American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (93 page)

  After pan-frying a pork chop and some potatoes and washing them down with a stiff whiskey, Potter went over to Whig headquarters to hear . . . whatever he heard. Dance music blared from the wireless sets: the polls hadn’t closed yet. He pulled out his pocket watch. It was a little past seven-thirty—less than half an hour to go.

  That gave him plenty of time for another drink, or two, or three. He nodded to Braxton Donovan, who also had a whiskey in his hand, and said, “The condemned man drank a hearty meal.”

  “Funny,” the lawyer said. “Funny like a crutch.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean you,” Potter said. “If you think I meant you, I apologize. I meant the country. Before they execute a man, they give him a blindfold and a cigarette. What do we do when the Confederate States of America go up against the wall?”

  Donovan studied him. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say you were sorry before. You must mean it. You don’t waste time being polite.”

 
I try not to waste time at all,
 Potter thought. But he had nothing to do but stand there banging his gums till clocks in Charleston started striking eight. “All along the eastern seaboard of the Confederate States, the polls have closed,” an announcer on the wireless declared. “We’ll bring you the latest results from the presidential, Congressional, state, and local elections—but first, a word from our sponsor.” A chorus of young women started singing about the wonders of a soap made from pure palm oil. Potter wondered what could be going through their minds as they trilled the inane lyrics. Probably something like,
We’re
getting paid
. Times were hard indeed.

  Then the numbers started coming in. Somebody posted each new installment on a big blackboard at the front of the room. That meant the Whigs could go on chattering and still keep up. As soon as Clarence Potter saw the early results from North Carolina, he knew what kind of night it would be. North Carolina was a solid, sensible, foursquare Whig state. The collapse hadn’t hit it so hard as a lot of other places.

  Jake Featherston led there. He led by more every time the fellow at the board erased old numbers and put up new ones. And he had coattails. Freedom Party Congressional candidates were winning in districts where they’d never come close before. And it looked as bad everywhere else.

  Braxton Donovan stared owlishly at the returns. He fixed himself another drink, then came back to stand by Potter and stare some more. He didn’t say anything for a long, long time. At last, he did: “Jesus Christ. It’s like watching a train wreck, isn’t it?”

  Potter shook his head. “No, Braxton. It’s like being
in
a train wreck.” Donovan thought that over, then slowly nodded.

  And it got no better, not from a Whig point of view, as the polls closed in states farther west. Back in 1921, Tennessee had decided the election when it finally went Whig. This year, it went for Featherston and the Freedom Party. So did Mississippi and Alabama. Potter hadn’t expected anything different there, but he would have loved to be proved wrong. The Whigs led in Arkansas, but Arkansas wasn’t big enough to matter.

  “My God,” somebody behind Potter said. “What
is
the world coming to?” He didn’t need to ask the question, not when he could see the answer. Jake Featherston was going to be president. He would have a majority—a big majority—in the House. The Senate, whose members were chosen by state legislatures rather than popular vote, wasn’t so obvious. Even so, it all added up to the same thing: after seventy years in the saddle, the Whigs were going into the minority.

  “The minority?” the man in back of Potter said when he spoke that thought aloud. “That’s crazy.” He still seemed unbelieving.

  “If you don’t get it, think like a nigger,” Potter said. “It’ll come to you then, believe me.”
 

  A
long with news of a corruption scandal in the Iowa legislature, newsboys in Des Moines shouted about Jake Featherston’s victory down in the Confederate States. More of them yelled about the scandal, which was right there in town. The election news hit Cincinnatus Driver a lot harder. He got out of his truck on the way to the railroad yards and bought a paper, something he hardly ever did: getting there a minute late might cost him a good cargo. But today he spread the
Register and Remembrance
on the seat beside him and read a paragraph or two whenever he had to stop.

  He was still shaking his head when he got out of the Ford at the yards and started dickering with a conductor over a load of beds and dressers and nightstands. “What’s the big deal?” asked the conductor, a white man too young to have fought in the Great War. “Who cares what happens down in the Confederate States?”

  “I cares.” Cincinnatus knew that was bad grammar even without Achilles telling him so. “I grew up in Kentucky when it was part of the CSA. Glad it ain’t no more. I got out of there once the USA took it over. This here’s a better place if you’re colored.”

  The conductor was not only white, he was a blond who couldn’t have got any whiter if somebody’d thrown him into a tub of bleach. He said, “I don’t know nothin’ about that. All I know is, you may be colored, but you haggle like a damn kike.”

  If he’d been talking about Cincinnatus to a Jew, he probably would have called him a damn nigger.

  Cincinnatus took such names in stride; he’d heard them all, especially the one applying to his own race, too often to get excited about them. He said, “I tell you, Mr. Andersen, I don’t reckon it’s against the law to try an’ git me enough money to make the job worth my while. I ain’t no charity.”

  “Well, I’m a penny-pinching squarehead myself, and I won’t tell you anything different,” Andersen said.

  Cincinnatus liked him better after that; if he could insult himself as casually as he insulted everybody else, odds were none of those insults meant much.

  Cincinnatus got fairly close to the price he wanted for hauling the load of bedroom furniture, too. He drove it over to a furniture store on Woodland Street on the west side of town, only a little north of the bend of the Raccoon River. After growing up by the bank of the Ohio, Cincinnatus didn’t think either the Raccoon or the Des Moines was anything special.

  Olaf Thorstein, who ran the furniture store, was even paler than Andersen. Cincinnatus had trouble believing anybody this side of a ghost could be. Thorstein was a tall, thin man of stern rectitude, the sort who would skin you in a deal if he could but would walk across town in the snow to give back a penny—or a hundred-dollar bill—you accidentally left in his store. With a similar streak in his own character, Cincinnatus had no trouble getting along with him.

  Thorstein said, “Way you talk, you used to live in the Confederate States.” He was not far from Cincinnatus’ age, which meant he’d likely fought in the Great War.

  “Yes, suh, that’s a fact.” Cincinnatus nodded. “Came to Des Moines ten years ago. Ain’t been sorry, neither. This here’s a lot better’n Kentucky.” He remembered Luther Bliss and shivered in spite of himself.

  “Well, what do you think of what’s going on down there now?” the white man asked.

  “Don’t reckon you’ll hear no black man sayin’ nothin’ good about the Freedom Party,” Cincinnatus answered. “What do
you
think, Mr. Thorstein?” A surprising—or maybe a depressing—number of whites weren’t the least bit shy about saying what they thought of people who didn’t look like them. Had the USA had more Negroes, it probably would have had something like the Freedom Party, too.

  “Me? I don’t know much. I have not been there, except in the Army,” Thorstein said, confirming Cincinnatus’ guess. The furniture-seller went on, “I tell you this, though: I think that man Featherston will bring trouble. He lies. How can you trust a man who lies? You cannot. And any man who comes on the wireless and says, ‘I am going to tell you the truth’—well, what else can he be except a liar?” Behind bifocals, his ice-blue eyes flashed. Plainly, he was condemning Jake Featherston to some chilly hell.

  Cincinnatus wished getting rid of the man were that simple. But he nodded to Thorstein. Hating dishonesty of any sort, the Swede might also hate injustice of any sort. “I got me no quarrel with any o’ that,” Cincinnatus said.

  “How could anyone quarrel with it?” Olaf Thorstein sounded genuinely bewildered. “Is it not as plain as the nose on a man’s face? And yet how could the people in the Confederate States have voted for the man if they saw it? They must not have seen it. This I do not understand.”

  “Sometimes folk don’t want to see,” Cincinnatus said. “I reckon that had a lot to do with it.”

  “But why would anyone blind himself on purpose?” Thorstein asked, seeming more bewildered still.

  Cincinnatus had asked himself the same question, more than once. He said, “Seems to me they got a choice. They can look square in the mirror and see how ugly they are, or they can be blind. Looks like they done picked what they aim to do.”

  “Uh-
huh
.” Olaf Thorstein chewed on that. At last, he asked, “And what would a Freedom Party man say about what you just said?”

  “Oh, that one’s easy.” Cincinnatus laughed. “Reckon he’d say I was an uppity nigger, a crazy nigger. Reckon he’d be right. When I used to live in the CSA, I wouldn’t never’ve said nothin’ like that. Colored fella livin’ in the CSA got to be crazy to talk that way. But I been in the USA since 1914 now. This ain’t no great place for black folks—don’t reckon there’s anywhere that’s a great place for black folks—but you take it all in all an’ it’s a lot better than the Confederate States ever was. I got me a chance here—not a good one, maybe, but a chance. Down there?” He shook his head. “No way, nohow, not before the Freedom Party, an’ not now, neither.”

  Again, Thorstein thought before he spoke. “I have never heard a Negro talk so freely of these things,” he said, and then shrugged. “How many Negroes are there in Des Moines for me to talk to?”

  “Not many. We’re thin on the ground here. We’re thin on the ground all over the USA,” Cincinnatus said.
And maybe that’s why things are a little easier for us here,
 he thought.
White
folks in the USA
don’t like us much, but they ain’t afraid of us like in the Confederate States. Not enough of us
here to be afraid of.

  “I hope I have not delayed you too much,” the furniture-store owner said. “I know you need as much work as you can get. Who does not, the way things are these days?”

  “It’s all right, Mr. Thorstein. Don’t you worry about it none,” Cincinnatus said, for Thorstein really did sound concerned. “When I seen in the paper that that Featherston fella won, I was so upset, I didn’t know what to do. Times gonna be hard for colored folks down in the CSA—gonna be real hard. Glad I got me a chance to talk about it some.”

  He was less glad when he got back to the railroad yard just in time to see another driver go off with a choice load that might have been his had he returned five minutes earlier. But he got a load for himself half an hour after that, when a train full of canned salmon from the Northwest puffed to a stop. Several groceries were waiting for their fish, and he took them a lot of it.

  He was tired but happy—he’d made good money that day—when he got back to his apartment building and parked the truck in front of it. Joey Chang, the Chinaman who lived upstairs, was checking his mailbox when Cincinnatus walked into the lobby. “Hello,” Cincinnatus said, affably enough. He got on well with Chang, who brewed good beer in a dry state.

  “Hello,” Chang answered, his English flavored with an accent unlike any other Cincinnatus had heard.

  “We talk a few minutes?”

  “Sure,” Cincinnatus said in some surprise. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Your son Achilles ask my daughter Grace to go to the cinema with him,” Chang replied. “What you think of this?”

  “
Did
he?” Cincinnatus said, and the other man solemnly nodded. Achilles had said he thought Grace Chang was cute. As Olaf Thorstein had remarked, there weren’t that many Negroes in Des Moines. If Achilles found somebody he might like who wasn’t a Negro . . . Well, if he did, what then? “What do
you
think of that, Mr. Chang?” Cincinnatus asked.

  “Don’t know what to think,” Chang said, which struck Cincinnatus as basically honest. He went on, “Your Achilles good boy. I don’t say he not good boy, you understand? But he not Chinese.”

  Cincinnatus nodded. He had similar reservations about Grace. He asked, “What’s your daughter think?”

  “She is modern. She wants to be modern.” Mr. Chang made it sound like a curse. “She says, what difference it make? But it makes a difference, oh yes.”

  “Sure does,” Cincinnatus said. The laundryman gave him a surprised look. Perhaps Chang hadn’t thought a Negro might mind if his son wanted to take a Chinese girl to the cinema. After scratching his head, Cincinnatus went on, “Maybe we just ought to let ’em go out and not say anything about it. Going to the moving pictures together ain’t like gettin’ married. And if we tell ’em no, that’ll only make ’em want to do it more to rile us up. Leastways, Achilles is like that. Dunno ‘bout your Grace.”

  “Her, too,” Chang said morosely. “The more I do not like, the more she does. Modern.” He made the word sound even worse than he had before. Now he screwed up his face. “Yes, maybe we do this. I talk to my wife, see what she say.” By his tone, whatever Mrs. Chang decided would prevail.

  “Fair enough,” Cincinnatus said. “I’ll talk to Elizabeth, too—and to Achilles.” His wife wasn’t home yet. Neither was his son. After graduating from high school, Achilles was doing odd jobs and looking—along with so many others—for something more permanent. He got home before Elizabeth did, and set two dollars on the kitchen table, where Amanda sat doing homework. He
was
a good kid; he brought his pay home every day he worked.