he'd thought he knew about money.
He supposed that was one reason people voted for the Freedom Party and other outfits like it. They loudly proclaimed they had the answers to all the problems bedeviling the Confederate States. Proclaiming they had the answers was the easy part. Really having them, and making them work-that looked harder. That looked a hell of a lot harder to him. But some people would buy castles in the air because they were short of beans on the ground.
When six o'clock rolled around, he said, 'See you tomorrow, Mr. Harmon.'
The druggist looked up in vague surprise. 'Oh, yes, that will be fine.' He made no move to leave himself. Reggie was just hired help, and could come and go as he pleased-so long as he pleased to be on time most of the time. The drugstore belonged to Harmon. He worked as long as he thought he had to.
Reggie put on his overcoat and went out into the cold. It wasn't too bad-no snow lay on the ground-but it wasn't anything he enjoyed, either. He walked quickly, his feet clicking along the sidewalk. As long as he kept moving, he didn't feel the chill too badly. And Bill Foster's flat, where he had a supper invitation, lay only a few blocks away.
Sally Foster opened the door. 'Hello, Reggie,' she said. 'Come in, get warm, make yourself at home. How are you today?'
'I've been worse,' he answered, and heaven only knew that was true.
'Bill, hon,' Sally called, 'Reggie's here.' She was a short, slightly pudgy blonde in her mid-twenties. For reasons Bartlett couldn't quite fathom, she thought well of him. He'd wondered if he would keep Bill Foster as a friend after Bill and Sally got married: a lot of men gave up their bachelor friends after they stopped being bachelors themselves. But Sally had gone out of her way to be cordial, and so the friendship stayed warm.
'Hello, Reggie,' Bill Foster said. Married life plainly agreed with him; he'd put on ten pounds, easy, since Sally started cooking for him. 'Can I get you a little something to light a fire inside?'
'Thanks. I wouldn't mind,' Reggie answered.
Foster took down a whiskey bottle and a couple of glasses. 'Do you want water with that?' he asked. Sometimes Reggie did, sometimes he didn't.
Tonight, he didn't. 'Pipes are rusty enough already,' he said. Sally laughed. Maybe she hadn't heard it before. It was an old joke in the trenches, though, as Foster's resigned chuckle showed. When Reggie had the glass in his hand, he raised it and said, 'Here's to a long walk off a short pier for Jake Featherston.'
'Lord knows I'll drink to that,' Bill said, and he did. So did Bartlett. Sure enough, the whiskey warmed him nicely. Foster said, 'I'll drink to that any day, and twice on Sunday, as a matter of fact. But what made you come out with it just then?''
Reggie told him about the fat man with the cough who'd called out the Freedom Party's one-word slogan, and finished, 'When he walked out, I was standing there wishing I'd given him rat poison instead of his cough elixir.'
'I've heard it, too,' Bill Foster said. 'It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck, same as the noise of a shell coming in. You'd reckon people had better sense, but a lot of 'em don't.'
'The other thing I wondered was whether he was just somebody who voted for the Freedom Party, or if he was one of the tough guys who put on white and butternut and go out looking for heads to break,' Bartlett said. 'He didn't look like the type, but you never can tell.'
'They don't need very many ruffians,' Foster said. 'As long as folks think the fellows with the clubs are doing the right thing, they won't try and stop 'em. And that worries me more than anything.'
It gave Reggie something new to worry about, too: 'We can't even write our Congressman and complain. He'd likely send goons right to our door.'
'What you can do,' Sally said, 'is come and sit down and have supper. Once you get some food in your bellies to go along with the whiskey you're pouring down, the world won't seem like such a rotten place.'
Ham and applesauce and canned corn and string beans cooked with a little salt pork might not have changed the world, but Sally was right: they did improve Reggie's opinion of it. Peach pie improved it even more. He patted his stomach. He had no trouble understanding how Bill had put on weight. 'You don't happen to have a sister, do you?' he asked Sally, knowing she didn't.
He'd pleased her, though; he saw it in her eyes. 'You should have got married a long time ago,' she told him.
He shrugged. 'My mother says the same thing. She wants grandchildren. I never met a girl I felt like marrying.' He shook his head. 'No. That's not so. Before the war, I was sweet on a girl. But she wasn't sweet on me. She wasn't sweet on anybody, not back then she wasn't. I heard she finally married some Navy man after the war. Now, what was his name? I heard it. It's going to bother me if I can't remember.' He paused, thinking hard. 'Brantley? Buckley? No, but something like that… Brearley! That's what it was, Brearley. I knew I'd come up with it.'
'Now, if you could just come up with a girl,' Sally said.
'If I wanted to listen to my mother, I'd have gone to visit my mother,' Reggie said. Everybody laughed. He held out his glass to Bill Foster. 'You want to get me another drink? I know good and well my mother wouldn't.' Everyone laughed again.
Sylvia Enos smoked in short, savage puffs. 'That man!' she said.
Neither Sarah Wyckoff nor May Cavendish needed to ask about whom she was talking. 'What did Frank do now?' Sarah asked.
'Felt me up,' Sylvia snarled. 'He hadn't bothered me for weeks, but this morning, all of a sudden, he grew more arms than an octopus. He came back to where I was working and he felt me up like I was a squash he was buying off a pushcart. I almost hauled off and belted him.'
'You should have,' Sarah said. 'I would. I'd have knocked him into the middle of next week, too.' With her formidable build, she could have done it.
May said, 'He's been sniffing around Lillian for a while. He's probably been doing more than sniffing, too; she's a little chippy if I ever saw one.' She sniffed herself, then went on, 'But I haven't seen Lillian for the past couple days, and-'
'She quit,' Sylvia said. 'I heard one of the bookkeepers talking about it. She's moving out to California. It's good for your lungs out there.'
'Well, if she quit, then Frank is going to be on the prowl for somebody new,' May said. 'We've watched it happen often enough now.'
'Often enough to be good and sick of it,' Sylvia said. 'And I wish to heaven he wouldn't come sniffing around me. If he doesn't know by now that I don't feel like playing games, he's an even bigger fool than I think he is.'
'He couldn't be a bigger fool than I think he is,' Sarah Wyckoffsaid.
Sylvia took a big bite of her egg-salad sandwich. She wished she were a gigantic carnival geek, biting the head off of Frank Best instead of a chicken. Then she shook her head in bemuse-ment. He really had to be on her nerves, or she would never have come up with such a bizarre mental image.
She said, 'I wish I could find another job. But how am I even supposed to look for one when I'm here five and a half days a week? And jobs aren't easy to come by, not like they were during the war.'
'It's a nasty bind to be in, dearie,' May said. 'I hope it turns out all right for you.'
'The worst he can do is fire me,' Sylvia said. 'Then I will have time to look for a new job. When he gets to be like this, I almost wish he would fire me. You girls are dears, but I wouldn't mind getting out of this place.'
'What makes you think it would be different anywhere else?' May asked. 'You'd still have a man for a boss, and you know what men are like.'
'Careful,' Sarah said in a low voice. Frank Best strolled past and waved to the women at their dinner break. He doubtless thought his smile was charming. As far as Sylvia was concerned, it was so greasy, it might have been carved from a block of lard.
She lit a new cigarette. The foreman favored her with another oleaginous smile when he returned from wherever he'd gone. 'Almost time to get back to the line,' he said.
'Yes, Mr. Best.' Sylvia looked forward to returning to work about as much as she looked forward to going to the doctor to have a carbuncle lanced. Sometimes, though, she had to go to the doctor. And, when the whistle blew, she had to go back and paint red rings on galoshes.
Frank Best left her alone for twenty minutes after that, which was about fifteen minutes longer than she'd
