“You’re not my grandma,” Stan said. But, to Martin’s relief, he went back to driving nails and let Dushan alone.
It didn’t last. Chester might have known it wouldn’t. Something in him had known it wouldn’t. But he couldn’t do anything but watch when the trouble started. He was two stories up, nailing rafters to the roof pole, when Stan got in front of Dushan down on the ground and made as if to drive a stake through his heart.
Dushan looked at him for half a second. Then, his cold face revealing nothing of what he intended, he kicked Stan in the crotch. Had his booted foot gone home as he intended, there wouldn’t have been a fight, because Stan wouldn’t have been able to give him one. But, maybe because of his hangover, the kick got Stan in the hipbone rather than somewhere more intimate.
Stan roared with pain. But he didn’t fall over clutching at himself, which was what Dushan had had in mind. Instead, he surged forward and grappled with the other man. They fell to the ground, slugging and gouging and spitting out a couple of different flavors of guttural, consonant-filled Slavic curses.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Chester descended as fast as he could. He was cursing, too, almost as angry at himself as he was at Stan and Dushan. He’d seen trouble coming, but he hadn’t been able to stop it.
“Fight! Fight!” The shout brought construction workers running, just as it would have brought kids running on a high-school campus. Most of the workers only stood around and watched without trying to break it up. It was entertainment, something to liven up the day, something to talk about over the supper table tonight.
“Come on, let’s get ’em apart,” Chester said. Still enjoying the show, the men at his side looked at him as if he were crazy—till Mordechai got there a few seconds later.
Not much made Mordechai mad. Anything that slowed down work and threatened the job would do the trick, though. Swearing like the veteran Navy man he was, he shoved through the crowd of workers, most of whom were twice his size and half his age. Seeing that, Chester did some pushing and shoving of his own. The two of them grabbed Dushan and Stan and pulled them apart. Once they actually started doing that, they got some belated help from the other men.
Dushan twisted in Chester’s grasp, trying to wade back into the scrap. That might have been more for form’s sake than anything else. He hadn’t been getting the better of it. He had a bloody nose and a black eye and a scraped cheek. He’d hung a pretty good mouse on Stan, too, but the Pole hadn’t taken anywhere near so much damage as he had.
“What the hell happened here?” Mordechai couldn’t have sounded more disgusted if he’d tried for a week.
Dushan and Stan both gave highly colored versions of recent events. Some of the builders who’d been watching supported one of them, some the other, and some gave versions of their own that had very little to do with anything that had really gone on—that was how it seemed to Chester, anyhow.
Mordechai listened for a little while, then threw up his hands. “Enough!” he said. “Too goddamn much.” He used his mutilated right hand to point first to Stan, then to Dushan. Somehow, his two missing fingers made the gesture seem even more contemptuous than it would have otherwise. “You’re fired, and you’re fired, too. Get the fuck out of here, both of you. I don’t want to see either one of your goddamn ugly mugs again, either. And you both blow all of today’s pay.”
A sigh went through the workers. Nobody’d expected anything different. Dushan never changed expression. Stan said, “Fuck you, asshole,” but his bravado rang hollow. Word would get around, and get around quick. He’d have a tough time landing construction work from here on out. He was just an ordinary worker, easily replaceable by another ordinary worker.
If Mordechai had stopped there, nothing more would have come of it. But he was furious, and he held the whip hand. “And the rest of you pussies,” he said, glaring at the men around him, “the rest of you pussies lose half a day’s pay for standing around while all this shit was going on.”
“That’s not fair!” Chester Martin exclaimed. Several other men muttered and grumbled, but he was the one who spoke out loud.
Mordechai glowered. “You don’t like it, you know what you can do about it.”
He meant, nothing. But Martin wasn’t a veteran of union strife in Toledo for nothing, or to take nothing lying down. “Yeah,” he said stonily. “I know what I can do about it.”
As soon as people went back to work, he started doing it. He hadn’t done any union agitating for years, but he still knew how. Some of the men didn’t want to listen to him. “You’re gonna get your ass fired, and everybody else’s, too,” was something he heard more than once.
But others were ready to go along. Mordechai had hit too hard when he punished workers for something they hadn’t done. And a lot of the men who’d come to California to find jobs had belonged to unions back East. They remembered the gains they’d made, gains they’d had to throw away to find any work at all out here.
“We’ve got to spread the word,” Chester warned. “If we just strike at this site, they’ll crush us. But if we strike at all the building sites around Los Angeles, the bosses will have to deal with us.” He hoped they would, anyhow. And if they didn’t . . . well, he’d gone on strike before.
When he got his pay at the end of the day—half a day’s pay for a whole day’s hard work—he said, “I’m taking this under protest.”
The paymaster shrugged. “Take it and like it or take it and stick it up your ass.” He had a couple of bully boys with pistols behind him to make sure the payroll stayed safe. He could afford to talk tough—or thought he could, anyhow.
Martin thought he was playing into the workers’ hands. Several other men said, “I’m taking this under protest,” too. The paymaster went right on shrugging. He didn’t see the resentment he was raising—either that or, secure in his power, he just didn’t care.
That evening, when Chester told Rita what had happened, she looked at him for a long time before asking, “Are you sure you want to go through with this?” He knew what she meant; now that he had a child, he’d given fortune a hostage.
He sighed. “Do you want me to knuckle under?”
His wife bit her lip. After half a minute’s silence, she said, “No. They’ll own you if you do.” He kissed her. He’d thought—he’d hoped—she would say that. She was a stronger Socialist than he was.
He spent the next few weeks working his shift during the day and agitating during his free time. He talked with workers. He talked with Socialist Party officials. The Socialists gained seats in the House and Senate—and in the California legislature—in the off-year elections. That strengthened his hand. He hoped it did, anyhow.
One morning early in December, he got to the construction site at the same time as a pickup truck. Instead of going in to work, he grabbed a sign from the back of the truck. He wasn’t the only one who did. Inside of two minutes, three dozen UNFAIR! signs went up in a picket line. Picketers were hitting other sites all over town, too. “On strike!” Chester and the other men shouted. “Join us!” They cursed a worker who crossed the picket line. Another worker thought better of it.
“You sons of bitches!” Mordechai shouted. “You’ll pay for this!”
“We’ve paid too much for too long already,” Chester answered, wondering how much he would have to pay from here on out.
As soon as the engineer waved and the red light in the studio came on, Jake Featherston leaned toward the microphone like a lover toward his beloved. “I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth.” He wondered how many times he’d said that over the years. He always believed it, at least while he was talking.
“Truth is, for the past twenty years and more, the United States of America have been holding on to what doesn’t belong to them. At the end of the war, the USA stole Kentucky and Sequoyah and what they call Houston. The people in those states don’t want to belong to the USA. They’ve made it plain every way they know how that they don�
�t want to belong to the USA, but the United States government doesn’t want to listen to them.”
He paused to let that sink in, then went on, “If they held fair and honest elections in those places, the people there would show what they wanted. They would show they want to come home to the Confederate States of America. President Smith knows that as well as I do. He’s a clever man, and I reckon he’s an honest man.”
He didn’t think Smith was anything close to clever, and couldn’t have cared less whether he was honest. He did want to butter up the president of the United States. He had his reasons: “I challenge President Smith to allow plebiscites in Kentucky and Sequoyah and what they call Houston. I challenge him to abide by the results of those plebiscites. I challenge him, after the Confederate States win those plebiscites, to let those states come home.”
Featherston banged his fist down on the table. The microphone jumped a little. He loved sound effects like that. They made people pay attention to what he was saying. “President Smith has talked big about what he’d do to restore peace in the stolen states. He’s talked big, but he hasn’t done anything much. He’s even said he’d come to Richmond to hash things out. He’s said that, but he hasn’t done it. I tell him he’s welcome here, and I’d like to talk to him.
“And I tell him one more thing, something he’d better listen to. Back during the war, the USA helped our niggers when they rose up against us. Well, that was wartime, and maybe we can let bygones be bygones on account of it was. But the blacks still don’t know their proper place, and the United States are still sneaking weapons down across the border to ’em. That has got to stop. It’s cost us a lot of lives and it’s cost us a lot of money to keep the niggers in check. We’ve had to bump up the size of the Army. We’ve even had to put guns and bombs on our aeroplanes. It’s been expensive. We could have done better things with that money. We could have, but we didn’t get the chance. And that’s the USA’s fault.”
Inside, he was laughing. Here he was, blaming the United States for what he’d most wanted to do anyhow. The black guerrillas had given him the perfect excuse for rearming. Even the USA hadn’t squawked much about it. Had the guerrillas been white, he thought the USA would have. But the United States loved Negroes hardly more than the Confederate States did. They’d made it very plain they didn’t want the ones who tried to flee to the north.
He didn’t know whether the United States were arming the guerrillas. He knew he would have if he were in charge in Philadelphia. But coming up with U.S.-made weapons and putting them in the hands of dead Negroes so photographers could snap pictures of them was the easiest thing in the world.
“President Smith says the United States want peace. They act like they want trouble. We would rather have peace, too. But if they think we can’t handle trouble, they had better think again.”
That was a bluff, nothing else but. If the United States pushed hard against the Confederate States, he hadn’t a prayer of resisting. But the USA had seemed ever more reluctant to hang on to their conquests. If they couldn’t even manage that, they weren’t very likely to do anything more.
In the control room, the engineer held up a hand, fingers spread: five minutes. Jake nodded to show he’d seen the signal. He’d had a good notion of what the time was, but he wanted to make sure everything ran smoothly. “North America is a big place,” he said. “We’re not all crowded together, the way they are in Europe. There’s room on this continent for two great countries—maybe even for three, if the United States ever bother to recollect what they’ve done up in the north.” A smile that was half snarl flitted across his face. He enjoyed nothing more than sticking a needle in the USA. “If the United States think the Confederate States can’t be great again, if they think we shouldn’t be great again, then they had better think again about that, too.
“All we really want is for them to take their noses out of our affairs, to take them out and to keep them out. That’s what good neighbors do. Bad neighbors get doors slammed in their faces, and they deserve it, too. But I don’t really expect we’ll have any trouble. If they’re just reasonable, we’ll get on fine.”
To Featherston, if they’re just reasonable meant if they do what I want. That the phrase could mean anything else never occurred to him. He’d just said the last word when the engineer drew a finger across his throat and the red light went out. Jake got to his feet and stretched. As usual, Saul Goldman waited for him right outside the studio door. Goldman’s title—director of communications—didn’t sound like much, any more than the little Jew looked like much. But it meant that Goldman was in charge of the way the Freedom Party and the Confederate States presented themselves to the world.
“Good job, Mr. President,” he said now.
“Thank you kindly, Saul,” Jake answered. He spent more politeness on Goldman than on most people, a recognition of how valuable he thought the other man was. The Party and the CSA could get by without a lot of fellows who brought only fanaticism. Losing somebody with brains would have hurt much more. Brains were harder to come by.
Goldman said, “You do remember you’ve got the rally tonight? That’s going to be the speech about agriculture and about the dams and electricity.”
“I remember,” Jake said indulgently. “Got to talk about what’s going on inside the country. That’s what most folks worry about first. Wouldn’t want anything to go wrong with my reelection.” He laughed. Nothing would go wrong. But saying the word felt good. Up till now, no elected Confederate president had, or could have, been reelected. Now that the amendment had repealed those seven nasty words, though, Jake could go on about his business without worrying about leaving office after only six years. He clapped Goldman on the back. “You did real good with the campaign for the amendment, too.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” Goldman said. “You’re the one who will have to make it worthwhile.”
“And I intend to,” Featherston said.
He was feeling pretty cocky as he strode out of the studio and got into his armored limousine. “Back to the Gray House?” the driver asked.
“That’s right, Virgil,” Jake answered. Virgil Joyner had been driving him for years—ever since the Party struggled for survival after Grady Calkins assassinated President Hampton. Featherston trusted him as far as he trusted anybody.
Outriders on motorcycles pulled away from the curb before the limousine got going. Featherston didn’t believe in taking chances he didn’t have to. He wanted to make sure he got to enjoy his second term.
The limousine glided past Capitol Square. Everything there was clean and tidy and orderly. No more shantytown right at the heart of the CSA. All the hungry squatters had been cleared away well before the Olympics, and they hadn’t come back. Freedom Party stalwarts made damn sure they didn’t come back.
But instead of turning left to go up Shockoe Hill to the presidential residence, the driver hit the brakes. “What the hell?” Jake said.
“There’s a wreck up ahead,” Joyner answered. “We’ll have to go around.”
Sure enough, not just two but three autos had tangled at the corner of Twelfth and Capitol. Steam jetted from smashed radiators. Drivers and passengers stood by the wreckage arguing about who’d done what to whom.
Joyner blew his horn, which did no good at all. Featherston’s outriders descended from the motorcycles to push the wreckage out of the way, which was a lot more practical.
Another big motorcar raced down Twelfth Street. It screeched to a stop on the far side of the accident. Three men in the white shirts and butternut trousers of Freedom Party stalwarts got out. Jake didn’t think anything about that till they raised submachine guns and started shooting.
“Get the hell out of here!” he shouted as his guards started falling. The men who were dressed like stalwarts—or, worse, really were stalwarts—ran forward, shooting as they ran. One of them fell, which meant they hadn’t picked off all the outriders, but the others came on.
Virgil Joyner p
ut the limousine in reverse, but it could only limp—the assassins had shot out the two front tires. Their bullets starred the windscreen. Pretty soon, they’d punch through; even bulletproof glass could take only so much. Rifle rounds would have smashed through the glass right away.
Featherston and his driver both had .45s—not the best weapons to use against submachine guns, but a hell of a lot better than nothing. A heartbeat before the windscreen finally blew in and sprayed fragments of glass all over the passenger compartment, Jake threw himself flat in the back seat. Bullets thudded into the upholstery just above his head.
And then the stream of bullets punishing the limousine stopped. That meant at least one of the bastards out there had gone through a whole magazine’s worth of ammunition and needed to reload. Featherston popped up and fired out through the hole the assassins had shot in the windscreen. With a pistol, you had to aim. You couldn’t just spray bullets around and hope some of them would hit something. One of the gunmen started to grab for his face. He never finished the motion. Instead, he crumpled to the ground, the back of his head blown to red ruin as the round that killed him tore out.
The limousine’s horn blared. That was Joyner’s body slumping forward onto the button—the assassins’ fire had struck home after all. One son of a bitch left, Jake thought: one son of a bitch and me. And I’m the meanest s.o.b. this country ever saw.
If he’d been out there, he would have jumped up on the hood, stuck the submachine gun through the now-shattered windscreen, and finished the job. The last surviving assassin didn’t. Maybe losing two of his buddies had unnerved him. Must be a kid, went through Featherston’s mind. He’s never seen action before, and he doesn’t quite know what to do.
What the assassin did was go around to the side of the motorcar where Jake had been sitting. He grabbed for the door handle, intending to yank the door open and shoot through the gap.
What he intended wasn’t what he got. Featherston kicked the door from the inside with both feet, using all his strength. It caught the assassin in the midsection. With a startled squawk, he went down on his wallet. He hung on to the submachine gun, but he was still trying to swing it back toward the limousine when Jake shot him in the belly. He was trying to shoot him in the balls, but didn’t quite get what he wanted. The assassin’s shriek was satisfying enough as things were. Featherston’s next shot, more carefully aimed, blew off the bottom half of his face.
The Victorious Opposition Page 38
