American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (73 page)

  “Yes, sir,” they chorused. The privates among them were young men, conscripts. The sergeant who led the squad was in his thirties, a Great War veteran with ribbons for the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star among the fruit salad on his chest.

  The wind blew out of the west. It tasted of alkali. Dowling thought tumbleweeds should have been blowing down dusty streets with a wind like that. The streets in Salt Lake City weren’t dusty, though.

  They were well paved. Everything in the city—with the inevitable exception of the ruins of the Temple and Tabernacle—was shiny and new. Everything from before the Great War had been knocked flat during the Mormon uprising.

  Sea gulls spiraled overhead. Seeing them always bemused Dowling. Staying within the borders of the United States, you couldn’t get much farther from the sea than Salt Lake City. The gulls didn’t care. They ate bugs and garbage and anything else they could scrounge. Farmers liked them. Dowling pulled down his hat, hoping the gulls wouldn’t make any untoward bombing runs.

  He strolled past the sandbagged perimeter around the headquarters. Soldiers in machine-gun nests saluted as he went by. He returned the salutes. Leaving headquarters wasn’t so hard. To return, he knew he’d have to show his identification. The Mormons hadn’t tried anything lately. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t.

  People on the street looked like . . . people. Women tugged at their skirts to keep them from flipping up in the breeze. Boys in short pants ran and shouted. A long line of men waited patiently in front of a soup kitchen. Dowling could have seen the like in any medium-sized city in the USA. And yet . . .

  Nobody said anything to him. He hadn’t expected anyone would, not with soldiers tramping along beside him with bayonets glittering on their Springfields. No one even gave him a dirty look. But he still had the feeling of being in the middle of a deep freeze. The locals hated him, and they’d go right on hating him, too.

  After a bit, he noticed one difference between Salt Lake City and other medium-sized towns in the USA. No election posters shouted from walls and fences. No billboards praised Hosea Blackford and Calvin Coolidge. Being under martial law, Utah didn’t enjoy the franchise. Lawsuits to let the locals vote had gone all the way to the Supreme Court—and had been rejected every time. Ever since the War of Secession, the Supreme Court had taken a much friendlier line toward the federal government’s authority than toward any competing principle.

 
  And it’s paid off, by God,
 Dowling thought.
We finally licked the damned Confederates. We’re the
strongest country in America. We’re one of the two or three strongest countries in the world. We
did what we had to do.

  He turned a corner . . . turned it and frowned. Half a dozen posters were plastered on a wall there: simple, wordless things showing a gold-and-black bee on a white background. The bee, symbol of industry, was also the symbol of Deseret, the name the Mormons had given to the would-be state the U.S. Army crushed.

  Dowling turned to the sergeant who headed the bodyguards. “Note this address,” he said. “If those posters aren’t down tomorrow, we’ll have to fine the property owner.”

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant said crisply.

  Martial law meant no antigovernment propaganda. The Mormons and the government hadn’t liked or trusted each other since the 1850s. They’d despised each other since the 1880s, and hated each other since 1915. That didn’t look like changing any time soon. The government—and the Army—held the whip hand. If the posters didn’t come down, the man on whose property they were displayed would be reckoned disloyal, and would have to pay for that disloyalty.

 
  Of course he’s disloyal,
 Dowling thought.
The only people in Utah who aren’t disloyal are the ones
who aren’t Mormons—and we can’t trust all of them, either. The Army didn’t stop to ask a whole
lot of questions about who was who back in 1915. We landed on everybody with both feet. So
some of the gentiles haven’t got any use for us, either. Well, too bad for them.

  As he walked down the block, he saw more bee posters. He nodded to the sergeant, who took down more addresses. One man was already out in front of his house with a bucket of hot water and a scraper, taking down the posters on his front fence. Dowling nodded to the noncom again, this time in a different way. That address didn’t get taken.

  But when Dowling asked the man scraping away at the posters if he knew who’d put them up, the fellow just shook his head. “Didn’t see a thing,” he answered.

  He likely would have said the same thing if he’d given cups of coffee to the subversives who’d put the posters on his fence—not that pious Mormons would have either offered or accepted coffee. Even the locals who outwardly cooperated with U.S. authority weren’t reliable, or anything close to it.

  With a sigh, Abner Dowling went on his way. He wasn’t in the front lines against the Japanese. He probably never would be. But whenever he went out into Salt Lake City, he got reminded he was at war.

 
“N
o, Mister—uh—Martin. Sorry, sir.” The clerk in the hiring office shook her head. “We aren’t looking for anyone right now. Good luck somewhere else.”

  “Thanks,” Chester Martin said savagely. The clerk blushed and ran a sheet of paper into her typewriter so she wouldn’t have to look at him.

  Jamming the brim of his cloth cap down almost to his eyes, Martin stalked out of the office. He didn’t even slam the door behind him. He might come back to this steel mill again, and he didn’t want them remembering him the wrong way.

  He wanted work. He wanted it so bad, he could taste it. But wanting and having weren’t the same.

  Somewhere around one man in four in Toledo was out of a job. It was the same all over the country.

  He hadn’t really expected to find work here, but he had to keep going through the motions. He’d been to every steel mill in town at least four times, with never the trace of a nibble. He’d been other places, too. He’d been to every kind of outfit that might need a strong back and a set of muscles. He’d had just as much luck at the plate-glass and cut-glass works, at the docks, at the grain mills, and even at the clover-seed market as he had in his proper line of work. Zero equaled zero. He didn’t remember much of what he’d learned in school, but that was pretty obvious.

  A man in a colorless cloth cap shabbier than his own came up to him and held out a hand. Voice a sour whine, the man said, “Got a dime you can spare, pal?”

  Chester shook his head. “I don’t have a job, either.”

  The other man eyed him—here, plainly, was another fellow who’d lost his job early in the collapse.

  “You haven’t been out of work all that long,” he said. “You still think you’ll get one pretty soon.” The day was hot and muggy, but his laugh might have come from the middle of winter.

  “I have to,” Martin said simply.

  “That’s what I said,” the other unemployed man replied. “That’s just what I said. After a while, though, you find a Blackfordburgh isn’t such a bad place. You just wait, buddy. You’ll see.” He tipped his shabby cap and walked on.

  With a shudder as if a goose had walked over his grave, Martin went on his way, too. He and Rita were still hanging on to their apartment, thanks to money borrowed from his folks. But he didn’t know how long his father and mother would be able to go on helping them. If his father lost
his
job . . . Chester didn’t even want to think about that. How could he help it, though, with so many men pounding the pavement looking for work?
Guys just like me,
 he thought as his own feet slapped up and down, up and down, on the sidewalk.

  He had a long walk home. He didn’t care. A long walk beat paying a nickel trolley fare. One of these days soon, though, he’d have to shell out some money to let the little old Armenian cobbler down the street repair his shoes. Walking wore on the soles as much as being out of work wore on the soul.

  Somebody on a soapbox—actually, on what looked like a beer barrel—was making a speech under the statue of Remembrance across from city hall. A couple of dozen men and a handful of women listened impassively as the fellow bawled, “We’ve got to hang all the damn Reds! They aren’t real Americans—they never have been! And the Democrats are just as bad. No, worse, by thunder! They pretend they want us strong, but all they really aim to do is keep us weak! Half of ’em are in the Japs’ pockets right this minute, so help me God they are!”

  He paused for applause. He didn’t get much. Chester Martin kept walking. He supposed it was inevitable that hard times would spawn reaction, but this fellow seemed no threat to imitate what the Freedom Party was doing in the CSA.
Just a noisy nut,
 Chester thought.
It’s not like we haven’t got
enough of those.

  VOTE SOCIALIST! posters a little farther on proclaimed. TOGETHER, WE HAVE POWER! they showed a brawny factory worker swinging a hammer under a bare electric bulb. Nowhere did they mention Hosea Blackford’s name. It was as if they wanted to forget he was there while hoping he got reelected anyhow.

  COOLIDGE! The Democrats’ posters weren’t shy about naming their man. HE’LL FIX THINGS! they promised, and showed the governor of Massachusetts as a confident-looking physician at the bedside of a wan U.S. eagle. That wasn’t fair, but it was liable to be effective. And the Democrats seemed not only willing but proud to tell the world who their presidential candidate was. They even had his running mate, a native Iowan with slicked-down hair, at his side handing him a stethoscope.

  Martin muttered under his breath. The depths to which the United States had fallen in the past three years and more truly made him wonder whether he’d done the right thing in turning Socialist after the Great War. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. He laughed, though it wasn’t funny. For how many mistakes was that an excuse? About half the ones in the world, if he was any judge.

  But it had. With the big capitalists clamping down tight on labor in the rough days right after the war, voting Socialist had seemed the only way to hold his own. And it had worked. For ten years and more, the country stayed prosperous. But when prosperity died, it died painfully.

  Would the Democrats have let things get this bad? Chester pondered that as he tramped toward his apartment. He still had the letter Teddy Roosevelt had sent him after he was wounded. He’d met Roosevelt in the trenches during the war—had, in fact, jumped on the president and knocked him flat when the Confederates started shelling his position on the Roanoke front. Roosevelt hadn’t forgotten him.

  TR’s concern hadn’t been based on class, as the Socialists’ was. It had been personal. The Socialists sneered at such ties, saying they were like those of an old-time baron and his feudal retainers.

  Maybe the Socialists were right. Chester had no reason to believe they were wrong. Right or wrong, though, they’d done none too well themselves. Maybe personal ties really did count for more than those of class.

  “Damned if I know,” Martin muttered. “Damned if I know anything any more, except that things are fouled up all to hell and gone.”

  A woman coming the other way gave him an odd look. She didn’t say anything. She just kept walking.

  The way things were nowadays, plenty of people went around talking to themselves.

  Martin opened the door to his apartment without having found any answers. He doubted anybody in the whole country had any answers. If anybody did have them, he would have been using them by now.

  Wouldn’t he?

  Rita’s voice floated out of the kitchen: “Hello, honey. How did it go?”

  “N.G.,” Chester answered. The two slangy initials summed up the way things were in the USA these days. The United States were no good, no good at all. He went on, “They aren’t hiring. Big surprise, huh?”

  His wife came out of the kitchen, an apron around her waist. She gave him a hug and a kiss. “You’ve got to keep trying,” she said. “We’ve both got to keep trying. Something’s bound to turn up sooner or later.”

  “Yeah.” Martin hoped his voice didn’t sound too hollow. He remembered the fellow who’d tried to panhandle from him, the one who’d said he was living in the local Blackfordburgh. With a shiver, Martin made himself shove that thought down out of sight. He tried to sound bright and cheerful as he asked,

  “What smells good?” He meant that; something sure did. They hadn’t had any meat for a few days, but the aroma said they would this evening.

  “It’s a beef heart.” Rita did her best to sound bright and cheerful, too. “Mr. Gabrieli had ’em on special for practically nothing. I know they’re tough, but if you stew ’em long enough they do get tender—well, more tender, anyhow. And I could afford it.”

  “All right,” Chester said. “It
does
smell good.” Since he’d lost his job, he’d found out about tripe and giblets and head cheese and other things he hadn’t eaten before. Some of them turned out to be pretty good—giblets, for instance. He wouldn’t get a taste for tripe if he lived to be a hundred. He ate it, because sometimes it was that or no meat at all. Sometimes—a lot of the time—it
was
no meat at all.

  Maybe the beef heart
would
prove tasty.

  It proved . . . not too bad. No matter how long Rita cooked it, it remained chewy, with a faintly bitter taste. But it satisfied in ways cabbage and potatoes and noodles couldn’t. “Here’s hoping Mr. Gabrieli has it on special again before too long,” Chester said. Rita nodded. Unspoken was the painful truth that, if even a cheap cut like beef heart wasn’t on sale, they couldn’t afford it.

  When morning came, Martin went out looking for work again. He actually found some: hauling bricks from trucks to a construction site. It was harder work than any on a foundry floor, and didn’t pay nearly so well. For a full day of it, he made two and a half dollars. But coming home with any money at all in his pocket felt wonderful—good enough to let him forget how weary he was.