Hmmm. Biggest difference is there aren’t any garages, he thought. There were some cars, but they were parked by the side of the road, and there weren’t very many of them. And no mobile homes, of course.
He paused to talk with a few of the children. Nobody snatched the kids away from conversation with a stranger, and he discovered another difference from the lands he knew: He hadn’t heard so many “sirs” since he’d mustered out of the Tenth Mountain after Iraq. What he sought stood within smelling distance of the mudflats, and a stone’s throw from the first factories of the industrial district.
The neighborhood watering hole was called Bobcat Bites; he looked at it for a minute before he realized what the main structure must be. Then he laughed out loud; somebody had taken a medium-sized Quonset hut and stuccoed the outside and whitewashed it—probably, given the degree of uniformity elsewhere, to coincide with the letter if not the spirit of some town-wide building code. Crossing that like the bar of a T was a two-story boxy adobe structure with racks for bicycles and Segways outside, a parking lot to the side with a scattering of cars and pickups, and a sign that gave the tavern’s name and encouraged all passersby to sample the free lunch until two-thirty, three P.M. on weekends.
Tully looked at his watch: Twelve P.M. Why not? he thought.
There was a long bar on either side of the entrance to the Quonset, complete with mirror, brass footrail and polished bar. “What’s the deal on the free lunch?” he asked the woman behind it.
The woman paused in her slow shoving of a rag over the oak. Now there,Tully thought, is someone even Warden Christiansen would admit is a “broad.” She was around forty, with yellow hair that had rather obviously come out of a bottle. A few years older than him, and she looked it, but in a nice way, wearing a long apron over a red dress, and smoking a cigarette. Christ, it’s going to be hard to keep on the wagon here. The secondary smoke stokes the old craving something fierce.
She looked him up and down; he could tell she was amused, in a friendly sort of way. And Christ, it’s a good thing women don’t go as much by looks as we uncouth males do, or after a few generations everyone would look like Tom. Turn on the charm, Roy.
“It means what it says, stranger,” she said. “You buy a drink or a beer, you get all you can eat—ain’t that the way it usually is?” Then a pause, and: “Say, aren’t you the guy in the paper this morning? From FirstSide?”
“Yeah, the famous Roy Tully,” he said, smiling back at her with his best leering-imp impersonation and sliding a New Virginian dime across the counter. “Make it a beer. Whatever you’ve got on tap.”
“Bayside Steam,” she said, getting out a frosted glass mug and drawing it full, with the foam edging slightly down the sides. “Enjoy.”
He snagged it, then went down to the spread. There were deviled hard-boiled eggs, half a dozen varieties of bread, sliced meats, soups over heating elements, butter and cheese and olive oil, oysters, smoked salmon, shrimp salad, potato salad, raw vegetables and guacamole, and most of the rest of the makings of a good smorgasbord, plus cakes and muffins under glass.
He loaded a plate, snickering slightly when he thought about the look of resentment he’d get from Tom if he were here. The big guy wasn’t exactly a chow-hound, but he liked his food and hated the fact that he had to work hard to burn it off. Tully liked to eat too, but knew from family example and his own experience that he’d be able to stuff himself his life long and stay slim… or scrawny, as some unkind souls had called it… without bothering to work out unless he wanted to. His father had never lifted anything heavier than a briefcase full of legal papers, and still had the same belt measurement he’d graduated from high school with.
“So, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” he asked, sitting on a stool, taking a drink of the beer—quite good—and a bite of pumpernickel loaded with shrimp—excellent.
“The name’s Maud, I’m not a girl, and I own the place, mister,” she replied. “Have since that worthless bastard I married drowned hisself.”
“He probably deserved it,” Tully said.
“He certainly did, not knowing better than taking a boat out while he was drunk,” she replied equably. “Second beer’s a nickel.”
Tully sat, ate, and talked with Maud when she wasn’t busy with other customers. That was less often as the lunch crowd thickened, and then the families started coming in for a Sunday-afternoon outing. He’d judged right about the location; it was all working stiffs, a cut below the lower-middle-class and skilled-labor area nearer the farmer’s market.
They were ready enough to talk to a newcomer, as welclass="underline" small-town friendly, but with little of the underlying standoffishness you often found in little out-of-the-way places.
Probably because it’s new and growing, instead of a place where you’re born and people are more likely to move out than in, he thought.
Gentle prodding was more than enough to set people talking about themselves. Most of the women were housewives; the rest were in the service trades, or were things like elementary school teachers, with a few nurses. The men worked in the factories—consumer goods, boatbuilding, an electric-arc foundry owned by the O’Briens, small machine shops that made a surprisingly broad range of spare parts—or in construction, or drove forklifts at the Gate complex, or crewed fishing boats and coastal ships, or did things like sewer maintenance. A large majority had been born in the Commonwealth, and many were second or third generation; a majority of their grandparents had come from America, with a bias toward the upper South, and the rest had ancestors who were German, French, and Italian, with a scattering from all over Eastern Europe. The immigrant minority included Russians, Afrikaners, and a few Croats and Serbs.
The talk wasn’t all that different from a bar-cum-restaurant in a small deep-rural Arkansas town somewhere in the Ozarks: sports, weather, gossip, fishing and hunting, how the farmers were doing that year—the main difference was the absence of national media and their stories. He heard a fair amount of grousing about the Thirty, mostly straightforward envy, and a fair amount of gossip about them as well, mostly of the sort you heard about the upper crust back home, but with more personal knowledge, and a bit less lurid. The main buzz was an elopement between the children of two Family heads, Primes.
People he spoke to often congratulated him on getting out of FirstSide; they generally thought it was pretty bad, even if they also discounted some of the Commission’s propaganda.
A little later he overheard a political conversation.
“…doesn’t sound too bad to me,” one man said. “Couple of nahua girls to peel grapes and drop ’em in my mouth while their brothers do all the work and I kick their asses now and then.”
The other man snorted; his English had a thick South African accent, clipped and guttural, like the late, unlamented Schalk van der Merwe. “Man, where exactly are they going to work for you? On the big farm you don’t have? The factory you don’t own? Down the mine you’ll never get?”
The Afrikaner held up his hands. “All you’ve got is your house and these, just like me, you bliddy fool. If we get a lot more nahua in here working for fifty cents a day, and staying around long enough to learn skilled trades, what’s to stop your boss paying you fifty cents, and telling you he’ll put one of them in your place if you complain, and then you can live on nothing? Bliddy poor whites, that’s what we’d be.”