The Center Cannot Hold ae-2

by Harry Turtledove

  "I don't know what it says, but I'll tell you what I say," Cincinnatus answered, giving back a jaundiced glance of his own: Achilles was getting altogether too mouthy these days. "What I say is, you can complain as much as you please, but you don't recollect enough about Kentucky to know when you's well off."

  Elizabeth nodded. She used her fork to pull a clove out of her slice of beef tongue. "Your father, he right," she said, and took a bite.

  At seventeen, Achilles was ready to lock horns with anybody over anything. "What do you two know about it?" he said. "Way you talk, it doesn't sound like you know anything." His own accent was ever more like a white Iowan's these days.

  Cincinnatus said, "You're right." That startled Achilles; his father didn't say it very often. Cincinnatus went on, "You know why we talk like we do? You ever wonder 'bout that? Don't reckon so. It's on account of there weren't no schools for black folks there, on account of my ma and pa, and your mother's, too, they was slaves when they was little. Never had no chance to learn like you got here. I'm lucky I had my letters at all. You know that?"

  "I better know it," Achilles said sullenly. "You go on about it all the time."

  "Mebbe I do. But you better pay some attention, son. You go complainin' 'bout Iowa, you don't know when you's well off."

  Achilles got up from the table even though he hadn't finished supper. He stormed away. Amanda stared after him. She was still young enough to be convinced her parents had all the answers, not to be dedicated to proving they didn't. "Oh, my," she said softly.

  "Mebbe you laid it on too thick," Elizabeth said.

  "Mebbe I did," Cincinnatus answered with a shrug. "Mebbe-but I don't think so. He got to see he don't know everything there is to know jus' yet."

  His wife smiled. "When you was his age, didn't you reckon you knowed everything, too, jus' like him?"

  " 'Course I did," Cincinnatus said. "My pa thrashed it out o' me. I don't like hittin' a boy that size-he ain't far from a man, even if he ain't as close as he thinks. I don't like it… but if I got to, I got to." Deliberately, he made himself take a bite of tongue. He usually liked it; it had been a treat when he was growing up. But anger spoiled the flavor.

  "You got his goat, but he got yours, too," Elizabeth said.

  He started to deny it, then realized he couldn't. He let out a long sigh. "Yeah, he done did." He raised his voice: "Come on back an' eat your supper, Achilles. I won't talk no more 'bout politics if you don't." That was as far as he was willing to go.

  From the long silence that followed, he wondered if it was far enough to satisfy his son. At last, though, Achilles said, "All right, Pa. That's fair enough." He returned to the table.

  "Probably ain't even had time yet to get cold," Elizabeth said.

  "No, Ma. It's fine." As if to prove as much, Achilles made tongue and potatoes and carrots disappear. "Mighty good," he said. "May I have some more, please?" He had manners when he remembered to use them.

  "I'll get it for you," Elizabeth said. She turned to Cincinnatus as soon as she'd picked up Achilles' plate. "He sure do like his food."

  "That's true." Cincinnatus wasn't sure it was a compliment, especially during hard times, but he could hardly deny it.

  After supper, Achilles went off to do his homework. He'd never lost his liking for school. That pleased Cincinnatus-pleased him all the more because, even though Achilles seemed to want to disagree with everything he said, his son hadn't rejected the idea that education was a good thing.

  The next morning, Cincinnatus scrambled into his Ford truck and hurried out to the railroad yards. He got there before the sun came up, but he wasn't the first man there looking for whatever hauling business he could get. These days, cargo wasn't always the only thing that traveled in boxcars. As a freight train pulled into the yard, a couple of men in tattered clothes leaped down even before it had completely stopped. They started running.

  They didn't disappear quite fast enough. "Come back here, you sons of bitches!" a railway dick shouted. He had a nightstick and a. 45 on his belt. Feet pounding on gravel, he lumbered after the fleeing freeloaders.

  "Gotta be crazy to ride the rails like that," Cincinnatus said to the conductor with whom he was dickering over the price of hauling a load of office furniture to the State Capitol.

  "Gotta be desperate, anyway," the conductor answered. "Why the hell anybody who was ridin' would want to get off in Des Moines…" He shrugged. "I don't know about crazy, but you sure gotta be stupid."

  As he had with Achilles, Cincinnatus said, "This ain't a bad town, suh. Beats Covington, Kentucky, all hollow, and that's the truth."

  "Well, sure, if that's what you're comparing it to," the other man said with a laugh. "But you run it up against Los Angeles or San Francisco or Portland or Seattle or Denver or Albuquerque or… You get the idea what I'm saying, buddy? I've seen all them places. I know what I'm talking about."

  Cincinnatus knew his standards of comparison were limited. He was familiar with Des Moines, and with Covington, and with very little else. He knew Cincinnati a little, as it lay right across the Ohio from Covington. But San Francisco might have been on the far side of the moon, for all he knew of it. The newspaper had talked about building a bridge across the Golden Gate one day. That didn't mean much to Cincinnatus, either. He knew rivers, and bridges over rivers. The Pacific Ocean? He'd never even seen a lake-not a big one, anyhow.

  He got back to the business at hand: "I may not know nothin' 'bout them places, Mistuh Gideon, but I knows haulin', and I knows I got to have another dollar to make this here trip worthwhile."

  He ended up with another four bits. That was less than he'd hoped for, more than enough to make the journey worth his while. He stacked desks and swivel chairs and oak file cabinets in the back of the Ford till it wouldn't hold any more and the springs wouldn't bear much more. For good measure, he squeezed two more swivel chairs into the cabin with him.

  The conductor nodded approval. "One thing I always got to give you, Cincinnatus-you work like a bastard."

  "Thank you kindly." To Cincinnatus, that was high praise.

  Getting to the Capitol took only a few minutes; it lay not far south of the railroad yards-like them, on the east side of the Des Moines River, across the river from Cincinnatus' apartment building. The gilded dome atop the ornate building was a landmark visible all over town. For that matter, since the Iowa countryside was so flat, the dome was visible from quite a ways outside of town, too.

  Men in fancy suits, bright silk neckties, and expensive homburgs-legislators, lawyers, lobbyists-climbed the stairs to the Capitol's front entrance. Times might be hard, but men of that stripe seldom suffered. They were, of course, uniformly white. Cincinnatus, with his black skin, dungarees, wool sweater, and soft cloth cap, drove past the front entrance with hardly a glance. He pulled up at the freight entrance and backed his truck up to the loading dock.

  A white man in an outfit almost identical to his own came over to the truck, clipboard in hand. "How you doin', Cincinnatus?" he said.

  "Not too bad, Lou." Even after most of a decade in Des Moines, calling a white man by his first name still wasn't something Cincinnatus did casually. His upbringing in Confederate Kentucky ran deep. "How's yourself?"

  "Damn cold weather makes my wound ache." Lou set a hand on his haunch. "If I'd known getting shot in the ass would stick with me so long, I wouldn't've left it up there for them Confederate sons of bitches to aim at. I'd've stuck my head up instead-ain't like I got the brains to worry about gettin' 'em blown out." He pointed to the truck. "So what the hell you got for us this time?"

  "Office furniture," Cincinnatus told him.

  " 'Bout time that shit started gettin' here," Lou declared. "All them fancy-pants bastards in there who waste our money been bellyachin' like you wouldn't believe about how their goddamn desk drawers squeak and they can't screw their secretaries on the old swivel chairs." Lou respected nothing and nobody, least of all the elected and appointed officials of the gr
eat state of Iowa.

  Cincinnatus, on the whole a straitlaced man, hadn't thought about screwing in a chair, swivel or otherwise. Now that he did, he liked the idea-provided he and Elizabeth could both be home at the same time while their children weren't, which might not prove easy to arrange. He got out of the truck with a clipboard of his own. "I got papers for you to sign off on."

  Lou laughed and flourished his clipboard, which made the papers on it flutter. "Listen, pal, this here is state business. I got more papers'n you do, and you can take that to the bank. Ain't nobody in the goddamn world got more papers'n you need to do state business, unless maybe it's them cocksuckers in Philly."

  Again, Cincinnatus knew nothing about the habits, sexual or bureaucratic, of Philadelphians. From other trips to the State Capitol, he did know how many papers he'd have to sign before his delivery was official. "Let's get on with it," he said resignedly, and signed and signed and signed. Lou went through the relative handful of papers on Cincinnatus' clipboard in nothing flat.

  Once Cincinnatus had got to the bottom of Lou's pile of paperwork, he asked, "What do they do with all these here forms?"

  "Let the mice chew 'em up-what the hell you think?" Lou answered. He raised his voice to a full-throated bellow: "Ivan! Paddy! Luigi! Get your asses over here, and get this crap outa my buddy's truck! You think he's got all day?" The workmen descended on the truck. Lou pulled a flask from his hip pocket-the opposite side from his war wound. "Want a snort?"

  Iowa was a dry state that took being dry very, very seriously. That didn't stop liquor from getting made there or smuggled in. Cincinnatus' experience was that it did keep good liquor from entering the state. The nip he took from Lou's flask did nothing to change his mind. "Do Jesus!" he said when he recovered the power of speech. "Tastes like paint thinner an' possum piss."

  "I'm gonna tell that to my brother-in-law," Lou said, laughing. "He cooked up the shit."

  "He don't like you in particular, or he don't like nobody?" Cincinnatus asked, still trying to get his breath back. Lou laughed again, and aimed a lazy mock punch at him. As lazily, he ducked. He tried to imagine himself sassing a white man like that back in Kentucky-tried and felt himself failing.

  Lou asked, "You got the whole kit and caboodle here, or is there more of this shit back on the train?"

  "There's more, plenty more. Some o' them fellers should be bringin' it any time. Soon as you get me unloaded, I'm goin' back, see if I can get me another load."

  "I'll give you another slug of this stuff when you get back." Lou patted the pocket with the flask.

  "Damn good reason to stay away," Cincinnatus said. Lou laughed yet again, for all the world as if he'd been joking.

  J onathan Moss wasn't used to getting shaken awake at two in the morning. "Wuzzat?" he said muzzily. He wasn't used to waking up under any circumstances without a steaming cup of coffee or three at his elbow to make the transition easier.

  Laura's voice, however, turned out to do the job well enough: "Jonathan, you'd better take me to the hospital now, because the pains are only four minutes apart, and they're getting stronger."

  "Jesus!" Moss sat bolt upright. "Why didn't you tell me a while ago?"

  His wife shrugged. "I've watched plenty of cows and sows and ewes give birth. I know what happens, as well as you can till it happens to you. I wasn't going anywhere much. Now I am-and so we'd better get moving."

  "Right," he said. They'd packed a bag for her a couple of days earlier. He had clothes draped over the chair, ready to throw on. As he got out of bed, he gave her a kiss. "Congratulations, sweetheart. You're saving us some money."

  "I'm not doing it on purpose, believe me," Laura said.

  "I know." The lawyerly part of Moss' mind operated automatically. "But if Junior'd waited another week and a half, it would've been 1933, and then we couldn't write him off this year's taxes."

  Having doffed her long wool nightgown, Laura was putting on a long wool maternity dress. A tent would have had no more material and been no less stylish. She draped a coat over the dress; it was snowing outside. "Somehow or other, taxes aren't my biggest worry right this minute," she said, her voice as chilly as the weather.

  Moss lit a cigarette and patted her on the bottom. "Really, babe? Why is that, do you think?" She did her best to make her glare withering. He did his best not to wither.

  Going downstairs was another adventure. He carried the case in one hand and held his wife's hand with the other. She had to pause on the stairs while a labor pain passed. He didn't want to think about what would happen if she fell. He didn't want to, and so he didn't. He did, however, let out a loud sigh of relief after they made it to the lobby, went down a few more stairs, and reached the sidewalk.

  His breath would have smoked without the cigarette. When he inhaled, the air cut like knives. In conversational tones, Laura remarked, "The auto had better start, don't you think?"

  "What, you don't want to hang around waiting for a cab?" Moss said, which earned him another glare. He opened the Bucephalus' door and carefully handed her in, then flung the overnight bag onto the back seat.

  He slid behind the wheel and slammed his door shut. That got him out of the icy wind. When he turned the key, he uttered something between a prayer and a curse. Past two on a cold winter night… Would the engine turn over?

  The starter made a grinding noise. The engine didn't start. He tried again. Still no luck. "Come on, you goddamn fucking son of a bitch," he growled, wishing for a groundcrew man to spin the prop.

  Laura looked down at her swollen stomach. "Don't listen to him," she advised the baby. "Hold your hands over your ears. He's just a barbarous Yank, and he doesn't know any better."

  "I don't know any better than to keep driving this miserable old rattletrap," Moss said, and twisted the key once more, with savage force.

  Grind… Grind… Grind… He was about to throw up his hands in despair when the engine belched like a man after three quick beers. He came down hard on the gas, hoping, hoping… Another belch, and then a full-throated roar. Steam and smoke poured from the tailpipe.

  "There is a God!" Moss shouted.

  "I should hope so," Laura said, "and I doubt He's very amused at what you said a minute ago."

  "Too darn bad," Moss said; now that the Bucephalus had started, he was willing to make his language less incandescent. But he didn't back down: "I wasn't very amused with Him a few minutes ago, either."

  "Jonathan, I think-" What ever his wife thought was lost as another labor pain seized her. When she could speak again, she said, "I think you'd better get me to the hospital as fast as you can."

  "I will," he promised. "I want to make sure the engine warms up before I put it in gear, though. If it quits on me, that would be.. not so good." Laura nodded. They might argue about a good many things, but she wasn't going to disagree with that.

  Even though the streets of Berlin were almost deserted, he drove with great care. Skidding on snow would have been bad any time. Skidding on snow while his wife was in labor was one more thing he didn't care to contemplate.

  Beside him, Laura let out a sharp hiss. She couldn't say anything more for most of a minute. At last, she managed, "I won't be sorry for the ether cone or what ever it is they give you to make the pain go away."

  "We're almost there," he said. Nothing in Berlin was too far from anything else. He could have driven for quite a while longer in Chicago. Of course, Chicago also boasted more hospitals than Berlin's one.

  As he took Laura toward the door, another auto pulled up behind his: a flivver even more spavined than his Bucephalus. The woman who got out was as extremely pregnant as Laura. Her husband said, "They can't pick two in the afternoon to do this, eh?"

  "Doesn't seem that way," Moss agreed.

  Nurses took the two women off to the maternity ward. Moss and the other man stayed behind to cope with the inevitable paperwork. After they'd dotted the last i and crossed the last t, another nurse guided them to the waiting room, whic
h boasted a fine selection of magazines from 1931. Moss sat down on a chair, the other fellow on the leatherette sofa. They both reached for cigarettes, noticed the big, red NO SMOKING! FIRE HAZARD! signs at the same time, and put their packs away with identical sighs.

  "Nothing to do but wait," the other man said. He was in his mid-twenties-too young to have fought in the Great War. More and more men these days were too young to have fought in the war. Moss felt time marching on him-felt it all the more acutely because so many of his contemporaries had gone off to fight but hadn't come home again.

  Nodding now, he said, "I wonder how long it'll be."

  "You never can tell," his companion said. "Our first one took forever, but the second one came pretty quick."

  "This is our first one," Moss said.

  "Congratulations," the other man said.

  "Thanks." Moss yawned enormously. "I wish they had a coffeepot in here." Then he looked at the NO SMOKING! FIRE HAZARD! signs again. "Well, maybe not, not unless you want cold coffee."

  "I wonder why it's a fire hazard," the Canadian said.

  "Ether, maybe," Moss answered, remembering what Laura had said just before they got to the hospital. He sniffed. All he smelled was a hospital odor: strong soap, disinfectant, and a faintest hint of something nasty underneath.

  They waited. Moss looked at the clock. The younger Canadian man did the same. After a while, he said, "You're a Yank, aren't you?"

  "That's right," Jonathan admitted, wondering if he should have tried to lie. But his accent had probably given him away. American and Canadian intonations were close, but not identical.

  Another pause. Then the Canadian asked, "Is your wife a Yank, too?"

  Moss laughed. "No, she's about as Canadian as can be. Her first husband was a Canadian soldier, but he didn't come back from the war."

  "Oh," the younger man said, and then shrugged. "None of my business, really."

  Most Americans would have kept on peppering Moss with questions. Canadians usually showed more reserve, as this one had. Of course, some Canadians still wanted to throw all the Americans in their country back south of the border once more. Moss knew his own wife was one of them. If they hadn't been lovers, if she hadn't warned him of the rebellion a few years before, that might have been worse. He might have got caught in it, too, instead of coming through unscathed.