The Victorious Opposition

by Harry Turtledove

  After supper, they played double solitaire and slapped each other’s hands grabbing the cards. A lot of the fellows at work didn’t talk about anything but what they’d heard on the wireless the night before. Chester would have liked to have a wireless set himself. They were a lot cheaper than they had been only a few years before. If he kept working steadily, he could start saving for one—if that money didn’t have to go to his brother-in-law instead.

  How do you get ahead? he wondered. Christ, how do you even stay where you are? Socialists talked about capitalism pushing the bourgeoisie down into the proletariat. He’d never been bourgeois (a steelworker in Toledo? not likely!), but he knew what being declassed was all about just the same. It had frightened him into abandoning Socialism and voting Democratic—once. He didn’t think he would do that again.

  Rita started yawning before nine-thirty. That disappointed Chester, who’d hoped to persuade her to play something more exciting than double solitaire. She gave back a rather wan smile when he slipped an arm around her waist. Still, despite another yawn, she didn’t say no. But she did yelp when he started playing with her breasts. “Careful,” she said. “They’ve been awfully sore lately.”

  “Sorry, hon,” he said. “I know they get that way sometimes when it’s right before your. . . .” He paused and thought back. “When was your last time of the month?” He didn’t always keep close track, but he did think she hadn’t had to mess with pads for quite a while now.

  Sure enough, she said, “Early last month—I’m late. I didn’t want to say anything till I was sure, but I’m pretty sure now.”

  “A baby?” That squeak in Chester’s voice was fear, all right. On top of everything else, how were they supposed to feed a baby? He wasn’t even sure this apartment building allowed them. “How did that happen?”

  “The usual way, I’m pretty sure,” Rita answered. “We can call him Broken Rubber Martin.” Chester laughed. He hadn’t thought he could. And he almost forgot about other things till Rita said, “Aren’t you going to go on? It feels nice, as long as you don’t squeeze too hard.”

  “Does it?” Chester did go on. By the small sounds his wife made, it did feel nice. Before too long, he started to reach into the nightstand drawer for a safe. That made him laugh again. Why lock the barn door if the horse was long gone? He went ahead without one. And that felt mighty nice, too. No matter how good it felt, though, he started worrying again the second they finished. Rita fell asleep right away. He worried for a long time.

  Clarence Potter looked into the mirror over the sink in his apartment. He thought he looked pretty sharp: polka-dot bow tie, white shirt with blue pinstripes, cream-colored linen jacket to fight the summer heat and humidity of Charleston, straw boater cocked at a jaunty angle. Then he let out a sour laugh. How he looked wouldn’t matter a dime’s worth when he got to the Whig meeting tonight. Nobody there would listen to him. Nobody there ever did.

  He sometimes wondered why he kept going. Pigheadedness, he supposed. No, more than pigheadedness these days. He also had the feeling that somebody had to do something about the Freedom Party. If the Whigs didn’t, if they couldn’t, he didn’t see anyone else who could.

  That cool linen jacket also concealed a shoulder holster. Nobody had tried to give him a hard time yet. But he knew he was on a Freedom Party list. The Party was thorough, if not always swift. Some people had already disappeared. Potter didn’t intend to go quietly. If the stalwarts wanted him, they would have to pay the price for him.

  Out the door he went, whistling. No one lurked at the bottom of the stairs or, when he checked, out on the street. He nodded to himself. They were less likely to drop on him away from his flat, because they had more trouble knowing exactly where he was then. If they didn’t want him now, they likely wouldn’t for the rest of the day. Whistling still, he walked on toward Whig headquarters.

  A couple of blocks from the headquarters, he ran into Braxton Donovan, who was heading in the same direction. The lawyer nodded. He had more patience with Potter than most local Whigs did.

  “How goes it, shyster?” Potter asked. “They still haven’t decided to call you a political and run you in?”

  “Not yet,” Donovan answered. He was a ruddy, fleshy man with an impressive pompadour. “Of course, now that the Supreme Court is gone, they’re liable to get rid of all the others next, and then where will I be?”

  “Up the creek,” Potter answered, and Braxton Donovan ruefully nodded. Potter went on, “Why couldn’t people see it’s a damnfool thing to do, electing a party that said ahead of time it wouldn’t play by the rules once it got in?”

  “Because too many people don’t care,” Donovan said. He pulled out his pocket watch. Carrying one made him on the old-fashioned side—a typical attitude for a Whig. Potter, following postwar fashion, preferred a wristwatch. Donovan said, “We’re early. You want to stop at the saloon across the street and hoist a couple?”

  “Twist my arm,” Potter said, holding it out. Donovan did, not too hard. “I give up,” Potter announced at once. “Let’s hoist a couple.”

  But when they turned the corner, they found a line of gray-uniformed policemen and Freedom Party stalwarts in white and butternut, the cops with drawn pistols—a couple of them had submachine guns instead—and the stalwarts with bludgeons, stretched in front of the entrance to the Whig meeting hall. Angry Whigs milled about on the sidewalk and in the street, but nobody was going inside.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Potter said. Against a dozen policemen and twice that many stalwarts, the pistol under his left arm suddenly seemed a lot less important.

  “I don’t know, but I intend to find out.” Braxton Donovan strode forward. In his fullest, roundest, plummiest courtroom voice, he demanded, “What is the meaning of this?”

  One of the cops pointed a submachine gun at the lawyer’s belly. Donovan stopped, most abruptly. A burst from a weapon like that could cut him in half. The policeman said, “No more political meetings. That there’s our orders, and that there’s what we’re gonna make sure of.”

  “But you can’t do that,” Donovan protested. “It’s against every law on the books.”

  “Braxton . . .” Potter said urgently. He took his friend’s arm.

  Donovan shook him off. “You want to listen to this other feller here,” the cop said. This time, he didn’t point the submachine gun—he aimed it. “By order of the governor in the interest of public safely, all political meetings except for the Freedom Party’s are banned till after the election.”

  One of the stalwarts added, “And for as long as we feel like after that, too.” Several of his buddies laughed.

  Potter wondered whether Donovan would have a stroke right there on the spot. “Good God, are you people nuts?” the lawyer said. “I can go to Judge Shipley and get an injunction to stop this nonsense in thirty seconds flat. And then I file the lawsuits.”

  He was plainly convinced he had the big battalions on his side. The policeman, just as plainly, was convinced he didn’t. So were the stalwarts. With a nasty grin, the one who’d spoken before said, “Judge Shipley resigned last night. Reasons of health.” He leered.

  What was going on had got through to Clarence Potter a little while before. The old rules didn’t hold any more. In the new ones, the Freedom Party held—had grabbed—all the high cards. He watched Braxton Donovan figure that out. Donovan had been red, almost purple. Now he went deathly pale. “You wait till after the election,” he whispered. “The people won’t stand for this. They’ll throw you out on your ear.”

  The policeman’s finger twitched on the trigger of the submachine gun. Donovan flinched. The cop laughed. So did the Freedom Party stalwarts, in their crisp not-quite-uniforms. One of them said, “You don’t get it, do you, pal? We are the people.”

  “I am going to declare this here an illegal assembly,” the policeman said. “If you folks don’t disperse, we will arrest you. Jails are crowded places these days. A lot of you big talkers
end up in ’em for a lot longer than y’all expect. Run along now, or you’ll be sorry.”

  Across the street and into the saloon counted as dispersing. Potter ordered a double gin and tonic, Braxton Donovan a double whiskey. “They can’t do that,” he said, tossing back the drink.

  “They just did,” Clarence Potter observed. “Question is, what can we do about it?”

  Another Whig who’d taken refuge in the saloon said, “We’ve got to fight back.”

  “Not here,” the bartender said. “You start talking politics in here, I get in trouble. I don’t want no trouble. I don’t want no trouble with nobody. Neither does the owner. You keep quiet about that stuff or I got to throw y’all out.”

  “This is how it goes,” Potter said.

  “How what goes?” Donovan asked.

  “How the country goes—down the drain,” Potter said. “The Freedom Party is doing its best to make sure we don’t have elections any more—or, if we do, they don’t mean anything. Its best is pretty goddamn good, too.” He spoke in a low voice, in deference to the harassed-looking barkeep. Even that was an accommodation to what the Freedom Party had already accomplished.

  Donovan snorted. “They won’t get away with it. And when they do lose an election, there won’t be enough jails to hold all of them, not even at the rate they’re building.”

  “I hope you’re right. I hope so, but I wouldn’t count on it,” Potter said. “Jake Featherston worries me. He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s a shrewd son of a bitch. The way he went after the Supreme Court . . . People will be studying that one for the next fifty years. Pass a law that’s popular but unconstitutional, make the Court make the first move, and then land on it with both feet. Nobody much has complained since, not that I’ve heard.”

  “Who would dare, with the stalwarts ready to beat you if you try?”

  But Potter shook his head. “It’s more than that. If he’d really riled people when he did it, they would scream. They’d do more than scream. They’d stand up on their hind legs and tell him to go to hell. But they don’t. Going ahead with that river project has given thousands of people jobs. It’s given millions of people hope—hope for electricity, hope the rivers won’t wash away their farms and their houses. They care more about that than they do about whether the bill’s constitutional.”

  “Nonsense,” Braxton Donovan said. “What could be more important than that?”

  “You’re a lawyer, Braxton,” Potter answered patiently. “Think of ordinary people, farmers and factory hands. You ask them, they’d say staying dry and getting electric lights count for more. There are lots of them. And they vote Freedom.”

  “Even assuming you’re right—which I don’t, but assuming—what are we supposed to do about it?” Donovan asked. “You’ve got all the answers, so of course you’ve got that one, too, right?”

  Potter stared down at his drink as if he’d never seen it before. He gulped the glass dry, then waved to the bartender for a refill. Only after he’d got it did he say, “Damn you, Braxton.”

  “Well, I love you, too,” Donovan replied. “You didn’t answer my question, you know.”

  “Yes, I do know that,” Potter said gloomily. “I also know I don’t have any answers for you. Nobody in the country has any answers for you.”

  “All right. As long as we understand each other.” Donovan finished his second drink, then got to his feet. “I don’t want another one after this. I just want to go home. That’s about what we have left to us these days—our homes, I mean. They’re still our castles . . . for the time being.” He slipped out the door. It had grown dark outside, but not nearly so dark as Potter’s mood.

  What do we do? What can we do? The questions buzzed against his mind like trapped flies buzzing against a windowpane. Like the flies, he saw no way out. Even fighting the Freedom Party looked like a bad idea. Featherston’s followers had been fighters from the start. They were better at it than the Whigs, much better at it than the Radical Liberals.

  If we can’t fight them, and if they do whatever they please, no matter how illegal it is, to get what they want, what’s left for us? Buzz, buzz, buzz: another good question with no good answer visible.

  “Maybe he’ll go too far,” Potter muttered. “Maybe he’ll land us in a war with the United States. That’d fix him.”

  He despised the USA as much as any man in the CSA. That he could imagine the United States in the role of savior to the Confederate States said a lot about how he felt about the Freedom Party. None of what it said was good.

  Two tall gins were plenty to make him feel wobbly on his pins when he rose from the barstool. A fellow in overalls came in just then and sat down at the bar. He ordered a beer. As the bartender drew it for him, he said, “ ‘Bout time they’re shutting down those goddamn Whigs. Mess they got the country into, they ought to thank their lucky stars they aren’t all hangin’ from lamp posts.”

  That was a political opinion, too, but the barkeep didn’t tell him to keep quiet. It was, of course, a political opinion favorable to the Freedom Party. In the CSA these days, who could get in trouble for an opinion like that?

  If Potter had had another gin in him, he would have called the bartender on it. If he’d had another couple of gins in him, he would have started a fight. But if he fought with every idiot he met in a saloon, he’d end up dead before too long. He went home instead. The cops didn’t arrest him. The stalwarts didn’t pound on him. In the CSA these days, that counted for freedom.

  V

  Sylvia Enos and Ernie lay side by side on her bed. He was as rigid as he would have been some hours after death. By the look on his face, he wished he were dead. “It is no good,” he said, glaring straight up at the ceiling. “It is no goddamn good at all.”

  “Not tonight, sweetheart,” Sylvia said. “But sometimes it is. Things don’t always work perfect for a woman every time, either, you know.”

  “But I am a man. Sort of a man. A piece of a man.” He raised up on one elbow to look down at himself. “A missing piece of a man. Times like this, I want to blow my brains out. One of these days . . .”

  “You stop that.” Sylvia put a hand over his mouth. Then, as if fearing that wasn’t enough to drive such thoughts from his mind, she took the hand away and kissed him instead. “Don’t be stupid, you hear me?”

  “Is it stupid to want to be a man? Is it stupid to want to do what men can do?” He answered his own question by shaking his head. “I do not think so.”

  “It’s stupid to talk that way. This . . . this is just one of those things, like . . . I don’t know, like a bad leg, maybe. You have to make the best of it and do what you can to live your life. Sometimes things are all right, you know.”

  “Not often enough,” he said. “It is not you, sweetheart. You do everything you know how to do. But it is no damn use. I might as well try to drive a nail with half the handle of a hammer. A wound like this is not like a leg. It goes to the heart of a man, to what makes him a man. And if it is not, he is not.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t want to know what you’re talking about, either,” Sylvia said. “All I know is, you’re scaring me.” George had never scared her. Infuriated her, yes, when he wanted other women after being away from her too long. But she could understand that, no matter how mad it made her. It was . . . Her mind groped till she found the word. It was normal, was what it was. It had none of the darkness that made Ernie’s furious gloom so frightening.

  Naked, he got to his feet and headed for the kitchen. “Christ, but I need a drink.”

  “Fix me one, too,” Sylvia said.

  “All right. I need my pipe, too. Cigarettes are not the same.” Ernie never smoked the pipe in Sylvia’s apartment. Cigarettes were all right, because she smoked, too. But pipe tobacco would have made the place smell funny to Mary Jane when she got home.

  “Thanks,” Sylvia said when he brought her whiskey over ice.

  He gulped his, still in that black
mood. “For a long time after I got wounded, I could not do anything with a woman,” he said, his voice hard and flat. “Not anything. A dead man could do more. I wanted to. Oh, how I wanted to! But I could not.”

  “Ernie,” she said nervously, “wouldn’t it be better not to think about . . . about the bad times?”

  She might as well have saved her breath. He went on as if she hadn’t spoken: “I bought a rifle. I went hunting. I hunted and hunted. I shot more kinds of animals than you can think of. Sometimes, if you cannot love, killing will do.”

  “I told you once to cut that out,” Sylvia said. “I’m going to tell you again. I don’t like it when you talk that way. I don’t like it a bit.”

  “Do you think I like what happened to me? Do you think I like what does not happen with me?” Ernie laughed a strange, harsh laugh. “If you do, you had better think again. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.”

  That sounded like poetry, not quite like the way he usually talked. But Sylvia didn’t know what it was from, and she was damned if she would ask him. She said, “You’re the first man I’ve cared about since the Confederates killed my husband. If you think I’m going to let you get away, you’d better think again.”

  “If I decide to go, nobody will stop me.” Somber pride rang in Ernie’s voice. “Not you, not anybody. Do you know something?”

  “What?” she asked warily.

  “I am jealous of you. I am more jealous of you than I know how to say.”

  “Of me? How come?”

  “You had your revenge. You went to the Confederate States. You knocked on Roger Kimball’s door. When he opened it, you shot him. Your husband can rest easy.”

  You were never a seaman, Sylvia thought. Like most sailors, George Enos had had a horror of dying at sea, of having his body end up food for fish and crabs. He’d had the horror, and then it had happened to him. Yes, she’d avenged herself, but poor George would never rest easy.

  Ernie added, “I can never have my revenge. I do not know which English pilot shot me. He may not know he shot me. It was war, and I was a target. He went on his way afterwards. I hope he got shot down. I hope he burned all the way. But even then, it would be over for him. I go on, a quarter of a man.”