Pigeons strutted along the street, cooing gently. They were slow and stupid and ever so confident nobody would bother them. Why not? They'd proved right again and again and again. This one stranger in their midst wouldn't prove any different… would he?
Clarence Potter laughed. He threw his arms wide. Some of the pigeons scurried back from him. One or two even spread their wings and fluttered away a few feet. Most? Most kept right on strutting and pecking, and paid him no attention whatsoever. 'You goddamn dumb sons of bitches,' he told them, laughing though it wasn't really funny. 'You might as well be Whigs.' The birds went right on ignoring him, which proved his point.
He wondered whether the Radical Liberals would take him seriously. Odds were, they would. The Freedom Party, after all, was replacing them as the Whigs' principal opposition. But then he wondered if it mattered whether the Rad Libs took him seriously. It probably didn't. No one except a few dreamers had ever thought the Radical Liberals could govern the CSA. They gave the states of the West and Southwest a safety valve through which they could blow off steam when Richmond ignored them, as it usually did. Closer to the heart of the CSA, the Radical Liberals let people pretend the country really was a democratic republic-without the risks and complications a real change of power would have entailed.
Why do I bother? Potter wondered as he strode past the pigeons that, fat and happy and brainless, went on pretending he wasn't there-or, if he was, that he couldn't possibly be dangerous. Easier just to sit back and let nature take its course.
But he knew the answer to that. It was simple enough: he knew Jake Featherston. Ten years now since I walked into the First Richmond Howitzers' encampment. Ten years since he told me Jeb Stuart III's body servant might be a Red, and since Jeb Stuart III, being III of an important family, made sure nothing would happen to the nigger. Jeb Stuart III was dead, of course. He'd looked for death when he realized he'd made a bad mistake. He'd had plenty of old-fashioned Confederate courage and honor. But he'd taken however many Yankee bullets he took without having the faintest conception of just how bad a mistake he'd made.
'The whole Confederacy is still finding out just how bad a mistake you made, Captain Stuart,' Clarence Potter muttered. A young woman coming the other way-a young woman in a shockingly short skirt, one that reached so high, it let him see the bottom of her kneecap-gave him a curious glance as she went by.
Potter was by now used to garnering curious glances. He wasn't nearly so used to women showing that much leg. He looked back over his shoulder at her. For a little while, at least, he forgot all about the Freedom Party.
W hen the steam whistle announcing shift change blew, Chester Martin let out a sigh of relief. It had been a good day on the steel-mill floor. Everything had gone the way it was supposed to. Nobody'd got hurt. You couldn't ask for more than that, not in this business.
Instead of heading straight home, he stopped at the Socialist Party hall not far from the mill. A good many men from his mill and others nearby sat and stood there, talking steel and talking politics and winding down from the long, hard weeks they'd just put in. 'How's it going, Chester?' somebody called. Martin mimed falling over in exhaustion, which got a laugh.
Somebody else said, 'They don't work us as hard as they worked our fathers.'
'Only goes to show what you know, Albert,' Chester retorted. 'My old man's got one of those soft foreman's jobs. He hardly even has calluses on his hands any more, except from pushing a pencil. They work me a hell of a lot harder than they work him.'
'Sold out to the people who own the means of production, has he?' Albert Bauer said-he was and always had been a Socialist of the old school.
Before Chester could answer that, someone else did it for him: 'Oh, put a sock in it, for Christ's sake. We're starting to own the means of production. At least, I've bought some shares of stock, and I'll bet you have, too. Go on, tell me I'm a liar.'
Bauer said not a word. In fact, so many people said not a word that something close to silence fell for a moment. Have that many of us bought stocks? Chester wondered. He had a few shares himself, and knew his father had more than a few: Stephen Douglas Martin had been picking up a share here, a share there, ever since he started making good money when he wasn't conscripted into the Great War.
'Funny,' Martin said. 'The Party talks about government owning the means of production, but it never says much about the proletariat buying 'em up one piece at a time.'
'Marx never figured anything like that would happen,' someone said. 'Neither did Lincoln. Back when they lived, you couldn't make enough money to have any left over to invest.'
'As long as Wall Street keeps going up and up, though, you'd have to be a damn fool not to throw your money that way,' somebody else said. 'It's like stealing, only it's legal. And buying on margin makes it even easier.'
Nobody argued with him. Even now, most of the men who left their jobs at the steel mills left only because they were too old or too physically worn or too badly hurt to do them any more. Those were the people for whom the Socialists were trying to push their old-age insurance policy through Congress. But if you could quit your work at sixty-five, or even sixty, and be sure you had enough left to live on for the rest of your days thanks to what you'd done for yourself while you were working… If you could manage that, the whole country would start looking different in twenty or thirty years.
I'll turn sixty-five in 1957, Martin thought. It didn't seem so impossibly far away-but then, he had just put in that long, long day at the mill.
He rode the trolley home, ate supper with his parents and his sister, and went to bed. When the wind-up alarm clock next to his head clattered the next morning, he just turned it off. He didn't have a moment's sleepy panic, thinking it was some infernal device falling on his trench. I've been home from the Great War for a while now, he thought as he put on a clean work shirt and overalls. But he would take a couple of puckered scars on his left arm to the grave. As it had on so many, the war had left its mark on him.
When he went into the kitchen, his father was already there, smoking his first cigar of the day. His mother fried eggs and potatoes in lard. She used a wood-handled iron spatula to flip some onto a plate for him. 'Here's your breakfast, dear,' she said. 'Do you want some coffee?'
'Please,' he said, and she poured him a cup.
His father said, 'Saturday today-only a half day.'
Chester nodded as he doctored the coffee with cream and sugar. 'That's right. You know I won't be home very long, though-I'm going out with Rita.'
Stephen Douglas Martin nodded. 'You already told us, yeah.'
His mother gave him an approving smile. 'Have a good time, son.'
'I think I will.' Chester dug into the hash browns and eggs so he wouldn't have to show his amusement. His folks had decided they approved of Rita Habicht, or at least of his seeing her. They must have started to wonder if he would ever see anybody seriously. But he wasn't the only Great War veteran in no hurry to get on with that particular part of his life. Plenty of men he knew who'd been through the mill (and, as a steelworker, he understood exactly what that phrase meant) were still single, even though they'd climbed into their thirties. It was as if they'd given so much in the trenches, they had little left for the rest of their lives.
He took the trolley past the half-scale statue of Remembrance-who would have looked fiercer without half a dozen pigeons perched on her sword arm-to the mill, where he put in his four hours. Then he hurried back home, washed up, shaved, and changed from overalls, work shirt, and cloth cap to trousers, white shirt, and straw hat. 'I'm off,' he told his mother.
'You look very nice,' Louisa Martin said. He would have been happier if she hadn't said that every time he went anywhere, but still-you took what you could get.
He rode the trolley again, this time to the block of flats where Rita lived. She had one of her own. She'd got married just before the war started. Her husband had stopped a bullet or a shell in one of the endless battles on the Roanoke front. Martin had fought there, too, till he got wounded. He'd never met Joe Habicht, but that proved exactly nothing. Rita had had a baby, too, and lost it to diphtheria the day after its second birthday. Women fought their own battles, even if not with guns. Through everything, though, she'd managed to hang on to the apartment.
She didn't keep Chester waiting when he knocked on the door. His heart beat faster as she opened it. 'Hi,' he said, a big, silly grin on his face. 'How are you?'
'Fine, thanks.' She patted at her dark blond hair. It was a little damp; she must have washed after getting back from her Saturday half day, too. 'It's good to see you.'
'It's good to be here,' he said, and leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. 'You look real pretty.'
