American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (65 page)

  Besides, Horwitz might win promotion to major, in which case he
would
escape Morrell’s perhaps stifling influence on his career. No report would get Morrell the brigadier general’s stars he craved.

  Promotion during the war had been swift. Promotion after the war . . . Even men in good odor in Philadelphia languished. Promotion for someone who wasn’t might never come.

 
  And if you retire a colonel?
 Morrell shrugged. He’d done his part to win one war for his country. No one could take that away from him. If they wanted him to count jackrabbits and pine trees out here in Kamloops, he would do it till they wouldn’t let him do it any more.
One of these days, they may decide
they need someone who knows something about barrels again. You never can tell.

  He laughed a bitter laugh. He knew he did a good enough job here in Kamloops, but what he did had nothing to do with the specialized knowledge he’d acquired during the war. Any reasonably competent military bureaucrat could have taken his place and done about as well. That even applied to his proposed solution to Japanese meddling in British Columbia, though he might have wanted to push harder than most uniformed drones would.

  He laughed again, this time with something approaching real amusement. Reasonably competent military bureaucrats shuddered at the prospect of ending up in a place like this. They intrigued and pulled wires to stay in Philadelphia, or to go on inspection tours of places like New Orleans. That meant Kamloops and other such garrisons in the middle of nowhere attracted drunks, fools, dullards . . .
and people like me,
Morrell thought.

  When he went home after finishing the day’s stint, he didn’t walk. He couldn’t, not when the last blizzard had left a foot and a half of snow on the ground, snow that piled into drifts higher than a man. Instead, he buckled on the pair of long wooden skis leaning against the wall of the entry hall.

  Captain Horwitz came out while Morrell was making sure he’d got everything tight. His aide-de-camp shook his head. “You wouldn’t get me on those things, sir.”

  “I know. I’ve tried,” Morrell answered. “I keep telling you—you don’t know what you’re missing. It’s the next best thing to flying with your own wings.”

  “I know what I’m missing,” Horwitz said stubbornly. “A broken ankle, a broken leg, a dislocated knee, a broken arm, a broken neck . . . And if I go flying, I’ll do it in an aeroplane, thanks.”

  “O ye of little faith.” Holding both ski poles in one hand, Morrell opened the door, then quickly closed it behind him.

  Cold smote. He skied down the steps—there was enough snow on them to make it easy—and pushed off for home. Darkness had already fallen. He relished the wind in his face, the play of his muscles as he glided along over the smoothly undulating snow. A shimmer of motion in the sky caught his eye. He stopped, staring up in awe. White and golden and red, the northern lights danced overhead.

  He didn’t know how long he simply stood there staring. At last, he got moving again, though he kept looking up to the heavens. Warmth and home and family had their place, no doubt—he was always delighted to get back to Agnes and Mildred. But there were so many who, like Captain Horwitz, closed their souls to this chill magnificence.

  “God, I’m sorry for them,” he said, and skied on.

 
A
nother Friday. Another payday. It wouldn’t be much of a check; Chester Martin knew as much. He’d been working six hours a day instead of eight for quite a while now, and not working at all on Saturdays.

  He should have enjoyed the extra time off. He would have enjoyed it a lot more if he’d had the money to do more things. As it was, fifty cents for a couple of cinema tickets once or twice a month made him and Rita worry. The evening out would mean beans for supper instead of liver and tripe—or, the way things were these days, it might mean potatoes and cabbage instead of beans.

 
  I’ve still got a job,
 he thought as he inched toward the clerk who would give him his pay envelope. The clerk still had a job, too, and still had the faintly supercilious air he’d worn when times were good.

 
Petty-bourgeois bastard looking down his nose at the
proletariat,
 Martin thought sourly.
Do you
really believe the bosses can’t replace you, too?

  Later on, he remembered that that had gone through his mind just before he got to the clerk and gave him his name and pay number. The clerk checked him off a long, long list, handed him the envelope, and all of a sudden didn’t seem so snotty any more. “Here you are, Martin,” he said, as if speaking in a sickroom.

 
  What’s eating him?
 Chester wondered. He didn’t open the envelope till he got to the front door of the steel mill. A couple of galvanized iron trash cans stood there, to hold just such refuse. Martin pulled out the check and put it into the breast pocket of his overalls. He started to throw away the envelope when he noticed another piece of paper inside.

  This one was pink.

  Martin stood there staring at it, altogether unmoving, for at least half a minute. He’d known the same mix of numbness, disbelief, and swelling pain when he got wounded on the Roanoke front—never before, and surely never since.

  He pulled out the second sheet of paper, hoping against hope it might be something else. It wasn’t.

  Come Monday, he didn’t have a job any more.

  Other paydays, he’d seen stunned men holding pink slips here. You didn’t say anything. You didn’t look at them. Maybe that was cruel. Maybe it had a touch of,
There but for the grace of God go I.
 But maybe it held a sort of rough kindness, too. If you didn’t look at your fellow workers who all at once weren’t working beside you, they could say anything, do anything, they chose, and not have to worry about losing face.

  The only trouble with that was, Chester had no idea what to do with the license he had. What could he possibly say? Nothing would make any difference. He was gone, and the steel mill would go on without him.

  At last, one thing did occur to him. “Fuck,” he said softly. He tore up the pink slip, dropped the pieces into a trash can, and walked out. He might as well have torn himself up and thrown himself away instead.

  After all, what was he but a disposable proletarian the capitalists who ran the mill had just disposed of?

  That thought made him look up the street toward the Socialist Party hall. He almost started over there. If anybody knew what to do, if anybody could help him, he’d find what he needed there. But he shook his head before taking his first step in that direction. The hall could wait. It was only a trolley ride away (but, with no money coming in, was it
only
a trolley ride?), and Rita deserved to know first.

  When the trolley rattled past the statue of Remembrance across from the city hall, Martin had to look away. He’d remembered. He’d helped the United States get their honor back. He’d paid in blood and pain doing it, too. But now, it seemed, the whole world had forgotten him—him and how many hundreds of thousands, how many millions, of others just like him?

  He almost missed his stop, and had to scramble off at the last minute. The motorman, who’d started rolling, sent him a sour look as he braked again. Most of the time, Martin would have apologized. Now he hardly even noticed. He trudged off toward his apartment building, his feet scuffing through snow.

  A man in a ragged overcoat came toward him from an alley. “Spare change?” the fellow said, and coughed. He’d probably been hatchet-faced when he was eating well. Now a man could wound himself on the sharp angles of cheeks and nose and chin.

  Martin had always given what he could, even though he hadn’t had much. Tonight, he shook his head.

  “Sorry, buddy,” he said. “I just lost my job, too.”

  “Just?” The hatchet-faced man’s scorn said there were degrees in misery, too, degrees Martin hadn’t yet imagined. “It’s been two years for me. I used to have a house and a motorcar. Hell, I used to have a wife. Enjoy it. You’re only a beginner.” He tipped his battered hat and walked away.

  Shivering from more than the cold, Martin hurried into his building. He half feared another beggar would find him before he got up the steps, but none did.
How long can we keep this place?
 he wondered as he turned the key in the lock.
Is the next stop a Blackfordburgh?

  Rita came to the door and gave him a quick, wifely peck on the lips. “How did it . . . ?” she began. Her voice trailed away as she got a real look at his face. Slowly, the blood drained from hers. “Oh, no,” she said. “You didn’t . . .” She stopped again.

  “I sure as hell did,” Chester said. “Yes, I sure as hell did, and God only knows what happens now.

  Have we got anything to drink in this place?”

  He knew they did. He took a bottle of bourbon—KENTUCKY PRIDE, NOW MADE IN THE USA, it said—from a cupboard and poured himself a glass. Very much as an afterthought, he added a couple of ice cubes.

  When he started to put the bottle away, Rita said, “Wait a minute.” She made a drink for herself, too, though she added water as well as ice to the whiskey.

  Martin raised his glass. “Cheers,” he said—the very opposite of what he meant. He drank. A good many steelworkers celebrated payday by going out and getting drunk. He’d never fallen into that habit.

  Tonight, though, he felt like killing the bottle, and whatever other bottles they had in the place.
Why not?

  he thought.
Why the hell not? It’s not like I’ve got to
get up in the morning. Who knows when I’ll
have to get up in the morning again?

  “What are we going to do?” Rita said in a thin, frightened voice.

  “Maybe one of us’ll find a job,” Chester answered. He didn’t mean that, either. He took another sip and shook his head. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t mean it as that he didn’t believe it. Rita had been looking ever since she lost her job, and hadn’t had any luck landing a new one. She hadn’t just searched for typist positions, either. Nobody seemed to be hiring anyone, even as a waitress or a salesgirl.

  As for him . . . He wanted to laugh, but he hurt too much inside. He wondered if he even ought to bother trying other steel mills. They were all laying people off, not hiring. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a new face on the foundry floor.

  Rita said, “What do we do if . . . if we can’t find a job? Neither one of us, I mean.”

  “Why do you think I’m drinking?” he said, which seemed as complete a reply as anything else. A couple of swallows of bourbon later, he added, “My pop’s still working. We’ve got a place to stay, if we have to.”

  He couldn’t imagine a worse humiliation than moving back in with his folks as he neared his own fortieth birthday—and bringing his wife with him. His father and mother would take them in. He was sure of that.

  But having to crawl back to them was the last thing he wanted.

  He shook his head again. The
last
thing he wanted was to have nowhere at all to go, and to end up in a Blackfordburgh. Next to that, the prospect of trying to fit himself and Rita into the room that had been cramped for him alone didn’t seem so bad.

  Rita said, “Maybe you can find something in some other line: construction or something like that.” Even she sounded doubtful. Chester wanted to laugh again. Again, the pain was too much to let him. As gently as he could, he asked, “Hon, why would they want me when they’ve got real carpenters and whatnot coming out their ears?”

  He didn’t expect his wife to have an answer for him, but she did: “Why? I’ll tell you why. Because you’d work cheaper.”

  “Oh.” He winced. It wasn’t because she was wrong. It was because she was right.
And so much for
Socialist solidarity among workers,
 he thought. If times got bad enough, if people got desperate enough, Socialist solidarity went straight out the window. A job now, no matter what the pay, counted for more than the damage taking that job did to labor’s ability to get better wages later.

  His glass was empty. He filled it again. Again, he started to put away the bottle. Again, Rita wouldn’t let him. She poured herself another drink, too. After she’d taken a swallow, she said, “At least your father’s still got work.”

  “Yeah,” Chester said. Rita’s father had worked in a cement plant for more than thirty years, except when he’d done his time in the Army during the Great War. That hadn’t stopped him from losing his job a few months before. He hadn’t been fired, or not exactly; the company had gone belly-up. He’d been able to land only odd jobs since, and worried about losing his house.

  “How much exactly have we got in the bank?” Rita asked.

  Their bank was still sound, where so many had gone under. If this mess had any sort of silver lining, that was it. “We can get by for a month or two, anyhow,” Martin answered. “We’d be better off if we’d never bought any stocks at all, dammit.”

  “We were suckers,” his wife said. “Lots of people were suckers.”

  “Don’t I know it,” he said bitterly. “Buy when the market was near the top, throw money away on margin calls when it went sour. And you’re right, honey—we aren’t the only ones.”

  “Election’s coming up this year,” she said. “I don’t see how Hosea Blackford has a prayer of getting a second term.”

  “I almost went to the Socialist Party hall before I came home,” Martin said. And then, proving the depths of his own despair, he asked, “Why the devil should anyone who’s out of work vote Socialist, though?”

  “It wasn’t the Democrats who passed the relief bills,” Rita said. “They voted against most of them.”

  “I know. But they say the crash never would have happened in the first place if they’d been running things.” Martin sighed. “Maybe they’re even right. Who knows?” Rita looked shocked. He held up a defensive hand. “I used to be a Democrat till after the war. My old man still is—you know that. I changed my mind when the bosses sicced the cops on us when we struck for higher wages. We needed worker solidarity then, and we needed the Socialists, too.”