Blood and Iron (76 page)

Still, the idea left him uneasy. He didn’t sit around and yarn and drink homemade whiskey, as he usually did after the business part of a meeting wound down. Instead, glum and oddly dissatisfied, he headed for the door. One of the guards there caught his eye. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a dollar, and tossed the banknote into the bucket at the guard’s feet. “Thank you kindly, Jeff,” the bruiser said. “Party needs every penny it can get its hands on these days.”

“I know, Tim,” Pinkard answered. He laughed. “And think—just last year, we had more millions than you can shake a stick at.” It wasn’t really funny, not for the Freedom Party. A sound currency had done as much to squeeze folks out of the Party as had Wade Hampton’s assassination. Real money gave people one less thing to be angry about, and anger was the gasoline that fueled the Party’s engine.

It had started to drizzle. Jeff jammed his cap down low on his head and tugged up his coat collar. He was angry, by God—angry about having to wait for the trolley in the rain. The trolley got there late, too, which did nothing to improve his mood. He threw five pennies in the fare box (bronze coins were returning faster than silver) and rode out to the Sloss Works company housing.

A woman was waiting at the trolley stop. Pinkard thought she would get on after he got off. When she didn’t, he gave a mental shrug and started off toward his cottage. The trolleyman clanged his bell. The car rattled down the tracks.

“Jeff?” the woman called.

Pinkard stopped—froze, in fact. “Emily,” he whispered, and slowly turned. In the darkness and drizzle, he hadn’t recognized her, but he would have known her voice anywhere. His own roughened as he went on, “What the devil are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you,” she answered. Her own tone was sharp: “I sure enough knew what you’d be doing this night of the week, didn’t I? I just got here myself, though—didn’t expect you back quite so soon. Things ain’t so lively at the Party nowadays?”

“None of your business—you made sure of
that
, by God,” Jeff said. “What do you want with me, anyway, you…tramp?” He could have used a stronger word, and nearly had.

“Wanted to see how you were,” Emily answered. “Wanted to see what you were up to.” She sighed and shook her head. “Not like you cared enough about me to find out any of that.”

“After what you done, why should I care?” he said. “You’re lucky I don’t kick you down the street.” Had he had some whiskey in him, he thought he would have done it.

“I got lonesome,” she said. “I got lonesome when you was in the Army, and I got lonesome when you started caring more about the Freedom Party than you did about me. I don’t like being lonesome, so I went and did something about it.”

She didn’t mean
lonesome
. She meant
horny
. Pinkard knew that. She’d been fine as long as he gave her everything she needed. When he stopped, she’d gone out and taken what she needed, as a man with a frigid wife might have done. It would have been all right in a man. In a woman…Pinkard shook his head. No man could put up with what she’d done, not if he wanted to stay a man.

Emily said, “I was almost hoping I wouldn’t find you here, on account of that’d mean you were back at the house, not at that stinking livery stable. It’d mean you’d wised up and gotten out of the Freedom Party. But if what happened to President Hampton didn’t open your eyes, I reckon nothin’ ever will.”

She’d hoped he’d given up the Party? Did that mean she wanted him back, or would have wanted him back? Did he want her back? She was explosive between the sheets. He knew that. But how would he keep from thinking he wasn’t the only man she’d taken to bed? How would he keep from thinking she wasn’t taking some other man to bed along with him? He shook his head again. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.

To keep from thinking about that now, he asked, “What are you doing these days?”

“Working in a textile mill,” she answered with a shrug. “It ain’t a lot of money, but I don’t need a lot, so I get by. I get lonesome sometimes, though.”

She meant
horny
again. “Bet you can find plenty of fellows if you do.” Jeff didn’t try to keep the scorn from his voice.

“Of course I can. A woman always can.” Emily sounded scornful, too, and weary, so weary. “Harder to find anybody who cares about more than that, though.”

“Too bad,” Jeff said harshly. “Too damn bad.”

Emily sighed. “I don’t know why I bothered doing this. Just wasted my time. Reckon I was hoping you’d changed—changed back into the fellow I knew before the war.”

“He’s dead,” Pinkard said. “The damnyankees killed him, and the niggers killed him, and you helped kill him, too. The country he lived in is dead along with him. He ain’t ever coming back. Maybe the country we had back then will. That’s what the Freedom Party is all about.”

“To hell with the Freedom Party!” Emily said furiously. A distant street lamp showed tears running down her cheeks. “And to hell with you, too, Jefferson Davis Pinkard.”

“Go on, get out of here. Go peddle your tail somewhere else, or I’ll give you what I gave you before, only more of it.” Jeff made a fist and raised his arm. “I sure as hell don’t need you. I don’t need anybody, by God. As long as I’ve got the Party, that’s everything I need in the whole wide world.”

Emily turned away, her shoulders slumping. She was crying harder now, crying like a little lost child. Jeff headed home, a smile on his face now in spite of the chilly drizzle. Why not? He’d won. He knew damn well he’d won.

Chester Martin liked playing football. He liked it in the snow, and he liked it here in springtime, too. In that, he was very little different from anybody else in the United States. In New England and New York, a few people still enjoyed baseball, a game that had briefly flourished in the couple of decades before the War of Secession. Even there, though, football was king.

He pulled on his leather helmet. Being a burly steelworker, he played in the line on offense and defense.
In the trenches,
people called that these days. The comparison wasn’t far-fetched. Plenty of times, he’d wished for a bayoneted rifle to hold off whatever charging rhinoceros the other team aimed at him. And not a game went by when he didn’t wish he were wearing a green-gray steel pot on his head instead of mere leather.

Albert Bauer played beside him in the line. Bauer pointed to their opponents, a team of bruisers in dark blue wool shirts. “Here we go, Chester,” he said. “Legal revenge for everything the police have given us since the end of the war—and before that, too.”

“You don’t need to fire me up, Al. I’m ready now.” Martin looked down at his own shirt, which was bright red. “We licked ’em in the presidential election, and we licked ’em again in the Congressional election last year, and we’ve licked ’em a few times on the gridiron, too. I figure we can do it again.”

“That’s the proletarian spirit,” Bauer said. “Don’t take them lightly, though. The enemies of progress fight hard, even if their cause is doomed. They will lose the war. They can win the battles.”

On one sideline, steelworkers’ friends and families gathered to cheer their gladiators. Sue Martin waved to Chester. He waved back. On the other sideline stood friends and relatives of the cops. A stranger couldn’t have guessed which side was which. Seeing how ordinary policemen’s families were never ceased to surprise Martin.

The two referees were newspapermen; they’d covered both sides, and both sides trusted, or rather distrusted, them about evenly. They waved the team captains over to them and flipped a silver dollar. The cop let out a happy little grunt; he’d guessed right. “Give us the ball,” he said.

“Yeah, give it to ’em in the balls,” a steelworker said. He grinned, but it was a sharp-toothed sort of grin.

Martin held the ball upright with his finger as the kicker booted it down the field—the park, actually—toward the cops. Then he was on his feet and running as hard as he could. A policeman ran toward him, yelling in a language that didn’t sound like English. Martin lowered a shoulder and knocked him sprawling. The first hit always felt good. He banged into a couple of other policemen before two of his teammates brought down the fellow with the ball.

When he lined up at right tackle, the cop playing opposite him looked familiar. “Have I seen you someplace before?” Martin asked.

Before the cop could answer, the center snapped the ball back to the quarterback, who stood waiting for it. The cop gave Martin a body block that took him out of the play, though the run gained only a yard or two. Then he helped him up. “I dunno. I been playing football for a while, same as most guys.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Martin said. “Where’d you fight in the war?”

Another play intervened. This time, Martin spun past the blocker in dark blue and flattened the fullback behind the line of scrimmage. The fullback accused him of unsavory practices. He laughed.

“I was in Kentucky with the First Army—Custer’s men,” the cop answered with no small pride as they took their places once more. “Then I got sent to Utah, to put down the Mormon uprising. After that, I fought in Arkansas. How about you, bud?”

Before Martin could answer, the ball was snapped again. The quarterback booted it away in a quick kick. It rolled dead deep in the steelworkers’ territory. Now it would be Martin’s turn to try to hold the cop away from the ball carrier.

“Me?” he said as he took his stance. “I was in Virginia the whole time—on the Roanoke front till I got wounded, then up in the north.”

The cop charged at him. Martin managed to hold his own. Even while he held the policeman at bay, he was puzzled. He was almost sure he’d seen the broken-nosed face in front of him twisted with fury while the policeman aimed a gun at…at…

He laughed. “What’s funny?” the cop asked.

“I’ll tell you what’s funny,” Martin answered. “You tried to shoot me a couple-three years ago, I think.”

“Oh.” The policeman frowned. Then he also started to laugh. “You should have been wearing a goddamn red shirt then, too. I would have hit what I was aiming at.”

The ball flew back to the steelworkers’ quarterback. He retreated till he stood more than five yards behind the line, then let fly with a forward pass. An end caught it and ran another ten yards before being dragged down from behind.

One more pass a couple of plays later moved the ball deep into the cops’ territory. From there, the steelworkers pounded it into the end zone, running straight at their opponents and defying them to bring down the ball carrier. They were, Martin realized as he took the measure of the opposition, a little heavier and bigger and a little younger than their opponents. He smiled, thinking they would have an easy game and punish the policemen who had given them so much trouble on the picket line.

On the try for the point after the touchdown, he knocked the cop across from him over on his back. The steelworkers’ kicker drop-kicked the ball through the uprights for the extra point.

“Smash ’em!” Sue yelled as the steelworkers trudged back to their side of the field for the kickoff.

“Of course we’ll smash ’em!” Chester Martin yelled back. One of the referees tossed him the ball. He knelt down and held it for the kicker to send it down the field to the policemen. He didn’t think he was bragging or doing anything but telling the truth. How could the cops compete against bigger, younger men?

Before long, he found out. One of the halfbacks on the policemen’s team was nothing special to look out: a skinny little fellow with a blond Kaiser Bill mustache. But when he got the ball, that scrawny halfback was quick as a lizard and twisty as a snake. He did most of the work on the cops’ drive, and capped it by sprinting into the end zone on a pretty fifteen-yard run.

Martin’s tongue was hanging out from chasing him. “Jesus,” he panted as both sides lined up for the cops’ try for the point after touchdown. “If I had a gun right now, I wouldn’t shoot you.” He nodded to the policeman who’d fired during the labor unrest. “I’d shoot that miserable son of a bitch instead. He’s trying to give me a heart attack.”

“Yeah, Matt’s dangerous,” the cop agreed. “You try taking a shot at him, I figure it’s about even money he dodges the bullet.”

“Maybe,” Martin said. “Have to bring along a machine gun, then, and see if he can dodge that.” The cop chuckled and nodded. They both understood the weapons of war, even if they’d stood on opposite sides of the barricade. The policemen’s drop-kick was also good, and knotted the game.

It swayed back and forth all afternoon. The steelworkers had size and youth and a quarterback who threw enough to keep the policemen from doing nothing but storming forward to stop the run. The cops had nothing but Matt. All by himself, he kept them in the game, tackling pass receivers on defense and running like the wind whenever the policemen had the ball. He never wore down. Martin started to wonder whether he was human or mechanical. However many times he got smashed to the dirt, he rose again as if nothing had happened. Even his mustache stayed unruffled, which made Chester all the more suspicious.

In the end, the steelworkers won, 27–23. Martin made himself a minor hero, falling on a fumble in the closing moments to ensure that the cops couldn’t come back. After shaking hands with the policemen, he limped off the field, covered in glory and sweat and mud and bruises. He still had all his front teeth, which made him unusual on the team.

He took off his helmet and ran a hand through his damp, matted hair. “Whew!” he said. “This is supposed to be fun, they tell me. I feel like I’ve been slammed by a triphammer a couple dozen times.”

His sister gave him a hug. “You were wonderful, Chester.” She wrinkled her nose. “You don’t smell so wonderful, though.”

“If you were out there, you wouldn’t smell so wonderful, either,” Martin retorted. He stretched. It hurt.

His father said, “It’s a different game nowadays, with all this throwing. Might as well be baseball, if you ask me. When I was playing, back around the time you were born, we just ran. That was a real man’s game, if you ask me.”

“Sure it was, Pa,” Chester said. “Nobody had helmets then, and—”