The Victorious Opposition Read online

  Maybe nobody from the Rad Libs wanted to run against the Freedom Party. Maybe nobody dared run against it.

  A cop coming down the street gave Scipio a hard stare. “You, nigger!” he snapped. “Let me see your passbook.”

  “Yes, suh.” Scipio handed it over. For a while after the end of the Great War, nobody’d much worried about whether a black man had a passbook. Things had tightened up again before too long, though, and they’d got even worse after Jake Featherston won the presidency.

  The cop made sure Scipio’s photo matched his face. “Xerxes.” He made a mess of the alias, but Scipio didn’t presume to correct him. He looked Scipio up and down. “Why the hell you wearin’ that damn penguin suit, boy, when the weather’s like this?” His own gray uniform had darker gray sweat stains under the arms and at the collar.

  “Suh, I waits tables at de Huntsman’s Lodge,” Scipio answered. Getting called boy by a man half his age rankled, too. He didn’t let it show. Negroes who did let such resentment show often didn’t live to grow old.

  Grudgingly, a little frustrated that Scipio hadn’t given him any excuse to raise hell, the policeman thrust the passbook back at him. “All right. Go on, then. Stay out of trouble,” he said, adding, “Freedom!”

  “Freedom!” Scipio echoed, sounding as hearty as he could. Satisfied, the cop walked on. So did Scipio, heart pounding and guts churning with everything he had to hold in. A colored man who didn’t give back that Freedom! was also in trouble, sometimes deadly trouble. A colored man born in the CSA is born in trouble, Scipio thought. He’d always known that. He hadn’t imagined how much trouble a colored man could be born into, though, not till the Freedom Party came to power.

  The Huntsman’s Lodge was probably the best restaurant in Augusta. It was certainly the fanciest and most expensive. “Hey there, Xerxes.” The manager was a short, brisk fellow named Jerry Dover. “How are you?”

  “Gettin’ by.” Scipio shrugged. “I thanks de Lord Jesus I’s doin’ dat much.”

  “Bunch of damn foolishness, not that anybody cares what I think,” Dover said. “Bad for business.”

  He was a decent man, within the limits imposed on whites in the Confederate States. Bad for business and damn foolishness were as far as he would go in saying anything about the riots, but Scipio couldn’t imagine him rampaging down into the Terry to rip up and destroy what little the Negroes of Augusta had.

  Now he jerked a thumb in the direction of the kitchen. “You aren’t on for half an hour. Get yourself some supper.”

  “Thank you kindly, suh,” Scipio said. Waiters always ate where they worked. Even a white cook would feed them, and as for his colored assistants . . . In a place like this, though, the manager often tried to hold back the tide, not wanting to waste expensive food on the help. Not Dover. Scipio liked not having to sneak.

  He liked the trout and brussels sprouts and delicate mashed potatoes he got, too. Bathsheba and the children were eating either soup-kitchen food or what they could find at the handful of cafés still open in the Terry. Part of Scipio felt guilty about getting meals like this. The rest reminded him it was food he didn’t have to pay for. That counted, too.

  He was at the tables the minute his shift started. Back and forth to the kitchen he went, bringing orders, taking food. To the customers, he was part of the furniture. He couldn’t help wondering if any of them had gone down to the Terry to take from his people what small store of happiness they had. Maybe not. These men had too much money to need to feel the Negro as a threat. On the other hand . . . On the other hand, you never could tell.

  He worked his shift. He made pretty good tip money. Everyone knew him as Xerxes. Nobody thought he was an educated fellow. The customer who’d seen him when he was Anne Colleton’s butler had scared him half to death. And now he’d had to use that fancy accent again, had to use it with Bathsheba listening. The echoes from that hadn’t even come close to dying down.

  When midnight came, Scipio told Jerry Dover, “I see you tomorrow, suh.”

  “See you tomorrow,” the white man echoed. “Be careful on the way home, you hear? Plenty of drunks out looking for trouble this time of night.”

  Spotting a black man would give them the excuse to start some, too. Scipio couldn’t help saying, “Can’t very well be careful goin’ home, Mistuh Dover, on account of I ain’t got no home. White folks done burn it down.”

  “I knew that,” his boss said. “Telling you I’m sorry doesn’t do you a hell of a lot of good, does it? Go on. Get out of here. Go back to your family.”

  That Scipio could do. He slipped out the kitchen door to the Huntsman’s Lodge and down the alley behind the place. That made him harder to spot than if he’d gone right out onto the sidewalk. He took back streets and alleys south and east into the Terry. Telling when he got there wasn’t hard. It wouldn’t have been hard even before the riots: the edge of the Terry was where the street lights stopped.

  He didn’t dare relax once he got into the Negro district, either. Whites might have beaten him or shot him for the sport of it. Blacks would do the same to find out how much money he carried. The destruction of the riots had left plenty of people desperate—and some had been robbers before the riots, too.

  No one troubled Scipio tonight. He made it back to the Godliness Baptist Church with nothing more dangerous than a stray cat (and not even a black one) crossing his path. Most of the people in the church were already asleep, on cots or on blankets spread over the pews.

  Because a few men worked odd hours, the pastor had put up more blankets to give them a sheltered place to change. Scipio shed his formal clothes there and put on a nightshirt that fell down to his ankles. A cot by the one where his wife lay was empty. When he lay down, a sigh of relief escaped him. He’d been on his feet a long time. The cot was hard and lumpy, but weariness made it feel like a featherbed. He drifted toward sleep amidst the snores and occasional groans of several dozen people.

  And then Bathsheba’s voice, a thin thread of whisper, penetrated the rhythmic noise of heavy breathing: “How’d it go?”

  He thought about pretending to have drifted off, but knew he couldn’t get away with it. “Not bad,” he whispered back.

  The iron frame of Bathsheba’s cot creaked as she shifted her weight. “Any trouble?” she asked.

  He couldn’t pretend he didn’t know what she meant. Shaking his head, he answered, “Not today. Policeman check my passbook, but dat’s all. I pass. I’s legal.”

  “Legal.” His wife laughed softly. “Is you?”

  “Xerxes, he legal,” Scipio said, not liking the way this was going. “An’ I ain’t nobody but Xerxes. If I ain’t Xerxes, who is?”

  Bathsheba stopped laughing. “That ain’t the right question. Right question is, if you ain’t Xerxes, who you is?”

  “I done tol’ you everything.” Scipio didn’t like lying to Bathsheba. He lied here anyhow, and without hesitation. He liked talking about his years at Marshlands and his brief, hectic weeks in the Red Congaree Socialist Republic even less. He’d told her as little as he possibly could.

  Trouble was, she knew it. Her bed creaked again, this time because she shook her head. “All them years we been together, and I never knew you could talk that way. I never imagined it. I lived with you. I had your babies. And you done hid that from me. You hid all the things that . . . that made it possible for you to talk that way.” She didn’t usually speak with such precision herself, but then, she didn’t usually have to get across such a difficult idea, either. She was far from stupid—only ignorant. She went on, “It’s like I never really knew you at all. Somebody you’re in love with, that ain’t right.”

  “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 mi
ght 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 police. 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.

  Chester 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 w
eren’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.