The Victorious Opposition Read online

  “You’re more of a man than you think you are.” Sylvia pressed herself against him. “Do you think I’d want you to stay with me if you didn’t make me happy?”

  “Carpet munching,” he muttered. “A bull dyke could do it better than I can.”

  “But that’s not what I want,” Sylvia said. “What I want is you, and you’re plenty of man for me.” If he really believed it, maybe he wouldn’t be quite so ready to blow his brains out.

  He was mule-stubborn, though. “I am not plenty of man for me, sweetheart.” He finished the drink, got out of bed, got dressed, and left her apartment without another word and without a backwards glance. She wondered why that didn’t infuriate her, as it would have if some different man had done it. She couldn’t say. All she knew was, it didn’t.

  As things turned out, she was glad Ernie left, because she got a knock on the door about fifteen minutes later. She was in a housecoat by then, washing out the glasses that had held whiskey so she could put them away and so Mary Jane wouldn’t notice they’d been out. She’d already dumped Ernie’s cigarette butts down to the bottom of the wastepaper basket.

  “Who is it?” she called, wondering if a neighbor wanted to chat or to borrow something. It was a little late for that, but not impossibly so.

  “It’s me—George.” The voice was eerily like her dead husband’s. She’d thought so ever since George Jr. went from a boy to a man.

  She hurried to open the door. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Why aren’t you with Connie? Did you get drunk when your boat came back to T Wharf, and think you still live here instead of with your wife?”

  “No, Ma. I just had a couple of drinks,” he said, breathing whiskey fumes at her. Good, she thought. He’s less likely to notice the booze on my breath. He went on, “I know where I live and all just fine. I’ll go back there soon enough, too. But I wanted to stop by and say hello. You raised me, after all.”

  He was a big man, bigger than Ernie, wide-shouldered and solid and not at all inclined to talk frightening nonsense. How had he got so big? Hadn’t he been a little boy raising hell in the Coal Board offices just a few months ago? So it seemed to her, anyhow. Slowly, she answered, “I must have done something right back then. I couldn’t ask for a better son.”

  “Aw, Ma.” Now she’d embarrassed him—easier when whiskey helped make him maudlin. He paused for a moment, then went on, “I want you to be happy. Mary Jane and I both want you to be happy.”

  “You both make me happy,” Sylvia said. “You make me very happy.”

  “That’s good, Ma.” George Jr. hesitated again. “If . . . if you was to meet a fella who made you happy, neither one of us’d mind or anything. We talked it over one time. If he was a nice fella, I mean.”

  How much did they know about Ernie? Did they know anything? Sylvia thought Mary Jane might. Her daughter had never caught him here (though she’d come close a couple of times), but Sylvia wouldn’t have been surprised if the neighbors gossiped. What were neighbors good for besides gossiping?

  And how to answer George Jr.? Carefully, that was how. Sylvia said, “Well, that’s sweet of both of you. If I find somebody like that, I’ll remember what you said.” She shook her head. She needed to tell him a little more: “You know, I’m a grownup myself. If I want to look for a fellow, I don’t really need anybody’s permission to go ahead and do it.”

  “Oh, no. I know that. I didn’t mean you did. I just meant . . . you know. That we aren’t upset or anything.”

  Not that we wouldn’t be upset. They did know, then. Or they knew something, anyhow. Sylvia doubted they knew some of the things she’d been doing not too long before. Children always had trouble imagining their parents doing anything like that. And they wouldn’t know how Ernie was mutilated and some of the makeshifts Sylvia and he had to use.

  “As long as you’re happy, that’s what matters,” George Jr. said.

  “I am, dear,” she answered. Most of the time I am, anyhow. When Ernie starts talking about guns—that’s a different story.

  “All right, Ma.” Her son stooped and kissed her on the cheek. “I’m going to go on home. I hope they give me a little time before I have to head out again, but you never can tell.” He touched the brim of his low, flat cap and ducked out of the apartment where he’d grown up, the apartment that would never be his home again.

  The next morning, Sylvia left Mary Jane, who’d come in late, in bed asleep and went down to T Wharf to see what she could get in the way of seafood. With her husband and her son both fishermen, she had connections ordinary people could only envy. She bought some lovely scrod at a price that would have turned an ordinary housewife green, and, better yet, got the young cod without any jokes about the pluperfect subjunctive. She didn’t know how many times she’d heard those from fish dealers and fishermen. She did know it was too many.

  She was on her way back to the flat when someone called her name. She turned. “Oh,” she said. “Hello, Mr. Kennedy.”

  “Good morning to you, Mrs. Enos.” As always, Joseph Kennedy’s smile displayed too many teeth. It was not a friendly smile; it looked more like a threat. “So you prefer a hack writer to me, do you?”

  “Ernie’s no hack!” Sylvia said indignantly.

  “Anyone who writes an ‘as-told-to’ book is a hack,” Kennedy said, still smiling. He wanted to wound with those teeth; he wanted to bite. That Sylvia had said no to him was bearable as long as she said no to everyone else, too. That she’d said no to him and yes to somebody else . . . that irked him.

  “He’s a fine writer,” Sylvia said. “Times are hard. Everybody’s got to eat.”

  “Yes.” Kennedy made the word into a hiss. “Everybody does. The campaign will start early next year, since President Hoover’s going to run for reelection. You would have had a part in it, but. . . .” He shrugged. “You’d sooner have half a man.”

  Sylvia wanted to slap him in the face with a scrod. Instead, in a deadly voice, she answered, “Half of him makes a better man, and a bigger man, than all of you.”

  He went fishbelly pale under the brim of his boater. Sylvia hadn’t bothered keeping quiet. Several people sniggered. A woman pointed at Kennedy. He fled. Sylvia knew she’d pay later, but oh, triumph was sweet for now.

  The Alabama Correctional Camp (P) lay in the Black Belt, the cotton-growing part of the state, forty miles south of Montgomery and a hundred forty south of Birmingham. Except for his time in the Confederate Army and his stint down in the Empire of Mexico, Jefferson Pinkard had never been so far from home. The camp lay between cotton fields and pecan groves not far from a town of about a thousand people called Fort Deposit. Once upon a time, the fort had protected settlers from Indians. Now only the name was left to commemorate the stockade that had once stood there.

  Fort Deposit did boast a train station, a little clapboard building with a roof that hung out over the track so people could board and leave a train when it was raining. And raining it was when Pinkard stood on the rickety platform by the track waiting for the northbound Louisville and Nashville Railroad train to take him up to Birmingham. He wore his warden’s uniform, his Freedom Party pin on proud display on his left lapel. He kept hoping someone would want to argue politics, but nobody did.

  Up chugged the train. It wheezed to a halt, iron wheels squealing against iron rails. Most of the people who got off and boarded were Negroes with work-weary faces and cardboard luggage. A couple of cars up at the front of the train were for whites, though. Jeff climbed in and sat down in one of those. A few minutes later, the train rattled north again.

  Five hours later, the train came into the Louisville and Nashville station in Birmingham. The station was at Twentieth and Morris, only a few blocks west of the Sloss Works, where Pinkard had worked for so long. He took a cab back to his apartment closer to the center of town. The Freedom Party was picking up a good part of the tab for the place.

  He didn’t stay there long—only long enough to get out of uniform and
into the white shirt and butternut trousers of a Freedom Party stalwart. He wasn’t the only one wearing that almost-uniform who converged on Birmingham Party headquarters. Oh, no—far from it.

  Inside Caleb Briggs had already started talking, warming up the men for what they would be doing. “Tomorrow is election day,” rasped the dentist who headed the Party in Birmingham. His voice was only a ruin of its former self; he’d been gassed in the war, and he’d never recovered. “We got to make sure the fellows who get elected vote our way. All of ’em, y’all hear me?”

  “Freedom!” the men roared, Pinkard loud among them.

  Briggs nodded. “That’s right. Freedom. We’ve already got the House in Richmond, and we’ll keep it. But we got to get the Senate, too, and that’s tougher, on account of the state legislatures pick the Senators. So we have to take care of those. Y’all reckon we can do it?”

  “Yes!” the stalwarts shouted, and, “Hell, yes!” and a great many other things besides. The louder they yelled, the more excited they got.

  “Good.” Caleb Briggs grinned a wide, crooked grin. “Not so many Whig and Rad Lib gatherings as there used to be. But the Whigs are holding one tonight in Capitol Park, smack in the middle of town. We got to make sure they don’t go through with it, and that they don’t do any voting tomorrow. Make sure you grab your clubs and whatnot, and we aren’t going there to take prisoners.”

  As the men assembled for the march on the park, they told stories of other elections, other brawls. A lot of them talked about 1933, when Jake Featherston won the presidency. Pinkard was one of the smaller number who could talk about 1921, when Featherston almost won. Nobody talked about the presidential election of 1927; the Party had wandered in the wilderness then. Even Jeff, a stalwart among stalwarts, had wondered if it would ever emerge.

  Policemen tipped their hats to the advancing stalwarts. The dustup in the park that followed came almost as an anticlimax. The Whigs weren’t what they had been two years earlier. They’d been fighting for their lives then, and known it. Now . . . Now it was as if they sensed it was all over but the shouting. A few stubborn men fought hard to hold back the Freedom Party avalanche, but only a few. The rest fled. So did the Whig candidate for governor, and just in time. The stalwarts would surely have beaten him had they caught him, and they might have strung him up.

  “That’ll teach those sons of bitches,” somebody not far from Pinkard said.

  “Yeah.” Jeff nodded. “Not like it was in the old days, when the governor used to sic the National Guard on us to keep us from kicking up our heels.”

  “Folks know which side their bread is buttered on nowadays,” the other stalwart said. “And what the hell? We’re holding most of the bread now.”

  “That’s right.” Pinkard nodded again, emphatically. “And we’re going to get the rest of it, too.”

  He wished he could go to a saloon and have a few drinks with his comrades, but Alabama remained stubbornly dry. Instead, he went home and slept in his own bed for the first time in months. He’d got used to the hard military cot down at the Alabama Correctional Camp (P). His mattress seemed squashy by comparison, and he woke up with a stiff back. Grumbling, he made a cup of coffee—just about all he had in the place—and got into the stalwarts’ almost-uniform again.

  When he went back to Freedom Party headquarters, Caleb Briggs sent him to a polling place a few blocks away. “I don’t expect the police’ll enforce the electioneering limits,” Briggs rasped. “Case they do, don’t pick a fight with ’em. Here.” He handed Jeff and the other party men a sheet of newspaper-style photos of men’s faces. “See if y’all can keep these bastards from getting to the booth. They’re nothing but trouble-making trash.”

  Jeff grinned at the men with him. They were grinning, too. “You bet,” he said, and took a cudgel from among those stuffed into a sheet-metal trash can. He thwacked the bludgeon into the palm of his left hand. This was the enjoyable part of the job. He pulled a quarter from his pocket, too. “Gonna buy some doughnuts before we get there,” he said. “I’m empty inside.”

  The Confederate flag flew in front of an elementary-school auditorium. Sure enough, no one said a word, no policemen appeared, when the Freedom Party men stationed themselves right outside the door. Quite a few of the men going in to vote displayed Party pins, some without the black border that showed a new member, more with. They nodded and tipped their hats to the stalwarts as they went by. The call of “Freedom!” rang out again and again.

  About half past eight, Pinkard nudged the stalwart nearest him. “There’s one of the fuckers we’re supposed to stop.”

  “Right,” the other fellow said, and stepped into the would-be voter’s path. “You better get the hell out of here, buddy, you know what’s good for you.”

  “Are you saying I’m not allowed to exercise my Constitutional right to vote?” the man asked. He was bald, skinny, middle-aged, and wore a suit; he looked like a lawyer or somebody else too smart for his own good.

  “He said you better get lost,” Pinkard answered. “And you better, too, or you’ll be real sorry.”

  “I will—as soon as I vote.” The clever-looking guy started forward again.

  Maybe he had guts. Maybe he was too stupid to know what was coming. All four stalwarts set on him, bludgeons rising and falling. “Freedom!” they shouted as the blows thudded home. Pinkard added, “You should’ve listened, you dumb asshole. You gonna vote now?” The bald man’s wails rose above the thumps of the clubs and the stalwarts’ battle cries.

  At last, they let him go. He staggered away, face and scalp bloodied. He didn’t try to go into the polling place, which proved they hadn’t beaten all the brains out of him.

  They beat up three or four other men from their sheet of photos; several more abruptly discovered urgent business elsewhere on seeing them waiting. The stalwarts saluted one another with their blood-spattered bludgeons each time that happened. Schoolchildren watched one beating. They laughed and cheered the stalwarts on. No policemen came to bother them. Pinkard hadn’t expected that any would; the Party had been strong in police and fire departments across the CSA for years.

  When the polls closed, a couple of Jeff’s comrades headed home. He went back to Party headquarters. As he’d known they would, they had wireless sets blaring out election returns. They also had sandwiches and homebrew.

  Results from the Confederate states on the East Coast had a good start on those in Alabama and farther west. “Looks like the Freedom Party landslide that started two years ago is still rolling downhill, folks,” the announcer said. He sounded delighted with the news. People who didn’t sound delighted the Freedom Party was doing well didn’t last on the wireless. This fellow went on, “North Carolina’s going to have a new governor, a Freedom Party man. Same with Georgia. And Party candidates are picking up seat after seat in the legislatures in the Carolinas and Florida. That makes races for the Senate likely to go Freedom, too.”

  Jefferson Pinkard turned to the closest stalwart and raised his glass of beer. “Here’s to us, by Jesus! We’ve gone and done it. We sure as hell have.”

  “Looks like it,” the other Party man agreed. He sported a mouse under one eye. He must have run into a Whig with more gumption than most. Pinkard hadn’t.

  After a while, Alabama returns and others from the western part of the Confederacy started coming in along with those from the Eastern seaboard. The only state where the Freedom Party didn’t seem to be doing well was Louisiana, where the Radical Liberal governor had a solid organization of his own. Somebody not far from Jeff said, “He can laugh now, but that son of a bitch’ll pay before long. You can count on it.” Heads solemnly bobbed up and down, Pinkard’s among them.

  With restive Kentucky on its border, Tennessee went Freedom in a big way, and probably would have even without stalwarts outside polling places. With even more restless Sequoyah and stolen Houston on its borders, Texas voted Freedom more spectacularly still. Jeff went back to his apartment and t
o bed before many returns came in from Chihuahua and Sonora. For one thing, he was confident they’d turn out for the Party, too. For another, they were mostly greasers down there anyhow, and he’d had his fill of greasers fighting in the Empire of Mexico.

  He got on the train again the next day, to go back to the Alabama Correctional Camp (P). Newsboys shouted election results. “Freedom Party claims vetoproof majority in both houses of Congress!” was one cry.

  Conscious of a job well done, Jeff bought a paper. He read it as the train rumbled south from Birmingham. Then he let it fall to the floor and dozed: no, he didn’t sleep well in his own bed any more.

  He got rudely awakened just before the train pulled into Montgomery. He came within inches of getting killed. A bullet blew out the window by his seat, cracking past his head and spraying him with broken glass. More bullets stitched along the length of the car.

  “Down! Get down, goddammit!” he shouted, and dove between his seat and the one in front. Quite a few of the men in the car—likely the ones who’d seen combat during the war—did the same thing. Like him, they knew machine-gun fire when they heard it. Screams and wails said some of the bullets hadn’t missed—and that civilians were panicking. Before long, Pinkard’s hands and knees were wet and sticky with someone’s blood.

  The last time anybody’d shot up a train in which he was riding, it had been Negro rebels when he was a private on his way to put down one of the Socialist republics the blacks had proclaimed in Georgia. Who was it this time? The country between Birmingham and Montgomery was full of farms and plantations . . . and the plantations were full of Negroes.

  Coincidence? Or the start of a new uprising? Jeff didn’t know—he had no way of knowing—but he muttered under his breath.