“Man alive.” Cunningham shook his head, back and forth, back and forth. By the way he did it, that one on the rail wasn’t the first he’d hoisted. “Never reckoned you’d dive into the Freedom Party like a turtle diving off a rock into a creek.”
It was, when you got down to it, a pretty fair figure of speech. Jeff felt a lot happier swimming in the river of the Party than he did out on a rock by his lonesome. He said, “Maybe you ought to come along, give yourself somethin’ to do besides gettin’ lit up.”
“I like getting lit up,” Cunningham said. “What the hell better have I got to do, anyhow? Can’t hardly work, not shy an arm. I’ll vote Freedom, sure as hell I will, but I don’t fancy sitting around and listening to people making speeches.”
“It’s not like that,” Jeff protested, but Bedford Cunningham was hoisting his glass again. With a shrug, Pinkard went up the walk and into his own house.
“Hello, dear,” Emily said. She tilted up her face for a kiss. He gave her one, rather a perfunctory job. She didn’t try to improve it. “I know you got your meeting tonight,” she went on when he let her go, “so supper’ll be on the table for you in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” She went back into the kitchen to dish it out. She didn’t shake her own tail, as she would have not so long before.
Jeff paid no attention to the change. “Good thing you remembered,” he told her. “Barney Stevens is back in town from Richmond, and he’s going to let us know what those bastards in Congress are up to. I don’t want to be late, not for that.”
“You won’t be,” Emily promised, her voice floating out through the hall. “Come on and set yourself down.”
He did, then shoveled chicken and dumplings into his face with the single-minded dedication a stoker might have shown in shoveling coal into a steam engine’s firebox. Then, after bestowing another absentminded kiss on his wife, he headed over to the closest trolley stop for the ride to the livery stable where the Freedom Party still met.
He felt at home there, more even than he did in the cottage he’d shared with Emily since the days before the war. Almost all the men who’d joined the Party were veterans, as he was; they’d fought the damnyankees in Virginia, in Kentucky, in Arkansas, in Sequoyah, in Texas, in Sonora. And most of them had put on white shirts and butternut pants these past few months and gone charging forth to break up rival parties’ rallies and to remind the blacks of Birmingham where in the scheme of things they belonged.
“Freedom!” he said every time he shook somebody’s hand or slapped somebody else on the back. And men also reached out to clasp his hand and slap his back and hailed him with the one-word greeting that was also a battle cry. He might have been a Freemason or an Odd Fellow: everyone in the livery stable with him was his brother.
Along with everyone else, he stamped and whistled and clapped when Barney Stevens, massive and impressive in a black suit, strode to the front of the open area. “Freedom!” Stevens—now Congressman Stevens—called.
“Freedom!” his audience roared back. Jefferson Pinkard felt different when he used the slogan along with his comrades. It took on a power then that it lacked when it was simply a greeting. It became a promise, and at the same time a warning: anyone who didn’t care for the Freedom Party’s ideas needed to get out of the way, and in a hurry, too.
“Boys, we’ve got a power of work to do, and that’s a fact,” Barney Stevens said. “Nobody’s mucked out that big barn they call the Capitol in a hell of a long time. Most of the folks, they’ve been there since dirt, or else their pappies were there since dirt, and they’re taking over after the old man finally upped and dropped dead. Damn fancy-pants bluebloods.” Stevens fluttered his hand on a limp wrist. The Freedom Party men howled laughter. He went on, “But we’re starting to get things moving, to hell with me if we’re not. This business with passbooks was just the first shell in the bombardment. Let me tell you some of what I mean…”
After a while, Jeff found himself yawning. Stevens wasn’t a bad speaker—far from it. But Jeff hadn’t joined the Freedom Party to pay close attention to the nuts and bolts of policy. He’d joined because he’d felt down in his bones that something had gone dreadfully wrong with his country and he thought Jake Featherston could fix it.
Exactly how it got fixed didn’t matter so much to him as getting together every week with other people who followed Featherston and going out with them every so often to bust the heads of people who didn’t. That brought back the sense of camaraderie he’d known in the trenches: about the only good thing he’d known in the war.
And so, when Barney Stevens went on and on about hearings and taxes and tariffs and labor legislation, Jeff slipped from the middle of the open area in the livery stable toward the back. “Sorry, Grady,” he whispered after stepping on another man’s toes. He noticed he wasn’t the only fellow moving toward the back of the stable, either. Everybody was glad to have Stevens in Congress, but he’d lost part of his audience tonight. He’d been elected to take care of the details, not to bore everybody with them.
Pinkard wasn’t the first one to slide out the door. “My wife’s a bit poorly,” he whispered to the two burly guards as he left. They nodded. Odds were, they knew he was lying. He shrugged. He’d been polite—and he’d thrown half a million dollars into the big bowl by the door. As long as he was both polite and paid up, the guards didn’t care if he left early.
Since he was leaving early, Emily would probably still be awake. Maybe they’d make the mattress creak when he got home. For some reason, she’d acted kind of standoffish toward him lately. He’d take care of that, by God. Horning it out of her was the best way he knew—he’d enjoy it, too.
He took the trolley to the edge of Sloss company housing, then walked to his cottage. A few people still sat on their front porches, enjoying the fine night air. He wondered if he’d see Bedford Cunningham on his, drunk or passed out. But Bedford must have gone inside to bed, because he wasn’t there.
Pinkard’s own house was also dark, so he figured Emily had gone to bed, too. Well, if she had, he’d damn well wake her up. He turned his key in the lock. The door didn’t squeak as it swung on its hinges. He’d oiled them after he came home from the war, and quietly kept them oiled ever since. He’d caught Emily cheating on him once, and wanted a fair chance to do it again if she stepped out of line. She hadn’t, not that he knew of, but….
The hinges didn’t squeak, but something in the house was squeaking, squeaking rhythmically. He knew what that noise was. It came from the bedroom. Rage filled him, the same rage he knew when he put on white and butternut and went off to break heads, but focused now, as if with a burning glass.
“God damn you, Emily, you little whore!” he bellowed, and stomped down the hall toward the bedroom.
Twin cries of horror greeted him, one Emily’s, the other a man’s. They were closely followed by scrabbling noises, a thump, and the sound of running feet. Whoever’d been in there with Emily hadn’t wanted to face Jeff. As Jeff stormed in, his feet caught on something, then kicked something else: a man’s tangled trousers and his shoe. Whoever the fellow was, he’d departed too quickly to bother retrieving his clothes.
“Jeff, honey, listen to me—” Emily spoke in a quick, high, desperate voice.
“Shut up,” he said, and she did. She hugged the blanket to herself. The moonlight sliding in through the window—the window through which her lover had fled—showed her arms pale and bare against the dark blue wool.
He yanked the blanket off her. She was naked under it. He’d known she would be. Breathing hard, he lashed out and slapped her twice, forehand and backhand, fast as a striking snake. She gasped, but made no other sound. If he killed her on the spot, no jury would convict him. She had to know as much.
When he’d caught her the first time, she’d used all her bodily charms to mollify him. It had worked, too, even if he’d felt filthy and used as he traveled back to the front in west Texas. Now he aimed to use his body to take revenge. He undid his trousers, let them fall to the floor, and flung himself upon her.
She endured everything he did without a whimper, without a protest. In other circumstances, he might have admired that. Now he just wanted to break her, as if she were a wild horse. When his imagination and stamina ran out at last, he got up from the bed and lit the gas lamp above it. Having spent himself again and again, he was prepared to go easy—and too worn to do anything else.
Or so he thought, till he saw that the shirt on the floor had the left sleeve pinned up. “Bedford,” he whispered in a deadly voice. Emily’s face went pale as skimmed milk, which only made the bruises he’d given her look darker.
He pulled up his pants, then yanked her out of the bed and slung her over his shoulder. She squealed then, squealed and kicked. Ignoring everything she did, he carried her out of the cottage and dumped her, still naked, on the walk. Then he went back inside and locked the door behind him.
When she came up crying and wailing, he shouted, “Go to hell. You made your choice. Now you pay for it.” He’d made his choice, too.
I’ll live with it,
he thought. He went back to the bedroom, lay down, and fell asleep right away.
Arthur McGregor worried every time he left the room he’d taken in the cheap Winnipeg boardinghouse. He worried while he was in the room, too. That wasn’t because inside his trunk sat a wooden box containing the largest, finest bomb he’d ever made. He worried about the bomb when he left the room: he worried that someone would discover it, and that he wouldn’t be able to use it.
When he was in the sparsely furnished room, he worried about the farm. He worried about whether Maude and Julia and Mary could do everything that needed doing without his being there. He also occasionally worried about whether the story he and his family had put about—that he’d gone to visit cousins back in Ontario—would hold up under close scrutiny. If some bright Yank added two and two and happened to come up with four…
But the Yank likeliest to do that, Major Hannebrink, was dead. McGregor had made sure of that, and he’d got away with it. Now he was going to make sure of General Custer’s demise, too, and he thought he could get away with that. And, if he couldn’t, he was willing if not eager to pay the price.
“Strike a blow for freedom,” he muttered under his breath as he went downstairs for breakfast.
He wasn’t used to eating anyone’s cooking but Maude’s. The eggs here were fried too hard, while the bacon felt rubbery between his teeth. Morning chatter flowed around him. Apart from a “Good day” or two and a couple of polite nods, he added nothing to it.
Off he went, for all the world as if he had a job to which he didn’t want to be late. His landlady thought he did have a regular job. He’d made certain she thought that. If she thought anything different, the Yanks were liable to hear about it. That was the last thing he wanted.
Almost three years after the end of the Great War, Winnipeg presented an odd mixture of rubble and shiny new buildings, as if a phoenix had risen halfway from the ashes. In another few years, McGregor thought, it might turn into a handsome city again. The rubble would be forgotten. So would the buildings and the hopes from which that rubble had been made. The new Winnipeg would be an American city, not a Canadian one.
HORNE
’
S HOUSE PAINTS
, said a sign on Donald Street. 37
COLORS AVAILABLE.
If Horne had been in business before 1914, if he wasn’t a johnny-come-lately Yank, his sign would have advertised 37
COLOURS
then. Even spelling changed under U.S. rule.
McGregor scowled. To him,
COLORS
looked clipped, unnatural…American. He stepped off the curb—and almost got clipped himself, by an American motorcar. An angry blast from the Ford’s horn sent him leaping back onto the sidewalk. “Watch out, you goddamn hayseed!” the driver screamed, in an accent unmistakably from the USA. “Ain’t you never seen an automobile before?” He stepped on the gas and whizzed away before McGregor could say a single word.
“Christ!” McGregor wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “That’d be all I need, stepping out in front of one of those damn things when I’m carrying…” He let his voice trail away. He did not intend to mention out loud what he might be carrying. He wouldn’t have come so close had he not just come close to getting killed.
Had so many motorcars scurried through the streets of Winnipeg before the Great War? McGregor had come up to the city only a couple of times in those days, so he couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t think so. It might end up prosperous as well as handsome.
He didn’t care. He would sooner have been poor under King George than rich under the Stars and Stripes. The Yanks had taken his country away from him. If they expected him to be happy about it, they were in for a disappointment.
As a matter of fact, if they expected him to be happy about it, they were in for a
big
disappointment. He chuckled grimly—so grimly that a fellow in a business suit edged away from him. He didn’t notice. He wanted to make sure their disappointment was as big as possible.
He crossed the Donald Street bridge over the Assiniboine and strolled past a three-story building that had somehow come through the war intact. Soldiers in green-gray with pot-shaped helmets stood guard around the building in sandbagged machine-gun nests that gave it a formidable defensive perimeter. He didn’t linger. The U.S. guards asked pointed—or sometimes blunt—questions of people naive enough to linger around General Custer’s headquarters.
They would, without a doubt, ask even more pointed—or perhaps blunt—questions of anyone foolhardy enough to try to leave a wooden box anywhere in the neighborhood. McGregor had seen as much on his last trip to Winnipeg.
There was a park not far away. It didn’t even boast children’s swings. All it had were grass and a few benches. McGregor sat down on the grass and waited for noon. He’d done that a good many times by now, and come to know the park well. The earth here was not smooth, but full of round depressions of different sizes and depths. A narrow zigzag strip of low ground, partly obliterated by the depressions, ran across the park from east to west. The troops defending Winnipeg had made a stand here. McGregor grunted. They’d failed, damn them.