The Center Cannot Hold ae-2 Read online

  Martial law meant no antigovernment propaganda. The Mormons and the government hadn't liked or trusted each other since the 1850s. They'd despised each other since the 1880s, and hated each other since 1915. That didn't look like changing any time soon. The government-and the Army-held the whip hand. If the posters didn't come down, the man on whose property they were displayed would be reckoned disloyal, and would have to pay for that disloyalty.

  Of course he's disloyal, Dowling thought. The only people in Utah who aren't disloyal are the ones who aren't Mormons-and we can't trust all of them, either. The Army didn't stop to ask a whole lot of questions about who was who back in 1915. We landed on everybody with both feet. So some of the gentiles haven't got any use for us, either. Well, too bad for them.

  As he walked down the block, he saw more bee posters. He nodded to the sergeant, who took down more addresses. One man was already out in front of his house with a bucket of hot water and a scraper, taking down the posters on his front fence. Dowling nodded to the noncom again, this time in a different way. That address didn't get taken.

  But when Dowling asked the man scraping away at the posters if he knew who'd put them up, the fellow just shook his head. "Didn't see a thing," he answered.

  He likely would have said the same thing if he'd given cups of coffee to the subversives who'd put the posters on his fence-not that pious Mormons would have either offered or accepted coffee. Even the locals who outwardly cooperated with U.S. authority weren't reliable, or anything close to it.

  With a sigh, Abner Dowling went on his way. He wasn't in the front lines against the Japanese. He probably never would be. But whenever he went out into Salt Lake City, he got reminded he was at war.

  "N o, Mister-uh-Martin. Sorry, sir." The clerk in the hiring office shook her head. "We aren't looking for anyone right now. Good luck somewhere else."

  "Thanks," Chester Martin said savagely. The clerk blushed and ran a sheet of paper into her typewriter so she wouldn't have to look at him.

  Jamming the brim of his cloth cap down almost to his eyes, Martin stalked out of the office. He didn't even slam the door behind him. He might come back to this steel mill again, and he didn't want them remembering him the wrong way.

  He wanted work. He wanted it so bad, he could taste it. But wanting and having weren't the same. Somewhere around one man in four in Toledo was out of a job. It was the same all over the country.

  He hadn't really expected to find work here, but he had to keep going through the motions. He'd been to every steel mill in town at least four times, with never the trace of a nibble. He'd been other places, too. He'd been to every kind of outfit that might need a strong back and a set of muscles. He'd had just as much luck at the plate-glass and cut-glass works, at the docks, at the grain mills, and even at the clover-seed market as he had in his proper line of work. Zero equaled zero. He didn't remember much of what he'd learned in school, but that was pretty obvious.

  A man in a colorless cloth cap shabbier than his own came up to him and held out a hand. Voice a sour whine, the man said, "Got a dime you can spare, pal?"

  Chester shook his head. "I don't have a job, either."

  The other man eyed him-here, plainly, was another fellow who'd lost his job early in the collapse. "You haven't been out of work all that long," he said. "You still think you'll get one pretty soon." The day was hot and muggy, but his laugh might have come from the middle of winter.

  "I have to," Martin said simply.

  "That's what I said," the other unemployed man replied. "That's just what I said. After a while, though, you find a Blackfordburgh isn't such a bad place. You just wait, buddy. You'll see." He tipped his shabby cap and walked on.

  With a shudder as if a goose had walked over his grave, Martin went on his way, too. He and Rita were still hanging on to their apartment, thanks to money borrowed from his folks. But he didn't know how long his father and mother would be able to go on helping them. If his father lost his job… Chester didn't even want to think about that. How could he help it, though, with so many men pounding the pavement looking for work? Guys just like me, he thought as his own feet slapped up and down, up and down, on the sidewalk.

  He had a long walk home. He didn't care. A long walk beat paying a nickel trolley fare. One of these days soon, though, he'd have to shell out some money to let the little old Armenian cobbler down the street repair his shoes. Walking wore on the soles as much as being out of work wore on the soul.

  Somebody on a soapbox-actually, on what looked like a beer barrel-was making a speech under the statue of Remembrance across from city hall. A couple of dozen men and a handful of women listened impassively as the fellow bawled, "We've got to hang all the damn Reds! They aren't real Americans-they never have been! And the Democrats are just as bad. No, worse, by thunder! They pretend they want us strong, but all they really aim to do is keep us weak! Half of 'em are in the Japs' pockets right this minute, so help me God they are!"

  He paused for applause. He didn't get much. Chester Martin kept walking. He supposed it was inevitable that hard times would spawn reaction, but this fellow seemed no threat to imitate what the Freedom Party was doing in the CSA. Just a noisy nut, Chester thought. It's not like we haven't got enough of those.

  VOTE SOCIALIST! posters a little farther on proclaimed. TOGETHER, WE HAVE POWER! they showed a brawny factory worker swinging a hammer under a bare electric bulb. Nowhere did they mention Hosea Blackford's name. It was as if they wanted to forget he was there while hoping he got reelected anyhow.

  COOLIDGE! The Democrats' posters weren't shy about naming their man. HE'LL FIX THINGS! they promised, and showed the governor of Massachusetts as a confident-looking physician at the bedside of a wan U.S. eagle. That wasn't fair, but it was liable to be effective. And the Democrats seemed not only willing but proud to tell the world who their presidential candidate was. They even had his running mate, a native Iowan with slicked-down hair, at his side handing him a stethoscope.

  Martin muttered under his breath. The depths to which the United States had fallen in the past three years and more truly made him wonder whether he'd done the right thing in turning Socialist after the Great War. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. He laughed, though it wasn't funny. For how many mistakes was that an excuse? About half the ones in the world, if he was any judge.

  But it had. With the big capitalists clamping down tight on labor in the rough days right after the war, voting Socialist had seemed the only way to hold his own. And it had worked. For ten years and more, the country stayed prosperous. But when prosperity died, it died painfully.

  Would the Democrats have let things get this bad? Chester pondered that as he tramped toward his apartment. He still had the letter Teddy Roosevelt had sent him after he was wounded. He'd met Roosevelt in the trenches during the war-had, in fact, jumped on the president and knocked him flat when the Confederates started shelling his position on the Roanoke front. Roosevelt hadn't forgotten him. TR's concern hadn't been based on class, as the Socialists' was. It had been personal. The Socialists sneered at such ties, saying they were like those of an old-time baron and his feudal retainers.

  Maybe the Socialists were right. Chester had no reason to believe they were wrong. Right or wrong, though, they'd done none too well themselves. Maybe personal ties really did count for more than those of class.

  "Damned if I know," Martin muttered. "Damned if I know anything any more, except that things are fouled up all to hell and gone."

  A woman coming the other way gave him an odd look. She didn't say anything. She just kept walking. The way things were nowadays, plenty of people went around talking to themselves.

  Martin opened the door to his apartment without having found any answers. He doubted anybody in the whole country had any answers. If anybody did have them, he would have been using them by now. Wouldn't he?

  Rita's voice floated out of the kitchen: "Hello, honey. How did it go?"

  "N. G.," Ches
ter answered. The two slangy initials summed up the way things were in the USA these days. The United States were no good, no good at all. He went on, "They aren't hiring. Big surprise, huh?"

  His wife came out of the kitchen, an apron around her waist. She gave him a hug and a kiss. "You've got to keep trying," she said. "We've both got to keep trying. Something's bound to turn up sooner or later."

  "Yeah." Martin hoped his voice didn't sound too hollow. He remembered the fellow who'd tried to panhandle from him, the one who'd said he was living in the local Blackfordburgh. With a shiver, Martin made himself shove that thought down out of sight. He tried to sound bright and cheerful as he asked, "What smells good?" He meant that; something sure did. They hadn't had any meat for a few days, but the aroma said they would this evening.

  "It's a beef heart." Rita did her best to sound bright and cheerful, too. "Mr. Gabrieli had 'em on special for practically nothing. I know they're tough, but if you stew 'em long enough they do get tender-well, more tender, anyhow. And I could afford it."

  "All right," Chester said. "It does smell good." Since he'd lost his job, he'd found out about tripe and giblets and head cheese and other things he hadn't eaten before. Some of them turned out to be pretty good-giblets, for instance. He wouldn't get a taste for tripe if he lived to be a hundred. He ate it, because sometimes it was that or no meat at all. Sometimes-a lot of the time-it was no meat at all. Maybe the beef heart would prove tasty.

  It proved… not too bad. No matter how long Rita cooked it, it remained chewy, with a faintly bitter taste. But it satisfied in ways cabbage and potatoes and noodles couldn't. "Here's hoping Mr. Gabrieli has it on special again before too long," Chester said. Rita nodded. Unspoken was the painful truth that, if even a cheap cut like beef heart wasn't on sale, they couldn't afford it.

  When morning came, Martin went out looking for work again. He actually found some: hauling bricks from trucks to a construction site. It was harder work than any on a foundry floor, and didn't pay nearly so well. For a full day of it, he made two and a half dollars. But coming home with any money at all in his pocket felt wonderful-good enough to let him forget how weary he was.

  And, when he set the coins and bills in front of his wife, she was delighted, too. "Will there be more tomorrow?" she asked hopefully.

  "I don't know," he answered. "But you can bet I'm going to go back and find out."

  He made sure he got to the construction site early. He didn't get there early enough, though. By the time he came up, a couple of hundred men already clamored for work. Toledo cops did their best to keep order. Chester had played football against one of the policemen. "How about a break, pal?" he said. "Let me slide up toward the front? I could really use the job."

  The cop shook his head. "Can't do it," he said. "Everybody else here is hungry, too. Playing favorites'd be worth my neck."

  He was probably right. That made Martin no less bitter. Knowing he had no chance for work there, he went off to look for it somewhere else. He had no luck, not even when he offered to help a truck driver bring crates of vegetables into a store for a quarter.

  "No, thanks. I'll do it myself," the driver said. "If I give you a quarter, I lose money on the haulage." He stacked more crates-all of them with fancy labels glued to one side-on a dolly and wheeled them into the grocery. When he came out again, he said, "You that hungry?"

  "Hell, yes," Martin said without hesitation. "I'd do damn near anything for a real job again."

  "You ought to go to California, then," the driver said. "That's where this stuff comes from, and they grow so goddamn much out there, they're always looking for pickers and such. Weather's a damn sight better than it is here, too."

  "Probably doesn't pay anything," Chester said. "If it sounds so good, why aren't you on your way yourself?"

  "Believe me, buddy, I'm thinking about it," the truck driver said. "There are times when I don't want to see another snowflake as long as I live, you know what I mean?"

  "Yeah," Martin admitted. "I do. But California? It's a hell of a long way, and who knows what things are really like out there?"

  "Only one way to find out." The driver set more crates on the dolly. The spicy odors of oranges and lemons filled the air. They were, in their own way, better arguments than anything he could have said.

  "California," Chester muttered as he went off to see what else he could scrounge in Toledo. Pickings were slim. Pickings, in fact, couldn't have been any slimmer. Would they be any better on the far side of the country? He shrugged. Maybe that was the wrong question. Maybe the right question was, how could they be worse?

  Up till now, Flora Blackford had never been to the West Coast. When she got off the train in Los Angeles, she was surprised to find it was ninety degrees in the second week of October. She was even more surprised to discover that ninety-degree weather could be pleasant, not the humid hell it would have been in New York City or Philadelphia or Washington-or Dakota, for that matter.

  She joined her husband on the platform at the station. President Blackford was smiling and shaking hands with well-wishers. "Four more years!" people chanted. Patriotic red-white-and-blue bunting was draped everywhere Socialist red bunting wasn't.

  Vice President Hiram Johnson said, "Welcome to the Golden State, Mr. President. We're doing everything we can to make sure we deliver the goods three weeks from now."

  "Thanks very much, Hiram," Hosea Blackford replied with a gracious smile. The two Socialist stalwarts stood side by side as photographers snapped pictures. Flora wondered what the captions to those pictures would say; the Los Angeles Times didn't love the Socialist Party.

  "Your limousine is waiting, Mr. President-Mrs. Blackford." Johnson suddenly seemed to remember that Flora existed.

  Escorted by police cars with wailing sirens, the limousine made its slow way from Remembrance Station to the Custer Hotel. The bright sunshine, the clear blue sky, and the palm trees made everything seem wonderful at first glance. The grinding despair of the business downturn might have been on the other side of the world, or at least on the other side of the United States.

  It might have been, but it wasn't. Even in the couple of miles from the station to the hotel, Flora saw a soup kitchen, a bread line, and a lot of men in worn clothes aimlessly wandering the streets. Thanks to the mild weather, getting by without a roof over their heads was far easier in Los Angeles than in, say, Chicago.

  Recognizing the president in the open motorcar, one of those men who looked to have nowhere to go shouted, "Coolidge!"

  "Ignore him," Vice President Johnson said quickly.

  "It's a free country," Blackford said with a smile. "He can speak up for whichever candidate he pleases. Certainly is a pretty day. I can see why so many people are coming here. We don't have Octobers like this in Dakota, believe you me we don't."

  Another man, this one wearing a tweed jacket out at the elbows, pointed at the limousine and yelled, "Shame!"

  This time, Hiram Johnson tried to pass off the heckling with an uneasy chuckle. Hosea Blackford said, "I have nothing to feel ashamed about. I've done everything I could from the moment this crisis began to try to repair it. I defy any citizen of either major party-or any Republican, either, for that matter-to show me anything I might have done and have not."

  Flora reached out and set her hand on top of her husband's. She knew he was telling the truth. She also knew the toll the business collapse had taken on him. He'd aged cruelly in the three and a half years since taking the oath of office. She sometimes wished Coolidge had won the election in 1928. Then all of this would have come down on his head, and Hosea would have been spared the torment of fighting a disaster plainly too big for any one man to overcome.

  At the Custer Hotel, a woman reporter called, "Why aren't we doing more in the war against the Japanese?"

  "We're doing everything we can, Miss Clemens, I assure you," Blackford answered. "This is a war of maneuver, you must understand. It isn't a matter of huge masses slamming together, as t
he Great War was."

  "Why weren't we ready to fight a war like that?" Ophelia Clemens persisted.

  "We'll win it," he said. "That's what counts."

  He and Flora managed to get to their suite without too many more questions. She tipped the swarthy porter-he spoke with a Spanish accent, and might have been born in the Empire of Mexico. As soon as the fellow left, Hosea Blackford collapsed on the bed. "For the love of God, fix me a drink," he said.

  "As soon as I find where they're hiding the liquor, I will," she said. "And I'm going to make myself one, too." She held up the whiskey bottle in triumph when she pulled it out of a cabinet. Her husband clapped his hands. The ice bucket was right out in plain sight. So were glasses. Whiskey over ice didn't take long.

  "Thank you, dear." Hosea sat up and downed half his drink at a gulp. He let out a long, weary sigh, then spoke two words: "We're screwed."

  "What?" Flora choked on her whiskey. She hoped she'd heard wrong. She hoped so, but she didn't think so. "What did you say?" she asked, on the off chance she really had been wrong.

  "I said, we're screwed," the president of the United States replied. "Calvin Coolidge is going to mop the floor with me. Calvin goddamn Coolidge." He spoke in sour, disgusted wonder. "Half the time, no one's even sure if he has a pulse, and he's going to clean my clock. Isn't this a swell old world?" He finished the drink and held out the glass. "Make me another one, will you?"

  "You've got a speech in a couple of hours, you know," Flora warned.

  "Yes, and I'll be all right," her husband said. "Not that it would make a dime's worth of difference if I strode in there drunk as a lord. How could things be any worse than they are already?"

  He'd never shown despair till that moment. He hadn't had much hope, but he'd always put the best face he could on it. No more. As Flora poured whiskey into the glass, she said, "You can still turn things around."

  "Fat chance," he said. "I couldn't win this one if they caught Coolidge in flagrante delicto with a chorus girl. Probably not even if they caught him in flagrante with a chorus boy, for heaven's sake. Blackfordburghs." He spat the name out in disgust. "How can I win when my name's gone into the dictionary as the definition for everything that's wrong with the whole country?"