'I've got a couple of steaks in the icebox, and some good Canadian beer, too.' Agnes raised an eyebrow. 'After that, who knows what might happen?'
'The wench grows bold.' He patted her on the bottom. 'Good. I like it.'
What happened after dinner was that he played with Mildred on the living-room floor while the wireless blared out endless streams of numbers. Every so often, his little girl would complain because his mind wasn't fully on their game. 'You're listening to that silly stuff,' she said.
'You're right,' he said. 'I'm sorry.' He was sorry to disrupt the game. He wasn't sorry, not in the least, about what he was hearing. What everyone had thought would happen was happening: Calvin Coolidge was trouncing Hosea Blackford. Even as he listened, Coolidge's lead in Ohio went up to a quarter of a million votes.
'And Coolidge is also ahead in Indiana, which last went Democratic in the election of 1908,' the announcer said. Morrell clapped his hands in not quite childish glee. Mildred gave him a severe look a schoolmarm would have envied. He apologized again.
His daughter eventually went to bed. Morrell and Agnes stayed up a while longer, to let her fall asleep and to hear some more returns. Coolidge kept capturing state after state. By the time they went to bed, too, they had a lot to celebrate-and they did.
C incinnatus Driver knew a certain amount of local pride. 'The new vice president, he was borned in Iowa,' he said. 'How 'bout that?'
His son sent him a jaundiced glance. 'And he moved away as fast as he could go, too,' Achilles retorted. 'He moved as far as he could go, too-all the way out to California. What does that say about this place?'
'I don't know what it says, but I'll tell you what I say,' Cincinnatus answered, giving back a jaundiced glance of his own: Achilles was getting altogether too mouthy these days. 'What I say is, you can complain as much as you please, but you don't recollect enough about Kentucky to know when you's well off.'
Elizabeth nodded. She used her fork to pull a clove out of her slice of beef tongue. 'Your father, he right,' she said, and took a bite.
At seventeen, Achilles was ready to lock horns with anybody over anything. 'What do you two know about it?' he said. 'Way you talk, it doesn't sound like you know anything.' His own accent was ever more like a white Iowan's these days.
Cincinnatus said, 'You're right.' That startled Achilles; his father didn't say it very often. Cincinnatus went on, 'You know why we talk like we do? You ever wonder 'bout that? Don't reckon so. It's on account of there weren't no schools for black folks there, on account of my ma and pa, and your mother's, too, they was slaves when they was little. Never had no chance to learn like you got here. I'm lucky I had my letters at all. You know that?'
'I better know it,' Achilles said sullenly. 'You go on about it all the time.'
'Mebbe I do. But you better pay some attention, son. You go complainin' 'bout Iowa, you don't know when you's well off.'
Achilles got up from the table even though he hadn't finished supper. He stormed away. Amanda stared after him. She was still young enough to be convinced her parents had all the answers, not to be dedicated to proving they didn't. 'Oh, my,' she said softly.
'Mebbe you laid it on too thick,' Elizabeth said.
'Mebbe I did,' Cincinnatus answered with a shrug. 'Mebbe-but I don't think so. He got to see he don't know everything there is to know jus' yet.'
His wife smiled. 'When you was his age, didn't you reckon you knowed everything, too, jus' like him?'
' 'Course I did,' Cincinnatus said. 'My pa thrashed it out o' me. I don't like hittin' a boy that size-he ain't far from a man, even if he ain't as close as he thinks. I don't like it… but if I got to, I got to.' Deliberately, he made himself take a bite of tongue. He usually liked it; it had been a treat when he was growing up. But anger spoiled the flavor.
'You got his goat, but he got yours, too,' Elizabeth said.
He started to deny it, then realized he couldn't. He let out a long sigh. 'Yeah, he done did.' He raised his voice: 'Come on back an' eat your supper, Achilles. I won't talk no more 'bout politics if you don't.' That was as far as he was willing to go.
From the long silence that followed, he wondered if it was far enough to satisfy his son. At last, though, Achilles said, 'All right, Pa. That's fair enough.' He returned to the table.
'Probably ain't even had time yet to get cold,' Elizabeth said.
'No, Ma. It's fine.' As if to prove as much, Achilles made tongue and potatoes and carrots disappear. 'Mighty good,' he said. 'May I have some more, please?' He had manners when he remembered to use them.
'I'll get it for you,' Elizabeth said. She turned to Cincinnatus as soon as she'd picked up Achilles' plate. 'He sure do like his food.'
'That's true.' Cincinnatus wasn't sure it was a compliment, especially during hard times, but he could hardly deny it.
After supper, Achilles went off to do his homework. He'd never lost his liking for school. That pleased Cincinnatus-pleased him all the more because, even though Achilles seemed to want to disagree with everything he said, his son hadn't rejected the idea that education was a good thing.
The next morning, Cincinnatus scrambled into his Ford truck and hurried out to the railroad yards. He got there before the sun came up, but he wasn't the first man there looking for whatever hauling business he could get. These days, cargo wasn't always the only thing that traveled in boxcars. As a freight train pulled into the yard, a couple of men in tattered clothes leaped down even before it had completely stopped. They started running.
They didn't disappear quite fast enough. 'Come back here, you sons of bitches!' a railway dick shouted. He had a nightstick and a. 45 on his belt. Feet pounding on gravel, he lumbered after the fleeing freeloaders.
'Gotta be crazy to ride the rails like that,' Cincinnatus said to the conductor with whom he was dickering over the price of hauling a load of office furniture to the State Capitol.
'Gotta be desperate, anyway,' the conductor answered. 'Why the hell anybody who was ridin' would want to get off in Des Moines…' He shrugged. 'I don't know about crazy, but you sure gotta be stupid.'
As he had with Achilles, Cincinnatus said, 'This ain't a bad town, suh. Beats Covington, Kentucky, all hollow, and that's the truth.'
'Well, sure, if that's what you're comparing it to,' the other man said with a laugh. 'But you run it up against Los Angeles or San Francisco or Portland or Seattle or Denver or Albuquerque or… You get the idea what I'm saying, buddy? I've seen all them places. I know what I'm talking about.'
Cincinnatus knew his standards of comparison were limited. He was familiar with Des Moines, and with Covington, and with very little else. He knew Cincinnati a little, as it lay right across the Ohio from Covington. But San Francisco might have been on the far side of the moon, for all he knew of it. The newspaper had talked about building a bridge across the Golden Gate one day. That didn't mean much to Cincinnatus, either. He knew rivers, and bridges over rivers. The Pacific Ocean? He'd never even seen a lake-not a big one, anyhow.
He got back to the business at hand: 'I may not know nothin' 'bout them places, Mistuh Gideon, but I knows haulin', and I knows I got to have another dollar to make this here trip worthwhile.'
He ended up with another four bits. That was less than he'd hoped for, more than enough to make the journey worth his while. He stacked desks and swivel chairs and oak file cabinets in the back of the Ford till it wouldn't hold any more and the springs wouldn't bear much more. For good measure, he squeezed two more swivel chairs into the cabin with him.
The conductor nodded approval. 'One thing I always got to give you, Cincinnatus-you work like a bastard.'
'Thank you kindly.' To Cincinnatus, that was high praise.
Getting to the Capitol took only a few minutes; it lay not far south of the railroad yards-like them, on the east side of the Des Moines River, across the river from Cincinnatus' apartment building. The gilded dome atop the ornate building was a landmark visible all over town. For that matter, since the Iowa countryside was so flat, the dome was visible from quite a ways outside of town, too.
Men in fancy suits, bright silk neckties, and expensive homburgs-legislators, lawyers, lobbyists-climbed the stairs to the Capitol's front entrance. Times might be hard, but men of that stripe seldom suffered. They were, of course, uniformly white. Cincinnatus, with his black skin, dungarees, wool sweater, and soft cloth cap, drove past the front entrance with hardly a glance. He pulled up at the freight entrance and backed his truck up to the loading dock.
