American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (54 page)

  Cincinnatus knew it, too; he remembered the hell-raiser he’d been at Achilles’ age. This was what boys did when they started turning into men. “I can’t help it, son,” Cincinnatus said now, as mildly as he could.

  “I talk the way I’ve always talked. Don’t know no other—”

  “Any other,” Achilles broke in.

  “—way to do it,” Cincinnatus finished, as if his son hadn’t spoken. “And I’m talkin’ about important stuff with your ma, stuff we got to talk about. Maybe your English teacher don’t like the way we do it”—this time, he quelled Achilles with a glance—“but we got to hash it out just the same.”

  “Your pa’s right,” Elizabeth said. “Things ain’t easy.” Her accent was thicker than her husband’s, but Achilles held his peace. She went on, “I ain’t been gettin’ so much in the way of housekeeper’s work lately, neither. Dunno what we gwine do. Like your pa say, dunno what we
kin
do.”

  “Government talks about them makework jobs for folks who can’t get nothin’ else,” Cincinnatus said.

  Achilles stirred not once but a couple of times, but had the sense to keep his mouth shut.
Maybe he does
want to live to grow up,
 Cincinnatus thought. Aloud, he went on, “Trouble is, I don’t want one o’ them.

  All I want is to go on doin’ what I been doin’, go on doin’ that and make a living at it.” Elizabeth nodded. “I know,” she said. She didn’t say she wanted to go on cleaning other people’s houses, and Cincinnatus knew she didn’t. What she did say made a painful amount of sense: “We got to get the money from somewheres, though.”

  “I know,” Cincinnatus said glumly.

  “I could look for something,” Achilles said. “Plenty of people hire kids nowadays, because they can pay

  ’em less than grownups.”

  He was, of course, dead right. Cincinnatus shook his head even so. “Ain’t gonna let you do that unless things get a lot worse’n they are now. First thing is, you wouldn’t bring in much money, like you say. And second thing is, I want you to get all the education you can. Down the line, that’ll do you more good than anything else I can think of. We ain’t in the Confederate States no more. No law against you goin’ out and gettin’ any kind o’ work you’re smart enough to do. There’s even colored lawyers and doctors in the USA.”

  So there were—a handful of each. Their clients were also colored, almost exclusively. Cincinnatus didn’t dwell on that. He wanted his son ambitious, as he was. He’d done as well as he could himself to have the hauling business. Maybe, one of these days, Achilles would take over for him. But maybe, once the boy became a man, he would want something more—want it and be able to get it. So Cincinnatus hoped, anyway.

  Amanda said, “Wish you was—wish you
were
—home more, Pa.” She corrected herself before her older brother could do it for her.

  “I wish I was, too, sweetheart,” Cincinnatus answered. After getting out of jail, he’d had to get to know his little girl all over again. By the time he came home, she’d nearly forgotten him. And he’d found there was a great deal to like in her. She had an even sweeter nature than Elizabeth’s, which was saying a lot.

  But wishes and the real world had only so much to do with each other. “I don’t work, we don’t eat.

  Simple as that. Wish it wasn’t, but it is.”

  It had always been as simple as that. Now, though, a new and dreadful simplicity threatened the old: even if he worked as hard as he could, as hard as was humanly possible, they still might not eat. That terrified him.

  Snow was falling when he got up the next morning. He fired up the truck and headed for the railroad yard even so. He intended to get there early. Some truckers would let snow make them late. They were the ones who’d get what was left after the more enterprising men won the good assignments—or maybe the latecomers would end up with nothing at all.

  When Cincinnatus saw how few trains had come into the yard, he thanked heaven he’d come as fast as he could. He got a choice load, too: he filled the back of the old Ford with canned fish from Boston—the mackerel on the cans looked absurdly cheerful—and set out to deliver it to the several grocery stores run by a fellow named Claude Simmons.

  Some of the grocery boys who helped him unload the fish were no older than Achilles. One or two of them looked younger than his son. Down in the CSA, even white kids would have pitched a fit about working alongside a colored man. Nobody here complained. The boys seemed as grateful to have work as Cincinnatus was himself.

  At one of the stores, Simmons himself signed off on the paperwork. He nodded to Cincinnatus. “I’ve seen you delivering things here more than once, haven’t I?” he asked.

  “That’s right, suh,” Cincinnatus answered.

  “You drive for yourself?”

  “Yes, suh.”

  The grocery man studied him. “You do that just ‘cause it’s the way things worked out, or are you one of those people who can’t stand taking orders from anybody? People like that, they start going crazy if they have to let somebody else tell ’em what to do, so they end up with a job where they work for themselves—either that or they really do go nuts. I’ve seen that happen a time or two.” With a shrug, Cincinnatus answered, “I don’t reckon I’m like that. You ask somebody else, he might tell you different. But I think I just want to make a living, do the best I can for my family.”

  “You want a job with me?” Simmons asked. “Delivery driver, twenty-two fifty a week. You won’t get rich, but it’s steady.” He pointed to the clipboard in Cincinnatus’ hand. “What you’re doing there, you’re liable to starve on.”

  That held the unpleasant ring of truth. Even so, Cincinnatus didn’t need to think very long before he shook his head. “Thank you kindly, suh, but I got to tell you no.”

  “Do you?” Simmons scowled. Cincinnatus got the idea not many people—and especially not somebody like a colored truck driver—told him no. He went on, “You won’t tell me you clear twenty-two fifty a whole lot of weeks these days.”

  “No, suh.” Cincinnatus admitted what he could hardly deny. “But what happens if I take the job with you, and things get worse like they look like they’re doin’ and
then
you let me go? I’d’ve been drivin’

  one o’ your trucks, right?—not my own. Probably sell that. Then I’d really have to start at the bottom. I done that before. Don’t want to have to try and do it again.”

  “Have it your way,” the grocery man said with a shrug. “Don’t expect me to ask you twice, that’s all.”

  “I don’t, suh. Didn’t expect you to ask me once. Right decent of you to do it.” Suddenly, Simmons seemed less a boss and more a worried human being: “Do you really think it’ll get that much worse? How could it?”

  “How? Dunno how, Mr. Simmons,” Cincinnatus answered. “But you ever know times that weren’t so bad, they couldn’t get worse?”

  That seemed to strike home. “Go on, get out of here,” Claude Simmons said, his tone suddenly harsh. “Here’s hoping you’re wrong, but”—he lowered his voice—“I’m afraid you’re liable to be right.”

  Over supper that night, Cincinnatus asked Elizabeth, “Did I do the right thing? Twenty-two fifty steady money, that ain’t bad. Ain’t great, but it ain’t bad.”

  “You done just right.” His wife spoke with great authority. “Couple-three months, he forget why he took you on and he let you go. What kind of mess we in then? Way things is, leastways you know what you got to do to git by.”

  “I thought the same thing—the very same thing,” Cincinnatus said. “We’re in trouble now, but we’d be ruined if I took that job and I lost it. We’ll go on the best way we know how, that’s all.”

  “Can’t get worse’n what it was when you was in jail,” Elizabeth said.

  “Hope to God it can’t,” Cincinnatus answered. He didn’t know exactly how bad it had been for his family. But when he laughed, he didn’t feel mirthful. “When I was in jail, I didn’t have to worry none about where my next meal was comin’ from. I knew I was gonna get fed. Wouldn’t be much, an’ it wouldn’t be good, but I was gonna get fed.”

  He would have got beaten, too, but he didn’t talk about that. It wasn’t anything his family needed to know, and it wasn’t relevant to the discussion. Elizabeth said, “One way or another, the Lord provide for us.”

  “That’s right,” Cincinnatus said. Clarence Darrow might not have believed in God, but he did. The confidence that God was keeping an eye on him even while he went through the worst of times in jail was hard to come by, but it had proved true. So he remained convinced, at any rate.

  And, one day about six weeks later, when he went to the railroad yard to see what he could haul, he remarked to the conductor, “I ain’t had nothin’ for the Simmons stores in a while now.” The white man sent him an odd look. “You wouldn’t want that assignment if I gave it to you, Cincinnatus,” he answered. “Old man Simmons went bankrupt week before last. Didn’t you know?”

  “No,” Cincinnatus said softly. “I missed that.” He looked up toward the heavens. A drop of drizzle hit him in the eye, but he didn’t care. “Thank you, Jesus,” he whispered. He might not have much, but what he had, he would keep a while longer.

 
S
ylvia Enos had always enjoyed books. Like anyone who’d grown up in the days before wireless sets brought words and music straight into the home, she’d used books to while away a lot of empty hours in her life. That didn’t mean she’d ever thought she would end up writing one herself.

  Well, yes, she had a coauthor. He was a real writer. He told her to call him Ernie, so she did. He’d been shot up during the war; he’d served in Quebec, and had written a couple of novels about that. She’d even read one. But times were just as hard for writers these days as they were for everybody else. He’d got himself a thousand-dollar contract for
I Sank Roger Kimball
, by Sylvia Enos, as told to . . . and five hundred dollars of that went into his pocket and the other five hundred into Sylvia’s, and five hundred dollars bought a hell of a lot of groceries, so Sylvia was writing a book.

  “Tell me how it happened,” Ernie would say, sitting in the chair in her front room, smoke curling up from his pipe as he took notes. “Tell me exactly how it happened. Make it very plain. Make it so plain anyone can follow.”

  “I’ll try,” Sylvia would say. “I’ll do my best.” She found herself echoing the direct way in which he spoke. “When I got on the train bound for Charleston, I thought—”

  “Wait. Stop.” Ernie held up a hand. He was a big man, burly like a prizefighter, and the scars above his eyebrows and on his cheeks argued he’d been in his share of scraps, whether in the ring or just in one saloon or another. “Don’t tell me what you thought. Tell me what you did.”

  “Why don’t you want to know what I thought?” Sylvia asked. “That’s why I did what I did.”

  “Tell me what you did,” Ernie insisted. “I’ll write that. People will read it. Then they’ll know what you did. And they’ll know why, too.”

  Sylvia frowned. “Why will they know that?”

  Ernie was a handsome man, but normally one with a slightly sullen expression. When he smiled, it was like the sun coming out. “Why? Because I’m good,” he said.

  That smile by itself was almost enough to lay Sylvia’s doubts to rest. She’d had room in her life for precious few romantic thoughts since the
Ericsson
sank, but Ernie’s smile coaxed some out from wherever they’d been hiding all these years. She knew that was foolishness and nothing else but. How could she help knowing it, when he was five or ten years younger than she was?

  He listened. She didn’t think she’d ever had anyone listen so closely to what she said. She knew George hadn’t when he was still alive. She’d loved him, and she was sure he’d loved her, too. But he hadn’t listened like that—nor, as she had to admit to herself, had she listened to him so. Paying such close attention hadn’t occurred to either one of them.

  Ernie not only listened, he took detailed notes. Sometimes he lugged a portable typewriter to her flat.

  The battered leather of its case said he’d lugged it to a lot of different places, most of them worse than Boston not far from the harbor. He typed in quick, short, savage bursts, pausing between them to stare at the ceiling and gnaw on the stem of his pipe.

  In one of those pauses between bursts, Sylvia said, “The way the keys clatter, it sounds like a machine gun going off.”

  The pipe stopped twitching in his mouth. It swung toward her, as if it were a weapon itself. “No,” he said, his voice suddenly harsh and flat. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Thank God you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “I drove an ambulance,” he said, at least as much to himself as to her. “Sometimes I was up near the front. Sometimes I had to fight myself. I know what machine guns sound like. Oh, yes. I know. But I was on the safe side of the St. Lawrence”—he laughed—“when I got shot. An aeroplane shot up a train full of soldiers. Poor, stupid bastards. They never even found out what it was about before they got shot.” He shrugged. “Maybe that was what it was about, that and nothing more. I went to help them, to take them away. A hospital was close by. Another aeroplane came over. It shot up all of us. I got hit.” Ernie went back to typing then. The next time Sylvia thought of making some unasked-for comment, she kept it to herself instead.

  He delivered the finished manuscript on a day when winter finally seemed ready to give way to spring.

  Thrusting it at her, he said, “Here. Read this. It is supposed to be yours. You should know what is in it.” He flung himself down on the sofa, plainly intending to wait till she read it. It wasn’t very thick. Sylvia sat down in the chair by the sofa and went through it. Even before she got halfway, she looked up at him and said, “I understand why I did what I did better now than I did when I did it.” She wondered if that made any sense at all. It must have, for he gave her a brusque nod. “I told you,” he said. “I’m good.”