The Victorious Opposition (59 page)

As seriously as he could, Potter answered, “I think that, if I tell you what I think, I’ll get in trouble for telling you what I think.” She started to get angry. So did he. He went on, “Dammit, Anne, what do you think my job is? Finding out secrets and keeping them, that’s what. How long do you think I could do it if I ran my mouth like a heavy freight tearing downhill with the brakes gone?”

Every once in a while, when she heard the plain truth, it would disarm her completely. Clarence remembered that from the days of their unhappy affair in South Carolina. It was one of the things he’d liked most about her then. Now he saw it again. “I hadn’t looked at it like that,” she admitted in a small voice. “Never mind.”

He sat up in bed, put on his glasses, and swung his feet down to the carpet, still wondering whether he’d passed his own test, hers, or Jake Featherston’s. Through the gauzy curtains on the window, he could see people bustling along the paths in Capitol Square and others lying on the grass in the shade of the trees, doing their best to fight the oppressive weather.

On the sidewalk down below the window, a Negro said, “Spare some change for a hungry man? . . . Spare some change for a hungry man? . . . Spare some change for—? Oh, God bless you, ma’am!”

“I wouldn’t give a nigger a dime,” Anne said coldly. “I wouldn’t give a nigger a penny, by God. If they can’t find work, to hell with them. Let ’em starve.”

Clarence judiciously pursed his lips. “A lot more of them looking for work these days, you know, with tractors and farm machinery driving sharecroppers off the land.”

“Yes, I’ve seen that. So what?” she said. “If they can’t figure out some way or another to make themselves useful, who needs them? The whole country would be better off without them.”

“Would it? I wonder. Who’d do the nigger work without niggers?”

“Machines could do a lot of it, the way they do on a farm,” Anne answered.

“Some of it, anyway,” Clarence admitted. “But where are you going to get a machine that waits on tables or cuts somebody’s hair? If we didn’t have niggers, whites would need to do things like that.” He started getting dressed.

“It could happen,” Anne said stubbornly. “I do all sorts of things for myself I used to have servants do back before the war.”

“I suppose so,” Potter said. “Nigger work must get done in the USA, too, and they don’t have that many niggers to do it. But things are different here. An awful lots of whites here say, ‘I may be poor and stupid, but by God I’m white, and I’m better off than those niggers, and I don’t have to do the things they do.’ ” Slyly, he added, “An awful lot of them vote Freedom, too.”

Anne Colleton didn’t rise to the bait. She just nodded. “I know they do. But if they didn’t have any choice, they’d do what needs doing. If we had another war, we could even make them feel patriotic about doing what needs doing.”

At first, Potter thought that was one of the most monstrously cynical things he’d ever heard, and he’d heard some doozies. Then he realized that, no matter how cynical it was, it probably wasn’t wrong. He leaned over and kissed her. “Do you want to write that down and pass it on to the president, or do you want me to do it?” he asked.

“Whichever you please,” she answered. “But what do you want to bet he’s already thought of it himself?”

Clarence thought it over. He didn’t need to think very long. “I won’t touch that one,” he said. “You’re bound to be right.” Featherston was plenty cynical enough to use patriotism to get people to do what he wanted—and plenty good enough at leading to get them to follow.

“One of us ought to do it,” Anne said, “just on the off chance it hasn’t occurred to him.”

“I’ll take care of it, then,” Potter said, knotting his butternut tie. “Unless you really want to, I mean.”

“No, it’s all right. Go ahead.” Anne laughed. “The funny thing is, here we are, both trying to give him good advice, and he doesn’t trust either one of us as far as he can throw us.”

“We’ve known him too long, and we’ve known him too well, and at one point or another we’ve both stood up and told him no,” Potter said. “That doesn’t happen to him very often, and he doesn’t much like it.”

“True.” Anne laughed again, on a lower, less amused, note. “And now we’re both following his orders even so. Everybody follows his orders these days.”

“He’s the president.” Potter set his shiny-peaked officer’s cap on his head. “He’s the president, and he’s been right. How do you lick a combination like that? As far as I can see, you’re better off joining him.”

Would he have said that before Jake Featherston brought him back into the Army? He knew he wouldn’t. But that was almost four years ago now. And in serving Featherston, he also served his country. His country counted most. So he told himself, and told himself, and. . . .

G
eorge Enos carefully coiled the last line that had held
Sweet Sue
to T Wharf. The fishing boat’s diesel rumbled under his feet. Pungent exhaust poured from the stack. The
Sweet Sue
began to move, although for the first few seconds it seemed more as if the boat were standing still and the wharf sliding away from it. But then there could be no doubt. The fishing boat was leaving Boston and Boston harbor behind. George let out a slightly hung-over sigh of relief.

He’d been putting to sea for his entire adult life, almost half of his thirty years, but he’d never been so glad to watch his home town slide below the horizon as he had this past year and a little more. If he didn’t have to look at Boston, he didn’t have to be reminded—so much—of the place where that writer son of a bitch had shot his mother and then shot himself. He’d told her Ernie was no goddamn good for her, told her and told her. His sister had told her the same thing. Fat lot of good it did.

I shouldn’t have just talked,
he thought for the thousandth time.
I should have kicked the crap out of that bastard.
His fists clenched. his jaw knotted. His teeth ground. He hadn’t done it, and it was too late now. It would always be too late.

He was so lost in his own gloom, he jumped when somebody clapped him on the back. “How you doin’ Junior?” Johnny O’Shea asked.

“I’m all right, Johnny,” George answered. It wasn’t really true, but the older man couldn’t do anything about what ailed him. Nobody could, not even himself.

“You looked a little green there,” O’Shea said, fiddling with one upturned end of his old-fashioned gray Kaiser Bill mustache. He was a wiry little fellow whose strength and endurance belied his sixty years. He and a few other old-timers who’d known George’s father were the only ones who called him Junior. George didn’t mind. Anything that helped him connect to his old man was welcome. George had only vague memories of him. He’d been just seven when that Confederate submersible sank the USS
Ericsson
. Before that, his father had been in the Navy or on a fishing boat most of the time.

If the
Sweet Sue
sinks tomorrow, my kids won’t remember me at all. They’re too little.
That was a hell of a cheerful thought with which to put to sea.

He realized he hadn’t answered Johnny. “A little too much beer last night, that’s all,” he said. “I’ll be all right.” Talking about the other would have shown weakness. He refused.

O’Shea’s laugh showed missing teeth, a few stubs stained almost the color of tobacco juice, and a plug of chewing tobacco big enough to choke a Clydesdale. “A little too much beer?” he said. “A little? Sweet Jesus Christ, what a milk-and-cookies lot we’ve raised up to take our places when we’re gone. When I was your age and I’d be going out to sea the next morning, I’d drink till I couldn’t see and fuck till I couldn’t get it up for a month afterwards and let the skipper worry about having me on board when we got going. If you’re gonna do these things, for God’s sake do ’em right.”

George had made sure Connie had something to remember him by, too. That was one of the reasons he hadn’t drunk too much to excess. If you didn’t know who you were, your John Henry wouldn’t know who he was, either.

He was damned if he felt like talking about what he’d done in the bedroom, though. Instead, his voice sly, he asked, “How about last night for you, then?”

“Oh, I got drunk,” O’Shea said. “Take enough aspirins, drink enough coffee, and that ain’t so bad the next day. And I found me a a girl, too. But I’ll tell you something, Junior, and it’s a goddamn fact. Enough fucking so you can’t get it up for the next month is a hell of a lot less when you’re my age than it is when you’re yours.” He spat a stream of tobacco juice into the sea.

A lot of men would have sounded bitter saying something like that. Johnny O’Shea thought it was funny. He slapped George on the back and went off to chin with one of the other fishermen.

He got even less in the way of response from Carlo Lombardi than he had from George. Aspirins and coffee might have been enough to beat Johnny’s hangover, but Carlo looked as if he’d been ridden hard and put away wet. Under his perennial five-o’-clock shadow, his face was fishbelly pale. He had a hat jammed down low over his eyes to shield them from the sun, and they were nothing but bloodshot slits. He answered O’Shea in monosyllables, and then stopped answering him at all. Johnny thought that was funny, too. George didn’t. He’d been where Carlo was a few times—well, maybe more than a few times—and he hadn’t enjoyed it a bit.

A couple of the other fishermen looked as much the worse for wear as Lombardi. By the time they got out to the Grand Bank, they’d be sober enough. The only liquor aboard the
Sweet Sue
was a bottle of medicinal brandy under lock and key in the galley. Every so often, Captain Albert would dole out a nip as a reward for a job well done. Davey Hatton, whose territory the galley was, had also been known to pour out a little brandy every now and then, but that was unofficial, even if the skipper winked at it.

Back in George’s father’s day, most fishing boats leaving T Wharf had made for Georges Bank, about five hundred miles offshore. Some still did, but Georges Bank had been fished so hard for so long, it didn’t yield what it had. The Grand Bank, though, out by Newfoundland, seemed inexhaustible. Some people said Basque fishermen had been taking cod and tuna there since before Columbus discovered America. George Enos didn’t know anything about that one way or the other. He did know there were a hell of a lot of fish left.

Boston sank below the edge of the sea. He wasn’t sorry to see it go, or all the little islands that marked the way into the harbor. A couple of miles off to port, a U.S. Navy minesweeper—not a very big warship, but a giant when measured against fishing boats—opened up with its guns. A few seconds later, a big column of water rose from the Atlantic. The flat, harsh crack of the explosion took ten or twelve seconds to reach the
Sweet Sue
. When it did, Carlo Lombardi looked as if he wished his head would fall off, or maybe as if it just had.

George felt the blast in his teeth and sinuses, too. Even so, he nodded in satisfaction. “There’s one mine we won’t have to worry about any more,” he muttered. During the war, the USA had mined the approaches to Boston harbor to a faretheewell, to make sure Confederate and British raiders and submarines couldn’t sneak in and raise hell. And the Confederates had sown mines to give U.S. shipping a hard time.

Some of those mines still floated in place. Some of the ones that had been moored came loose with the passage of years and drifted free, a menace to navigation. Fishing boats and the occasional freighter blew up and sank with all hands. Finding mines and disposing of them had kept the Navy hopping since the end of the war.

And how long would it be before the Navy stopped sweeping for mines and started laying them again? George didn’t like the headlines coming out of the states that had changed hands between the CSA and the USA. President Smith was loudly declaring he’d removed the last reasons for war on the North American continent. George hoped he was right. As far as he could see, everybody hoped the president was right.

Gulls glided along overhead. They always followed fishing boats, hoping for handouts from the garbage and offal that went over the side. They did better when the boats were farther out to sea and actually fishing, but that didn’t keep them from being optimistic whenever they saw fishermen.

George stopped in the cramped little galley for a mug of coffee. He took it up to the
Sweet Sue
’s bow and drank it there. The hot, sweet, creamy brew and the fresh breeze from the fishing boat’s passage helped submerge the last of his headache. His cure wasn’t so drastic as Johnny O’Shea’s, but he hadn’t hurt himself so badly the night before, either.

Going out to the Grand Bank was a long haul. Once the ocean surrounded the
Sweet Sue
on all sides, she might not have been moving at all. No landscape changed to prove she was. Every so often, she would pass an inbound fishing boat. Captain Albert would get on the wireless then, doing his best to find out exactly where the fish were biting best.

When my old man went to sea, his boat didn’t even have wireless,
George thought. He remembered his mother saying his father hadn’t know that crazy Serb had blown up the Austrian archduke till he got back to T Wharf after a fishing trip. And when a Confederate commerce raider captured him and sank his boat, his skipper back then hadn’t been able to yell for help. He’d been interned in North Carolina for months before the Confederates finally let him go.

On George’s first night in the tiny, cramped bunk up at the bow, he tossed and turned and slept very badly. He always did his first night at sea. He’d got used to a bed that didn’t shift under him, to one where he could roll over without falling out, to one where he could sit up suddenly without banging his head—hell, to one with Connie in it, sweet and warm and mostly willing. He knew he’d be all right tomorrow, but tonight was tough.

More coffee persuaded his eyes they really did want to stay open the next morning. He poured in the cream as if there were no tomorrow. So did everybody else. Even on ice, it wouldn’t stay fresh through the cruise, so they enjoyed it while they could. By the same token, Davey Hatton did up enormous plates of scrambled eggs for the fishermen.