The Victorious Opposition (28 page)

With an enormous yawn, Rita said, “I’m going to bed myself. He’s been so fussy the past few nights. He must be cutting a tooth, but I can’t find it yet. If he wakes up and he isn’t hungry, I wish you’d take him tonight.”

“All right.” Chester did rock Carl back to sleep every once in a while.

When the alarm clock went off the next morning, he woke up happy. He hadn’t heard a thing in the night, which meant the baby must have slept straight through. Or so he thought, till he got a look at Rita’s wan, sleepy face. Reproachfully, she said, “You told me you’d take him, but you just lay there while he cried, till finally I got up and got him. He didn’t want to go back to bed after that, either.”

“I’m sorry,” Martin said. “I never even heard him.” That was nothing but the truth. Because he didn’t usually get up when the baby cried, the noise Carl made didn’t rouse him, though he’d shut off the alarm clock as soon as it rang.

His wife looked as if she had trouble believing him. “I don’t see how you could have missed him. Half the neighbors must have heard,” she said. But he kept protesting his innocence, and finally persuaded her. She rubbed bloodshot eyes. “I wish
I
could sleep through a racket like that.”

Chester had slept through worse in the Great War. Bursting shells hadn’t fazed him then, not unless they landed very close. A man could get used to anything. Absently, Chester scratched along the seam of his pajama bottoms. He’d got used to being lousy, too, and the vermin hid and laid their eggs in seams.

After strong coffee, scrambled eggs, and toast, he grabbed his tool kit and headed for the trolley stop. A man who had work clung to it. He didn’t give anyone the chance to take it away. Martin knew what he had to do. He aimed to do it. One day, he wanted to have the money to buy a house. His father had never owned one, living in apartments all his days.
I can do better than that,
Martin thought—a great American war cry.
I can, and, by God, I will.

P
olite as usual, Heber Young nodded to Abner Dowling. “I am afraid, Colonel, that this is our final meeting,” said the unofficial leader of the even more unofficial Mormon movement.

Dowling blinked “What’s that you say, Mr. Young?” His mouth fell open. Several chins wobbled.

“I am very sorry, but I have concluded that the United States are not serious about negotiating with the people of Utah,” Young said. “This being so, my continued presence no longer serves any useful purpose. I have better things to do with my time, to do with my life, than try to turn back the tide.”

That was some sort of legend. Dowling knew as much, though he couldn’t recall the details. He said, “I hope you’ll reconsider, Mr. Young. I know you to be a man of good will and a man of good sense. Your people will be the losers if you walk away.”

“So I have told myself many times—I am no less vain than any other man,” Heber Young replied gravely. “Telling myself such fables has kept me coming here to your headquarters these past several years, even though I know President Hoover has tied your hands. I believe you would be more liberal if not constrained by orders from Philadelphia. After so many futile discussions, though, I find I no longer have the heart for any more.”

“If you were any man but yourself, I would say the Confederate hotheads had got to you.” Dowling didn’t hide his anger and disappointment. “If you leave the scene, they
will
get to your people, and the results will not be happy.” He didn’t need Winthrop W. Webb’s prediction to see that, but the spy’s judgment here matched his own all too well.

“I shall have to take that chance,” Young said. “I am still not altogether convinced these men serve the CSA and not the USA.” He held up a hasty hand. “Please understand me, Colonel—I do not claim you are lying when you deny planting provocateurs among us. I believe you—you personally, that is. But whether someone else in the U.S. government is using such men . . . of that, I am less certain.”

Abner Dowling grunted. He wasn’t a hundred percent certain no U.S. officials were using provocateurs here in Utah, either. He wished he were, but he wasn’t. Since he wasn’t, he thought it wiser not to talk any more about that. Instead, he said, “You tell me you’re unhappy with the orders I get from back East? I admit I haven’t been happy about all of them myself.”

“Because you are honest enough to admit such things, I’ve kept coming back to talk with you,” Young said. “But no more. I am sorry, Colonel—I am very sorry, in fact—but enough is enough.” He started to get to his feet and walk out of Dowling’s office.

“Wait!” Dowling exclaimed.

“Why?” The Mormon was still polite, but implacable.

“Why? For the results of the election, that’s why,” the commandant of Salt Lake City answered. “If Smith beats Hoover, isn’t it likely I’ll have new orders after the first of next February?”

“Hmm.” Heber Young had already taken his dark homburg by the brim. Now he hesitated: perhaps the first time Dowling had ever seen him indecisive. He set the hat back on the tree and returned to the chair across the desk from Dowling. “Now that is interesting, Colonel. That is very interesting. You
would
follow more liberal orders if you received them?”

“I am a soldier, sir. I am obliged to follow all legitimate orders I receive.” Dowling didn’t tell the Mormon leader he intended to vote for Hoover, or that he hoped the incumbent would trounce Al Smith. Young likely knew as much. But he had told the truth. As if to prove it, he said, “Didn’t I try to get public-works jobs for Utah just after Hoover took over?” The president had forbidden the scheme, but Young couldn’t say he hadn’t tried.

“You did,” Young admitted. He rubbed his square chin. Then, abruptly, he nodded; once he had made up his mind, he didn’t hesitate. “All right, Colonel Dowling. I will wait and see what happens in the election. If Hoover wins a second term, that will be the end of that. If Smith wins . . . If Smith wins, I will see what happens next. Good day.” Now he did take his hat. Tipping it, he left.

Dowling allowed himself a sigh of relief. If Heber Young walked away from talks with the occupying authorities, that in itself might have been enough to ignite Utah. Dowling’s career wasn’t where it would have been if he hadn’t spent so many years as George Custer’s adjutant, but he still had hopes for it. With a Utah uprising on his record, he would have been dead in the water as far as hopes of getting stars on his shoulders one day went.

The telephone in the outer office rang. His own adjutant answered it. A moment later, the telephone on Dowling’s desk rang. “Abner Dowling,” he said crisply into the mouthpiece. He listened and nodded, though no one was there to see it. “That’s very good news. Thanks for passing it on.” He hung up.

Captain Toricelli came into the inner office, his face alight. “Barrels!” he said. “They’re really going to give them to us!”

“I only started shouting for them a year or so ago,” Dowling said. “The way things work back in Philadelphia, they’re on the dead run.”

“We could all have been dead by the time they got here,” Captain Toricelli said.

“If we
had
died, that’s the one thing I can think of that would have got them here faster,” Dowling said. His adjutant laughed. He wondered why. He hadn’t been kidding.

Being promised the machines didn’t mean getting them right away. When they did arrive, he was grievously disappointed. He’d been hoping for new barrels, and what he got were Great War retreads. They must have come from Houston; most of them still showed fresh bullet scars and other combat-related damage to their armor.

“
I
can move faster than one of these things,” Dowling said scornfully. Since he was built like a rolltop desk, that was unlikely to be true. But it wasn’t
very
false, either. A man in good shape
could
outrun one of these snorting monsters. Dowling eyed the crewmen, duffel bags on their shoulders, who dismounted from passenger cars. “They take a couple of squads’ worth of men apiece, too,” he grumbled; he remembered that very well from Great War days.

“Yes, sir,” Captain Toricelli answered. “But they’re better than nothing.”

“I suppose so,” Dowling said unwillingly. Then he brightened, a little. “I suppose new barrels are coming off the line. They’d have to be, eh? They must be going straight to Houston—and to Kentucky now, too.”

“That makes sense to me.” Toricelli sounded faintly aggrieved. What was the world coming to when a superior started making sense?

Three days later, a pair of barrels rumbled up Temple Street and took up positions in Temple Square. Dowling thought that would be the least inflammatory way he could use them. Temple Square had been under guard ever since the U.S. Army leveled the Mormon Temple and killed the last stubborn defenders there. Bits of granite from the Temple were potent relics to Mormons who opposed the government. That struck Dowling as medieval, which made it no less true. Soldiers had always had orders to shoot to kill whenever anyone tried to abscond with a fragment.

Dowling wasn’t particularly surprised when Heber Young paid him a call a few days later. He did his best to pretend he was, saying, “And to what do I owe the pleasure of your company this time, Mr. Young?”

“Those . . . horrible machines.” Young was furious, and making only the barest effort to hide it. “How dare you pollute Temple Square with their presence?”

“For one thing, we’ve had soldiers in the square for years. The barrels just reinforce them,” Dowling answered. “For another, I want people here to know we have them, and that we’ll use them if we need to. It might—prevent rashness, I guess you’d say.”

Heber Young shook his head. “More likely to provoke than to prevent.”

“No.” Dowling shook his head. “I am very sorry, sir, but I cannot agree. To my mind, the safety of my men and the protection of U.S. interests in Utah must come first.”

“Those infernal machines promote neither,” the Mormon leader insisted.

They looked at each other. Not for the first time, they found they were both using English but speaking two altogether different languages. “I would be derelict in my duties if I did not use barrels,” Dowling said.

“Using them is what makes you derelict.” Young eyed him, then sighed. “I see I do not persuade you. I don’t suppose I should have expected to. Yet hope does spring eternal in the human breast. I tell you, Colonel, no good will come from your using these machines.”

“Do you threaten me, Mr. Young?”

“Colonel, if I tell you the sun will come up tomorrow, is that a threat? I would not say so. I would call it a prediction based on what I know of past events. I would call this the same thing.” He stood up, politely challenging Dowling to arrest him for sedition after he’d come and put his head in the lion’s jaws. Dowling couldn’t, and he knew it. The word that Heber Young languished in a U.S. prison would touch off insurrection, regardless of whether the barrels in Temple Square did. As Young turned to go, he added, “If the government were generous enough to grant me the franchise, you may rest assured I would vote for Al Smith, in the hope that such discussions as this one would become unnecessary. Good day, Colonel Dowling.” Out he went, a man whose moral force somehow made him worth battalions.

Four days later, one of the barrels caught fire on the way from the U.S. base to its turn at Temple Square. All eighteen crewmen escaped, and nobody shot at them as they burst from the doomed machine’s hatches. Word came to Dowling almost at once. Cursing, he left the base in an auto and zoomed down Temple toward the blazing barrel.

By the time he got there, the fire had already started touching off ammunition. The fireworks display was spectacular, with red tracer rounds zooming in all directions. A fire engine roared up not long after Dowling arrived. It started spraying water on the barrel from as far away as the stream from the hose would reach. That struck him as being about as futile as offering last rites to a man smashed by a speeding locomotive, but he didn’t think it could do any harm, so he kept quiet about it.

“How did this happen?” he demanded of the barrel’s commander, a captain named Witherspoon.

“Sir, I don’t know.” Witherspoon nursed a burned hand.

He’ll live,
Dowling thought savagely. “Was it sabotage?” he asked.

“Sir, I don’t know,” Captain Witherspoon repeated. “It could have been, but. . . .” He shrugged. “This machine has to be almost twenty years old. Plenty of things can go wrong with it any which way. A leak in a fuel line, a leak in an oil line . . .” Another shrug. He pointed toward the burning barrel, from which a thick cloud of black smoke rose. “We’ll never know now, that’s for damn sure.”

“Yes. It is,” Dowling said unhappily. Were people in Salt Lake City laughing because they’d got away with one? Worse, were people in Richmond laughing because
they’d
got away with one?

K
aplan’s, on the Lower East Side, was a delicatessen Flora Blackford hadn’t visited for years. That got driven home the minute she walked in the door. She remembered the foxy-red hair of Lou Kaplan, the proprietor; it made you want to warm your hands over it. Kaplan was still behind the counter. These days, though, his hair was white.

These days, Flora’s hair had more than a little gray in it, too. She saw her brother at a table in the corner. She waved. David Hamburger nodded. She hurried over to him. Her little brother had a double chin, tired eyes, and gray in his own hair.
The things time does to us!
Flora thought, sudden tears stinging her eyes. She blinked them away. “It’s good to see you, David,” she said. “It’s been too long.”

He shrugged. “I get by. I like being a tailor. I like it better than being a Congressman’s brother, and a lot better than being a First Lady’s brother. You can’t say I ever bothered you for anything, the way important people’s relatives do.”

“Bothered me?” Flora shook her head. “I wish you would have. Most of the time, you wouldn’t even talk to me. You don’t visit. . . .”

“I don’t get out much.” David tapped the cane leaning against his chair. He’d lost a leg in the war, not far below the hip. He could walk with a prosthesis, but only painfully. As if to emphasize that, he pointed to the chair across from him and said, “Sit down, for heaven’s sake. You know why I’m not going to get up till I have to.”