Africa? You ask me, he likes doing what he's doing. He'll try and keep doing it.' He held up a forefinger. 'Here's one for you, Al: if Teddy does run again, will that make things easier or harder for us?'
'I'm damned if I know,' Bauer replied, his voice troubled. 'Nobody knows. Maybe people will remember he fought the war and won it. If they do, they'll vote for him. Or maybe they'll remember how many men died and all the trouble we've had since. If they do that, they won't touch him with a ten-foot pole.'
'The war will have been over for almost three and a half years by the time the election rolls around,' Martin said.
'That's a fact.' Albert Bauer sounded glad it was a fact, too. 'People don't remember things very long. Of course'-he didn't seem to want to be glad about anything-'the Great War is a big thing to forget.'
'Losing two elections in a row is a big thing to forget, too, and that's what Debs has done,' Martin said. 'If we do run him again, what'll our slogan be? 'Third time's the charm'? I don't think that'll work.'
'He walks in and he knows all the answers.' Bauer might have been talking to the ceiling; since he spoke of Martin in the third person, he wasn't-quite-talking to him. But then he was once more: 'All right, all right, maybe not Debs. But if we don't run him, who do we run? He's the one fellow we've got who has a following across the whole damn country.'
'You pick somebody,' Chester Martin said. 'You're always going on about how you're the old-time Red, so you have to know all these people. I'm nothing but a damn recruit. That's what you keep telling me, anyway.'
'Go peddle your papers,' Bauer said. A little less gruffly, he continued, 'Go on, take the rest of the day off. It's Sunday, for Christ's sake. Don't you have anything better to do with your time?'
'Probably.' Martin got up from the table where he and his friend had been preparing fliers for mailing. 'But if too many people find better things to do with their time than work for the Party, the work won't get done. Where will we be then?'
'Up the same old creek,' Bauer admitted. 'But the Rebs won't capture Philadelphia if you have yourself a couple of beers or something.'
'Twist my arm,' Martin said, and Bauer did, not very hard. Martin groaned anyway. 'Aii! There-you made me do it. See you later.'
When he stepped outside, spring was in the air. While he'd fought in the Roanoke Valley, it had arrived sooner and more emphatically than it did here by the shore of Lake Erie. That was the one good thing he could say about Virginia. Against it, he set filth and stench and horror and fear and pain and mud and lice. They sent the scales crashing down against the place.
How many veterans would weigh what they'd been through in the same fashion? Was what they'd done worth it? Could anything have been worth three years of hell on earth? He didn't think so, especially not when he reckoned in the trouble he'd had after the war was over. Would the rest of the millions who'd worn green-gray- those of them left alive, anyhow-feel as he did? If so, Teddy Roosevelt faced more trouble than he guessed.
Red flags flew above the Socialists' building. Toledo cops still prowled past. Martin no longer carried a pistol in his pocket. Something like peace had returned to the labor scene. He wondered how long it would last. The answer supplied itself: till the day after the election.
One of the policemen in brass-buttoned dark blue flashed Martin a thumbs-up. Martin was so surprised to get it, he tripped on a crack in the sidewalk and almost fell. During the great wave of strikes, that cop had undoubtedly broken workers' heads along with his goonish chums. Did he think he could turn into a good Socialist with one simple gesture? If he did, he was an even bigger fool than the usual run of cop.
Or maybe he was a straw, blowing in the wind of change. If a cop found it a good idea to show somebody coming out of the Socialist hall that he wasn't hostile, who held the power? Who was liable to hold it after March 4, 1921? Maybe the policeman was hedging his bets.
'Won't do you any good,' Martin muttered under his breath. 'We'll still remember you bastards. Hell, yes, we will.'
He listened to himself. That was when he began to think the party that had wandered so long in the wilderness might have a chance to come home at last. The Democrats had ruled the roost for a long time. They wouldn't be happy about clearing out, not after all these years they wouldn't.
'Too damn bad,' Martin said.
Red Socialist posters were plastered on every wall and fence and telegraph pole. They shouted for freedom and justice in big black letters. For once, more of them were up than their red-white-and-blue Democratic counterparts. Those showed the U.S. eagle flying high over a burning Confederate flag, and bore a one-word message: VICTORY!
As poster art went, the Democrats' handbills were pretty good. The only drawback Chester Martin found in them was that they bragged about old news. As Bauer had said, people forgot things in a hurry.
Martin walked over to the trolley stop and rode back to the apartment building where he and his parents and sister lived. They were playing hearts three-handed. 'About time you got home,' his father said. 'This is a better game when the cards come out even when you deal 'em.'
'See what you get for starting without me?' Martin said, drawing up a chair.
'Dad wants to throw in this game because he's losing,' his sister said. But Sue's grin said she didn't mind throwing it in, either.
'My own flesh and blood insult me,' Stephen Douglas Martin said. 'If I'd told my father anything like that-'
'Gramps would have laughed his head off, and you know it,' Martin said. He gathered the cards and fanned them in his hand. 'Draw for first deal.' He ended up dealing himself. After generously donating the ace of spades and a couple of hearts to his mother, who sat on his left (and receiving a similar load of trash from his sister, who sat on his right), he called, 'All right, where's the deuce?'
Out came the two of clubs. As the hand was played, his father asked, 'Did you get the whole world settled, there at the Socialist meeting hall?'
'Sure as heck did,' Martin said cheerfully. 'The revolution of the proletariat starts next Wednesday, seven o'clock in the morning sharp. You'd better step lively, Pop-you don't want to be late.' He took a trick with the ace of diamonds, then led the ten of spades. 'Let's see where the queen's hiding.'
'Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer,' his father said. As Chester's mother had done, he ducked the spade. So did Sue. Stephen Douglas Martin went on, 'Do people want it to be that rabblerousing fool of a Debs again?'
'Some people do,' Martin answered. 'I think we'd have a better chance with somebody else.' Since the ten of spades had failed to flush out the queen, he led the nine. 'Maybe this'll make her show up.'
His mother pained and set out the ace of spades. His father grinned and tucked the king under it. His sister grinned even wider and dropped the queen, sticking his mother with thirteen points she didn't want. 'There you go, Ma,' Sue said sweetly.
'Thank you so much,' Louisa Martin said. She turned to her son. 'When the revolution comes, will the queen only be worth one point, to make her equal with all the hearts in the deck?'
'Don't know about that one, Ma,' Chester said. 'I don't think there's a plank that talks about it in the Socialist Party platform.'
'Is there a plank that explains why they think we need anybody but bully old Teddy?' Stephen Douglas Martin inquired.
'I can think of two,' his son replied. 'First one is, nobody's ever had three terms. If TR decides to run again, he shouldn't, either. And even if the Democrats run somebody else, they have to explain what we got for all the men who got killed and maimed during the war, and why they've been in the trusts' pocket ever since.'
When he was around Albert Bauer, he sounded like a reactionary. When he was around his parents-who were, in his view of things, reactionaries-lie sounded as radical as Bauer did. The more he thought about that, the funnier it seemed.
The quitting whistle's scream cut through the din on the floor of the Sloss Works like a wedge splitting a stump. Jefferson Pink-ard leaned on his crowbar. 'Another day done,' he said. 'Another million dollars.'
He wasn't making a million dollars a day, but he was making better than a million a week. Next month, probably, he'd be up over a million a day. It didn't matter. What the CSA called money was only a joke, one that kept getting funnier as the banknotes sprouted more and more zeros. The bottom line was, he'd lived better before the war than he did now. That was so for almost everybody in the Confederate States.
