expensive black homburg.
Then it was back to Socialist Party headquarters to wait for the polls to close in the district and across the country. As the night lengthened, telephone lines and telephone clickers began bringing in reports. By the third set of numbers from her district, she knew she was going to beat Marcus Krauskopf: her lead was close to two to one.
Well before midnight, Krauskopf read the writing on the wall and telephoned to concede. 'Mazeltov' he said graciously. 'Now that you've won, go right on being the conscience of the House. They need one there, believe me.'
'Thank you very much,' she said. 'You ran a good race.' That wasn't quite true, but matched his graciousness.
'I did what I could.' She could almost hear him shrug over the wire. 'But you've made a name for yourself, it's a Socialist district anyhow, and I don't think this is a Democratic year.'
As if to underscore that, Maria Tresca exclaimed, 'We just elected a Socialist in the twenty-eighth district in Pennsylvania. Where is that, anyhow?'
People looked at maps. After a minute or so, Herman Bruck said, 'It's way up in the northwestern part of the state. We've never elected a Socialist Congressman from around there before- too many farmers, not enough miners. Maybe the people really have had enough of the Democratic Party.'
'Even if they are finally fed up, it's taken them much too long to get that way,' Maria said. As far as she was concerned, the proletarian revolution was welcome to start tomorrow, or even tonight.
The later it got, the more returns came in from the West. The first numbers from Dakota showed Hosea Blackford handily ahead in his district. 'A sound man,' Herman Bruck said.
'Sound? Half the time, he sounds like a Democrat,' Maria Tresca said darkly.
But even her ideological purity melted in the face of the gains the Socialists were making. A couple of districts in and just outside Toledo that had never been anything but Democratic were going Socialist tonight. The same thing happened in Illinois and Michigan and, eventually, in distant California, too.
'Is it a majority?' Flora asked, a question she hadn't thought she would need tonight. She'd been optimistic going into the election, but there was a difference between optimism and cockeyed optimism.
Except, tonight, maybe there wasn't. 'I don't know.' Herman Bruck sounded like a man doing his best to restrain astonished awe. 'A lot of these races are still close. But it could be.' He looked toward a map where he'd been coloring Socialist districts red. 'It really could be.'
Every time Cincinnatus Driver got downwind of the Kentucky Smoke House, spit gushed into his mouth. He couldn't help it; Apicius Wood ran the best barbecue joint in Kentucky, very possibly the best in the USA. Negroes from the neighborhood came to the Kentucky Smoke House. So did Covington's whites. And so did the men who'd come down from the other side of the Ohio since the Stars and Stripes replaced the Stars and Bars atop the city hall. Nobody turned up his nose at food like that.
Lucullus-Lucullus Wood, now that his father Apicius, like Cincinnatus, had taken a surname-was turning a pig's carcass above a pit filled with hickory wood and basting the meat with a sauce an angel had surely brought down from heaven. He nodded to Cincinnatus. 'Ain't seen you here for a while,' he remarked. 'What you want?'
Cincinnatus stretched out his hands in the direction of the pit. For a moment, he wanted nothing more than to revel in the warmth that came from it: the weather outside held a promise of winter. 'I want to talk to your pa,' he answered as he began to warm up himself.
Lucullus made a sour face. 'Why ain't I surprised?'
'On account of you know me,' Cincinnatus said. 'I'll be damned if I know how you can look like you done bit into a green persimmon when you're takin' a bath in the best smell in the world.'
'Only thing I smell when you come around here is trouble,' Lucullus said. He never missed a beat in turning the carcass or basting it.
With a bitter laugh, Cincinnatus answered, 'That'd be funny, except it ain't. I get into trouble around here, it's trouble your pa put me in. Now'-he let his voice roughen-'can I see him, or not?'
Lucullus Wood was harder to lean on than he had been. He was twenty now, or maybe a year past, and had confidence in himself as a man. Even so, a show of determination could still make him back down. He bit his lip, then said, 'That room in back I reckon you know about.'
'Yeah, I know about that room.' Cincinnatus nodded. 'He in there with anybody, or is he by his lonesome?'
'By his lonesome, far as I know,' Lucullus said. 'Go on, go on. You barged in before. Barge on in again.' Had his hands been free, he probably would have made washing motions with them to show that whatever happened next was not his fault. As things were, his expression got the message across.
Ignoring that expression, Cincinnatus went down the hall at the back of the Kentucky Smoke House till he got to the door he knew. He didn't barge in; he knocked instead. 'Come in,' a voice from within said. Cincinnatus worked the latch. Apicius Wood looked at him with something less than pleasure. 'Oh. It's you. Reckoned it might be somebody I was glad to see.'
'It's me.' Cincinnatus shut the door behind him.
With a grunt, Apicius pointed to a battered chair. The proprietor of the Kentucky Smoke House looked as if he'd eaten a great deal of his own barbecue. If that was how he'd got so fat, Cincinnatus didn't think he could have picked a better way. 'Well,' Apicius rumbled, 'what we gonna fight about today?'
'Don't want no fight,' Cincinnatus said.
Apicius Wood laughed in his face. 'Ain't many niggers in this town as stubborn as I am, but you're sure as hell one of 'em. We don't see eye to eye. You know it, an' I know it, too. When we get together, we fight.'
Cincinnatus let out a long sigh. 'I ain't enough of a Red to suit you, I ain't enough of a diehard to suit Joe Conroy, and I'm too goddamn black to suit Luther Bliss. Where does that leave me?'
'Out on a limb,' Apicius answered accurately. 'Well, say your say, so I know what we gonna fight about this time.'
'What you think of the elections?' Cincinnatus asked.
'What the hell difference it make what I think or even if I think?' Apicius returned. 'Ain't like I got to vote. Ain't like you got to vote, neither. Have to wait till after the revolution for that to happen, I reckon.'
'Maybe not,' Cincinnatus said. 'Put 'em together, the Socialists and the Republicans got more seats in the House than the Democrats do. First time the Democrats lose the House in more'n thirty years. They lost seats in the Senate, too.'
'Didn't lose a one here in Kentucky,' Apicius said. ''Fore they let somebody here vote, they make damn sure they know who he vote for.'
Cincinnatus refused to let the fat cook sidetrack him. 'How much you work with the white Socialists before the elections?' he asked.
'Not much,' Apicius said. 'Ain't much to work with. Don't hardly have no homegrown white Socialists, and every one that come over the Ohio, Bliss and the Kentucky State Police got their eye on him. Don't want them bastards puttin' their eye on me any worse than they done already.'
'How hard did you try?' Cincinnatus persisted. 'Did you-?'
But Apicius wasn't easy to override, either. Raising a pale-palmed hand, he went on, ' 'Sides, them white Socialists ain't hardly Reds. They're nothin' but Pinks, you know what I mean? They jaw about the class struggle, but they ain't pickin' up guns and doin' anything much.'
'What you talkin' about?'* Cincinnatus said. 'All these strikes-'
Apicius broke in again: 'So what? Ain't much shootin' goin' on, not to speak of. When the niggers in the Confederate States rose up, that was a fight worth talkin' about. We'd have done the same thing here, certain sure, if the Yankees hadn't taken us out of the CSA by then. Did do some of it anyways.'
That was true, and Cincinnatus knew it. He also knew something else: 'Yeah, they rose up, sure enough, but they got whipped. Reds rise up in the USA, they get whipped, too. Got to be more to the class struggle than shootin' guns all the blame time, or the folks with most guns always gonna win.'
'Not if their soldiers and their police work out whose side they really ought to be on,' Apicius said. This time, he spoke quickly, to make sure Cincinnatus couldn't interrupt him: 'Yeah, I know, I know, it ain't likely, not the way things is now. I ain't sayin' no different.'
'All right, then,' Cincinnatus said. 'If it ain't all struggle with guns, we-you-ought to be workin' with the white
