weather no matter how hard you tried.
A bum slept in a doorway, a blanket wrapped around him. Living here without money was easier than it was in the eastern USA, because people didn't have to worry so much about shelter. Idly, Martin wondered if Florida and Cuba had more than their share of out-of-work people in the CSA for the same reason.
He needed a southbound trolley today. He was heading down to Hawthorne, a suburb south of the airport and not far from the beach. Mordechai's crew was running up a pair of apartment buildings. People with jobs kept moving to Southern California, too, and they all needed places to live.
When the trolley rolled up, Martin threw his nickel in the fare box, paid two cents more for a transfer, and then sat down with his toolbox in his lap. Even though that toolbox was a sign he had work to go to, he didn't stop worrying. The way things were these days, who could? He wondered if he would be able to go on working after Mordechai retired. The foreman with the missing fingers on his right hand had to be past sixty. Whoever replaced him might have new favorites who needed jobs. In a trade without a union, that sort of thing was always a worry.
Posters praising candidates for the upcoming Congressional elections sprouted like toadstools on walls and fences and telephone poles: Democratic red, white, and blue against Socialist red and, here and there, Republican green. Trying to guess who'd win by seeing who had the most posters up was a mug's game, which didn't mean people didn't play it all the time. By the way things looked here, the two big parties were running neck and neck. Outside of a few states in the Midwest, Republicans had a hard time getting elected. Their ideas were stuck between those of the Democrats and the Socialists, and old-timers still associated them with the nineteenth- century disasters the USA had suffered under Lincoln and Blaine.
Martin changed lines on El Segundo. He got off the trolley at Hawthorne Boulevard and walked two blocks south and three blocks east. Mordechai waved to him when he came up, calling, 'Morning, Chester.'
'Morning,' Martin answered. About half the crew-who lived all over the Los Angeles area-were already there. It was still only a quarter to eight. Chester didn't expect many people to show up after eight o'clock. You did that more than once-twice if you were lucky-and some hungry son of a bitch would grab your job with both hands.
This morning, only Dushan came in late. He was plainly hung over. Mordechai said something to him. He nodded in a gingerly way, then got to work. He depended on construction work less than most of the other men, for he could make cards and dice behave the way he wanted them to. That let him-or he thought that let him-get away with showing up late every once in a while.
He buckled down willingly enough, even if the banging of hammers made him turn pale. The fellow working alongside Chester, a big Pole named Stan, said, 'Goddamn if Dushan don't look like a vampire left out in the sun.'
The past few years, there'd been a lot of films about vampires and werewolves and other things that should have been dead but weren't. That probably put the comparison in Stan's mind. It was good enough to make Martin nod. All the same, he said, 'Don't let Dushan hear that. He's from the old country, and he's liable to take it the wrong way.'
'Let him. I ain't afraid,' Stan said. He was bigger and younger than Dushan, so he had reason to be confident. Still…
'Don't push it.' Now Chester sounded a plain warning. 'Why start trouble?'
'You're not my grandma,' Stan said. But, to Martin's relief, he went back to driving nails and let Dushan alone.
It didn't last. Chester might have known it wouldn't. Something in him had known it wouldn't. But he couldn't do anything but watch when the trouble started. He was two stories up, nailing rafters to the roof pole, when Stan got in front of Dushan down on the ground and made as if to drive a stake through his heart.
Dushan looked at him for half a second. Then, his cold face revealing nothing of what he intended, he kicked Stan in the crotch. Had his booted foot gone home as he intended, there wouldn't have been a fight, because Stan wouldn't have been able to give him one. But, maybe because of his hangover, the kick got Stan in the hipbone rather than somewhere more intimate.
Stan roared with pain. But he didn't fall over clutching at himself, which was what Dushan had had in mind. Instead, he surged forward and grappled with the other man. They fell to the ground, slugging and gouging and spitting out a couple of different flavors of guttural, consonant-filled Slavic curses.
'Oh, for Christ's sake!' Chester descended as fast as he could. He was cursing, too, almost as angry at himself as he was at Stan and Dushan. He'd seen trouble coming, but he hadn't been able to stop it.
'Fight! Fight!' The shout brought construction workers running, just as it would have brought kids running on a high-school campus. Most of the workers only stood around and watched without trying to break it up. It was entertainment, something to liven up the day, something to talk about over the supper table tonight.
'Come on, let's get 'em apart,' Chester said. Still enjoying the show, the men at his side looked at him as if he were crazy-till Mordechai got there a few seconds later.
Not much made Mordechai mad. Anything that slowed down work and threatened the job would do the trick, though. Swearing like the veteran Navy man he was, he shoved through the crowd of workers, most of whom were twice his size and half his age. Seeing that, Chester did some pushing and shoving of his own. The two of them grabbed Dushan and Stan and pulled them apart. Once they actually started doing that, they got some belated help from the other men.
Dushan twisted in Chester's grasp, trying to wade back into the scrap. That might have been more for form's sake than anything else. He hadn't been getting the better of it. He had a bloody nose and a black eye and a scraped cheek. He'd hung a pretty good mouse on Stan, too, but the Pole hadn't taken anywhere near so much damage as he had.
'What the hell happened here?' Mordechai couldn't have sounded more disgusted if he'd tried for a week.
Dushan and Stan both gave highly colored versions of recent events. Some of the builders who'd been watching supported one of them, some the other, and some gave versions of their own that had very little to do with anything that had really gone on-that was how it seemed to Chester, anyhow.
Mordechai listened for a little while, then threw up his hands. 'Enough!' he said. 'Too goddamn much.' He used his mutilated right hand to point first to Stan, then to Dushan. Somehow, his two missing fingers made the gesture seem even more contemptuous than it would have otherwise. 'You're fired, and you're fired, too. Get the fuck out of here, both of you. I don't want to see either one of your goddamn ugly mugs again, either. And you both blow all of today's pay.'
A sigh went through the workers. Nobody'd expected anything different. Dushan never changed expression. Stan said, 'Fuck you, asshole,' but his bravado rang hollow. Word would get around, and get around quick. He'd have a tough time landing construction work from here on out. He was just an ordinary worker, easily replaceable by another ordinary worker.
If Mordechai had stopped there, nothing more would have come of it. But he was furious, and he held the whip hand. 'And the rest of you pussies,' he said, glaring at the men around him, 'the rest of you pussies lose half a day's pay for standing around while all this shit was going on.'
'That's not fair!' Chester Martin exclaimed. Several other men muttered and grumbled, but he was the one who spoke out loud.
Mordechai glowered. 'You don't like it, you know what you can do about it.'
He meant, nothing. But Martin wasn't a veteran of union strife in Toledo for nothing, or to take nothing lying down. 'Yeah,' he said stonily. 'I know what I can do about it.'
As soon as people went back to work, he started doing it. He hadn't done any union agitating for years, but he still knew how. Some of the men didn't want to listen to him. 'You're gonna get your ass fired, and everybody else's, too,' was something he heard more than once.
But others were ready to go along. Mordechai had hit too hard when he punished workers for something they hadn't done. And a lot of the men who'd come to California to find jobs had belonged to unions back East. They remembered the gains they'd made, gains they'd had to throw away to find any work at all out here.
'We've got to spread the word,' Chester warned. 'If we just strike at this site, they'll crush us. But if we strike at all the building sites around Los Angeles, the bosses will have to deal with us.' He hoped they would, anyhow. And if they didn't… well, he'd gone on strike before.
When he got his pay at the end of the day-half a day's pay for a whole day's hard work-he said, 'I'm taking
