“That’s not true,” Sylvia exclaimed. “It was fine just last week.”
He didn’t want to listen. “No good at all,” he said again. “Sometimes I wonder why the hell I bother. What is the use? There is no use. I know that. I know that much too well.”
“Don’t be silly,” Sylvia told him. “It can happen to anybody at all, not just to you.”
“It does not happen to a real man,” Ernie said. “That is what it means to be a real man. And what am I?” His laugh told what he thought he was. “A leftover. Something from the scrap heap. I ought to go to Spain. I could fight there.” A Nationalist uprising backed by France and Britain had half the country up in arms against King Alfonso XIII. Kaiser Wilhelm had belatedly sent the Monarchists weapons to resist their would-be overthrowers, but things didn’t look good for them even so.
Sylvia shook her head. “What does shooting people have to do with—this?” She set her hand on the part, or part of a part, that hadn’t quite worked.
Ernie twisted away, kicking the quilt she’d got from Chris Clogston down onto the floor. “You do not understand. I knew you would not understand. Damn you anyway.” He all but jumped out of the bed they’d shared and started putting on his clothes.
“Maybe I would understand, if you’d talk sense once in a while,” Sylvia said.
“You are only a woman. What do you know?” Ernie stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him. Sylvia sighed as she picked up the quilt and put on a nightgown. This sort of thing had happened before. It would probably happen again. She sighed once more, went into the bathroom to brush her teeth, and then came back and fell asleep. Whatever time Mary Jane came in, Sylvia never heard it.
George Jr., his wife, Connie, and their children came over for supper the next evening. Sylvia enjoyed spoiling her grandchildren. Bill, the baby boy for whom Mary Jane had bought another quilt, was toddling now. Sylvia also enjoyed listening to her son’s stories about life on a fishing boat. They took her back to the days when her husband had told the same kind of stories. Hard to believe George was more than twenty years dead. Hard to believe, but true.
“And how are you, Ma?” George Jr. asked. “How’s Ernie? Sis said you went to the cinema with him last night.”
He sounded earnest himself. The pun made Sylvia laugh a little. He wants me to be happy, she thought. He really does. That’s sweet. But she had to answer. “He’s been better,” she said slowly. “But he’s been worse, too.”
Her son’s sigh had an indulgent quality, one that made her wonder who’d raised whom. “You really ought to—” he began.
Sylvia held up a hand and cut him off. “I really ought to do whatever I think is the best thing for me to do. And you really ought to”—she enjoyed turning George Jr.’s phrase back on him—“mind your own beeswax.”
“Give up, George,” Connie said. “You don’t let her tell you what to do. How can you blame her if she doesn’t want to let you tell her?”
“That’s right.” Sylvia beamed at her daughter-in-law.
“Fine. I give up. Here—I’m throwing in the towel.” George Jr. took his napkin off his lap and tossed it into the middle of the table. “But I’m going to tell you one more thing before I shut up.”
“I know what you’re going to say.” Sylvia held up her hand again, like a cop stopping traffic. “I don’t want to hear it.”
“I don’t care. I’m going to say it anyway.” George Jr. stuck out his chin and looked stubborn. “That guy is bad news, Ma. There. I’m done.”
“About time, too.” Sylvia knew her son was right. Ernie was, or could be, bad news. She would have known even if Mary Jane hadn’t told her the same thing. The feel of danger—within limits—was part of what made him attractive. Whether he would ever break those limits . . . But he hadn’t—quite—in all the time Sylvia had known him. And he had reasons for being the way he was. Sylvia didn’t think George Jr. knew about those. She couldn’t very well talk about such things with a man, and especially not with her son.
She wondered whether George Jr. could keep from bringing up Ernie again for the rest of the evening. She would have bet against it, but he managed. That made time pass a lot more pleasantly. Only when he and his family were leaving did he say, “Take care of yourself, Ma.”
“And haven’t I been doing that since before you were born?” Sylvia said. “A fisherman’s wife who can’t take care of herself is in a pretty sorry state, that’s all I’ve got to tell you.” She looked to Connie. “Am I right or am I wrong?”
“Oh, you’re right, all right,” her daughter-in-law said.
“You bet I am.” Sylvia spoke with great certainty. Fishermen were away at sea so much, their wives had to do things on their own behalf. If the wives didn’t, nobody would or could. And Sylvia had gone from fisherman’s wife to fisherman’s widow. Nobody gave a widow a helping hand. She’d discovered that the hard way.
For that matter, no elves emerged from the walls to help her with the dishes. She did them herself, the way she always had. She couldn’t go to bed without being angry at herself till they were done. Her hard-earned, hard-learned self-reliance ran deep.
And when Ernie showed up at her door with flowers two days later to ask her out the next Saturday, she didn’t say no. She didn’t even ask him if he would behave himself. A question like that would just have made him angry and all the more determined to act up. She couldn’t blame him for that, not when she felt the same way herself.
When Saturday came, he took her to the Union Oyster House. She smiled, remembering her last visit there with Mary Jane. Unlike Mary Jane, though, Ernie washed down his fried oysters with several stiff drinks. “Are you sure you want to do that?” Sylvia picked her words with care. He did have more trouble in the bedroom when he was drunk—and he had plenty when he was sober. And when he was drunk, he had a harder time coping with the trouble he had.
But he didn’t want to listen to her tonight, any more than she’d wanted to listen to George Jr. earlier in the week. “I am fine. Just fine,” he said loudly. The way he said it proved he was nothing of the sort, but also proved he would pay no attention if she tried to tell him so.
If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em, she thought, and waved to the waiter for another drink of her own. After another one, and then another one yet, she stopped worrying—at any rate, she stopped caring—about how many Ernie had had, though he kept pouring them down, too. She took him by the arm. “Where shall we go?” she asked, laughing at how bold and brassy she sounded.
“We will go back to my place,” he answered. “And when we get there, we will see what comes up.” That made Sylvia laugh, too, though Ernie wasn’t joking the way another man might have. In fact, he seemed to be trying to persuade himself something would come up. Under his leer, or perhaps stirred into it, was enough desperation to give Sylvia pause, though she was a long way from sober herself.
“Maybe we ought to have some coffee or something first,” she said.
Ernie took her arm. “Come on,” he said, and effortlessly hauled her up out of the booth. He was very strong, even if he didn’t show it all the time. She went along with him, thinking, The walk will sober him up. It may even sober me up, too.
Her head still buzzed when they got to Ernie’s apartment. She didn’t want to think about what it would feel like in the morning. But the morning seemed a million miles away. Ernie closed the door behind them, then took her in his arms and kissed her, hard. He tasted of whiskey and pipe tobacco. He picked her up and carried her into the cramped little bedroom and half set, half dropped her on the bed.
“Come on,” he said again, and started taking off his clothes.
Sylvia did the same, quickly. His strength and the whiskey in her and the taste and smell of him all combined to excite her. If he’d been any other man, he would have thrown himself on her and done what he wanted to do. But he couldn’t. He hadn’t been able to do anything like that for more than twenty years. If he was go
ing anywhere, she would have to get him there. She sat up and leaned forward and took what there was of him in her mouth as he stood by the side of the bed.
And nothing happened. He groaned again and again, but always in frustration, not release. Try as she would, it was no use. She did everything she knew how to do. Nothing helped. Sweat ran down his face, down his chest. “Damn you,” he muttered, and then, “Damn me.”
She looked up at him. “What do you want?” she asked. “I’ll do anything you think will do you good. You know I will.”
She’d turned on the lamp by the bed a little while before. Sometimes watching helped him. Not tonight. He looked at her, looked through her. His eyes might have belonged to a dead man. His voice sounded as if it came from the other side of the grave, too: “It makes no difference, not any more.”
“What do you mean?” she said. “Of course it does. Next time, we’ll—” She broke off. “What are you doing?”
The blued metal of the pistol he took out of the nightstand gleamed dully in the lamplight. “Nothing matters any more,” he said, and pointed it at the side of his own head.
“No!” He’d played such games before. This time, Sylvia didn’t think he was playing. She grabbed for the pistol. Ernie cursed and hit her. She tried to knee him in the crotch. He twisted away. They wrestled, both of them shouting, both of them swearing, there on the bedroom floor.
Loud as the end of the world, the pistol went off. She never knew whether he’d intended to shoot her. It made no difference. It didn’t matter. The bullet tore into her chest, and the world was nothing but pain and darkness.
As if from very far away, Ernie shouted, “Sylvia! Don’t die! Damn you, I love you!” She tried to say something, but blood filled her mouth. From even further away, she heard another shot, and the thump of a falling body, and then nothing, nothing at all.
Jefferson Pinkard was not a happy man. He’d come to Louisiana to help run a camp for political prisoners, and what had they gone and done? They’d taken out most of the politicals and filled the camp full of colored guerrillas. The politicals had been sober, civilized, middle-aged men who did as they were told. The Negroes, on the other hand . . .
Though Pinkard didn’t want to admit it, even to himself, the captured Negroes scared him to death. They had taken up arms against the Confederate States not in hope of victory—as the colored Reds had a generation earlier—but because they simply couldn’t stand the way things were. Now that they’d been taken prisoner, they expected nothing from the men into whose hands they’d fallen. They expected nothing—and they were seldom disappointed.
Camp Dependable was a rougher place now than it had been when inoffensive politicals filled it. These days, guards always carried submachine guns. They carried the weapons with safeties off, and they always traveled in pairs in areas where prisoners went. So far, the blacks hadn’t managed to steal a submachine gun from a guard. Jeff hoped that record would last. He wondered if it could.
He had other worries, too, though not of the life-and-death sort. Just keeping track of the prisoners was a record-keeper’s worst nightmare. They didn’t come into the camp with passbooks in the pockets of their dungarees. He assumed most of the names they gave were false. Even had those names been genuine, they wouldn’t have helped much. Negroes in the CSA had never been allowed to take surnames, as they were in the USA. With passbooks, the powers that be didn’t have too much trouble sorting out who was who. Without them . . .
The camp had an underofficer who specialized in taking fingerprints and forwarding them to Baton Rouge and to Richmond for identification. If the people in Baton Rouge and Richmond had cared as much as Pinkard did about matching those fingerprints to the ones in their files, he would have been happier. As things were, he wasn’t sure who most of his prisoners were. The only thing he was sure of was that they had good reason for concealing their identity.
“We’ve got to be careful, dammit,” he would tell the guards every morning. “These nigger bastards don’t want to argue with us like the politicals did. They want to kill us. That’s why they’re here. Thing we can’t do is give ’em the chance.”
Work parties that left the barbed-wire perimeter of the camp made him especially nervous. The blacks who went out on road-building details and other hard labor were chained to one another. They wore balls and chains on their left ankles. They couldn’t possibly run. So Jeff told himself. He worried even so.
And it was all his baby. When the politicals had gone off to another camp, the warden at Camp Dependable had gone with them. “You made this place a going concern,” he told Pinkard before he went away. “You know it best, and that makes you best suited to keeping these black devils in line here.”
Maybe he’d even been right. Regardless of whether he had, Jeff didn’t love him and never would. The then-warden had had a choice between an easy job and a hard one. He’d taken the easy one himself and left the hard one to somebody else. If he’d fought in the war, he would have sent patrols forward while he stayed in a nice, safe dugout in his own trench line. Jeff had known officers like that. He’d despised them, too.
Higher rank. Fancier emblems on his collar tabs. A bigger paycheck every month. Pinkard approved of all those things. But he didn’t approve of the way he’d got them.
He checked the clock in his office. Half past five. About time for the working party to come back. Pinkard heaved himself out of the swivel chair, which creaked under his weight. He headed for the front gate. He always liked to watch the gangs come in. If he could get a report on the spot, he didn’t give the guards a chance to come up with any lies. He knew such things happened. He’d done the like himself, and didn’t want it done to him.
His timing was good. He got to the gate two or three minutes before the work party returned. The Negroes clanked along, slowed by their chains and the weights attached to their ankles—and slowed also by doing work they didn’t want to do and coming back to a place where they didn’t want to be.
“How did it go?” Jeff called to the chief guard, a stocky, hard-faced man named Mercer Scott.
“Another day,” Scott answered with a shrug. He shifted a plug of tobacco and spat a stream of brown juice on the ground. “Three niggers keeled over. Two of ’em croaked, and we flung ’em in the swamp. The other one got back up on his feet when we thumped him a couple times. Lazy bastard just wanted a break. I’ll break his black ass, he tries that kind of shit with me.” He spat again.
“Who died?” Pinkard asked. “I’ve got to try and keep the records straight, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Mercer Scott screwed his face into a parody of deep thought. “One was that mincing little faggot named Dionysus. He’s been poorly since that big buck beat him up last month. And the other one . . . Hell, who was the other one?” He turned to another guard. “Who was the other nigger we pitched in the swamp, Bob?”
“The skinny bastard,” Bob answered. “Cicero, that’s his name.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s right. I couldn’t recollect if he was today or yesterday.” Scott turned to Jeff. “That’s who it was, all right. Dionysus and Cicero. No loss, either one of ’em.”
Pinkard nodded and scribbled a note to himself. The camp held several Ciceros, but only one of them was in this work gang, so he wouldn’t have any trouble with that. He said, “Good enough. Make sure the count matches, then bring ’em on inside.” A mosquito lit on the back of his wrist. He smashed it. Hell might have more mosquitoes than Louisiana, but he wasn’t sure anyplace else did.
One by one, the Negroes counted off. The reek of their unwashed bodies was harsh in Pinkard’s nostrils. The guards smelled nearly as ripe. In this heat and humidity, everybody stank.
One of Pinkard’s aides pounded on the door to his quarters at half past twelve that night. He woke up grabbing for his pistol. Nobody would bother him at that time of night for anything but trouble. As far as he was concerned, trouble came in two flavors: escape and uprising. “What the hell?”
he demanded, throwing the door open in just his pajamas.
“Warden, they need you at the front gate right away,” the aide said.
Jeff shoved his feet into slippers and jammed his hat down onto his head so people would have some idea of who he was. “I’m coming,” he said. “What am I walking into?”
“I don’t exactly know,” the aide answered, and Jeff wanted to clobber him with the pistol. He went on, “There’s folks from Richmond there. Reckon they’ll tell you what you need to know.”
“From Richmond?” Pinkard’s mind raced. Was he in trouble? What kind of trouble could he be in? He couldn’t think of anything he’d screwed up. He’d done his job here. He’d done it back in Alabama, too. He’d been a good Freedom Party man since the days just after the war, and he’d stayed in the Party through the hard times after Grady Calkins shot President Hampton. Hell, he’d broken up with his wife because Emily was fooling around on him on nights when he went to meetings. “Get out of my way, goddammit.” He pushed past the aide and hustled to the gate.
None of the guards said a word about what he had on. He could deal with them later, when he was in proper uniform. The men at the gate wore the regalia of Freedom Party guards, high-ranking ones. Their cold, hard faces would have scared the bejesus out of even a thoroughgoing son of a bitch like Mercer Scott. “You are Jefferson Pinkard?” one of them asked. He didn’t say anything about how Pinkard was dressed, either.
“That’s right,” Jeff answered. “Who the—devil are you?”
“Chief Assault Band Leader Ben Chapman.” The accent wasn’t Virginia; it was Alabama, much like Pinkard’s own. “I have a prisoner to deliver to this camp. You are to acknowledge receipt.”
“You do? I am?” Pinkard said. The Party officer nodded. “Well, who the hell is he?” Jeff asked testily. “And what are you doing bringing him here in the middle of the goddamn night?”
The Victorious Opposition Page 44