American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (14 page)

  “Fuck you, Grandpa,” the man with the bloodied face replied. “You drove right into me.”

  “Liar!”

  “Liar yourself!”

  Neither one of them said anything about a little girl, and neither one of them paid any attention to Nellie.

  “Clara!” she called once more. She didn’t want to look closely at the accident, for fear she would see little legs sticking out from under a wheel.
“Clara!”

  “Boo!”

  Nellie sprang a foot in the air. There stood her daughter, coming out from behind the stout iron base of a street lamp. “Thank you, Jesus,” Nellie whispered. She ran to her little girl and held her tight.

  “Fooled you, Mama!” Clara said happily. “I got down there and—
Ow!
 ” Nellie applied her hand to the part on which her daughter was in the habit of sitting, much harder than she had before they went outside.

  Clara started to howl. “What’s that for, Mama? I didn’t do nothing!”

  “Oh, yes, you did,” Nellie said, and spanked her again. “You scared me out of a year’s growth, that’s what you did. I was afraid one of those cars ran over you, do you know that?” Clara, at the moment, knew nothing except that her fanny hurt. She tried to get away, and had no luck whatsoever. Nellie dragged her back into the coffee shop. “Louise!” Clara wailed.

  Although Nellie was tempted to leave the doll out on the sidewalk, that would have cost more tears and hysterics than it was worth. She snarled, “You stay here. Don’t move a muscle!” at Clara, and then went back to retrieve Louise. She all but threw the rag doll at her daughter. “Here!”

  “Thank you, Mama,” Clara said in an unwontedly small voice. She
hadn’t
moved a muscle, and evidently had figured out this was no time to say or do anything that might land her in more trouble.

  When Nellie’s husband came back from a friend’s later that morning, Nellie told him the whole story.

  Clara looked at him in silent appeal; he was often softer than her mother. But not this time. Hal Jacobs sighed, wuffling out his white mustache. “Clara, you must not play games like that,” he said. “Your mother thought you were hurt, maybe even killed.”

  “I’m sorry, Pa,” Clara said. Maybe she even meant it. She seemed more inclined to be good for Hal than she was for Nellie.
She takes after her half sister,
 Nellie thought sourly. Edna had always done what she wanted, not what Nellie wanted. She’d taken great pleasure in flaunting it, too.

  And she’d married well in spite of everything. When she came to visit as the sun was setting, she wore a maroon silk dress that daringly showed her legs halfway to her knees. Nellie, who’d had a really gamy past, had spent more than thirty years trying to live it down. Edna, in keeping with young people everywhere these days—or so it seemed to Nellie—flaunted her fast life.

  “Be good, Armstrong,” she told her son. Armstrong Grimes—Edna’s husband, Merle, came from the same town in Michigan as General Custer—was two, only a couple of years younger than Clara, his aunt. Having told him to be good, Edna let him run wild—that seemed to be her idea of how to raise children.

  “How are you, dear?” Nellie asked, pouring Edna a cup of coffee.

  “Couldn’t be better, Ma,” Edna answered expansively. She looked like a twenty years’ younger version of her mother, but without the pinched, anxious expression Nellie so often wore. She still thought she could beat the game of life. Nellie was convinced nobody could. But Edna had her reasons. She went on,

  “Merle just got himself promoted in the Reconstruction Agency. That’s another forty dollars a month, and you’d best believe it’ll come in handy.”

  “Bully,” Nellie said, meaning perhaps a third of it. She’d had to fret and scrape for every dime she ever made—she’d had to do worse things than fret and scrape for some of the dimes she’d made before Edna was born. As far as she could see, her daughter had things easy but didn’t begin to guess how lucky she was.

  Before Edna could go on bragging, a shriek rose from the direction of the kitchen. “Ma!” Clara squealed. “Armstrong just pulled my hair, Ma!”

  Edna laughed. Nellie didn’t. “Well, pull his back,” she said.

  Her older daughter bristled. A moment later, Armstrong Grimes started to cry. Then Clara shrieked again. “Ma! He
bit
me!”

  “You going to tell her to bite him back, too?” Edna asked. Nellie glared. Children, whether four or thirty, could drive you right out of your mind.

 
R
eggie Bartlett was a first-rate weather prophet. He looked at his boss and said, “Reckon it’ll rain tomorrow.”

  Jeremiah Harmon looked up from the pills he was compounding. “Shoulder kicking up again?” the druggist asked.

  “Sure is,” Bartlett answered. “Leg, too, matter of fact. I took me a couple of aspirins, but they don’t shift the ache.” He’d spent the end of the war in a U.S. military hospital after catching two bullets from a machine-gun burst and getting captured down in Sequoyah. The wounds had finally healed, but their memory lingered on.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me if you were right.” Harmon added a little water to his mix and put it in a twenty-pill mold. He swung the hinged top of the mold into place. “There we go. These’ll make somebody piss like a racehorse.”

  “I’ve heard that one a million times. How do racehorses piss?” Reggie asked, and then, before his boss could, he answered his own question: “Pretty damn quick, I bet.” Jeremiah Harmon snorted. “You’ve always got a snappy comeback, don’t you?”

  “I do my best,” Bartlett answered. He had an engaging grin, one that let him say things a dour man could never have got away with.

  The bell over the front door jangled. A customer came in. “Help you with something, sir?” Reggie asked.

  “Yes. Thanks. Chilly out there.” The man came up to the counter. Bartlett wished he hadn’t. His breath was so dreadful, he might not have used a toothbrush since before the Great War. Maybe, if God were kind, he’d ask about one now, or about mouthwash. But no such luck; he said, “What have you got in the way of rat poison?”

 
  You could breathe on them,
 Reggie thought.
That’d do the job, the way the Yankees’ chlorine killed
the rats in the trenches on the Roanoke front.
 No matter how engaging his grin, though, he knew he couldn’t get away with that. Life in Richmond was too civilized for such blunt truths. “Here, let me look,” he said, and pulled up a bright yellow box with an upside-down rat with X’s for eyes on the front of it.

  “This ought to do the job.”

  “It’ll shift ’em, will it?” the man asked, breathing decay into Reggie’s face.

  “Sure will, sir.” Reggie drew back as far as he could, which wasn’t nearly far enough. “Rats, mice, even cockroaches. You put it down, they eat it, and they die.”

  “Reckon I can manage that.” The customer dug a hand in his pocket. Coins jingled. “How much?”

  “Twenty-two cents,” Bartlett said. The man gave him a quarter. He solemnly returned three pennies.

  “Thanks.” The fellow put them in his pocket. He took the box of rat poison and headed out the door.

  “Freedom!” Without waiting for an answer, he left the drugstore.

  Reggie’s boss looked up from the pills, which he was removing from the mold. “You showed fine patience there,” he said. “I don’t know if I could have done the same. I could smell him all the way over here.”

  “You could give a man like that a straight flush in a poker game, and he’d still find a way to lose,” Bartlett said. “No wonder he’s a Freedom Party man.”

  “His money is as good as anyone else’s,” Harmon said. “In fact, you can gloat if you like, because his money’s going into my pocket, and into yours, and neither one of us can stand Jake Featherston.”

  “We’re not fools. I hope to God we’re not fools, anyway,” Reggie answered. “The only thing Featherston can do is make a speech that sounds good if you’re a sorry so-and-so who can’t add six and five without taking off your shoes.”

  “I’m not going to try to tell you you’re wrong—you ought to know that.” Harmon looked at the clock on the wall. “Just about quitting time. Why don’t you knock off a couple of minutes early? Call it a bonus for the way you dealt with that fellow.”

  “Thank you kindly. I don’t mind if I do.” Bartlett put on his coat and his fedora. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “See you then.” Jeremiah Harmon was busy making more pills. Reggie sometimes wondered if he ever went home at night.

  The man with slit-trench breath had been right: it was chilly outside. Bartlett wished he’d brought along a pair of earmuffs. As he hurried toward the trolley stop a couple of blocks away, he went past some posters that hadn’t been pasted to a half ruinous wall when he walked by it on the way to work that morning.

  VOTE FREEDOM IN 1925! they shouted in red letters on a white background. Below that, in smaller type, they added,
Jake Featherston talks straight. Every Wednesday on the wireless. The truth shall
set you free.

  “And when will you ever hear the truth from that son of a bitch?” Reggie muttered. He’d heard Jake Featherston on the stump in the very earliest days of the Freedom Party. He hadn’t liked what he heard then, and he hadn’t liked anything he’d heard from Featherston or the Freedom Party since.

 
  Only difference is, Featherston was a little snake then, and he’s a big snake now,
 Bartlett thought.

  But even a big snake could lose some hide now and then. Reggie hooked his fingernails under the top of one of those posters and yanked. As he’d hoped, most of it tore away. The fellows who’d hung the posters had done a fast job, a cheap job, but not a good one. They hadn’t used enough paste to stick them down tight. Whistling “Dixie,” he ripped down one poster after another.

  He hadn’t got all of them, though, before a raucous voice shouted, “Hey, you bastard, what the hell you think you’re doing?”

  “Taking down lies,” Reggie answered calmly.

  “Them ain’t lies!” the man said. He was about Reggie’s age, but shabby, scrawny, still wearing a threadbare butternut uniform tunic that had seen a lot of better years. Veterans down on their luck swelled the ranks of the Freedom Party. This one snarled, “You touch another one o’ them posters, and I’ll beat the living shit out of you.”

  “You don’t want to try that, buddy,” Bartlett said. Down came another poster. The shabby veteran howled with rage and trotted toward him. Thanks to the wounds Reggie had taken in Sequoyah, he wasn’t much good either at fisticuffs or running away. He’d had run-ins with Freedom Party men before, too.

  During the war, a .45 had been an officer’s weapon, nothing to speak of when set against the Tredegar rifles most ordinary soldiers carried. These days, the .45 in a hidden holster on Reggie’s belt put him in mind of an extra ace up his sleeve. He took it out and pointed it at the onrushing would-be tough guy. His two-handed grip said he knew exactly what to do with it, too.

  The Freedom Party man skidded to a stop in the middle of the street, so abruptly that he flailed his arms and rocked back on his heels. The barrel of the .45 had to look the size of a railroad tunnel as Reggie aimed it at his midriff. “I told you, you don’t want to try that,” Reggie said.

  “You’ll pay for this,” the scruffy veteran said. “Everybody’s gonna pay for fucking with us. You’re going on a list, you—” He decided not to do any more cussing. Running your mouth at a man with a pistol when you didn’t have one of your own wasn’t the smartest thing you could do. Even a Freedom Party muscle man could figure that out.

  “Get lost,” Bartlett told him. He gestured with the .45 to emphasize the words. “Go on down to the corner there, turn it, and keep walking. You do anything else, you’ll be holding up a lily.” Face working with all the things he dared not say, the other man did as he was told. Bartlett finished tearing down the posters, then went on to the trolley stop. His only worry was that the Freedom Party man had a weapon of his own, one he hadn’t had a chance to use. But the fellow had talked about beating him up, not shooting him. And he didn’t reappear.

  Up came the trolley, bell clanging. Reggie tossed a dime into the fare box and took a seat. The dime should have been five cents; prices weren’t quite what they had been before the war. But they weren’t what they had been afterwards, either—he wasn’t paying a million dollars, or a billion, for the privilege of riding across town to his flat.

  Nobody on the trolley car had the slightest idea who he was or what he’d just done. That suited him fine, too. He had a chance to relax a little and look out the window. Before long, the trolley passed more of those VOTE FREEDOM IN 1925! posters. Reggie’s lip curled. He couldn’t rip them all down, however much he wished he could.

  Seven and a half years after the Great War ended, not all the destruction U.S. aeroplanes had visited on Richmond was yet repaired. Plenty of burnt-out and bombed building fronts stared at the street through window frames naked of glass; they might have been so many skulls peering out through empty eye sockets.
The damnyankees made my home town into Golgotha,
 Bartlett thought.
One of these days,
we’ll have to pay them back. But how?

  He shivered, though the crowded trolley was warm with humanity. That was how the Freedom Party thought, and how it got its members.
Haven’t you had enough of war?
 he asked himself. Asked that way, he could hardly say no.

  He got off at the shop nearest his flat. For supper, he fried up a ham steak and some potatoes. After he did the dishes—he was a fussy, neat bachelor—he read for a while and went to bed. He wouldn’t have minded a wireless set, so he could listen to music or a football game, but not on the salary of a druggist’s assistant.

  The next day did bring a chilly drizzle. Work at the drugstore went much as the previous day had. He didn’t bother telling his boss about the fuss over the posters. Jeremiah Harmon had no use for the Freedom Party, no, but Reggie didn’t want him fussing like a mother hen, which was just what he would have done.