"Would you let that stand between the two of you if you really love each other?" her mother asked.
"I don't think I could really love anybody who sucks up to the Americans," Mary answered. "I just couldn't stand it. So I'll have to find out about that. Then I'll make up my mind."
Maude McGregor sighed. "All right, dear. I'm not going to try to tell you any different. You're old enough to know your own mind. But I am going to tell you this: I'm afraid you won't have too many chances, so you'd be smart to think twice before you waste any of them."
"I never expected to have any," Mary said. "We'll see what happens, that's all. I'm going out to the barn now. I want to give the cow a bottle of that drench we got from the vet."
"I don't know how much good it will do," her mother said.
"Neither do I." Mary shrugged. "But it won't do any good if the cow doesn't drink it, so I'd better try."
The trick in getting medicine into a cow, she knew, was making sure she thrust the bottle almost down its throat. Otherwise, the drench would slop out the other side of the beast's mouth. It probably tasted nasty-it stank of ammonia, and she wouldn't have wanted to drink it herself. She poured it down the cow, though, and had the satisfaction of pulling the empty bottle from the beast's mouth and seeing only a few drops on the dirt and straw in the stall.
However satisfied Mary was, the cow was anything but. It drank from the trough, no doubt to get rid of the taste of the drench. Mary left the stall. She paused and sat down by the old wagon wheel. She hadn't given up. She didn't intend to give up. She still burned to pay back the Yanks-and the Canadians who collaborated with them.
"I'll take care of it, Father," she whispered. "Don't you worry about a thing. I'll take care of it."
And what would Mort Pomeroy think of that? He hadn't run away from her when he found out she was Arthur McGregor's daughter. That surely meant he had some interest in her-and that he liked the Yanks none too well. What else could it possibly mean?
Cold as Manitoba winter, she answered her silent rhetorical question. It could mean he's head over heels for you and doesn't care about politics one way or the other-or, if he does care, he'll forget about that for the time being because he's head over heels for you.
Or -colder yet- it could mean he's really a collaborator himself, but he's pretending not to be so he can trap you. Mary shook her head. It wasn't so much that she believed Mort incapable of such an outrage, though she did. It was much more that she didn't think the Yanks could be interested in her. Her father, after all, was almost nine years dead. She'd been a girl when he blew himself up. Since then, she hadn't done anything overt against the Americans. Oh, they were bound to know she didn't love them. But if they got rid of every Canadian who didn't love them, this would be a wide and ever so empty land.
She took her weekly bath earlier than usual that Saturday, and dressed in her best calico. Her mother smiled. "What time is Mort coming for you?" she asked.
"Between six and six-thirty," Mary answered. "Do I look all right?" She anxiously patted at her hair.
"You look wonderful," her mother answered. "I'm sure you'll have a good time. Talking pictures! Who would have thought of such a thing?"
Mary sniffed. "They've had them in the USA and the CSA for a couple of years now. We're only the poor relations. We have to wait our turn."
"That may be part of it, but Rosenfeld's not the big city, either," Maude McGregor said. "I'll bet they've had them in places like Winnipeg and Toronto for a while now."
With another sniff, Mary said, "Maybe." She didn't want to give the Americans the benefit of any doubt.
Mort Pomeroy pulled up in his Oldsmobile at six on the dot. Mary didn't, couldn't, hold his driving an American auto against him. After the U.S. conquest, the Canadian automobile industry no longer existed. "Hello, Mary," Mort said when she came to the door. "You look very pretty tonight. Hello, Mrs. McGregor," he added to her mother, who stood behind her.
"Hello, Mort," Maude McGregor answered gravely.
"Shall we go?" Mary didn't sound grave-she was eager.
"Have a nice time," her mother said. She didn't tack on, Don't stay out too late, as she had on Mort's first few visits to the farmhouse.
Riding in a motorcar was something Mary hadn't done very often before she got to know Mort Pomeroy, though she tried not to let on. It was ever so much faster and smoother than traveling by wagon. Almost before she knew it, they were back in Rosenfeld.
Mort laid down two quarters at the cinema as if he'd never had to worry about money in his life. That Mary doubted; his father might make a living from his diner, but nobody got rich running a business in Rosenfeld.
Inside the theater, he bought them a tub of popcorn and some sweet, fizzy stuff called Yankee Cola. The bubbles tickled as they went up Mary's nose. She laughed in spite of the fizzy water's name. Music blared from the screen as the newsreel started. Then there were pictures of a damaged warship that, with its flat deck and asymmetrical smokestack and superstructure, was as funny-looking as anything Mary had every imagined. "Jap treachery almost sank the USS Remembrance," the announcer boomed, "but quick work by her damage-control team saved her."
On the screen, a very fair officer looked out at the audience. "We got her back to port," he said. "She'll be in action again before long, and then the enemy's going to pay."
Mary leaned toward Mort Pomeroy. "Too bad the Japs didn't sink her," she whispered, and waited to see how he'd respond.
He nodded. He didn't make a fuss about it or get excited, but he nodded. Mary didn't think she could have stood it if he'd said he would rather see the USA win than Japan. As things were, she smiled and leaned her head on his shoulder in the dark theater and enjoyed the film. Sound did add to the story: more than it did to the newsreel, where most of it had been martial music and an announcer reading what would have been shown before in print on the screen. Hearing characters talk and sing made her feel as if she lived in New York City with them-and made her feel as if she wanted to, which was even more startling.
Afterwards, Mort drove her back toward the farmhouse. Voice elaborately casual, he said, "We could stop for a little while."
There were only the two of them, and the motorcar, and the vast Canadian prairie. Who would know if they did stop for a little while? No one at all. "Yes," Mary said, also casually, "we could."
He parked on the soft shoulder and turned off the engine and the headlights. It was very quiet and very dark. They slid towards each other on the front seat. His arms went around her. They kissed for a long time. He squeezed her breasts through the thin cotton fabric of her dress. The heat that filled her had nothing to do with the warm summer evening. But when he set a hand high on her thigh and tried to slide it higher yet, she twisted away. "I'm not that kind of girl, Mort," she said, and hoped her breathless voice didn't give away her lie.
Evidently not. He just nodded and said, "Kiss me again, then, sweetheart, and I'll take you home." She did, happily. He fired up the Oldsmobile's engine and put the auto in gear. Off toward the farm it went. Mary didn't know when she'd been so happy. Looking at Mort Pomeroy there beside her, she was almost sorry she wasn't that kind of girl.
"O ccupation duty!" Colonel Abner Dowling made the words into a curse. "My country's at war, and what do I get? Occupation duty. There's no justice in the world, none at all."
"As General Custer's adjutant, sir, you were right at the heart of things during the Great War," Captain Toricelli said.
"I wanted to be at the front, not at First Army headquarters," Dowling said. That was nothing but the truth. It wasn't the whole truth, of course. The whole truth was, he would have sold his soul for seventeen cents to escape the company of General Custer, provided the Devil or anyone else had offered him the spare change for it.
And yet Custer unquestionably was a hero, a hero many times over. How did that square with the other? Dowling cast a suspicious eye in the direction of Captain Toricelli. What did Toricelli think of him? Some things, perhaps, were better left unknown.
"If you must do occupation duty, sir," his adjutant persisted, "there are worse places than Salt Lake City. If the Mormons rise up again with all their might, they don't just tie down men we might use fighting the Japs-"
"Not likely they could," Dowling said. "Damned few battleships and cruisers and submersibles in the Great Salt Lake."
"Er-yes, sir," Captain Toricelli said. "But the railroads still run through Utah. An uprising could keep manufactured goods from getting to the West Coast and oil from getting to the East. That would make everything much harder."
"I should say it would," Dowling agreed. "And fighting Japan will be hard enough as is. The little yellow men have been getting ready for this ever since the Great War. And what have we been doing the past twelve years? Not enough, Captain. I'm very much afraid we haven't done enough."
"Do you know what worries me more than anything else, sir?" Toricelli said.
"Tell me, Captain," Dowling urged. "I can always use something new to worry about. I may not be able to find enough things on my own."
"Er-yes," Toricelli said again; Abner Dowling in a sportive mood disconcerted him. Gathering himself, he went on, "I'm afraid President Blackford will pick up a lot of votes because we're at war."
"Oh." Dowling scowled. That made entirely too much sense for him to like it. "I do hope you're wrong. With luck, people will see a Democrat in Powel House is the best hope we have of winning this war. We've been in two with Republicans, and we lost both of those. And we're not off to a good start with a Socialist running one. I'll trade you-do you want to know what worries me more than anything else?"
"Tell me, sir," Angelo Toricelli replied. He didn't actually say he wanted to know, but he came close enough. He was an adjutant, after all; part of his job was listening to his superior.
Dowling knew more about that side of being an adjutant than he cared to. But the shoe was on the other foot now. He didn't have to listen to General Custer's maunderings any more. And he didn't intend to maunder here. He said, "I'm afraid the Japs will take the Sandwich Islands away from us, the way we took them away from England in 1914. That would be very bad. Without the Sandwich Islands, we'd be fighting this war out of San Diego and San Francisco and Seattle. The logistics couldn't get much worse than that."
"Well, no, sir," Captain Toricelli said. "But we caught the British by surprise when the Great War broke out. I can't imagine the Japanese pulling off a surprise attack against Pearl Harbor."
"I hope not, by God," Dowling said. "Still, who would have thought they could have pulled off a sneak attack on the Remembrance? That was a pretty slick piece of work."
"It cost them, too," his adjutant said. "They lost their freighter and their speedboat and their submersible."
"A good thing they did," Dowling said. "If that sub could have launched a second spread of torpedoes, we'd have lost our aeroplane carrier. By everything people say, we almost lost her anyhow." He shook his head. His jowls wobbled. "As far as you can in a situation like that, we got lucky."
Toricelli nodded. "And Canada's quiet-for the time being, anyhow. And President Mitchel's keeping the CSA quiet, too. He can't possibly strike at us-the Confederates are no more ready for a big war than we are: less, if anything. And the Action Francaise is busy puffing out its chest and making faces at the Kaiser. So it's just us and the Japs."
"And thousands of miles of water," Dowling added.
"Yes, sir-and several thousand miles of water," Captain Toricelli agreed.
Those thousands of miles of water, of course, were the main reason Abner Dowling would almost surely stay in Utah for as long as the war lasted. The United States had needed an enormous Army to take on the Confederate States along the land frontier the two American republics shared-had needed it, got it, and won with it. But what good was an enormous Army out in the Pacific, where most of the islands were small and where the only way to get to them was by ship? None Dowling could see.
He surged to his feet, saying, "I'm going to take a bit of a constitutional." Every doctor he'd ever seen told him he'd be better off if he lost weight. Trouble was, he had no great interest in losing it. He'd always been heavy. He felt good. And he liked nothing in the whole wide world better than eating.
By the time he got to the entrance to Army headquarters in Salt Lake City, a squad of armed guards waited to escort him on his stroll: his adjutant must have telephoned ahead. Dowling fumed a little; he didn't want to go for a walk surrounded by soldiers. But he could hardly claim he didn't need guards, not after he'd been in General Pershing's office when that still uncaught assassin gunned down the military governor of Utah.
If anybody in a third-story window had a rifle, or maybe just a grenade, all the guards wouldn't do him a hell of a lot of good. He knew that-knew it and refused to dwell on it. "Let's go, boys," he said.
"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.
And, when he set the coins and bills in front of his wife, she was delighted, too. "Will there be more tomorrow?" she asked hopefully.
"I don't know," he answered. "But you can bet I'm going to go back and find out."
He made sure he got to the construction site early. He didn't get there early enough, though. By the time he came up, a couple of hundred men already clamored for work. Toledo cops did their best to keep order. Chester had played football against one of the policemen. "How about a break, pal?" he said. "Let me slide up toward the front? I could really use the job."
The cop shook his head. "Can't do it," he said. "Everybody else here is hungry, too. Playing favorites'd be worth my neck."
He was probably right. That made Martin no less bitter. Knowing he had no chance for work there, he went off to look for it somewhere else. He had no luck, not even when he offered to help a truck driver bring crates of vegetables into a store for a quarter.
"No, thanks. I'll do it myself," the driver said. "If I give you a quarter, I lose money on the haulage." He stacked more crates-all of them with fancy labels glued to one side-on a dolly and wheeled them into the grocery. When he came out again, he said, "You that hungry?"
"Hell, yes," Martin said without hesitation. "I'd do damn near anything for a real job again."
"You ought to go to California, then," the driver said. "That's where this stuff comes from, and they grow so goddamn much out there, they're always looking for pickers and such. Weather's a damn sight better than it is here, too."
"Probably doesn't pay anything," Chester said. "If it sounds so good, why aren't you on your way yourself?"
"Believe me, buddy, I'm thinking about it," the truck driver said. "There are times when I don't want to see another snowflake as long as I live, you know what I mean?"
"Yeah," Martin admitted. "I do. But California? It's a hell of a long way, and who knows what things are really like out there?"
"Only one way to find out." The driver set more crates on the dolly. The spicy odors of oranges and lemons filled the air. They were, in their own way, better arguments than anything he could have said.
"California," Chester muttered as he went off to see what else he could scrounge in Toledo. Pickings were slim. Pickings, in fact, couldn't have been any slimmer. Would they be any better on the far side of the country? He shrugged. Maybe that was the wrong question. Maybe the right question was, how could they be worse?
U p till now, Flora Blackford had never been to the West Coast. When she got off the train in Los Angeles, she was surprised to find it was ninety degrees in the second week of October. She was even more surprised to discover that ninety-degree weather could be pleasant, not the humid hell it would have been in New York City or Philadelphia or Washington-or Dakota, for that matter.
She joined her husband on the platform at the station. President Blackford was smiling and shaking hands with well-wishers. "Four more years!" people chanted. Patriotic red-white-and-blue bunting was draped everywhere Socialist red bunting wasn't.
Vice President Hiram Johnson said, "Welcome to the Golden State, Mr. President. We're doing everything we can to make sure we deliver the goods three weeks from now."
"Thanks very much, Hiram," Hosea Blackford replied with a gracious smile. The two Socialist stalwarts stood side by side as photographers snapped pictures. Flora wondered what the captions to those pictures would say; the Los Angeles Times didn't love the Socialist Party.
"Your limousine is waiting, Mr. President-Mrs. Blackford." Johnson suddenly seemed to remember that Flora existed.
Escorted by police cars with wailing sirens, the limousine made its slow way from Remembrance Station to the Custer Hotel. The bright sunshine, the clear blue sky, and the palm trees made everything seem wonderful at first glance. The grinding despair of the business downturn might have been on the other side of the world, or at least on the other side of the United States.
It might have been, but it wasn't. Even in the couple of miles from the station to the hotel, Flora saw a soup kitchen, a bread line, and a lot of men in worn clothes aimlessly wandering the streets. Thanks to the mild weather, getting by without a roof over their heads was far easier in Los Angeles than in, say, Chicago.
Recognizing the president in the open motorcar, one of those men who looked to have nowhere to go shouted, "Coolidge!"
"Ignore him," Vice President Johnson said quickly.
"It's a free country," Blackford said with a smile. "He can speak up for whichever candidate he pleases. Certainly is a pretty day. I can see why so many people are coming here. We don't have Octobers like this in Dakota, believe you me we don't."
Another man, this one wearing a tweed jacket out at the elbows, pointed at the limousine and yelled, "Shame!"
This time, Hiram Johnson tried to pass off the heckling with an uneasy chuckle. Hosea Blackford said, "I have nothing to feel ashamed about. I've done everything I could from the moment this crisis began to try to repair it. I defy any citizen of either major party-or any Republican, either, for that matter-to show me anything I might have done and have not."
Flora reached out and set her hand on top of her husband's. She knew he was telling the truth. She also knew the toll the business collapse had taken on him. He'd aged cruelly in the three and a half years since taking the oath of office. She sometimes wished Coolidge had won the election in 1928. Then all of this would have come down on his head, and Hosea would have been spared the torment of fighting a disaster plainly too big for any one man to overcome.
At the Custer Hotel, a woman reporter called, "Why aren't we doing more in the war against the Japanese?"
"We're doing everything we can, Miss Clemens, I assure you," Blackford answered. "This is a war of maneuver, you must understand. It isn't a matter of huge masses slamming together, as the Great War was."
"Why weren't we ready to fight a war like that?" Ophelia Clemens persisted.
"We'll win it," he said. "That's what counts."
He and Flora managed to get to their suite without too many more questions. She tipped the swarthy porter-he spoke with a Spanish accent, and might have been born in the Empire of Mexico. As soon as the fellow left, Hosea Blackford collapsed on the bed. "For the love of God, fix me a drink," he said.
"As soon as I find where they're hiding the liquor, I will," she said. "And I'm going to make myself one, too." She held up the whiskey bottle in triumph when she pulled it out of a cabinet. Her husband clapped his hands. The ice bucket was right out in plain sight. So were glasses. Whiskey over ice didn't take long.
"Thank you, dear." Hosea sat up and downed half his drink at a gulp. He let out a long, weary sigh, then spoke two words: "We're screwed."
"What?" Flora choked on her whiskey. She hoped she'd heard wrong. She hoped so, but she didn't think so. "What did you say?" she asked, on the off chance she really had been wrong.
"I said, we're screwed," the president of the United States replied. "Calvin Coolidge is going to mop the floor with me. Calvin goddamn Coolidge." He spoke in sour, disgusted wonder. "Half the time, no one's even sure if he has a pulse, and he's going to clean my clock. Isn't this a swell old world?" He finished the drink and held out the glass. "Make me another one, will you?"
"You've got a speech in a couple of hours, you know," Flora warned.
"Yes, and I'll be all right," her husband said. "Not that it would make a dime's worth of difference if I strode in there drunk as a lord. How could things be any worse than they are already?"
He'd never shown despair till that moment. He hadn't had much hope, but he'd always put the best face he could on it. No more. As Flora poured whiskey into the glass, she said, "You can still turn things around."
"Fat chance," he said. "I couldn't win this one if they caught Coolidge in flagrante delicto with a chorus girl. Probably not even if they caught him in flagrante with a chorus boy, for heaven's sake. Blackfordburghs." He spat the name out in disgust. "How can I win when my name's gone into the dictionary as the definition for everything that's wrong with the whole country?"
"It's not fair," Flora insisted. "It's not right." She sipped her own drink. The whiskey burned on the way down, but not nearly so much as her husband's acceptance of defeat.
When she was a little girl, she'd watched her grandmother die. Everyone had known the old woman was going to go, but nobody'd said a word. Up till now, the Socialists' presidential campaign had been like that. In public, she supposed it still would be. But she could see her husband had told the truth, no matter how little she liked it.
Hosea Blackford said, "We knew it was going to happen if I couldn't turn things around. I did everything I knew how to do-everything Congress would let me do-and none of it worked. Now they're going to give the Democrats a chance." He took a big swig from the new drink. "Hell, if I'd lost my job and my house, I wouldn't vote Socialist, either."
"It'll only be worse under the Democrats," Flora said.
"But people don't know that. They don't believe it. They don't see how it could be worse. They only see that it's bad now, and that there was a Socialist administration while it got this way. I'm the scapegoat."
"You did everything you could do. You did everything anybody could do," Flora said. "If they don't see that, they're fools."
"It wasn't enough," her husband answered. "They don't have any trouble seeing that. And so-" He finished the drink at a gulp. "And so, sweetheart, I'm going to be a one-term president." He laughed. "In a way, it's liberating, you know what I mean? For the rest of the campaign I can say whatever I please. It won't make any difference anyhow."
Before very long, an aide knocked on the door and said, "We're ready to take you to your speaking engagement, Mr. President, ma'am."
"We're ready," Blackford declared. Flora anxiously studied him, but he looked and sounded fine as he went to the door. More than a little relieved, she followed him out to the limousine.
He spoke at the University of Southern California, just north of Agricultural Park. The USA had touted the park and the football stadium there as a venue for the 1928 Olympic Games, but had lost out to Kaiser Wilhelm's Berlin. People were talking about another bid in 1936, but the Confederates were also trumpeting the possibility of holding the Games in Richmond that year. The international decision would come in 1933.
President Blackford got a warm welcome on the university campus. The Socialist Party still attracted plenty of students, though Flora wondered how many of them were twenty-one. A handful of signs saying COOLIDGE! waved as the limousine went by. "Reactionaries," Flora muttered.
Friendly applause greeted the president when he strode into the lecture hall where he would speak. A young man did shout Coolidge's name, but guards hustled him from the hall. The Democrats didn't try in any organized way to disrupt Blackford's address. They probably don't think they need to bother, Flora thought bitterly. They're probably right, too. My own husband doesn't think they need to bother, either.
Behind the podium, Hosea Blackford waited for the applause to die away. "We've done a lot for the country the past twelve years," he said. "The Democrats will say we've done a lot to the country the past twelve years, but that's because they're part of the problem, not part of the solution. If they hadn't played obstructionist games in Congress, we've have an old-age pension in place today. We'd have stronger minimum-wage laws. We'd have stronger legal support for the proletariat against their fat-cat capitalist oppressors. We would, but we don't. The Democrats are glad we don't. We Socialists wish we did. That's the difference between the two parties, right there. It's as plain as the nose on your face. If you want the proletariat to advance, vote Socialist. If you don't, vote for Calvin Coolidge. It's really just as simple as that, friends."
He got another round of applause. Sitting in the front row, Flora clapped till her palms were sore. Not all the Coolidge backers had left the hall, though. Two or three of them raised a chant: "Bread lines! Blackfordburghs! Bread lines! Blackfordburghs!"
Hosea Blackford met that head on. "Yes, times are hard," he said. "You know it, I know it, the whole country knows it. But answer me this: if my opponent had been elected in 1928, wouldn't we be talking about Coolidgevilles today? The Democrats would not have made things better. In my considered opinion, they would have made things worse."
"That's right!" Flora shouted. People in the hall gave her husband a warm hand. The only trouble was, making political speeches to an already friendly crowd was like preaching to the choir. These people (except for that handful of noisy Democrats) hadn't turned out to disagree with the president. And his words weren't likely to sway anybody who'd already decided to vote against him. Nothing was. Flora knew as much, even if she hated the knowledge.
Her husband pounded away at the Democrats, at Coolidge, at Coolidge's engineer of a running mate. He got round after round of applause. By the noise in the hall, he would have been swept back into office.
But then, just as Flora's spirits rose and even Hosea Blackford, buoyed by the reception, looked as if he too felt he wasn't just going through the motions, distant explosions made people sit up and look around and ask one another what the noise was. Then, suddenly, some of the explosions weren't so distant. They rattled the windows in the hall. Through them, Flora thought she heard aeroplane engines overhead.
She frowned. That was crazy, to say nothing of impossible… wasn't it? She looked up at her husband. No-she looked up at the president of the United States. "I don't know what's going on, my friends," he told the crowd, "but I think we ought to sit tight here till we find out."
He got his answer sooner than he expected. A man bleeding from a scalp wound burst into the hall and shouted, "The Japs! The goddamn Japs are bombing Los Angeles!" As if to underscore his words, a cannon somewhere in the distance began shooting at the aeroplanes. Flora wondered if it had any chance at all of bringing them down. She had her doubts.
The crowd, the crowd that had been so warm, so full of support, cried out in horror and dismay. A guard tapped Flora on the shoulder. "Come with me, ma'am," he said. "We're going to get the president and you out of here. If the roof comes down…"
Helplessly, she went with him. He and his comrades hustled the Blackfords into the limousine and drove off as fast as they could go. As they zoomed away from the University of Southern California, Flora saw fires flickering in front of the huts and tents of a huge Blackfordburgh in Agricultural Park. And she saw other fires burning farther away, fires Japanese bombs must have set. She put her face in her hands and began to cry. Now, for certain, there was no hope at all.
AmericanEmpire: TheCenterCannotHold