III
Jonathan Moss was an American. He had a Canadian wife. After studying occupation law, he’d made his living in Berlin, Ontario, by helping Canucks struggling in the toils of what the U.S. Army insisted on calling justice. Without false modesty, he knew he was one of the best in the business.
And what was his reward for doing everything he could to give the Canadians a hand? He stared down at the sheet of paper on his desk. He’d just taken it out of an envelope and unfolded it. In block capitals, it said, YANK SWINE, YOU WILL DIE!
He supposed he ought to turn it over to the occupying authorities. Maybe they could find fingerprints on it and track down whoever had stuck it in the mail. Instead, Moss crumpled up the paper and chucked it into the wastebasket. For one thing, odds were anyone who sent a charming missive of this sort had the elementary common sense to wear gloves while he was doing it. And, for another, taking a crank like this seriously gave him power over you.
During the war, Moss had flown observation aeroplanes and fighting scouts. He’d gone through all three years without getting badly hurt, and ended up an ace. After the real terror of aerial combat, a cowardly little anonymous threat didn’t get him very excited.
He methodically went through the rest of his mail. The Bar Association reminded him his dues were payable before December 31. That gave him two and a half weeks. His landlord served notice that, as of next February 1, his office rent would go up five dollars a month. “Happy day,” he said.
He opened another nondescript envelope. This one also held a single sheet of paper. Its message, also in untraceable block capitals, was, YOUR WIFE AND LITTLE GIRL WILL DIE, YANK SWINE!
Seeing that, Moss abruptly changed his mind about the letter he’d thrown away. He fished it from the trash can and flattened it out as best he could. The letters in both were about the same size and in about the same style. Moss rummaged for the envelope in which the first threat had come. He set it next to the one he’d just now opened.
“Well, well,” he murmured. “Isn’t that interesting?” He was no detective with a microscope, but he didn’t need to be to see that his address on the two envelopes had been typed with two different machines. Not only that, one U.S. stamp bore a Manitoba overprint, while the other had one from Ontario. The notes, as near as he could see, were identical. The envelopes not only weren’t but had been mailed from different provinces. (He checked to see if the postmarks confirmed what the stamps said. They did. One came from Toronto, the other from a town south of Winnipeg.) What did that mean?
Two possibilities occurred to him. One was that somebody didn’t like him and had got his bother-in-law or someone of that sort to help show how much. Somebody like that was a pest. The other possibility was that he’d fallen foul of a real organization dedicated to—What? To making his life miserable, certainly, and, odds were, to making Canada’s American occupiers unhappy en masse.
He’d hoped time would reconcile Canada to having lost the Great War. The longer he stayed here, the more naive and forlorn that hope looked. English-speaking Canada had risen once on its own, in the 1920s. More recently, the Empire of Japan had tried to ignite it again. Great Britain wouldn’t have minded helping its one-time dominion make the Yanks miserable, either.
With a sigh, Moss put both sheets of paper and both envelopes in a buff manila folder. With a longer, louder sigh, he donned his overcoat, earmuffs, hat, and mittens. Then he closed the door to the law office—as an afterthought, he locked it, too—and left the building for the two-block walk to occupation headquarters in Berlin.
Had he been in a tearing hurry, he could have left off the earmuffs and mittens. It was above zero, and no new snow had fallen since the middle of the night. Moss had grown up around Chicago, a city that knew rugged weather. Even so, his wartime service in Ontario and the years he’d lived here since had taught him some things about cold he’d never learned down in the States.
He saw three new YANKS OUT! graffiti between the building where he worked and the red-brick fortress that housed the occupation authority. Two shopkeepers were already out getting rid of them. He suspected the third would in short order. Leaving anti-American messages up on your property was an offense punishable by fine. Occupation Code, Section 227.3, he thought.
The sentries in front of occupation headquarters jeered at him as he came up the steps: “Look! It’s the Canuck from Chicago!” He wasn’t in the Army—indeed, most of his practice involved opposing military lawyers—so they didn’t bother wasting politeness on him.
“Funny boys,” he said, at which they jeered harder than ever. He went on into the building, or started to. Just inside the entrance, a sergeant and a couple of privates stopped him. “They’ve beefed up security, sir,” the sergeant said. “Orders are to pat down all civilians. Sorry, sir.” He didn’t sound sorry at all.
Moss shed his overcoat and held his arms out wide, as if he were being crucified. After he passed the inspection, he went on to the office of Major Sam Lopat, a prosecutor with whom he’d locked horns more than a few times. “Ah, Mr. Moss,” Lopat said. “And what sort of fancy lies have you got waiting for me next time we go at each other?”
“Here.” Moss set the manila folder on the major’s desk. “Tell me what you think of these.”
Lopat raised one eyebrow when Moss failed to come back with a gibe. He raised the other when he saw what the folder held. “Oh,” he said in a different tone of voice. “More of these babies.”
“More of them, you say?” Moss didn’t know whether to feel alarmed or relieved. “Other people have got ’em, too?”
“Hell, yes,” the military prosecutor answered. “What, did you think you were the only one?” He didn’t wait for Moss’ reply, but threw back his head and laughed. “You civilian lawyers think you’re the most important guys in the world, and nothing is real unless it happens to you. Well, I’ve got news for you: you aren’t the cream in God’s coffee.”
“And you are—” But Jonathan Moss checked himself. He wanted information from Lopat, not a quarrel. “All right, I’m not the only one, you say? Tell me more. Who else has got ’em? Who sends ’em? Have you had any luck catching the bastards? I guess not, or I wouldn’t have got these.”
“Not as much as we’d like,” Lopat said, which was pretty obvious. “We’ve torn apart the towns where they’re postmarked, but not much luck. You can see for yourself—all the Canucks need is a typewriter and a pen, and they could do without the typewriter in a pinch. If it makes you feel better, there’s never been a follow-up on one of these. Nobody’s got shot or blown up the day after one of these little love notes came.”
“I’m not sorry to hear that,” Moss admitted. “You didn’t say who else got a—love note.” He nodded to Lopat, acknowledging the phrase.
“I don’t have the whole list. Investigation isn’t my department, you know. I go into court once they’re caught—and then you do your damnedest to get ’em off the hook.” The military prosecutor leered at Moss, who stonily stared back. With a shrug, Lopat went on, “Far as I know, the other people these have come to have all been part of the occupation apparatus one way or another. You’re the first outside shyster to get one, or I think you are. Doesn’t that make you proud?”
“At least,” Moss said dryly, and Lopat laughed. Moss tapped one of the notes with a fingernail. “Prints?”
“We’ll check, but the next ones we find’ll be the first.”
“Yeah, I figured as much. You would have landed on these fellows like a bomb if you knew who they were,” Moss said. Lopat nodded. Something else occurred to Moss. “You think this has anything to do with that telephone threat I got last year, where the guy told me not to start my auto or I’d be sorry?”
The military prosecutor frowned. “I’d forgotten about that. I don’t know what to tell you. Pretty damn funny, you know? You’re the best friend—best American friend—the Canucks have got. You’re married to one of theirs, and I know what she thinks of most Yanks, me included. You’re the best occupation lawyer between Calgary and Toronto, anyway. Makes sense they’d want to get rid of me. I don’t like it, but it makes sense. But why you? Seems to me they ought to put a bounty on anybody who even messes up your hair.”
“I’ve wondered about that, too. Maybe they’re angrier at Laura for marrying me than they are at me for marrying her.”
“Maybe.” But Lopat didn’t sound convinced. “In that case, why aren’t they trying to blow her up instead of you?”
“I don’t know,” Moss answered. “As long as this isn’t too much of a much, though, I won’t lose any sleep over it.” He redonned his cold-weather gear. “I’ll see you in court, Major, and I’ll whip you, too.”
“Ha!” Lopat said. “You been smoking doped cigarettes, to get so cocky?”
After a few more good-natured insults, Moss left occupation headquarters. By then, a wan sun had come out. His long shadow stretched out to the northwest as he walked back to the building where he practiced.
He’d just set one foot on the steps leading up the sidewalk when the bomb went off behind him. Had he had an infantryman’s reflexes, he would have thrown himself flat. Instead, he stood there frozen while glass blew out of windows all around and fell clinking and clattering to the ground like sharp-edged, glittering snowflakes.
Already, a great cloud of black smoke was rising into the sky. Looking over his shoulder, Moss realized it came from the direction of the building he’d just left. He started running, back in the direction from which he’d come. At every step, his shoes crunched on shattered glass. He bumped into a bleeding man running the other way. “Sorry!” they both gasped. Each one kept going.
When Moss rounded the last corner, he came on a scene whose like he hadn’t met since the days of the war. Occupation headquarters had had plenty of guards, but someone, somehow, had sneaked a bomb past them. The red brick building had fallen in on itself. Flames shot up from it. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay all around. Moss stepped on an arm that stopped abruptly, halfway between elbow and wrist. It still had on shirt sleeve and wristwatch. Blood dribbled from the end. His stomach lurched.
Here and there, survivors were staggering or pulling themselves out of the building. “My God!” one of them—a woman secretary—said, over and over. “My God! My God!” Maybe she was too stunned to say anything else. Maybe she couldn’t find anything else that fit. She cradled a broken arm in her other hand, but hardly seemed to know she was hurt.
A hand sticking out from under bricks opened and closed. Moss dashed over and started clawing at the rubble. The soldier he pulled out was badly battered, but didn’t seem to have any broken bones. “God bless you, pal,” he said.
Fire engines roared up, sirens screaming. They began playing water on the wreckage. Moss looked for more signs of life under it. As he threw bricks in all directions, he wondered if the people who’d planted this bomb were the same ones who’d written him his notes. If they were, Sam Lopat had been wrong about them—not that he was likely to know that any more.
Down in southern Sonora, winter was the rainy season. Hipolito Rodriguez had planted his fields of corn and beans when the rains started, plowing behind his trusty mule. Now, with 1934 giving way to 1935, he tramped through them hoe in hand, weeding and cultivating. A farmer’s work was never done.
These days, he wasn’t the only one tramping through the fields. His two older sons, Miguel and Jorge, were big enough to give him real help: one was seventeen, the other sixteen. Before many more years—maybe before many more months—had passed, they would discover women. Once they found wives, they’d go off and farm on their own. Then Rodriguez would have to work his plot by himself again. No—by then Pedro would be old enough to pitch in. Now he enjoyed the extra help.
When the day’s work was done—earlier than it would have been without his sons’ help—he stood at the sink working the pump handle to get water to wash the sweat from his round brown face. That done, he dried himself on a towel prickly with embroidery from his wife and his mother-in-law.
“Magdalena, you know I am going into Baroyeca tonight,” he said.
His wife sighed but nodded. “Sí,” she said. The two of them, Magdalena especially, spoke more Spanish than English. Most Sonorans, especially of their generation, did, even though Sonora and Chihuahua had belonged to the Confederate States ten years longer than either one of them had been alive. Their children, educated in the school in town, used the two languages interchangeably. Schools taught exclusively in English. What the Rodriguezes’ children’s children would speak was something Hipolito wondered from time to time, but not something he could do anything about.
He said, “There’s nothing to worry about now. We have had no trouble holding Freedom Party meetings since Señor Featherston won the election.”
Magdalena crossed herself. “I pray to God you are right. And I still say you have not told me all you could about these times you were shooting at people.”
Since she was right, Rodriguez didn’t answer. He ate his supper—beans and cheese wrapped in tortillas—then walked to Baroyeca, about three miles away. He got to town just as the sun was setting.
Baroyeca had never been a big place. A lot of the shops on the main street were shuttered these days, and had been ever since the silver mines in the mountains to the north closed down a few years earlier. If Jaime Diaz’s general store ever shut down, Rodriguez didn’t know how the town would survive.
Except for the general store and the Culebra Verde, the local cantina, Freedom Party headquarters was the only business in Baroyeca that bothered lighting itself up after sundown. The lamps burned kerosene. Electricity had never appeared here. FREEDOM! the sign on the front window said, and below it, in slightly smaller letters, ¡LIBERTAD!
No matter what Rodriguez had told his wife, an armed guard with bandoleers crisscrossing his chest stood in front of the door. He nodded and stood aside to let Rodriguez go in. “Hola, Pablo,” Rodriguez said. “¿Todo está bien?”
“Yes, everything’s fine,” Pablo Sandoval answered in English. “Nobody gonna do nothin’ to us now.” Peeking out from under one of the bandoleers was his Purple Heart ribbon. Like Rodriguez, like most of the men now entering middle age in Baroyeca, he’d gone north to fight for the Estados Confederados and against the Estados Unidos in the Great War. He’d stayed in the English-speaking part of the CSA for several years before coming home, which went a long way toward explaining why he often used that language.
The Party organizer who’d come down to Baroyeca a few years before, on the other hand, was a native speaker of English but greeted Rodriguez in fluent Spanish: “Hola, señor. ¿Como está Usted?”
“Estoy bien. Gracias, Señor Quinn. ¿Y Usted?”
“I am also well, thank you,” Robert Quinn replied in Spanish. He was and always had been scrupulously polite to the men he’d recruited into the Freedom Party. That in itself set him apart from a lot of English-speaking Confederates, who treated men of Mexican blood as only a short step better than Negroes. Rodriguez hadn’t needed long in the Confederate Army to figure out that greaser was no term of endearment. Good manners alone had been plenty to gain Quinn several new Party members. “¡Libertad!” he added now.
“¡Libertad!” Rodriguez echoed. He nodded to his friends as he took a seat. They’d been in combat together, fighting against the dons who didn’t want to see the Freedom Party taking over Baroyeca and all of Sonora.
Continuing in his good if accented Spanish, Robert Quinn said, “Gentlemen, I have a couple of announcements to make. First, I am glad I see before me men with many sons. President Featherston is beginning a Freedom Youth Corps for boys fourteen to eighteen years old. They will work where work is needed, and they will learn order and discipline. The Party and the state of Sonora will join together in paying the costs of uniforms. Those will not cost any Party member even one cent.”
A pleased buzz ran through the room. Rodriguez’s friend, Carlos Ruiz, put up his hand. Quinn nodded to him. He said, “Señor, what if boys who come from families where there are no Party members want to join this Freedom Youth Corps?”
“This is a good question, Señor Ruiz.” Quinn’s smile was not altogether pleasant. He said, “In English, we say johnny-come-latelies for those who try to jump on the caboose when the train is rolling away. These boys will be able to join, but their families will have to pay for the uniforms. This seems only fair, or do you think differently?”
“No, Señor Quinn. I like this very much,” Ruiz replied. Rodriguez liked it very much, too. For as long as his family had lived in these parts, they’d had to make do with the dirty end of the stick. This time, though, he’d actually backed a winner. Not only that, backing a winner was proving to have its rewards. By the smiles on the faces of the other Freedom Party men, their thoughts were running along the same lines.
“Some of you already know about our next item of business,” Quinn said. “You saw, when the pendejos who fought for Don Joaquin shot up our headquarters here last year, that we could not rely on the guardía civil to keep such troublemakers away from us. The present members of the guardía civil have … resigned. Their replacements will be Freedom Party men.”
“Bueno,” Rodriguez said. His wasn’t the only voice raised in approval, either. Putting Freedom Party men in those places did a couple of things. It made sure the people who enforced the law would do that the way the Party wanted, as for so many years they’d done it the way the local mine owners and big landowners wanted. And, unless Rodriguez missed his guess, it would also make sure several Freedom Party men now down on their luck had jobs that paid enough to live on. Indeed, what point belonging to the winning side if you couldn’t reap any benefits from it?
Knowing smiles around the room said he wasn’t the only man to have figured that out, either. It’s good to know, he thought. One thing you could say about an old patrón: when trouble came, he looked out for the men who backed him. Now we see the Freedom Party does the same thing. We can rely on these people. They won’t use us and then walk away.
Underscoring that very point, Robert Quinn said, “Baroyeca is our town now. Sonora is our state. We have to make sure nobody takes them away from us, and we have to show people who haven’t joined the Freedom Party yet that they’d be smart if they did.”
Several men stirred at that. Carlos Ruiz put their worries into words: “Why do we want all these—what did you call them in English—johnnies-come-lately in the Party? What good are they? They would only be followers. They never fought for the Party. They never shed their blood for it. Who needs them?”
“You will always be special to the Freedom Party,” Quinn promised. He tapped the pin he wore in his lapel. “You men who were Party members before President Featherston was inaugurated will be able to wear pins like this one. They will show you followed the Freedom Party before that was the popular thing to do. The others, the latecomers, will have a black border on the pins they wear.”
“Not bad,” Hipolito Rodriguez murmured. Most of the other Party men nodded. We deserve to be singled out, Rodriguez thought. Carlos is right. We paid our Party dues in blood.
But Quinn went on, “Still, the Freedom Party has room for more than just us. The Freedom Party is for everyone in the Estados Confederados. Everyone, do you hear me? The Party is here to help all the people. It is here for all the people. And it is here to make sure all the people do all they can to make the Estados Confederados a better country, a stronger country. We will need all our strength. All of you who are old enough fought in the war. We were stabbed in the back then. If we ever have to fight again, we will win.”
Rodriguez hadn’t hated the United States before the Great War. He’d rarely thought about the USA before the war. Down here in southern Sonora, the United States had seemed too far away to worry about. Even Confederate states like Alabama and South Carolina had seemed too far away to worry about.
Things were different now. Men from the United States had spent a couple of years doing their level best to kill him. He knew he’d survived the war at least as much by luck as because he made a good soldier. Then, when the fighting finally ended, the men from the United States had taken away his rifle, as if he and his country had no more right to defend themselves.
Was he supposed to love the USA after that? Not likely!
“We’ll all be in step together,” Quinn said. “We’re marching into the future side by side. One country, one party—all together, on to … victory.”
One country … one party? Not so long ago, in this very room, Carlos had asked what would happen when the Freedom Party lost an election after gaining power. Robert Quinn had thought that was very funny. Hipolito hadn’t understood why, not at the time. Now … Now maybe he did.
“¿Hay otro más?” Quinn asked. Nobody said anything. Quinn nodded briskly—an English-speaker’s nod. “All right. If there is no other business, amigos, this meeting is adjourned. Hasta luego.”
Stars shone down brightly when Rodriguez and the other Freedom Party men left Party headquarters. The wind blew off the mountains to the northeast. It was as chilly a wind as Baroyeca ever knew, though up in Texas during the war Rodriguez had discovered things about winter he’d never wanted to know. He wished he’d brought along a poncho; the walk back to the farm would be less than delightful. Of course, the walking itself would help keep him warm.
Some of the Freedom Party men headed for La Culebra Verde, from which light and the sounds of a guitar and raucous singing emerged. “Come on, amigo,” Carlos Ruiz called. “One won’t hurt you, or even two or three.”
“Too much work tomorrow,” Rodriguez said. His friends laughed at him. They probably thought that, while a beer or a tequila, or even two or three, wouldn’t hurt him, Magdalena would. And, though he had no intention of admitting it to them, they were probably right.
Cincinnatus Driver pulled over to the curb, hopped out of his elderly Ford truck with the motor still running, and trotted to the corner to buy a copy of the Des Moines Herald-Express from the deaf-mute selling them there. The fellow tipped his cap and smiled as Cincinnatus gave him a nickel, and smiled wider when the Negro hurried back to the truck without waiting for his change.
He flipped the paper open to the inside pages and read whenever he had to stop for a sign or a traffic cop or one of the red lights that had sprung up like toadstools the past few years. The stories that concerned him most didn’t make it to the front page. That was full of the anti-U.S. riots convulsing Houston, the United State carved from west Texas at the end of the Great War. What Cincinnatus wanted to know more about weren’t world-shaking events, and they didn’t have anything directly to do with Des Moines, either. Sometimes several days would go by without one of the stories that worried him turning up.
Today, though, he found one. The headline—it wasn’t a big headline, not on page five—read, PARTY OF 25 NEGROES TURNED BACK AT BORDER. The story told how the blacks—men, women, and children, it said—had tried to cross from Confederate Tennessee into U.S. Kentucky, and how Border Patrol and National Guard units had forced them to go back into the CSA. They claimed intolerable persecution in their own country, the reporter wrote, but, as their entrance into the United States would have been both illegal and undesirable, the officers of the Border Patrol rejected their pleas, as is longstanding U.S. policy.
He’d made plenty of deliveries to the Herald-Express. If he’d had that reporter in front of him, he would have punched the man—a white man, of course—right in the nose. He came down on the clutch so clumsily, he stalled his truck and had to fire it up again. That made him realize how furious he was. He hadn’t done anything like that since he was learning how to drive back before the Great War.
But, as he rolled north toward the railroad yards, he realized he shouldn’t be mad at the reporter alone. The fellow hadn’t done anything but clearly state what U.S. government policy was and always had been. Back when the border between the USA and the CSA ran along the Ohio River, U.S. patrols had shot Negroes who were trying to flee to the United States while they were in the water. The USA had only a handful of blacks, and wanted no more. A lot of people here would have been happier without the ones they already had.
Cincinnatus’ laughter had a sour edge. “They was stuck with me and the ones like me, on account of they couldn’t no way get Kentucky without us,” he said. He was glad to live under U.S. rather than C.S. rule, especially now that the Freedom Party called the shots down in the Confederacy.
The race riots sweeping through the CSA were the main reason Negroes were trying to get out, of course. Jews had run away from Russian pogroms to the USA. Irishmen had escaped famines and English landlords. Germans had fled a failed revolution. Poles and Italians and Frenchmen had done their best to get away from hunger and poverty. They’d all found places in the United States.
Negroes from the Confederate States? Men and women who had desperately urgent reasons to leave their homes, who already spoke English, and who were ready to work like the slaves their parents and grandparents (and some of them, as youths) had been? Could they make homes for themselves here?
No.
He supposed he should have been glad U.S. military authorities hadn’t chased Negroes south into Confederate territory as they advanced during the war. For a moment, he wondered why they hadn’t. But he could see reasons. The Confederates could have got good use from the labor of colored refugees. And if anything could have made Negroes loyal to the CSA, getting thrown out of the USA would have been it. U.S. officials, for a wonder, had been smart enough to figure that out, and so it hadn’t happened.
Here were the railroad yards, a warren of tracks and switches and trains and fragments of trains scattered here and there over them, apparently—but not really—at random. A couple of railroad dicks, billy clubs in their hands, pistols on their hips, recognized Cincinnatus and his truck and waved him forward. “Mornin’, Lou. Mornin’, Steve,” he called to them. They waved again. He’d been coming here a long time now.
As he bumped over railroad crossings toward a train, he watched the two dicks in his rear-view mirror. They were chasing a ragged white man who’d been riding the rails and was either switching trains or getting off for good. Cincinnatus would have bet the fellow was bound for somewhere else, probably somewhere out West. Not many folks wanted to stay in Des Moines. Even if this poor bastard had had that in mind, he wouldn’t by the time Steve and Lou got through with him.
There stood the conductor, as important a man on a freight train as the supercargo was on a steamboat. Cincinnatus hit the brakes, jumped out of his truck, and ran over to the man with the clipboard in his hand. “Ain’t seen you in a while, Mr. Navin,” he said, touching the brim of his soft cloth cap. “What you got for me to haul today?”
“Hello, Cincinnatus,” Wesley Navin said. Cincinnatus wondered how many conductors came through Des Moines. However many it was, he knew just about all of them. By now, they knew him, too. They knew how reliable he was. Only a handful of them refused to give him business because he was colored. Navin wasn’t one of those. He pointed down the train to a couple of boxcars. “How you fixed for blankets and padding? I’ve got a shipment of flowerpots here, should be enough for this town for about the next hundred years.”
“Got me plenty,” Cincinnatus answered. “How many stops I got to make on this here run?”
“Let me have a look here… .” Navin consulted the all-important clipboard. “Six.”
“Where they at?” Cincinnatus asked. The conductor read off the addresses. Cincinnatus spread his hands, pale palms up. “You runnin’ me all over creation. I got to ask four dollars. Oughta say five—I might not make it back here to git me another load today.”
“Pay you three and a quarter,” Navin said.
“My mama didn’t raise no fools,” Cincinnatus said. “I get my ass over to the riverside. I get honest pay for honest work there.”
“You’re the blackest damn Jew I ever seen,” Navin said. Cincinnatus only grinned; that wasn’t the first time people had said such things about him. Still grumbling, the conductor said, “Well, hell, three-fifty. Since it’s you.”
“Don’t do me no favors like that,” Cincinnatus told him. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere till I don’t lose money on the way, and you ain’t got there yet.”
They settled at $3.75. A few years earlier, that wouldn’t have been enough to keep Cincinnatus in the black. But he was more efficient now than he had been—and prices on everything had come down since money got so tight.
He loaded what seemed like nine million flowerpots into the back of the Ford, using ratty old blankets to keep one stack from bumping another. Anything he broke, of course, he was stuck with. He winced every time the truck jounced over a pothole. He’d done a little thinking before leaving the railroad yard with the flowerpots. The couple of minutes he spent probably saved him an hour of travel time, for he worked out the best route to take to get to all six nurseries and department stores. That was part of what being efficient was all about.
It let him get back to the railroad yard just past two in the afternoon: plenty of time to get more cargo and deliver it before sundown. With the sun setting as he finished the second load, he drove home, parking the truck in front of his apartment building. When he walked into the apartment, his daughter Amanda was doing homework at the kitchen table, while Elizabeth, his wife, fried ham steaks in a big iron spider on the stove.
Cincinnatus gave Elizabeth a quick kiss, then said, “Where’s Achilles at? He in his room?”
She shook her head. She was cooking in the maid’s clothes she’d worn to work. “He blew in a little before you got home, stayed just long enough to change his clothes, and then he done blew out again,” she said.
“Why’d he bother changin’?” Cincinnatus asked. “What he does, he don’t need to.” Thanks not least to Cincinnatus’ insistence—sometimes delivered with a two-by-four—his son had earned his high-school diploma. Then he’d amazed everyone—including, very likely, himself—by landing a clerk’s job at an insurance company. He wasn’t likely to work up much of a sweat filing papers or adding up columns of numbers.
But Elizabeth said, “Why you think? He takin’ Grace out to the movin’ pictures again.”
“Oh.” Cincinnatus didn’t know how to go on from there. Grace Chang lived in the apartment right upstairs from his own. Her father ran a laundry and brewed excellent beer (a very handy talent in a state as thoroughly dry as Iowa). Cincinnatus couldn’t deny that Grace was a sweet girl, or that she was a pretty girl. No one at all could deny that she was a Chinese girl.
She’d been going out with Achilles for more than a year now. It made Cincinnatus acutely nervous. These weren’t the Confederate States, and Grace wasn’t white, but even so… . Having the two of them go out together also made Mr. Chang nervous. He liked Achilles well enough—he’d known him since he was a little boy—but there was no denying Achilles wasn’t Chinese.
“Ain’t nothin’ good gonna come o’ this,” Cincinnatus said heavily.
Elizabeth didn’t answer right away. She flipped the ham steaks over with a long-handled spatula. “Never can tell,” she said when they were sizzling again. “No, never can tell. Mebbe grandkids come o’ this.”
“Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus exclaimed. “You reckon he wants to marry her?”
His wife used the spatula on a mess of potatoes frying in a smaller pan. Then she said, “Don’t reckon he go with a gal for more’n a year unless he thinkin’ ‘bout that. Don’t reckon she go with him unless she thinkin’ ‘bout it, too.”
“What do we do, he ends up marryin’ the Chinaman’s daughter?” Cincinnatus asked.
Elizabeth turned more potatoes before answering, “Upstairs right about now, I reckon Mr. Chang sayin’ to his missus, ‘What we do, they git married?’ ” Her effort to reproduce a singsong Chinese accent was one of the funnier things Cincinnatus had heard lately.
But that bad accent wasn’t the only reason he started laughing. Even though Achilles and Grace had been going out for more than a year, nobody outside their families had said a word to either one of them about their choice of partner. It was as if white Des Moines—the vast majority of the town—couldn’t get excited about what either a Negro or a Chinese did, so long as it didn’t involve any whites.