The Victorious Opposition (8 page)

“How does it feel to come back?” Maria asked.

“Coming back here feels wonderful,” Flora said, which brought smiles all around. “I hope I can come back to Congress in November. With you people helping me, I’m sure I can.” That brought more smiles.

On the night of November 6, she and Hosea and Joshua came back to Party headquarters to find out if she had won. Her husband was still coughing and sneezing, but he had got better. Her parents were there, too, and her brothers and sisters and their families. Yossel Reisen, her sister Sophie’s son, was nineteen years old and six feet tall. In the next election, he’d be able to vote himself. That seemed impossible.

These days, a blaring wireless set brought results faster than telegrams had the last time she’d waited out a Congressional election. The more returns that came in, the better things looked, not just here in the Fourteenth Ward but all across the country. Hoover remained in office, of course, but he would have to deal with a Socialist Congress for the next two years.

At a quarter past eleven, the telephone rang. Herman Bruck answered it. A big grin on his face, he ceremoniously held out the mouthpiece to Flora. “It’s Lipshitz,” he said.

“Hello, Congressman,” Flora said.

“Hello, Congresswoman.” The Democrat sounded worn, weary, wounded. “Congratulations on a fine campaign. May you serve the district well.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much.” Politely, Flora tried to hold excitement from her voice. She was going back to Philadelphia!

T
he tinny ring of a cheap alarm clock bounced Jefferson Pinkard out of bed. He lurched into the bathroom and took a long leak to get rid of the homebrew he’d poured down the night before. Alabama was a dry state, but a man who wanted a beer or three could find what he was looking for.

Bloodshot eyes stared at Jeff from the mirror over the sink. He was a ruddy, beefy man in his early forties, his light brown hair pulling back at the temples, his chin a forward-thrusting rock whose strong outline extra flesh was starting to obscure. “Do I need a shave?” he asked out loud. He lived alone—he was divorced—and had fallen into the habit of talking to himself.

Deciding he did, he lathered up, then scraped his face with a formidable straight razor. He muttered curses when he nicked himself just under his lower lip. A styptic pencil stopped the bleeding, but stung like fire. He didn’t mutter the next set of curses.

When he put on his gray jailer’s uniform, the high, stiff collar bit into his neck and made his face redder than ever. After two cups of snarling coffee and three eggs fried harder than he cared for—he’d always been a lousy cook—he left his apartment and started for the Birmingham jail.

Newsboys hawked the
Birmingham Confederate
and the
Register-Herald
at almost every street corner. No matter which paper they waved, they shouted the same thing: “Supreme Court turns thumbs down on damming our rivers! Read all about it!”

“Screw the Supreme Court,” Pinkard muttered as he paid five cents for a copy of the
Confederate
. That was the Freedom Party paper in Birmingham. He wouldn’t waste his money on the
Register-Herald
. One of these days before too long, he suspected something unfortunate would happen to the building where it was written and printed.

The
Confederate
quoted President Featherston as saying, “Those seven old fools in black robes think they can stop us from doing what the Confederate people elected us to do. This is a slap in the face at every honest, hard-working citizen of our country. If the Supreme Court wants to play politics, they’ll find out that floods can wash away more than towns.”

“Damn right,” Jeff said, and chucked the paper into an ashcan. He didn’t know what the president could do about the Supreme Court, but he figured Jake Featherston would come up with something. He always did.

Two cops on the steps of the Birmingham city jail nodded to him as he climbed those steps and went into the building. One of them wore a Party pin on his lapel. The other one, though, was the one who said, “Freedom!”

“Freedom!” Pinkard echoed. He had a Party pin on his lapel, too. Not long after the war ended, he’d heard Jake Featherston speak in a Birmingham park. He’d been a Freedom Party man ever since.

In the jail, he had a desk in a cramped office he shared with several other jailers. The one he was following onto duty looked up from his own desk, where he was filling out some of the nine million forms without which the jail could not have survived a day. “Mornin’, Jeff,” Stubby Winthrop said. “Freedom!”

“Freedom!” Pinkard said again. “What’s new?”

“Not a hell of a lot,” Winthrop answered. As his nickname implied, he looked like a fireplug with hairy ears. “Couple-three niggers in the drunk tank, white kid in a cell for stabbing his lady friend when he found out she was this other fella’s lady friend, too. Oh, I almost forgot—they finally caught that bastard who’s been stealing everything that ain’t nailed down on the south side of town.”

“Yeah? Swell!” Pinkard said, adding, “About time, goddammit.” Like a lot of jailers, he was convinced the police who hunted down criminals couldn’t find a skunk if it was spraying their leg. Unlike a lot of men in his line of work, he wasn’t shy about saying so. His years at the Sloss Foundry had left him with the strength to back up talk with action if he ever had to. He asked the question Stubby Winthrop hadn’t answered: “What about the politicals?”

“Well, of course.” Winthrop looked at him as if at an idiot. “They drug in another twelve, fifteen o’ them bastards, too.” He poked at the papers with a short, blunt finger. “I can tell you exactly how many if you want to know.”

“Don’t worry about it now,” Jeff said. “I can find out myself before I do my morning walk-through—long as the paperwork’s there.”

“It is, it is,” Stubby assured him. “Think I want the warden reaming out my ass on account of messed-up papers? Not likely!”

“Cool down. I didn’t mean anything by it. Twelve or fifteen, you say?” Jeff asked. Winthrop nodded. Jeff let out a pleased grunt. “We
are
starting to clean up this town, aren’t we?”

“Bet your butt,” Winthrop said. “Anybody forgets who won the goddamn election, we teach the fucker a little lesson. Ain’t no such thing as a fit night out for Whigs or Radical Republicans, not any more there ain’t.”

Belonging to a political party other than the Freedom Party wasn’t against the law. Pinkard thought it ought to be, but it wasn’t. But anybody who raised his voice against the Party regretted it, and in a hurry. Disturbing the peace. resisting arrest, criminal trespass, inciting to riot, and possession of alcoholic beverages were plenty to get a man into jail. And, once he was in, he might be—he probably would be—a long time coming out again. Most judges, like anybody else, knew which side their bread was buttered on and went along with Freedom Party instructions. A couple of holdouts in Birmingham had already suffered mysterious and most deplorable accidents. Their replacements were more cooperative. So were the other judges. A few mysterious and most deplorable accidents could make anybody thoughtful.

Pinkard said, “Hell with me if I know what we’re going to do with all these stinking politicals. We’ve stuffed so many of ’em into cells, we don’t hardly have room for real crooks any more.”

“Ain’t my worry,” Stubby said. “And you know somethin’ else? There’s a fuck of a lot of worse problems to have.” Pinkard nodded again. He couldn’t very well argue with that. Winthrop went on, “Matter of fact, this whole goddamn jail is your baby for the next eight hours. I’m gonna get outa here, grab myself some shuteye. Freedom!” He headed out the door.

“Freedom!” Jeff called after him. Among Party men—and more and more widely through the CSA these days—the word replaced
hello
and
good-bye
.

The heavy armored door crashed shut behind Stubby Winthrop. Pinkard looked at the clock on the wall. The prisoners would just be getting breakfast. He had time to find out precisely what he needed to know about changes since yesterday before making his first walk-through of the day. He didn’t love paperwork, but he did recognize the need for it. He was conscientious about keeping up with it, too, which put him a jump ahead of several of his fellow jailers.

He’d just finished seeing what was what when the door to the office opened. The prisoner who came in had a trustie’s green armband on the left sleeve of his striped shirt. “What’s up, Mike?” Pinkard asked, frowning; this wasn’t a scheduled time for a trustie to show up.

But Mike had an answer for him: “Warden wants to see you, sir, right away.” His voice, like those of a lot of trusties, held a particular kind of whine. It put Pinkard in mind of the yelp of a dog that had been kicked too many times.

Whine or not, though, a summons from the warden was like a summons from God. Pinkard did his best not to evade but to delay, saying, “Can’t I take my morning walk-through first, anyways?”

“You’re a jailer—you can do whatever you please,” Mike said, which only proved he’d never been a jailer. Then he added, “But I don’t reckon the warden’d be mighty pleased,” which proved he had a good idea of how things worked anyhow. Pinkard grunted and decided the walk-through would have to wait.

Warden Ewell McDonald was a heavyset man with a mustache that looked like a gray moth on his upper lip. He was close to retirement age, and didn’t much care whose cage he rattled. “Come in, Pinkard,” he said, staring at Jeff over the tops of the half-glasses he used for reading.

“What’s up, sir?” Jeff asked warily.

“Come in,” the warden repeated. “Sit down. You ain’t in trouble—swear to God you ain’t.” Still cautious, Pinkard obeyed. McDonald went on, “That stuff on your record, how you set up that prisoner-of-war camp down in Mexico during their last civil war, that’s the straight goods?”

“Hell, yes,” Pinkard answered without hesitation. He was telling the truth, too, and knew other Confederate veterans—Freedom Party men—who’d gone down to the Empire of Mexico to fight for Maximilian III against the Yankee-backed republican rebels and could back him up. “Anybody says I didn’t, tell me who he is and I’ll kill the son of a bitch.”

“Keep your shirt on,” McDonald said. “I just wanted to make sure, is all. Reason I’m asking is, we’ve got more politicals in jail these days than you can shake a stick at.”

“That’s a fact,” Jeff agreed. “Stubby and me, we were just talking about that a little while ago, matter of fact.”

“It’s not just Birmingham, either—it’s all over Alabama. All over the country, too, but Alabama’s what counts for you and me. We’ve got to keep those bastards locked up, but they’re a big pain in the ass here in town,” McDonald said. “So what we’ve got orders to do is, we’ve got orders to make a camp out in the country and stow the politicals in it. We save the jail for the real bad guys, you know what I mean?”

Jefferson Pinkard nodded. “Sure do. Sounds like a good idea, anybody wants to know what I think.”

McDonald inked an old-fashioned dip pen and wrote something on the sheet of paper in front of him. “Good. I was hoping you were going to say that, on account of I aim to send you out there to help get it rolling. Your rank will be assistant warden. That’s good for another forty-five dollars a month in your pocket.”

It wasn’t the sort of promotion Jeff had expected, but a promotion it definitely was. “Thank you, sir,” he said, gathering himself. “You don’t mind my asking, though, why me? You got a bunch of guys with more seniority than I have.”

“More seniority
in the jail
, yeah,” McDonald answered. “But a camp out in the open? That’s a different business. Only fellow here who’s done anything like that is you. You’ll be there from the start, like I said, and you’ll have a lot of say about how it goes. We’ll get the barbed wire, we’ll get the lumber for the barracks, we’ll get the ordinary guards, and you help set it up so it works. . . . What’s so goddamn funny?”

“Down in Mexico, I had to scrounge every damn thing I used,” Pinkard answered. “I cut enough corners to build me a whole new street. You get me everything I need like that, it’s almost too easy to stand.” He held up his hand. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you.” In Mexico, he’d been glad to land that job riding herd on prisoners because it meant nobody was shooting at him any more. He’d never dreamt then how much good it would do him once he came home to the CSA.

W
ithout a doubt, Sam Carsten was the oldest lieutenant, junior grade, on the USS
Remembrance
. That was what he got for being a mustang. He’d spent close to twenty years in the Navy before making officer’s rank. No one could tell if he had gray hair, though, not when it had started out platinum blond. He was the next thing to an albino, with blue eyes and transparent pink skin that would sunburn in the light of a candle flame.

The North Pacific in December wasn’t a bad place for a man with a complexion like that. Even here, he’d smeared zinc-oxide ointment on his nose and the backs of his hands before coming out onto the ship’s flight deck. It wouldn’t help much. Nothing ever helped much.

He shifted his weight to the motion of the aeroplane carrier without noticing he was doing it. Most of the crew stood on the deck with him. Only the black gang down in the engine room and the men at the antiaircraft guns weren’t drawn up at attention, all in neat ranks, to hear what Captain Stein had to say.

“Gentlemen, it is official at last,” the captain said into a microphone that not only amplified his words for the sailors on deck but also carried them to the crewmen still at their posts. “We have received word by wireless from Philadelphia that the United States of American and the Empire of Japan are at peace once more.”

Sam kicked at the flight deck. He was standing only a few feet from a big patch in the deck, a patch that repaired the damage a Japanese bomb had done. He couldn’t help wondering whether the fight had been worthwhile.

Captain Stein went on, “The terms of the peace are simple. Everything goes back to what the diplomats call the
status quo ante bellum
. That just means the way things were before the shooting started. We don’t give anything to the Japs, and they don’t give us anything, either.”