American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (53 page)

  Morrell had to run the gauntlet of beggars once more on the way back to the U.S. Army base. The men cursed him all over again, this time for spending money on himself and not on them. “How would you like it if you were hungry?” one of them called after him—a parting shot, as it were.

  It was a good question. He had no good answer. Nobody wanted to be hungry. He remembered that skinny woman. Nobody wanted to have to choose between whoring and starving. But nobody seemed to have much of an idea how to make things better, either. Morrell hurried home, a troubled man.

 
J
onathan Moss was making a discovery as old as mankind: that not even getting exactly what you thought you’d always wanted guaranteed happiness. When he thought about it—which was as seldom as he could—he suspected Laura Moss, once Laura Secord, was making the same unpleasant discovery.

  “I don’t like the city,” she said one morning over a cup of tea (Jonathan preferred coffee, which he brewed himself).

  “I’m sorry,” he answered, not altogether sincerely. “I don’t know how I could practice law from a farm. . . .” He almost added
in the middle of nowhere
, but let that go at the last possible instant.

  He might as well have said it. By her sour expression, Laura heard it even if it remained technically unspoken. “But everybody here loves the Yanks and knuckles under to them,” she complained.

  The first part of that wasn’t even close to true, as she had to know. As for the second . . . “Whether you like it or not, dear, the United States won the war,” Moss pointed out.

  Laura’s expression got unhappier yet. Out on her farm, and even in Arthur—which was far enough off the beaten path for the American occupiers to pay little attention to it—she’d had an easier time pretending that blunt truth wasn’t real. Here in Berlin, she couldn’t ignore it. U.S. military courts here tried cases under occupation law. Soldiers in green-gray uniforms were always on the streets. “Even the newspapers!” she burst out. “They spell
color
c-o-l-o-r and
labor
l-a-b-o-r, not c-o-l-o-u-r and l-a-b-o-u-r.”

  “That’s how we spell them in the States,” Moss said.

  “But this isn’t the States! It’s the province of Ontario! Can’t you leave even the King’s English alone?”

  He finished his coffee at a gulp. “The King doesn’t run things around these parts any more. The United States do. Sweetheart, I know you don’t like it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t so.” Carrying his cup over to the sink, he went on, “I’m going to the office. I’ll see you tonight.”

  “All right.” She sounded almost as relieved to have him out of the apartment as he was to go. With a sigh, she added, “I don’t know what I’m going to do around here, though.” Back on her farm, finding ways to pass the time had never been a worry. Moss knew just enough of farm life to be sure of that. If you weren’t busy every waking moment on a farm, you had to be neglecting something. It wasn’t like that here in the city. To Moss, that was one of the advantages of getting off the farm. He wasn’t sure Laura saw things the same way.

  Before leaving, he put on his overcoat and a fur hat with ear flaps that tied under his chin. Berlin, Ontario, might be under U.S. occupation, but its winters remained thoroughly Canadian. Moss had grown up in Chicago. He’d thought he knew everything there was to know about nasty winter weather.

  The war and coming back here afterwards to practice law had taught him otherwise.

  Only after he was out the door and going down the stairs to his elderly Bucephalus did he realize he hadn’t kissed Laura good-bye. He kept going. His sigh was more glum than bemused. For years, he hadn’t been able to get the idea of her out of his mind. Then, when they finally did come together, their lovemaking had been the most spectacular he’d ever known.

  And now they were married—and he forgot to kiss her good-bye.
So much for romance,
 he thought unhappily. He got into the motorcar and turned the key, hoping the battery held enough charge to start the car. Someone down the street was cranking an old Ford. Most of the time, a self-starter was ever so much more convenient. In weather like this, though . . .

  The Bucephalus’ engine sputtered, coughed, and then came to noisy life. Moss let out a sigh of relief.

  The motorcar would get him to the office, which meant the odds were good it would get him home again, too. And then, once he got home, he would find out what new things Laura had found to complain about.

  He put the Bucephalus in gear and pulled onto the street even though the engine hadn’t had enough time to warm up. Only after the auto had started to roll did he wonder if he was running away from trouble.

 
Well, what if you are?
 he asked himself.
It’s not as if you won’t go back to it tonight.

  Not many motorcars shared the streets with the Bucephalus. Considering the snow and the state of the machine’s brakes, that might have been just as well. Moss saw one traffic accident, with steam pouring from a shattered radiator, and with two men in heavy coats standing there shouting at each other.

  Moss thought fewer automobiles were on the streets than had been the winter before. He knew why, too: fewer people in Berlin had jobs to go to than had been so the winter before. That was true all over Canada, all over North America, all over the world. Everyone hated it, but no one seemed to have the faintest idea what to do about it.

  Two words painted on the side of a building—YANKS OUT! Before long, somebody would come along and paint over them. The Canucks hadn’t given up wanting their own country back. The United States remained determined they wouldn’t get it. Since the USA had the muscle, the Canadians faced an uphill fight.

  As Moss got out of the Bucephalus, a man in a ragged overcoat who needed a shave came up to him with a gloved hand out and said, “Can you give me just a little money, friend? I’ve been hungry a long time now.”

  “Here you are.” Moss handed him a quarter. “Buy yourself something to eat.” The man took the coin. He went down the street muttering something about a damned cheapskate Yank. Jonathan Moss sighed. Try as you would, you couldn’t win.

  He had an electric hot plate in his office. As soon as he got in, he started perking more coffee. Not only would it help keep him awake, it would help keep him warm. Even before the coffee was ready, he got to work on the papers waiting for him on his desk.

  He’d won his name among the Canadians of Berlin for keeping the U.S. occupiers off their backs as much as he could. That brought him a fair number of cases to be tried in military courts. It also brought him a lot of much more ordinary legal business. Most of his current case load involved bankruptcies.

  So many of those were on his desk right now, in fact, that he thought of adding a slug of whiskey to the coffee he poured for himself. Maybe that would help him face the ruin of other men’s hopes with something more like equanimity.
Or maybe it’ll turn me into a drunk,
 he thought, and left the whiskey bottle—it was only a pint—in his desk drawer.

  How many of those bankruptcies would have happened if the Russians had managed to pay their loan to that Austro-Hungarian bank? Moss didn’t know, not exactly. The only sure answer that occurred to him was,
a lot fewer
. Of course, he was lucky he was still in business himself. He’d sold out when the stock market started dropping like a rock, and had escaped before Swan-Dive Wednesday. The longer he’d stayed in, the worse he’d have got hurt.

  By ten o’clock, he was starting to come up for air in his paperwork. That was when the door to his office opened and his first appointment of the day came in. “Good morning, Mr. Harrison,” Moss said, getting up and leaning forward across the desk to shake hands. “What can I do for you today?”

  “You can call me Edgar, for starters,” Edgar Harrison answered. He was a short, thin, intense-looking man of about Moss’ age. The top half of his left ear was missing: a war wound. Had the bullet that clipped him traveled a couple of inches to the right of its real course, he would have died before he hit the ground. As he sat down in the chair to which Moss waved him, he added, “It’s not like we haven’t worked together before.”

  “No, it’s not,” Moss agreed. Harrison sailed as close to the wind as he could when it came to urging more freedom for the conquered Canadian provinces. He’d spent time in jail not long after the Great War ended. Moss thought he’d been lucky not to get shot, though he’d never said that out loud. “Care for some coffee?” he asked, pointing to the pot on the hot plate.

  Edgar Harrison shook his head. “Nasty stuff. Never could stand it. Don’t know how you Yanks pour it down the way you do.”

  “We manage,” Moss said dryly, and refilled his cup. “You’ve got something on your mind—I can tell by your lean and hungry look.”

  “Such men are dangerous,” Harrison said with a laugh. “How would you like to mount a court challenge to the whole rationale for the U.S. occupation of Canada?”

  “How would I like it?” Moss echoed. “Personally, I’d like it fine. I’ll tell you straight out, though, you’ll lose. Occupation law says the U.S. Army can do whatever it has to in occupied territory, and the Constitution doesn’t apply here.”

  “I know that.” The Canadian’s face clouded. “I don’t see how I could help knowing it. But that’s what I want to challenge: the notion that your fancy, precious Constitution shouldn’t apply in Canada. Don’t we deserve the rule of law, same as you Yanks?”

  “What you deserve and what you’re going to get are two different things,” Moss replied. “I’m sorry, Mr. Harrison—Edgar—but I can’t help you make that case. I don’t see any point to even trying to get a judge to hear it. The law here isn’t any different from the law in Utah, and that’s part of the USA.”

  “Yes, and you Yanks were right on the point of letting it go back to being a regular part of the USA, too,” Harrison said.

  “We
were
,” Moss said. “Then that Mormon murdered General Pershing, and now it’ll be another ten years before anybody so much as mentions making Utah a normal state again.”

  “Nobody’s murdered a military governor here,” Harrison said.

  “That bomber tried, whatever his name was,” Moss answered. “He tried twice, as a matter of fact. And there was the uprising a few years ago.” He felt like fortifying this cup of coffee, too, but he wouldn’t, not with Harrison watching. “I’m sorry. Whether you’re right or wrong, you haven’t got a Chinaman’s chance of making an American court take you seriously.” Edgar Harrison’s eyes were gray as ice—and, at the moment, every bit as cold. “What will your wife say, Mr. Moss”—he wouldn’t use Jonathan’s first name now—“when she finds out you don’t want to help us toward our freedom?”

  “I hope she’ll say I’m the lawyer in the family, and I know what I’m doing,” Moss answered. “That’s what I hope. If she says anything else, well, that’s between her and me, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “That depends,” Harrison said. “Yes, indeed—that depends.” Moss looked at him. “Mr. Harrison, I think we’re done here. Don’t you?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid we are,” the Canadian replied. “I’m sorry you turned out to be just another goddamn Yank after all.” He got to his feet. “Well, we have ways of dealing with that, too.” Stung by the injustice of Harrison’s words, Moss exclaimed, “If it weren’t for me, half the Canucks in this town would be in jail or dead.” The other man paid no attention, but turned on his heel and walked out the door. Only after he was gone did Moss wonder if his words had been more than unjust. He wondered if they’d held a threat.

 
C
incinnatus Driver didn’t like having to start over as he approached middle age. He’d spent the years since moving up to Des Moines getting his hauling business up to the point where it made a pretty good living for him and his family. He’d sold the beat-up old Duryea truck he’d driven to Des Moines from Covington, and bought himself a less beat-up, middle-aged White: a bigger, more powerful machine.

  And then Luther Bliss had lured him back to Kentucky and thrown him into jail. Elizabeth had to sell the White to keep food on the table for his family and a roof over their heads. Cincinnatus had a little celebrity value when he got back. Thanks to that, he’d been able to get a new truck—well, actually, an old truck, a Ford that had seen a lot of better years—on credit. For a Negro, that was something not far from a miracle.

  He’d kept up the payments, too. He’d never been afraid of work. If he had to get up before the sun rose and keep driving till long after it set, he would do it without a word of complaint. He had done it without a word of complaint.

  And then the bottom fell out of the stock market. All of a sudden, fewer goods came into the railway yard. Fewer riverboats and barges tied up at the docks by the Des Moines River. But just as many hauling companies and independent drivers like Cincinnatus were fighting for less business.

  One way to get it, of course, was to charge less for hauling. If, after that, you worked more hours still, you might make ends meet. You might—provided you didn’t charge less than fuel and upkeep on your truck cost. Cincinnatus—and everybody else who drove a truck in Des Moines, and elsewhere in the country—collided head-on with that painful limitation.

  “What am I supposed to do?” he asked Elizabeth one evening over supper. “What
can
I do? Can’t charge less now. Don’t make no money at all if I charge less.”

  “Don’t make
any
money,” Achilles said. After so long in Iowa, he’d lost a good part of the Kentucky Negro accent Cincinnatus still kept. And, having entered his teens, he was inclined to look on everything his father did with a critical eye. He went on, “I know you’re not ignorant, Pa, but you sure do sound that way sometimes.”

  In another year or so, he probably would have come right out and called Cincinnatus ignorant.