Falling back into that weekly routine did help ease Rodriguez’s mind. Robert Quinn went through the usual announcements. There were more of those than there had been in the old days, for the Party had more members in Baroyeca now. Rodriguez and the other veterans of the hard times couldn’t help looking down their noses a little at the men who had joined because joining suddenly looked like the way to get ahead. No denying, though, that some of the newcomers had proved useful.
Once the announcements were done, the Party men sang patriotic songs, mostly in Spanish, a few in English. As they always did, they finished with “Dixie.” Then Quinn said, “Now there is something I want you men to think about when you go home tonight. It is possible—not likely, mind you, but possible—that los Estados Unidos will give us a hard time about our rightful demands against them. If that does happen, we may have to take a very firm line with them. If we do, they’ll be sorry. You can bet your bottom dollar on that. And you can bet los Estados Confederados won’t back down again.”
Applause filled the crowded room. Rodriguez joined it, even though that wasn’t exactly what Quinn had told him before the formal meeting started. Then he’d sounded as if he didn’t think the United States would fight. Of course, he was a politician, and politicians had a habit of telling people what they wanted to hear. But Rodriguez hadn’t thought Freedom Party men did that sort of thing.
Then Quinn said, “I’ll tell you something else, too, friends. During the last war, the mallates stabbed us in the back. We would have licked los Estados Unidos then if those black bastards hadn’t betrayed us. Well, that isn’t going to happen this time, por Dios. Jake Featherston will clamp down on them good and hard to make sure it doesn’t.”
He got another round of applause, a louder one this time. Rodriguez pounded his callused palms together till they hurt. He didn’t care what happened to the Confederacy’s Negroes, as long as it was nothing good. He’d got his baptism by fire against the black rebels in Georgia in 1916, before his division went to fight the damnyankees in Texas. He’d hardly seen a Negro since he got out of the Army. If he never saw another one, that wouldn’t break his heart.
“As long as we stand behind Jake Featherston a hundred percent, nothing can go wrong,” Quinn said. “He knows what’s what. This country will be great again—great, I tell you! And every one of you, every one of us, will help.”
More applause. Again, Hipolito Rodriguez joined it. Why not? Seeing the Confederate States back on their feet was another reason he’d joined the Freedom Party. One more was that Robert Quinn had never treated him like a damn greaser, an English phrase he knew much too well. The Party had nothing against men from Sonora and Chihuahua. It saved all its venom for the mallates.
Why shouldn’t it? Rodriguez thought. They deserve it. We never tried to hurt the country. We’ve been loyal. He scorned the men from the Empire of Mexico who sneaked into the CSA trying to find work, too. If any people deserved to be called greasers, they were the ones.
Robert Quinn held up a hand. “Before we call it a night and go home, I’ve got one more announcement to make. I’ve been trying to push this through for a long time, but I haven’t had any luck till now. I heard from the state Party chairman the other day. Now it’s certain: the silver mine in the hills outside of town is going to open up again next month. And, even though this part isn’t so sure, it does look like the railroad will be coming back to Baroyeca.” He grinned at the Freedom Party men. “Remember, you heard it here first.”
This time, he got something better than applause. He got delighted silence, followed by a low, excited buzz. The mine had been closed ever since the collapse, and the railroad had stopped coming to Baroyeca not much later. Rodriguez wondered what had made the authorities change their minds after so long.
Two men sitting in the next row back answered the question for him. One of them remarked, “Need plenty of plata to fight a war.”
“Sí, sí,” the other agreed. “And where there’s a little silver, there’s always a lot of lead. Need plenty of lead to fight a war, too.”
“Ahh,” Rodriguez murmured to himself. He liked seeing how things worked. He always had. Maybe the authorities hadn’t decided to reopen the mine from the goodness of their hearts alone. Maybe they’d seen that they would need silver and especially lead.
Well, what if they had? It would still do the town a lot of good. If the railroad came back, prices at Diaz’s general store would drop like a rock. Shipping goods in by truck on bad roads naturally made everything cost more. After the train line shut down, the storekeeper had been lucky to stay in business at all. Plenty of other places in town hadn’t.
“Three cheers for Señor Quinn!” somebody shouted. The cheers rang out. Quinn stood there, looking suitably modest, as if the news hadn’t been his doing at all. Maybe it really hadn’t, not altogether. But he deserved some credit for it.
When the Party meeting did end, several men headed over to La Culebra Verde to celebrate. Rodriguez thought of what Magdalena would say if he came home drunk. Sometimes, after he had that thought, he had another one: I don’t care. Then he would go off to the Green Snake and see how much cerveza or, more rarely, tequila, he could pour down. When he did that, Magdalena had some very pointed things to say the next morning, things a headache often did not improve.
Tonight, he just started out into the countryside beyond Baroyeca. The new line of poles supporting the wires that carried electricity made sure he couldn’t get lost even if he were drunk. The sky was black velvet scattered with diamonds. A lot of stars seemed to be out tonight.
One of them, a bright red one, startled him by moving. Then he heard the faint buzz of a motor overhead. “Un avion,” he muttered in surprise. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen an airplane above Baroyeca. It was flying south. He wondered where it was going. Off to scout the border with the Empire of Mexico? That seemed most likely. But wouldn’t it do better to scout the border with the USA?
Maybe other airplanes were doing that. Rodriguez hoped so. When he fought up in west Texas, the only airplanes he’d seen had belonged to the United States. The Confederate States, stretched too thin, hadn’t been able to deploy many on that distant, less than vital front.
Would things be any different in a new war? Yes, los Estados Confederados had Kentucky and Houston back again, so that Texas was whole once more. Maybe they’d even get back the other territory they had lost in the Great War. But that map on the wall of Freedom Party headquarters still said los Estados Unidos were bigger, and bigger still meant stronger in a long, drawn-out fight.
Maybe Jake Featherston knew something he didn’t. He hoped so. He couldn’t see what it might be, though. With one son in the Army, with two more likely to be called up, he also couldn’t help worrying.
When he got back to the farmhouse, he smiled at the fine white electric light shining out through the windows. Magdalena had left a lamp burning—no, not burning: she’d left a lamp on—for him. She’d waited up for him, too. He didn’t say anything about the growing threat of war. Instead, he talked about the silver mine’s reopening and the likely return of the railroad to Baroyeca.
His wife smiled. She nodded. And then she said, “This is all very good, but I still hope there will be peace with los Estados Unidos.”
Rodriguez realized he wasn’t the only one worrying.
Chester Martin passed a newsboy on his way to the trolley stop. The kid had a stack of the Los Angeles Times in front of him as tall as the bottoms of his knickers. He waved a paper at Chester and shouted out the morning’s headline: “Smith says no!”
Usually, Chester walked right past newsboys. That was enough to stop him, though. “Oh, he does, does he? Says no to what, exactly?”
The newsboy couldn’t tell him. They’d told the kid what to yell before they turned him loose, and that was it. He yelled it again, louder this time. “Smith says no!” For good measure, he added, “Read all about it!”
“Give me on
e.” Chester parted with a nickel. The newsboy handed him a paper. He carried it to the stop. As soon as he got there, he unfolded it and read the headline and the lead story. Al Smith had said no to Jake Featherston. The Confederates weren’t going to get back the pieces of Sonora and Arkansas and Virginia they’d lost in the war—or Sequoyah, either.
Smith was quoted as saying, “The president of the Confederate States personally promised me that he would make no more territorial demands on the North American continent. He has taken less than a year to break his solemn word. No matter what he may feel about his promise, however, I am resolved to hold him to it. These territories will remain under the administration and sovereignty of the United States.”
“About time!” Martin said, and turned the paper over to read more.
Just then, though, the trolley came clanging up. Chester threw another nickel in the fare box and found a seat. His was far from the only open copy of the Times as the streetcar rattled away.
A man of about Martin’s age sitting across the aisle from him folded his newspaper and put it in his lap with an air of finality. “There’s going to be trouble,” he said gloomily.
The woman sitting behind him said, “There’d be worse trouble if we gave that Featherston so-and-so what he wants. How soon would he be back trying to squeeze something else out of us?”
“Lady, I spent three stinking years in the trenches,” the man answered. “There isn’t any trouble worse than that.” He looked over at Chester for support. “Aren’t I right? Were you there?”
“Yeah, I was there,” Martin said. “I don’t know what to tell you, though. Looks to me like that guy is spoiling for a fight. The longer we keep ducking, the harder he’s going to hit us when he finally does.”
“Yikes!” The man jerked in surprise. He sent Martin a betrayed look. “Who cares about those lousy little chunks of land?”
“Well, I don’t, not much,” Chester admitted. “But suppose we give them back to him and then he jumps on us anyway? We’d look like a bunch of boobs, and we’d be that much worse off, too.”
“Why would he jump on us if he’s got everything he wants?” the man demanded.
Before Chester could say anything, the woman who’d been arguing beat him to it: “Because somebody like that never has everything he wants. As soon as you give him something, he wants something else. When you see a little kid like that, you spank him so he behaves himself from then on.”
“How do you spank somebody who’ll shoot back if you try?” the man asked.
“If we don’t spank him, he’ll shoot first,” Chester said. The woman in back of the other man nodded emphatically. They all kept on wrangling about it till first the woman and then the other man got off at their stops.
Chester kept on going down into the South Bay. The area was growing fast; builders wanted to run up lots of new houses. The construction workers’ union was doing its best to stop them till they met its terms. This tract in Torrance had been carved from an orange grove. The trees had gone down. The houses weren’t going up, or not very fast, anyway.
When Martin walked into the union tent across from the construction site, the organizer who kept an eye on things during the night, a tough little guy named Pete Mazzini, wore a worried expression. “What’s up?” Chester asked, grabbing the coffee pot that perked lazily over the blue flame of canned heat.
“I hear they really are gonna sic the goddamn Pinkertons on us today,” Mazzini said.
“Shit,” Chester said, and the other man nodded. “Pinkertons are bad news.” Mazzini nodded again. Martin hadn’t seen Pinkerton goons since the steel-mill strikes in Toledo after the Great War. In a way, fighting them was even worse than fighting cops. A fair number of cops were fundamentally decent guys. Anybody who’d sign up to use a club or a blackjack or a pistol for the Pinkertons had to be a son of a bitch.
“At least I found out.” Mazzini jerked a thumb toward the building site. “Dumb night watchmen over there don’t think about how voices carry once everything quiets down.”
“Good.” Martin had never got more than three stripes on his sleeve during the war, but he’d commanded a company for a while. Now he had to think not like a captain, but like a general. “We’ve got to let the pickets know as soon as they start showing up. They’ll be ready, because we’ve had word the builders might pull this. We’ve got to bring in as many weapons as we can. Not just sticks for the signs, either. We’ll need knives. Guns, too, if we can get ’em in a hurry.”
“We start shooting, that gives the cops all the excuse they need to land on us with both feet,” Mazzini said.
He wasn’t wrong. All the same, Chester answered, “If we let the goons break us, we’re screwed, too. If they break us, we might as well pack it in. You want that?”
“Hell, no,” Mazzini said. “I just wanted to make sure you were thinking about it.”
“Oh, I am. Bet your ass I am.” Martin scratched his chin. “I’m going to call somebody from the Daily Breeze. Torrance papers aren’t down on unions the way the goddamn Times is. We ought to have an honest witness here. I think I’ll talk to the Torrance cops, too. The builders don’t have them in their pocket, like in L.A. If they know the Pinkertons are going to raise hell ahead of time, maybe they can step on ’em.”
Pete Mazzini looked as if he would have laughed in anybody else’s face. “Good luck,” he said. His shrug declared that he washed his hands of dealing with all police anywhere. “I don’t suppose it can make things any worse.”
Yawning, he agreed to hang around and warn the incoming pickets of the trouble ahead while Chester went to talk with the man from the Daily Breeze and the police and make other arrangements. When Chester got back, he said, “Thanks, Pete. You can go home and get your forty winks now.”
Mazzini gave him a look. “Hell, no. If there’s gonna be a brawl, I want in on it. Those bastards aren’t going to lick us as easy as they think they are.” He yawned again, and fixed himself what had to be his millionth cup of coffee.
The reporter from the Daily Breeze showed up an hour or so later. He had a photographer with him, which gladdened Chester’s heart. Meanwhile, union backers came up to the men on the picket line, slipped them this or that, and then went on their way. Martin and Mazzini exchanged knowing glances. Neither said a word.
At twenty past eleven, half a dozen autos with Torrance cops in them pulled up by the building site. Martin wondered if they’d known what would go on before he told them. When a reporter from the Times showed up five minutes later, he stopped wondering. They had.
At twenty to twelve, two buses that had seen a lot of better years pulled up around the corner. “Here we go,” Chester said softly. It had been a long, long time—half a lifetime—since he’d shot at anybody, but he knew he could. Nobody who’d been through the Great War was likely to forget what gunplay was all about.
Here came the Pinkerton men. They looked like goons: drunks and toughs and guys down on their luck who’d take anybody’s money and do anything because they hadn’t had any real work for such a long time. They carried a motley assortment of iron bars and wooden clubs. One guy even had what Martin belatedly recognized as a baseball bat, something far, far from its New England home. Others, grim purpose on their faces, kept one hand out of sight. Knife men and shooters, Martin thought, and made sure he could get at his own pistol in a hurry.
“We don’t want any trouble, now,” said a Torrance policeman with the map of Ireland on his face. He and his pals formed a thin line between the advancing goons and the picketers, who were shaping a line of their own: a skirmish line. Chester warily watched the scabs on the site. If they took his men from behind while the Pinkertons hit them from the front . . . He grimaced. That wouldn’t be good at all.
As if reading his mind, Mazzini said, “I told a couple of our guys to start shooting at the scabs if they even take a step towards us. Some bullets go past their heads, I don’t think they’ve got the balls to keep coming.”
Chester laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment. “Good. Thanks.”
A short, scrawny, ferret-faced man in a loud, snappy suit seemed to be the Pinkertons’ commander. “Time to teach these damn Reds a lesson,” he said in a voice that carried. Low growls rose from his men, as if from a pack of angry dogs. He pointed. “Go get ’em!”
Instead of growling, the goons roared and charged. Some of the Torrance cops swung their billy clubs. Most of them let the Pinkertons go by. The union men roared, too. They were outnumbered, but not too badly. Some of them ran forward to meet the goons head on. A few others hung back, watching the scabs.
“Here we go!” Chester said, an odd note of exultation in his voice. He snatched up a club and waded into the brawl. He didn’t want to start shooting first, but he had nothing at all against breaking a few heads.
He almost got his broken as soon as he started fighting. A goon carrying an iron bar with a chunk of concrete on the end swung it for all he was worth. It hummed past Chester’s ear. He clobbered the Pinkerton before the fellow could take another swing at him.
That scrawny guy in the sharp suit didn’t mix it up along with the strikebreakers he’d brought. He stayed out of the fight and yelled orders. Martin pointed at the man with his club. “Get him!” he yelled to one of the Torrance cops, who’d managed to whack his way clear and was standing on the sidewalk as if it were the sideline of a football game. The cop paid him no attention.
But when the union men started getting the better of the strikebreakers, their boss was the one who first pulled a pistol out of his pocket. Chester tried to shift his club to his left hand so he could grab his own gun, but a goon had hold of his left arm. In desperation, he threw the club instead. He got lucky. It caught the fellow in the sharp suit right in the bridge of the nose.
He let out a howl that pierced the shouts and curses of the brawling men in front of him, dropped the pistol, and clapped both hands to his face. When he took them away a moment later, he had a mustache made of blood.
The Victorious Opposition Page 66