The Victorious Opposition
Table of Contents
Manicheism,
n.,
The ancient Persian doctrine of an incessant warfare between Good and Evil. When Good gave up the fight the Persians joined the victorious Opposition.
—Ambrose Bierce,
The Devil’s Dictionary
I
C
larence Potter walked through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, like a man caught in a city occupied by the enemy. That was exactly how he felt. It was March 5, 1934—a Monday. The day before, Jake Featherston of the Freedom Party had taken the oath of office as president of the Confederate States of America.
“I’ve known that son of a bitch was a son of a bitch longer than anybody,” Potter muttered. He was a tall, well-made man in his late forties, whose spectacles made him look milder than he really was. Behind those lenses—these days, to his disgust, bifocals—his gray eyes were hard and cold and watchful.
He’d first met Featherston when they both served in the Army of Northern Virginia, himself as an intelligence officer and the future president of the CSA as an artillery sergeant in the First Richmond Howitzers. He’d seen even then that Featherston was an angry, embittered man.
Jake had had plenty to be bitter about, too; his service rated promotion to officer’s rank, but he hadn’t got it. He’d been right in saying his superior, Captain Jeb Stuart III, had had a Negro body servant who was also a Red rebel. After the revolt broke out, Stuart had let himself be killed in battle rather than face a court-martial for protecting the black man. His father, General Jeb Stuart, Jr., was a power in the War Department. He’d made sure Featherston never saw a promotion for the rest of the war.
You got your revenge on him,
Potter thought,
and now he’s getting his—on the whole country.
He turned the corner onto Montague Street, a boulevard of expensive shops. A lot of them had flags flying to celebrate yesterday’s inauguration. Most of those that did flew not only the Stars and Bars but also the Freedom Party flag, a Confederate battle flag with colors reversed: a star-belted red St. Andrew’s cross on a blue field. Few people wanted to risk the Party’s wrath. Freedom Party stalwarts had broken plenty of heads in their fifteen-year drive to power. What would they do now that they had it?
The fellow who ran Donovan’s Luggage—presumably Donovan—was finding out the hard way. He stood on the sidewalk, arguing with a couple of beefy young men in white shirts and butternut trousers: Party stalwarts, sure enough.
“What’s the matter with you, you sack of shit?” one of them yelled. “Don’t you love your country?”
“I can show how I love it any way I please,” Donovan answered. That took guts, since he was small and skinny and close to sixty, and faced two men half his age, each carrying a long, stout bludgeon.
One of them brandished his club. “You don’t show it the right way, we’ll knock your teeth down your stinking throat.”
A gray-uniformed policeman strolled up the street. “Officer!” the man from the luggage shop called, holding out his hands in appeal.
But he got no help from the cop. The fellow wore an enamelwork Party flag pin on his left lapel. He nodded to the stalwarts, said, “Freedom!” and went on his way.
“You see, you dumb bastard?” said the stalwart with the upraised club. “This is how things are. You better go along, or you’ll be real sorry. Now, are you gonna buy yourself a flag and put it up, or are you gonna be real sorry?”
Clarence Potter trotted across Montague Street, dodging past a couple of Fords from the United States and a Confederate-built Birmingham. “Why don’t you boys pick on somebody your own size?” he said pleasantly, stowing his glasses in the inside pocket of his tweed jacket. He’d had a couple of pairs broken in brawls before the election. He didn’t want to lose another.
The stalwarts stared as if he’d flown down from Mars. Finally, one of them said, “Why don’t you keep your nose out of other people’s business, buddy? You won’t get it busted that way.”
In normal times, in civilized times, a swarm of people would have gathered to back Potter against the ruffians. But they were ruffians whose party had just won the election. He stood alone with Donovan. Other men on the street hurried by with heads down and eyes averted. Whatever happened, they wanted no part of it.
When Potter showed no sign of disappearing, the second ruffian raised his club, too. “All right, asshole, you asked for it, and I’m gonna give it to you,” he said.
He and his friend were bruisers. Potter didn’t doubt they were brave enough. During the presidential campaign, they’d have tangled with tougher foes than an aging man who ran a luggage store. But they knew only what bruisers knew. They weren’t old enough to have fought in the war.
He had. He’d learned from experts. Without warning, without tipping off what he was going to do by glance or waste motion, he lashed out and kicked the closer one in the crotch. The other one shouted and swung his bludgeon. It hissed over Potter’s head. He hit the stalwart in the pit of the stomach. Wind knocked out of him, the man folded up like his friend. The only difference was, he clutched a different part of himself.
Potter didn’t believe in wasting a fair fight on Freedom Party men. They wouldn’t have done it for him. He kicked each of them in the face. One still had a little fight left, and tried to grab his leg. He stomped on the fellow’s hand. Finger bones crunched under his sole. The stalwart howled like a wolf. Potter kicked him in the face again, for good measure.
Then he picked up his fedora, which had fallen off in the fight, and put it back on his head. He took his spectacles out of the inside pocket. The world regained sharp edges when he set them on his nose again.
He tipped the fedora to Donovan, who stared at him out of enormous eyes. “You ought to sweep this garbage into the gutter,” he said, pointing to the Freedom Party men. The one he’d kicked twice lay still. His nose would never be the same. The other one writhed and moaned and held on to himself in a way that would have been obscene if it weren’t so obviously filled with pain.
“Who the dickens are you?” Donovan had to try twice before any words came out.
“You don’t need to know that.” Serving in Intelligence had taught Potter not to say more than he had to. You never could tell when opening your big mouth would come back to haunt you. Working as a private investigator, which he’d done since the war, only drove the lesson home.
“But . . .” The older man still gaped. “You handled them punks like they was nothing.”
“They
are
nothing, the worst kind of nothing.” Potter touched the brim of his hat again. “See you.” He walked off at a brisk pace. That cop was liable to come back. Even if he didn’t, more stalwarts might come along. A lot of them carried pistols. Potter had one, too, but he didn’t want anything to do with a shootout. You couldn’t hope to outsmart a bullet.
He turned several corners in quick succession, going right or left at random. After five minutes or so, he decided he was out of trouble and slowed down to look around and see where he was. Going a few blocks had taken him several rungs down the social ladder. This was a neighborhood of saloons and secondhand shops, of grocery stores with torn screen doors and blocks of flats that had been nice places back around the turn of the century.
It was also a neighborhood where Freedom Party flags flew without urging or coercion from anybody. This was the sort of neighborhood stalwarts came from; the Party offered them an escape from the despair and uselessness that might otherwise eat their lives. It was, in Clarence Potter’s considered opinion, a neighborhood full of damn fools.
He left in a hurry, making his way east toward the harbor. He was supposed to meet a police detective there; the fellow had news about warehouse pilferage he would pass on—for a price. Potter had also fed him a thing or two over the years; such balances, useful to both sides, had a way of evening out.
“Clarence!” The shout made Potter stop and turn back.
“Jack Delamotte!” he exclaimed in pleasure all the greater for being so unexpected. “How are you? I haven’t seen you in years. I wondered if you were dead. What have you been doing with yourself?”
Delamotte hurried up the street toward him, his hand outstretched and a broad smile on his face. He was a big, blond, good-looking man of about Potter’s age. His belly was bigger now, and his hair grayer and thinner at the temples than it had been when he and Potter hung around together. “Not too much,” he answered. “I’m in the textile business these days. Got married six years ago—no, seven now. Betsy and I have a boy and a girl. How about you?”
“Still single,” Potter said with a shrug. “Still poking my nose into other people’s affairs—sometimes literally. I don’t change a whole lot. If you’re . . .” His voice trailed off. Delamotte wore a handsome checked suit. On his left lapel, a Freedom Party pin shone in the sunlight. “I didn’t expect you of all people to go over to the other side, Jack. You used to cuss out Jake Featherston just as much as I did.”
“If you don’t bend with the breeze, it’ll break you.” Delamotte shrugged, too. “They’ve been coming up for a long time, and now they’re in. Shall I pretend the Whigs won the election?” He snorted. “Not likely!”
Put that way, it sounded reasonable enough. Potter said, “I just saw a couple of Freedom Party stalwarts getting ready to beat up a shopkeeper because he didn’t want to fly their flag. How do you like that?” He kept quiet about what he’d done to the stalwarts.
“Can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” Delamotte answered. “I really do think they’ll put us back on our feet. Nobody else will. . . . Where are you going? I want to get your address, talk about old times.”
“I’m in the phone book,” said Potter, who wasn’t. “Sorry, Jack. I’m late.” He hurried away, hoping Delamotte wouldn’t trot after him. To his vast relief, the other man didn’t. Clarence wanted to puke. His friend—no, his former friend—no doubt thought of himself as a practical man. Potter thought of him, and of all the other “practical” men sucking up to Featherston’s pals now that they were in power, as a pack of sons of bitches.
He met the detective in a harborside saloon where sailors with a dozen different accents got drunk as fast as they could. Caldwell Tubbs was a roly-poly little man with the coldest black eyes Potter had ever seen. “Jesus Christ, I shouldn’t even be here,” he said when Potter sat down on a stool beside him. “I can’t tell you nothin’. Worth my ass if I do.”
He’d sung that song before. Potter showed him some brown banknotes—cautiously, so nobody else saw them. “I can be persuasive,” he murmured, as if trying to seduce a pretty girl and not an ugly cop.
But Tubbs shook his head. “Not even for that.”
“What?” Now Potter was genuinely astonished. “Why not, goddammit?”
“On account of it’s worth my badge if I even get caught talkin’ to you, that’s why. This is good-bye, buddy, and I mean it. You try to get hold of me from now on, I never heard of you. You’re on a list, Potter, and it’s the shit list. I were you, I’d cut my throat now, save everybody else the trouble.” He jammed his hat back onto his bald head and waddled out of the saloon.
Clarence Potter stared after him. He knew the Freedom Party knew how hard he’d fought it, and for how long. And he knew the Party was taking its revenge on opponents. But he’d never expected it to be so fast, or so thorough. He ordered a whiskey, wondering how he’d crack that pilferage case now.
A
fter a lifetime of living in Toledo, Chester Martin remained disbelieving despite several months in Los Angeles. It wasn’t just the weather, though that helped a lot. He and Rita had gone through a winter without snow. They’d gone through a winter where they hardly ever needed anything heavier than a sweater, and where they’d stayed in shirtsleeves half the time.
But that was only part of it. Toledo was what it was. It had been what it was for all of Chester’s forty-odd years, and for fifteen or twenty years before that. It would go right on being the same old thing, too.
Not Los Angeles. This place was in a constant process of
becoming
. Before the war, it hadn’t been anything much. But a new aqueduct and the rise of motion pictures and a good port had brought people flooding in. The people who worked in the cinema and at the port and in the factories the aqueduct permitted needed places to live and people to sell them things. More people came in to build them houses and sell them groceries and autos and bookcases and washing machines. Then
they
needed . . .
Chester had to walk close to half a mile to get to the nearest trolley stop. He didn’t like that, though it was less inconvenient here than it would have been in a Toledo blizzard. He could see why things worked as they did, though. Los Angeles
sprawled
in a way no Eastern city did. The trolley grid had to be either coarse or enormously expensive. Nobody seemed willing to pay for a tight grid, so people made do with a coarse one.
A mockingbird sang up in a palm tree. Martin blew a smoke ring at it. It flew away, white wing bars flashing. A jay on a rooftop jeered. It wasn’t a blue jay like the ones he’d always known; it had no crest, and its feathers were a paler blue. People called the birds scrub jays. They were as curious and clever as any jays he’d known back East. A hummingbird with a bright red head hung in midair, scolding the jay:
chip-chip-chip.
Hummingbirds lived here all year round. If that didn’t make a place seem tropical, what did?
Hurrying on toward the trolley stop, Martin ground out the cigarette with his shoe. A motion caught from the corner of his eye made him turn his head and look back over his shoulder. A man in filthy, shabby clothes had darted out from a doorway to cadge the butt. Things might be better here than they were a lot of places, but that didn’t make them perfect, or even very good.
Some of the eight or ten people waiting at the trolley stop were going to work. Some were looking for work. Chester didn’t know how he could tell who was who, but he thought he could. A couple, like him, carried tool chests. The others? Something in the way they stood, something in their eyes . . . He knew how an unemployed man stood. He’d spent months out of work after the steel mill let him go, and he was one of the lucky ones. More than a few people had been looking for a job since 1929.
The trolley clanged up. It was painted a sunny yellow, unlike the dull green ones he’d ridden in Toledo. By the way they looked, they might almost have been Army issue. Not this one. When you got on an L.A. trolley, you felt you were going in style. His nickel and two pennies rattled into the fare box. “Transfer, please,” he said, and the trolleyman gave him a long, narrow strip of paper with printing on it. He stuck it in the breast pocket of his overalls.