed tired, too. She tried to sound alluring when she called, “How about it, big boy?”

George kept walking. The whore swore at him. Even her curses sounded tired.

His block of flats stood only a couple of streets farther on. He hurried to it. Unlike the one where he’d lived with his mother, it had an elevator. Most of the time, he took that as proof he’d come up in the world. When he stepped into the lobby now, though, the cage was empty. The car was on some upper floor. He didn’t have the patience to wait for it. He went up four flights of stairs, taking them two at a time till his knees got tired.

The key to his apartment was brass. A good thing, too; with all the time he spent out on the ocean, an iron key would have rusted on the chain. He put the key in the lock and turned it.

Connie’s startled voice came from the kitchen: “Who’s there?” And then, realizing only one person besides her had a key, she went on, “Is that you, George?”

“Well, it’s not the tooth fairy and it’s not the Easter Bunny and it’s not Santa Claus,” he answered.

She came rocketing out of the kitchen and into his arms. He squeezed her till she squeaked. She felt wonderful. He didn’t stop to think that he’d been at sea so long, the Wicked Witch of the North would have felt good to him. He kissed her. Things might have—no, things would have—gone straight on from there if Bill and Pat hadn’t charged him and tried tackling him in ways that would have got flags thrown on any gridiron in the country. Fortunately, they weren’t big enough to do any serious damage.

“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” they squealed. If they went on after that, it was in voices only dogs could hear.

He let go of Connie and hugged the boys. They were also good to come home to, in a different way. His wife asked, “How long will you be here this time?”

“Don’t know. Didn’t hang around to find out,” he said. “I just drew part of my pay and headed on over here. When they want me again, they’ll come after me.”

“Well, at least they won’t have to scour the saloons to find you,” Connie said. “Some of those people . . .”

George didn’t say anything to that. He just tried to look virtuous. He didn’t know how good a job he did. For one thing, he intended to take a drink or three while he had the chance. For another, Connie’s father had seen the inside of a tavern and the bottom of a glass more than a few times in his day.

But George didn’t want to think about that right this minute, either. He asked, “How are things here?”

“Pretty good,” Connie answered. “They’ve been good boys. They haven’t tried to pull the ears off the cat or flush the Sears, Roebuck catalogue down the toilet.” They had committed the felony with the catalogue, one crumpled page and then more than one crumpled page at a time, till a flood and two spankings resulted. They hadn’t messed with the cat’s ears, at least not where their parents could catch them. But then Whiskers, unlike the hapless catalogue, could take care of himself.

The cat strolled up to see what the commotion was about. He gave George a leisurely glance, then yawned, showing needle teeth.
Oh, it’s you,
he might have said. He remembered George between trips just well enough to tolerate being petted. And, of course, George smelled of fish, which made him interesting.

“How was the run?” Connie did her best not to sound anxious. Her best could have been better. If the run wasn’t good, things got tight. She had to make ends meet on whatever George brought home.

“Pretty good. We brought back a lot of tuna,” he answered. “Only question now is how much it’ll bring.”

“News hasn’t been good,” Connie said, and he nodded. She went on, “That might drive prices up.”

“Maybe. I can hope.” He sniffed. “What smells good?”

“I was stewing a chicken,” she told him. “We were going to have it for two nights, maybe three, but who cares? I’ve got to show you I’m a better cook than the Cookie, don’t I?”

“You’re a lot cuter than Davey, anyhow,” he said, which made her squawk. He went on, “I just hope Bill and Pat get sleepy pretty soon.” Both boys let out indignant howls. If he’d listened to them, he would have believed they would never fall asleep again. Fortunately, he knew better.

Connie turned red. “My father used to say things like that when he came home from a fishing run.”

“So did mine,” George said. “I never understood why till not very long ago. I don’t remember much about my pa, but that sticks in my mind.”

“How come, Daddy?” Bill asked.

“I don’t know. It just does,” George answered. “It’s the sort of thing a fisherman would say, that’s for sure.” Bill asked why again. George didn’t say, not in words. He kissed Connie again instead. As far as he was concerned, that was the best answer he could give.

J
efferson Pinkard looked around at his kingdom and found it . . . not so good. He turned to Mercer Scott, the guard chief at Camp Dependable. “For Chrissake, Mercer,” he said, “what the hell are we gonna do when those goddamn sons of bitches in Richmond send us another shipment of niggers? This camp’ll go boom, on account of there just ain’t no room for any more spooks in here. Do they care? Do they give a shit? Don’t make me laugh.”

Scott shifted a chaw of Red Man from his left cheek to his right. He spat a stream of tobacco juice onto the ground. “You sure as hell ain’t wrong,” he said. “We got us coons hangin’ from their heels like they was bats. Dunno where else we can put ’em. On the roofs, maybe?” He laughed to show that was a joke.

Jeff laughed, too, though it was anything but funny. If he could have put bunks on the roofs of the prisoner barracks, he would have done it. He didn’t know where else to put them, that was for sure. “Bastards don’t send us enough in the way of rations, neither. We got pellagra, we got hookworm, we got plain old-fashioned starvation. Wouldn’t take a whole lot more food to make all that stuff a hell of a lot better.”

“Damned if I can see why you’re gettin’ your ass in an uproar about
that
,” Scott said. “They’re only niggers. No, they ain’t
only
niggers. They’re a bunch of goddamn Reds, too. So who gives a shit if they die? Ain’t nobody gonna miss ’em.”

“It’s not . . .” Pinkard frowned, looking for the word that summed up how he felt about it. “It’s not
orderly
, dammit. If they give me so many prisoners, they’re supposed to give me enough food for that many, too. That’s just the way things work.”

As a matter of fact, that wasn’t the way things worked. They’d worked that way in the prisoner camps down in the Empire of Mexico, not least because Jeff had made sure they did. And they’d worked that way in the Birmingham jail, because it was longstanding policy that they work so. There was no longstanding policy for camps housing political prisoners and Negroes taken in rebellion. Every day that passed saw such policy made.

Scott seemed to understand instinctively the root of that policy. It was,
Who gives a shit if they die?
Pinkard could see that for himself. A hell of a lot of prisoners left Camp Dependable feet first. He didn’t like it. He scavenged across the countryside for more rations than he was officially issued. No doubt that did some good. Against the kind of overcrowding he was facing, it didn’t do much.

A guard trotted up to him, heavy belly bouncing above his belt. “Telephone call for you, boss,” the man said. He hadn’t missed any meals. None of the guards had. Neither had Pinkard himself.

“Thanks, Eddie,” he said, though he didn’t know why he was thanking the guard. Telephone calls weren’t likely to be good news. He tramped back to the office and picked up the phone. “Pinkard speaking.”

“Hello, Pinkard.” The clicks and pops on the line said it was a long-distance call. “This is Ferdinand Koenig, calling from Richmond.”

“Yes, sir!” The attorney general was Jake Featherston’s right-hand man. “Freedom!”

“Freedom! I’ve heard you aren’t happy because you haven’t been getting enough advance notice of prisoner shipments,” Koenig said, as if he’d just finished listening to Jeff bitching to Mercer Scott.