American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (23 page)

  “Oh, good. They
are
funny,” Rita said. “I was in stitches the last time they came through Toledo.” That had been a couple of years before; she and Chester hadn’t known each other then. He wondered with whom she’d seen the comics. That she had a past independent of him occasionally bothered him, though he’d never stopped to wonder if his independent past bothered her. But neither of them had seen anybody else for several months now. That suited Chester fine, and seemed to suit Rita pretty well, too.

  They held hands at the trolley stop. An old lady clucked disapprovingly, but they paid no attention to her. Things were looser now than they had been when she was a young woman. As far as Chester Martin was concerned, that was all to the good, too. He was sorry when the trolley car came clanging up so soon.

  He slid a silver dollar to the ticket-taker at the Orpheum, and got back a half dollar and two yellow tickets. He and Rita went up to the first balcony and found some seats. He took her hand there, too. She leaned her head on his shoulder. When the house lights went down, he gave her a quick kiss.

  A girl singer and a magician led off the show. As far as Martin was concerned, the magician couldn’t have disappeared fast enough. A trained-dog act ended abruptly when the dog, which could jump and fetch and even climb ladders to ring a bell at the top, proved not to be trained in a much more basic way.

  He got an enormous laugh, but not one of a sort the fellow in black tie who worked with him had in mind.

  The dancer who came on next got another laugh by soft-shoeing out holding his nose.

  “I wouldn’t have done that,” Rita said, even though she’d laughed, too. “Now he’ll squabble with the man with the dog all the way to the end of the tour.” Chester wouldn’t have thought of that for himself.

  Once she said it, he realized she was bound to be right.

  At last, after a couple of other acts Martin knew he wouldn’t remember ten minutes after he left the Orpheum, the Engels Brothers came out, along with the tall, skinny, dreadfully dignified woman who served as their comic foil. They were all young men, not far from Chester’s age, but got their name from the enormous, fuzzy beards they wore. One of the beards was dyed red, one yellow, one blue, and the fourth left black. From the balcony, Martin couldn’t tell if the beards were real or fakes. For the comics’ sake, he hoped they were phony.

  The Brother with the undyed beard talked enough for any three men. The one with the yellow beard didn’t talk at all, but was so limber, he seemed to have no bones. The one with the blue beard tried to slap everybody else into line. The one with the red beard spent all his time chasing the tall, skinny woman, who seemed more bewildered than flattered by his attentions.

  At one point, they all started pelting one another with oranges. It might have been trench warfare up there—by the way the Engels Brothers dodged around the prop furniture, they’d been in the trenches—except that the woman kept standing up and getting nailed. By the time they’d finished, the stage was a worse mess, much worse, than it had been after the dog act. But this was a lot funnier, too.

  The Engels Brother with the black beard proved the sole survivor. He looked out at the audience and said, “Orange you glad you aren’t up here?” The curtain came down.

  “That was . . . I don’t know exactly what that was, but I don’t know when I’ve laughed so hard, either,” Rita said as she got up and made her way toward the exit. Since Chester Martin was rubbing at his streaming eyes with his handkerchief, he couldn’t very well argue with her.

  They had supper at a diner across the street from the Orpheum, then took the trolley back to Rita’s block of flats. “I had a wonderful time,” she said as she fumbled in her handbag for the key.

  “I always have a terrific time with you, Rita.” Chester hesitated, then asked, “Can I come in for a minute, please?”

  She hesitated, too. She was careful of her reputation. He’d seen that from the first time he took her out.

  He liked it. She said, “You’re not going to be—you know—difficult, are you?” He would have liked nothing better than to be difficult, but he solemnly shook his head. “Cross my heart,” he answered, and did.

  “All right.” Rita opened the door and flipped on a light. “The place is a mess.” It was, to Martin’s eye, perfectly neat. Rita sat down on the overstuffed sofa. She patted the upholstery next to her, asking,

  “What have you got in mind?”

  Instead of sitting there, Chester awkwardly went to one knee in front of her. Her eyes got very big.

  Tongue stumbling, heart pounding, he repeated, “I always have a terrific time with you. I don’t think I’d ever want to be with anybody else. Will you—will you marry me, Rita?” He took a velvet jewelry box from his pocket and flipped it open to show her a ring set with a tiny chip of diamond.

  She stared at him. “I wondered if you were going to ask me that tonight,” she whispered, and then, “The ring is beautiful.”

  “You’re beautiful,” he said. “Will you?”

  “Of course I will,” she answered.

  Afterwards, he wasn’t quite sure who kissed whom first. When he came up for air, he gasped, “You never kissed me like that before.”

  “Well, you never asked me to marry you before, either,” Rita answered.

  He laughed. They kissed again. Heart pounding, he asked, “What else don’t I know?”

  “You’ll find out,” she said. “After the wedding.”

 
S
cipio paid five cents for a copy of the
Augusta Constitutionalist
. In one way, that struck him as a lot of money to shell out for a newspaper. In another, considering that he would have paid millions if not billions of dollars when the currency went crazy a couple of years before, it wasn’t so bad.

  “Thanks, uncle,” said the white man who took his money. He didn’t answer. He just opened up the paper and read it as he hurried towards Erasmus’ fish market and restaurant.

  Had he answered, what would he have said? Angry at himself for even wondering, he shook his head as he walked along. White men never called black men
mister
, not in the Confederate States of America they didn’t. If he held his breath till they started to, he’d end up mighty, mighty blue. The fellow with the pile of papers at his feet would just have called him an uppity nigger, or maybe a crazy nigger, if he’d complained.

  Maybe the worst of it was, the white man had been trying to be polite.
I can’t win,
 Scipio thought.
Why
do I bother imagining I could?

  Even more to the point, he wondered why he’d wasted any money on the paper. The headline screamed about a lurid love triangle that had ended in an axe murder. It would have been made to seem a lot more lurid had the parties involved been colored. Or, on the other hand, it might not have made the paper at all in that case. A lot of whites expected Negroes to act that way, and took it for granted when they did.

  Much smaller stories talked about Congressional candidates’ latest promises. Scipio wondered why he bothered even glancing at those. It wasn’t as if he could vote. But the remarks of Eldridge P. Dinwiddie, the Freedom Party candidate in Augusta, did make his eyes widen as if he’d just poured down a couple of cups of Erasmus’ strong, chicory-laced coffee.

  “Too many Red rebels are still hiding in plain sight,” Dinwiddie was quoted as saying. “The Whigs have forgotten all about them. Going after them would remind people of how badly the party that’s in power bungled the war effort. But if you elect me, I’ll make sure they aren’t forgotten and are brought to justice. I aim to see all those nigger traitors hang.”

 
  Mr. Dinwiddie,
 wrote the reporter who’d listened to him,
received prolonged and vociferous support
for his suggestion
.

  “Hell wid Mistuh Dinwiddie,” Scipio muttered under his breath. Being one of those fugitive Reds himself, he didn’t care for the notion of getting hunted down and hanged. Here and there, faded posters still offered a reward for his capture.

 
  But that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead.
 Every so often, a phrase from the education Anne Colleton had made him acquire floated up out of his memory. This one fit. South Carolina might have been another country. The name on his passbook here in Georgia was Xerxes.

  Everyone here, even his wife, knew him by that name and no other.

  Anne Colleton, though, wasn’t dead. If she ever saw him, he would be, and in short order. Like most late summer days in Augusta, this one was hot and muggy. Scipio shivered even so.

  Foreign news got shoved onto page three. There’d been another battle in the endless Mexican civil war.

  Imperial forces claimed victory. The rebels weren’t calling them liars too loudly, so maybe they’d actually won. Venezuela and Colombia were talking about going to war with each other. The paper said the United States had sent the Kaiser a note warning him against arming or encouraging the Venezuelans, and that he’d denied doing any such thing—and warned the USA against encouraging or arming the Colombians. A party called French Action had caused riots in Paris at the same time as the French government claimed it was two years ahead of schedule in paying reparations in Germany. Japanese aeroplanes had bombed a town somewhere in China.

  He was so engrossed in the article about allowing the forward pass in football—some people condemned it as a damnyankee innovation, while others claimed it added excitement to the game—he almost walked past Erasmus’ place. “Mornin’, Xerxes,” his boss said when he came in.

  “Mornin’,” Scipio answered. “How you is?”

  “Tolerable,” Erasmus said. “Little better’n tolerable, mebbe. How’s your ownself?” Scipio shrugged. “Not bad. I’s gettin’ by.”

  “Can’t ask much more’n that, not till Judgment Day, anyways.” Erasmus raised a salt-and-pepper eyebrow. “You saved, Xerxes?”

 
  How do I answer that?
 Scipio wondered. His education had weakened his faith. And, he discovered, so had his time with the Red rebels, all of whom had been as passionate in their disbelief as a lot of Christians were in their belief. He hadn’t thought the Marxist ideology had rubbed off on him, but it seemed to have after all. After a moment’s thought, he said, “Hope so.”

  “Should ought to be able to say better’n that,” Erasmus said, but then, to Scipio’s relief, he let it go.

  Pointing to the
Constitutionalist
, he asked, “You done with that?”

  “Done wid it now, yeah,” Scipio answered: the only thing he could have said. Erasmus didn’t put up with reading on the job. That wasn’t because he couldn’t read a newspaper himself, though he couldn’t. It was because, when you worked for Erasmus, you
worked
for Erasmus.

  “Throw it on the fish-wrappin’ pile, then,” Erasmus said.

  As Scipio did, he asked, “What you think ‘bout de for’ard pass, boss?”

  “Bunch o’ damn foolishness, you ask me,” Erasmus answered. “Anybody got the time to git all hot and bothered about it gots
too
goddamn much time, an’ dat’s the Lord’s truth. Devil fill up your time just fine, you bet. Forward pass?” He rolled his eyes. “Might as well worry over that other damnfool damnyankee game—what the hell they call it? Baseball, dat’s the name.” Scipio had never seen a baseball game, or even a baseball, in his life. Because he was—or rather, had been—widely read, he knew the sport was played in the northeastern part of the United States. But it had never caught on all across the USA, the way football had. And it certainly hadn’t caught on in the Confederate States.

  Erasmus eyed him. “You got any more ways o’ wastin’ time ‘fore you starts earnin’ what I pays you?”

  “Only one,” Scipio said with a grin. He grabbed a mug and poured it full of coffee from the big pot on the stove, then added cream and sugar. But he didn’t sit down to drink it. He carried it with him as he started sweeping and tidying up. Erasmus had a steaming mug at his side, too. As long as Scipio worked hard, the older man didn’t mind coffee or things like that.

  The first breakfast customer came in a couple of minutes later. “Mornin’, Aristotle,” Scipio said. “How you is?” By now, he knew dozens of regulars by name and preferences. “You wants de usual?”

  “Sure enough do,” Aristotle answered. Scipio turned to Erasmus, who was already doing up a plate of ham and eggs and grits. Erasmus knew his customers even better than Scipio did. They were
his
, after all.

  After the breakfast rush petered out, Scipio washed a young mountain of dishes and silverware, then dried them and stacked them neatly to get ready for lunch, which would be even more hectic. Once he’d done that, he helped Erasmus clean catfish and crappie. The proprietor would fry a lot of them during lunch, and even more during dinner. Erasmus was a wizard with a knife. Every cut he made was perfect, and he moved as fast as any slicing machine. Scipio . . .

  “You makes me ’shamed,” Scipio said, for Erasmus could clean three fish to his one, and do a neater, better job on them to boot. “Watchin’ you makes me ’shamed.”

  “Shouldn’t ought to,” Erasmus answered. “You is doin’ the best you kin. Good Lord don’t want no more’n dat from nobody. I been cuttin’ up fish for a livin’ since I was ten years old. Maybe you went fishin’ couple-three times a year, gutted what you cotched. It make a difference, it surely do.”

  “Mebbe.” Scipio would have thought Erasmus was humoring him, but Erasmus had no sense of humor when it came to work, none at all.

  And now his boss said, “You’s better’n you was, too, an’ dat’s a good thing. You didn’t get no better, don’t reckon I’d let you mess around with knives no more.” Scipio looked at his hands. He had a couple of cuts, along with several scars he’d picked up earlier.

  Seeing what he was doing, Erasmus held out his own hands. He had more scars than Scipio could count, a maze, a spiderweb, of scars, new, old, short, long, and in between. “Do Jesus!” Scipio said softly.