Maybe the Socialists were right. Chester had no reason to believe they were wrong. Right or wrong, though, they'd done none too well themselves. Maybe personal ties really did count for more than those of class.
"Damned if I know," Martin muttered. "Damned if I know anything any more, except that things are fouled up all to hell and gone."
A woman coming the other way gave him an odd look. She didn't say anything. She just kept walking. The way things were nowadays, plenty of people went around talking to themselves.
Martin opened the door to his apartment without having found any answers. He doubted anybody in the whole country had any answers. If anybody did have them, he would have been using them by now. Wouldn't he?
Rita's voice floated out of the kitchen: "Hello, honey. How did it go?"
"N. G.," Chester answered. The two slangy initials summed up the way things were in the USA these days. The United States were no good, no good at all. He went on, "They aren't hiring. Big surprise, huh?"
His wife came out of the kitchen, an apron around her waist. She gave him a hug and a kiss. "You've got to keep trying," she said. "We've both got to keep trying. Something's bound to turn up sooner or later."
"Yeah." Martin hoped his voice didn't sound too hollow. He remembered the fellow who'd tried to panhandle from him, the one who'd said he was living in the local Blackfordburgh. With a shiver, Martin made himself shove that thought down out of sight. He tried to sound bright and cheerful as he asked, "What smells good?" He meant that; something sure did. They hadn't had any meat for a few days, but the aroma said they would this evening.
"It's a beef heart." Rita did her best to sound bright and cheerful, too. "Mr. Gabrieli had 'em on special for practically nothing. I know they're tough, but if you stew 'em long enough they do get tender-well, more tender, anyhow. And I could afford it."
"All right," Chester said. "It does smell good." Since he'd lost his job, he'd found out about tripe and giblets and head cheese and other things he hadn't eaten before. Some of them turned out to be pretty good-giblets, for instance. He wouldn't get a taste for tripe if he lived to be a hundred. He ate it, because sometimes it was that or no meat at all. Sometimes-a lot of the time-it was no meat at all. Maybe the beef heart would prove tasty.
It proved… not too bad. No matter how long Rita cooked it, it remained chewy, with a faintly bitter taste. But it satisfied in ways cabbage and potatoes and noodles couldn't. "Here's hoping Mr. Gabrieli has it on special again before too long," Chester said. Rita nodded. Unspoken was the painful truth that, if even a cheap cut like beef heart wasn't on sale, they couldn't afford it.
When morning came, Martin went out looking for work again. He actually found some: hauling bricks from trucks to a construction site. It was harder work than any on a foundry floor, and didn't pay nearly so well. For a full day of it, he made two and a half dollars. But coming home with any money at all in his pocket felt wonderful-good enough to let him forget how weary he was.
And, when he set the coins and bills in front of his wife, she was delighted, too. "Will there be more tomorrow?" she asked hopefully.
"I don't know," he answered. "But you can bet I'm going to go back and find out."
He made sure he got to the construction site early. He didn't get there early enough, though. By the time he came up, a couple of hundred men already clamored for work. Toledo cops did their best to keep order. Chester had played football against one of the policemen. "How about a break, pal?" he said. "Let me slide up toward the front? I could really use the job."
The cop shook his head. "Can't do it," he said. "Everybody else here is hungry, too. Playing favorites'd be worth my neck."
He was probably right. That made Martin no less bitter. Knowing he had no chance for work there, he went off to look for it somewhere else. He had no luck, not even when he offered to help a truck driver bring crates of vegetables into a store for a quarter.
"No, thanks. I'll do it myself," the driver said. "If I give you a quarter, I lose money on the haulage." He stacked more crates-all of them with fancy labels glued to one side-on a dolly and wheeled them into the grocery. When he came out again, he said, "You that hungry?"
"Hell, yes," Martin said without hesitation. "I'd do damn near anything for a real job again."
"You ought to go to California, then," the driver said. "That's where this stuff comes from, and they grow so goddamn much out there, they're always looking for pickers and such. Weather's a damn sight better than it is here, too."
"Probably doesn't pay anything," Chester said. "If it sounds so good, why aren't you on your way yourself?"
"Believe me, buddy, I'm thinking about it," the truck driver said. "There are times when I don't want to see another snowflake as long as I live, you know what I mean?"
"Yeah," Martin admitted. "I do. But California? It's a hell of a long way, and who knows what things are really like out there?"
"Only one way to find out." The driver set more crates on the dolly. The spicy odors of oranges and lemons filled the air. They were, in their own way, better arguments than anything he could have said.
"California," Chester muttered as he went off to see what else he could scrounge in Toledo. Pickings were slim. Pickings, in fact, couldn't have been any slimmer. Would they be any better on the far side of the country? He shrugged. Maybe that was the wrong question. Maybe the right question was, how could they be worse?
Up till now, Flora Blackford had never been to the West Coast. When she got off the train in Los Angeles, she was surprised to find it was ninety degrees in the second week of October. She was even more surprised to discover that ninety-degree weather could be pleasant, not the humid hell it would have been in New York City or Philadelphia or Washington-or Dakota, for that matter.
She joined her husband on the platform at the station. President Blackford was smiling and shaking hands with well-wishers. "Four more years!" people chanted. Patriotic red-white-and-blue bunting was draped everywhere Socialist red bunting wasn't.
Vice President Hiram Johnson said, "Welcome to the Golden State, Mr. President. We're doing everything we can to make sure we deliver the goods three weeks from now."
"Thanks very much, Hiram," Hosea Blackford replied with a gracious smile. The two Socialist stalwarts stood side by side as photographers snapped pictures. Flora wondered what the captions to those pictures would say; the Los Angeles Times didn't love the Socialist Party.
"Your limousine is waiting, Mr. President-Mrs. Blackford." Johnson suddenly seemed to remember that Flora existed.
Escorted by police cars with wailing sirens, the limousine made its slow way from Remembrance Station to the Custer Hotel. The bright sunshine, the clear blue sky, and the palm trees made everything seem wonderful at first glance. The grinding despair of the business downturn might have been on the other side of the world, or at least on the other side of the United States.
It might have been, but it wasn't. Even in the couple of miles from the station to the hotel, Flora saw a soup kitchen, a bread line, and a lot of men in worn clothes aimlessly wandering the streets. Thanks to the mild weather, getting by without a roof over their heads was far easier in Los Angeles than in, say, Chicago.
Recognizing the president in the open motorcar, one of those men who looked to have nowhere to go shouted, "Coolidge!"
"Ignore him," Vice President Johnson said quickly.
"It's a free country," Blackford said with a smile. "He can speak up for whichever candidate he pleases. Certainly is a pretty day. I can see why so many people are coming here. We don't have Octobers like this in Dakota, believe you me we don't."