“I think the bill will pass now. I hope it works out for the best, that’s all,” Martin said when Sue asked him about it that night over oxtail soup. “Can’t know till it happens.”
“When you do something, you can’t know ahead of time what will come of it,” his father said. “Politicians will tell you they do, but they don’t. Sometimes, you just go ahead and do things and see where they lead.”
“That’s how the war happened,” Martin said. “Nobody imagined it would be so bad when it started. When it started, people cheered. But we locked horns with the Rebs and the Canucks, and for the longest time nobody could go forward or back. I hope this doesn’t go wrong the same way, that’s all.”
“Sometimes being afraid of what could go wrong is a good reason not to do anything,” Stephen Douglas Martin observed.
“You’re a Democrat, all right,” Chester said.
“Well, so I am,” his father agreed. “Upton Sinclair’s been in for more than a year now, and I’m switched if I can see how he’s set the world on fire.”
Louisa Martin said, “We already set the world on fire once, not very long ago. Isn’t that enough for you, Stephen?”
“Well, maybe it is, when you put it like that,” her husband said. “If letting the Confederates off the hook means we don’t have to fight another war, I suppose I’m for it. But if they start spending the money they would have given us on guns and such, that’ll cause trouble like you wouldn’t believe.” He raised his mug of beer. “Here’s hoping they’ve learned their lesson.” He sipped the suds.
“Here’s hoping,” Chester Martin echoed. He drank, too. So did his mother and sister.
Roger Kimball was drunk. He’d been drunk a lot of the time since Grady Calkins shot President Wade Hampton V. Staring down into his glass of whiskey, he muttered, “Stupid bastard. Stupid
fucking
bastard.” Calkins might as well have taken his Tredegar and shot the Freedom Party right between the eyes.
The whiskey, Kimball decided, was staring back at him. He drank it down so it wouldn’t do that any more.
Any old excuse in a storm,
he thought. He poured himself a fresh glass. Maybe this one would be more polite. Whether it was or not, he’d drink it.
He did a lot of his own pouring these days. Too many people recognized him on the streets and in the saloons of Charleston. A few weeks before, a lot of those people would have greeted him with a wave and a cheery call of “Freedom!” Now they glared. Sometimes they cursed. One man had threatened to kill him if he saw him again. Kimball wasn’t too alarmed—he knew how to take care of himself—but he spent more time in his flat than he had.
That meant his bankroll shrank with every day’s inflation. He didn’t get into so many card games as he had, which was too damn bad, because they’d been what kept him afloat. Without them, the millions that paid the rent one week bought a sandwich the next week, a cigar the week after that, and were good only as pretty paper the week after that.
“God
damn
Grady Calkins,” he said, and drank some of the polite whiskey. It wasn’t fair. The more whiskey he drank, the more obviously it wasn’t fair. The Freedom Party still stood for exactly the same things as it had before the madman shot the president. Kimball still thought those things were as important as he had then. A couple of weeks before, people had applauded him and applauded Jake Featherston. Now they wouldn’t give the Freedom Party the time of day. Where was the justice in that?
Tears came into his eyes, a drunk’s easy tears. One rolled down his cheek—or maybe that was just a drop of sweat. Charleston in the summer, even early in the summer, taught a man everything he needed to know about sweating and then some.
Kimball knocked back the rest of his drink. At last, instead of leaving him furious or maudlin, it did what he wanted it to do: it hit him over the head like a rock. He staggered into the bedroom, took off his shoes, lay down diagonally across the bed, and passed out before he could undress.
Sunlight streaming in through the bedroom window woke him the next morning. It seemed so hot, so bright, so molten, he thought for a moment he’d died and gone to hell. He squinted his eyes down to narrow slits so he could come close to bearing the glare. When he rolled away from it, his head pounded like a submersible’s diesel running at full throttle.
His mouth tasted as if too many people had stubbed out too many cigars in there. Greasy sweat bathed his body from aching head to stockinged feet. He thought about getting up and taking a small nip to ease the worst of the pain, but his stomach did a slow, horrified loop at the mere idea.
Eventually, he did get up. “Only proves I’m a hero,” he said, and winced at the sound of his own voice even though he hadn’t been so rash as to speak loudly. He staggered into the bathroom, splashed his face with cold water, and used more cold water to wash down some aspirins. His stomach let out another loud shout of protest when they landed, as if it were a submarine under heavy attack from depth charges. He wondered if they’d stay down. He gulped a few times, but they did.
He brushed his teeth, which got rid of the worst of the cigar butts. Then he ran a tub full of cold water, stripped off his sweat-soaked clothes, and gingerly stepped in. It felt dreadful and wonderful at the same time. After he’d toweled himself dry and put on a shirt and trousers that didn’t smell as if he’d stolen them from a drunk in the gutter, he felt better. Before too long, he might decide he wanted to live after all.
Showing stern military discipline, he walked past the whiskey bottle on the coffee table in the front room and into the kitchen. Black coffee was almost as painful to get down as the aspirins had been, but made him feel better. After some thought, he cut a couple of thick slices of bread and ate them. They sank to his stomach like rocks, but added ballast once there.
He went back into the bathroom and combed his hair in front of the mirror. Only red tracks across the whites of his eyes and a certain general weariness betrayed his hangover to the world. He would do. Donning a straw hat to help shield his eyes from the slings and arrows of outrageous sunbeams, he left the apartment. However much he might have wanted to, he couldn’t stay indoors all the time.
Newsboys selling the
Courier
and the
Mercury
both shouted the same headline: “United States end reparations!” The boys with stacks of the
Mercury
, the Whig outlet, added, “President Mitchel says Confederate currency will recover!”
“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Kimball sneered: both newspapers cost a million dollars. But, if enough people believed it, it might happen. The prospect made him less happy than he would have thought possible. The shrinking—hell, the disappearing—Confederate dollar had helped fuel the Freedom Party’s rise.
A cop strode up the street toward Kimball, twirling his billy club in a figure-eight. He recognized the ex–Navy man, and aimed the nightstick at him like a Tredegar. “I catch you and your pals going around making trouble like you used to, I’ll run y’all in, you hear? Them’s the orders I got from city hall.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Bob,” Kimball answered wearily, “tell me you didn’t vote for Featherston and I’ll call you a liar to your face.”
“That don’t have nothing to do with nothing.” The policeman brushed a bit of lint from the sleeve of his gray tunic. “Word is, we got to be tough on keeping public order. We ain’t messin’ around with you boys no more, you hear?”
“I hear you,” Kimball said, and went on his way. He would have made sure the Freedom Party walked small for a while, anyway—only sensible thing to do. But getting orders from a fair-weather friend rankled.
And, when he opened the door to the Freedom Party’s Charleston offices, he realized the orders had been unnecessary for a different reason. The way things were right now, he would have had a devil of a time raising trouble even had he wanted to. The headquarters that had bustled all the way through the presidential campaign and afterwards felt more like a tomb now. Only a few people sat at their desks, none of them doing anything much.
Damn that Calkins,
Kimball thought again.
“God damn it,” he said loudly, “it isn’t the end of the world.”
“Might as well be.” Three people, one in the front of the office, one in the middle, and one at the back, said the same thing at the same time.
“No! Jesus Christ, no,” Kimball said. “If we were right before that miserable son of a bitch of a Hampton got his head blown off, we’re still right now. People
will
see it, so help me God they will.”
One of the men who’d said
Might as well be
replied, “I had a rock chucked through my front window the other night. Had a note tied round it with a string, just like in the dime novels.”
“The dime novels that cost millions nowadays,” Kimball broke in.
As if he hadn’t spoken, the Freedom Party functionary went on, “Said my neighbors would whale the tar out of me if I ever went out wearing white and butternut again, or else burn my house down.” He gave Kimball as hard a look as he could with his round, doughy face.
Kimball glared back. The leftover pain of his hangover made his scowl even fiercer than it would have been otherwise. “God damn you to hell, Bill Ambrose, I didn’t have a thing to do with burning down Tom Brearley’s house. I don’t do things like that. I might have shot the bastard—Lord knows I wanted to—or I might have beat him to death with a two-by-four, but I wouldn’t have done that. It’s a coward’s way out, like throwing a rock through a window. I go straight after what I don’t like. You understand me?”
Bill Ambrose muttered something. Kimball took two swift strides toward him. Feeling the way he did, he was ready—more than ready—to brawl. Ambrose wasn’t, though he’d been bold enough when the stalwarts marched. Hastily, he said, “I understand you, Roger.”
“You’d damn well better,” Kimball growled. “We’ve got to walk small for a while, that’s all. Yeah, some of our summer birds have flown south. Yeah, the cops are going to give us a rough time for a bit. But Jake Featherston’s still the only man who can save this country. He’s still the only man who has a prayer of licking the United States when we tangle with ’em again. All right, getting to the top won’t be as easy as we hoped it would. That doesn’t mean we can’t do it.”
He knew what he sounded like: a fellow at a football game when his team was down by two touchdowns more than halfway through the fourth quarter. If they only tried hard enough, they could still pull it out. If they gave up, they’d get steamrollered.
Looking around the office, he thought a lot of the men still there were on the point of giving up. They’d drift away, go back to being Whigs, and try to pretend their fling with the Freedom Party never happened, as if they’d gone out with a fast woman for a while and then given her up for the homely, familiar girl next door.
“Don’t quit,” he said earnestly. “That’s all I’ve got to tell you, boys: don’t quit. We
are
making this country what it ought to be. We never would have seen passbook laws with teeth if there hadn’t been Freedom Party men in Congress. That bastard Layne might have won the election if it hadn’t been for us.”
Some of the men looked happier. Kimball knew he wasn’t the only true-blue Party man here. But somebody behind him said, “Maybe things’ll get better anyhow, now that we’re not stuck with reparations any more.”
That was Kimball’s greatest fear. To fight it, he loaded his voice with scorn: “Ha! I know about Burton Mitchel, by God—I’m from Arkansas, too, remember? Only reason he got into the Senate is that his daddy and granddad were there before him—he’s another one of those stinking aristocrats. You ask me, if he does anything but sit there like a bump on a log, it’ll be the biggest miracle since Jesus raised Lazarus.”
A few people laughed: not enough. Kimball spun on his heel and stalked out of the Freedom Party offices. He’d never been aboard a slowly sinking ship, but now he had a good notion of what it felt like.
And he got no relief out on King Street, either. Up the sidewalk toward him came Clarence Potter and Jack Delamotte. Potter’s face twisted into a broad, unpleasant smile. “Hello, Roger. Haven’t see you for a while,” he said, his almost-Yankee accent grating on Kimball’s ears. “I expect you’re pleased with the pack of ruffians you chose. By all accounts, you fit right in.”
Kimball’s hands balled into fists. “First time I ever heard your whiny voice, I wanted to lick you. Just so you know, I haven’t changed my mind.”
Potter didn’t back away, not an inch. And Delamotte took a step forward, saying, “You want him, you’ve got us both.”
Joyously, Kimball waded in. The tiny rational part of his mind said he’d probably end up in the hospital. He didn’t care. Potter’s nose bent under his fist. As long as he got in a few good licks of his own, what happened to him didn’t matter at all.
Sam Carsten was sick to death of the Boston Navy Yard. As far as he could see, the USS
Remembrance
might stay tied up here forever. He expected to find cobwebs hanging from the hawsers that moored the aeroplane carrier to its pier.
“There’s nothing we can do, Carsten, not one damn thing,” Commander Grady said when he complained about it. “The money’s not in the budget for us to do anything but stay in port. We ought to count ourselves lucky they aren’t cutting the ship up for scrap.”
“They’re fools, sir,” Sam said. “They’re nothing but a pack of fools. There’s enough money in the budget for them to let the goddamn Confederates off the hook. But when it comes to us, when it comes to one of the reasons the Rebs had to pay reparations in the first place, a mouse ate a hole in the Socialists’ pockets.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” Grady said, “the Army’s feeling the pinch as hard as we are.”
“It doesn’t make me feel better, sir,” Carsten answered. “It makes me feel worse.”
“What kind of a Navy man are you, anyway?” the gunnery officer demanded in mock anger. “You’re supposed to be happy when the Army takes it on the chin. Besides”—he grew serious once more—“misery loves company, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Carsten said. “All I know is, I want us strong and the CSA weak. Whatever we need to do to make sure that happens, I’m for it. If it goes the other way, I’m against it.”