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 sub-mersible'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
