attention to opinions contradicting their own. For another, the man paid well. If he wanted to throw away his money… well, it was a free country, wasn't it?
It is till that Featherston bastard takes over, Potter thought.
On the trolley ride back to his flat after knocking off for the day, he passed another polling place. Police cars were parked in front of it. Blood stained the sidewalk and nearby walls. Freedom Party men waving their reversed- color Confederate battle flags still stood on the street. 'Feather ston! Feather ston!' Even through the trolley's closed windows, the chant lacerated Clarence Potter's ears. The police didn't try to run the stalwarts off. If Whigs had been here, they were no longer. This skirmish belonged to the Freedom Party.
After pan-frying a pork chop and some potatoes and washing them down with a stiff whiskey, Potter went over to Whig headquarters to hear… whatever he heard. Dance music blared from the wireless sets: the polls hadn't closed yet. He pulled out his pocket watch. It was a little past seven-thirty-less than half an hour to go.
That gave him plenty of time for another drink, or two, or three. He nodded to Braxton Donovan, who also had a whiskey in his hand, and said, 'The condemned man drank a hearty meal.'
'Funny,' the lawyer said. 'Funny like a crutch.'
'Oh, I didn't mean you,' Potter said. 'If you think I meant you, I apologize. I meant the country. Before they execute a man, they give him a blindfold and a cigarette. What do we do when the Confederate States of America go up against the wall?'
Donovan studied him. 'I don't think I've ever heard you say you were sorry before. You must mean it. You don't waste time being polite.'
I try not to waste time at all, Potter thought. But he had nothing to do but stand there banging his gums till clocks in Charleston started striking eight. 'All along the eastern seaboard of the Confederate States, the polls have closed,' an announcer on the wireless declared. 'We'll bring you the latest results from the presidential, Congressional, state, and local elections-but first, a word from our sponsor.' A chorus of young women started singing about the wonders of a soap made from pure palm oil. Potter wondered what could be going through their minds as they trilled the inane lyrics. Probably something like, We're getting paid. Times were hard indeed.
Then the numbers started coming in. Somebody posted each new installment on a big blackboard at the front of the room. That meant the Whigs could go on chattering and still keep up. As soon as Clarence Potter saw the early results from North Carolina, he knew what kind of night it would be. North Carolina was a solid, sensible, foursquare Whig state. The collapse hadn't hit it so hard as a lot of other places.
Jake Featherston led there. He led by more every time the fellow at the board erased old numbers and put up new ones. And he had coattails. Freedom Party Congressional candidates were winning in districts where they'd never come close before. And it looked as bad everywhere else.
Braxton Donovan stared owlishly at the returns. He fixed himself another drink, then came back to stand by Potter and stare some more. He didn't say anything for a long, long time. At last, he did: 'Jesus Christ. It's like watching a train wreck, isn't it?'
Potter shook his head. 'No, Braxton. It's like being in a train wreck.' Donovan thought that over, then slowly nodded.
And it got no better, not from a Whig point of view, as the polls closed in states farther west. Back in 1921, Tennessee had decided the election when it finally went Whig. This year, it went for Featherston and the Freedom Party. So did Mississippi and Alabama. Potter hadn't expected anything different there, but he would have loved to be proved wrong. The Whigs led in Arkansas, but Arkansas wasn't big enough to matter.
'My God,' somebody behind Potter said. 'What is the world coming to?'
He didn't need to ask the question, not when he could see the answer. Jake Featherston was going to be president. He would have a majority-a big majority-in the House. The Senate, whose members were chosen by state legislatures rather than popular vote, wasn't so obvious. Even so, it all added up to the same thing: after seventy years in the saddle, the Whigs were going into the minority.
'The minority?' the man in back of Potter said when he spoke that thought aloud. 'That's crazy.' He still seemed unbelieving.
'If you don't get it, think like a nigger,' Potter said. 'It'll come to you then, believe me.'
A long with news of a corruption scandal in the Iowa legislature, newsboys in Des Moines shouted about Jake Featherston's victory down in the Confederate States. More of them yelled about the scandal, which was right there in town. The election news hit Cincinnatus Driver a lot harder. He got out of his truck on the way to the railroad yards and bought a paper, something he hardly ever did: getting there a minute late might cost him a good cargo. But today he spread the Register and Remembrance on the seat beside him and read a paragraph or two whenever he had to stop.
He was still shaking his head when he got out of the Ford at the yards and started dickering with a conductor over a load of beds and dressers and nightstands. 'What's the big deal?' asked the conductor, a white man too young to have fought in the Great War. 'Who cares what happens down in the Confederate States?'
'I cares.' Cincinnatus knew that was bad grammar even without Achilles telling him so. 'I grew up in Kentucky when it was part of the CSA. Glad it ain't no more. I got out of there once the USA took it over. This here's a better place if you're colored.'
The conductor was not only white, he was a blond who couldn't have got any whiter if somebody'd thrown him into a tub of bleach. He said, 'I don't know nothin' about that. All I know is, you may be colored, but you haggle like a damn kike.'
If he'd been talking about Cincinnatus to a Jew, he probably would have called him a damn nigger. Cincinnatus took such names in stride; he'd heard them all, especially the one applying to his own race, too often to get excited about them. He said, 'I tell you, Mr. Andersen, I don't reckon it's against the law to try an' git me enough money to make the job worth my while. I ain't no charity.'
'Well, I'm a penny-pinching squarehead myself, and I won't tell you anything different,' Andersen said. Cincinnatus liked him better after that; if he could insult himself as casually as he insulted everybody else, odds were none of those insults meant much.
Cincinnatus got fairly close to the price he wanted for hauling the load of bedroom furniture, too. He drove it over to a furniture store on Woodland Street on the west side of town, only a little north of the bend of the Raccoon River. After growing up by the bank of the Ohio, Cincinnatus didn't think either the Raccoon or the Des Moines was anything special.
Olaf Thorstein, who ran the furniture store, was even paler than Andersen. Cincinnatus had trouble believing anybody this side of a ghost could be. Thorstein was a tall, thin man of stern rectitude, the sort who would skin you in a deal if he could but would walk across town in the snow to give back a penny-or a hundred-dollar bill-you accidentally left in his store. With a similar streak in his own character, Cincinnatus had no trouble getting along with him.
Thorstein said, 'Way you talk, you used to live in the Confederate States.' He was not far from Cincinnatus' age, which meant he'd likely fought in the Great War.
'Yes, suh, that's a fact.' Cincinnatus nodded. 'Came to Des Moines ten years ago. Ain't been sorry, neither. This here's a lot better'n Kentucky.' He remembered Luther Bliss and shivered in spite of himself.
'Well, what do you think of what's going on down there now?' the white man asked.
'Don't reckon you'll hear no black man sayin' nothin' good about the Freedom Party,' Cincinnatus answered. 'What do you think, Mr. Thorstein?' A surprising-or maybe a depressing-number of whites weren't the least bit shy about saying what they thought of people who didn't look like them. Had the USA had more Negroes, it probably would have had something like the Freedom Party, too.
'Me? I don't know much. I have not been there, except in the Army,' Thorstein said, confirming Cincinnatus' guess. The furniture-seller went on, 'I tell you this, though: I think that man Featherston will bring trouble. He lies. How can you trust a man who lies? You cannot. And any man who comes on the wireless and says, 'I am going to tell you the truth'-well, what else can he be except a liar?' Behind bifocals, his ice-blue eyes flashed. Plainly, he was condemning Jake Featherston to some chilly hell.
Cincinnatus wished getting rid of the man were that simple. But he nodded to Thorstein. Hating dishonesty of any sort, the Swede might also hate injustice of any sort. 'I got me no quarrel with any o' that,' Cincinnatus said.
'How could anyone quarrel with it?' Olaf Thorstein sounded genuinely bewildered. 'Is it not as plain as the nose on a man's face? And yet how could the people in the Confederate States have voted for the man if they saw
