His wife smiled. "When you was his age, didn't you reckon you knowed everything, too, jus' like him?"
" 'Course I did," Cincinnatus said. "My pa thrashed it out o' me. I don't like hittin' a boy that size-he ain't far from a man, even if he ain't as close as he thinks. I don't like it… but if I got to, I got to." Deliberately, he made himself take a bite of tongue. He usually liked it; it had been a treat when he was growing up. But anger spoiled the flavor.
"You got his goat, but he got yours, too," Elizabeth said.
He started to deny it, then realized he couldn't. He let out a long sigh. "Yeah, he done did." He raised his voice: "Come on back an' eat your supper, Achilles. I won't talk no more 'bout politics if you don't." That was as far as he was willing to go.
From the long silence that followed, he wondered if it was far enough to satisfy his son. At last, though, Achilles said, "All right, Pa. That's fair enough." He returned to the table.
"Probably ain't even had time yet to get cold," Elizabeth said.
"No, Ma. It's fine." As if to prove as much, Achilles made tongue and potatoes and carrots disappear. "Mighty good," he said. "May I have some more, please?" He had manners when he remembered to use them.
"I'll get it for you," Elizabeth said. She turned to Cincinnatus as soon as she'd picked up Achilles' plate. "He sure do like his food."
"That's true." Cincinnatus wasn't sure it was a compliment, especially during hard times, but he could hardly deny it.
After supper, Achilles went off to do his homework. He'd never lost his liking for school. That pleased Cincinnatus-pleased him all the more because, even though Achilles seemed to want to disagree with everything he said, his son hadn't rejected the idea that education was a good thing.
The next morning, Cincinnatus scrambled into his Ford truck and hurried out to the railroad yards. He got there before the sun came up, but he wasn't the first man there looking for whatever hauling business he could get. These days, cargo wasn't always the only thing that traveled in boxcars. As a freight train pulled into the yard, a couple of men in tattered clothes leaped down even before it had completely stopped. They started running.
They didn't disappear quite fast enough. "Come back here, you sons of bitches!" a railway dick shouted. He had a nightstick and a. 45 on his belt. Feet pounding on gravel, he lumbered after the fleeing freeloaders.
"Gotta be crazy to ride the rails like that," Cincinnatus said to the conductor with whom he was dickering over the price of hauling a load of office furniture to the State Capitol.
"Gotta be desperate, anyway," the conductor answered. "Why the hell anybody who was ridin' would want to get off in Des Moines…" He shrugged. "I don't know about crazy, but you sure gotta be stupid."
As he had with Achilles, Cincinnatus said, "This ain't a bad town, suh. Beats Covington, Kentucky, all hollow, and that's the truth."
"Well, sure, if that's what you're comparing it to," the other man said with a laugh. "But you run it up against Los Angeles or San Francisco or Portland or Seattle or Denver or Albuquerque or… You get the idea what I'm saying, buddy? I've seen all them places. I know what I'm talking about."
Cincinnatus knew his standards of comparison were limited. He was familiar with Des Moines, and with Covington, and with very little else. He knew Cincinnati a little, as it lay right across the Ohio from Covington. But San Francisco might have been on the far side of the moon, for all he knew of it. The newspaper had talked about building a bridge across the Golden Gate one day. That didn't mean much to Cincinnatus, either. He knew rivers, and bridges over rivers. The Pacific Ocean? He'd never even seen a lake-not a big one, anyhow.
He got back to the business at hand: "I may not know nothin' 'bout them places, Mistuh Gideon, but I knows haulin', and I knows I got to have another dollar to make this here trip worthwhile."
He ended up with another four bits. That was less than he'd hoped for, more than enough to make the journey worth his while. He stacked desks and swivel chairs and oak file cabinets in the back of the Ford till it wouldn't hold any more and the springs wouldn't bear much more. For good measure, he squeezed two more swivel chairs into the cabin with him.
The conductor nodded approval. "One thing I always got to give you, Cincinnatus-you work like a bastard."
"Thank you kindly." To Cincinnatus, that was high praise.
Getting to the Capitol took only a few minutes; it lay not far south of the railroad yards-like them, on the east side of the Des Moines River, across the river from Cincinnatus' apartment building. The gilded dome atop the ornate building was a landmark visible all over town. For that matter, since the Iowa countryside was so flat, the dome was visible from quite a ways outside of town, too.
Men in fancy suits, bright silk neckties, and expensive homburgs-legislators, lawyers, lobbyists-climbed the stairs to the Capitol's front entrance. Times might be hard, but men of that stripe seldom suffered. They were, of course, uniformly white. Cincinnatus, with his black skin, dungarees, wool sweater, and soft cloth cap, drove past the front entrance with hardly a glance. He pulled up at the freight entrance and backed his truck up to the loading dock.
A white man in an outfit almost identical to his own came over to the truck, clipboard in hand. "How you doin', Cincinnatus?" he said.
"Not too bad, Lou." Even after most of a decade in Des Moines, calling a white man by his first name still wasn't something Cincinnatus did casually. His upbringing in Confederate Kentucky ran deep. "How's yourself?"
"Damn cold weather makes my wound ache." Lou set a hand on his haunch. "If I'd known getting shot in the ass would stick with me so long, I wouldn't've left it up there for them Confederate sons of bitches to aim at. I'd've stuck my head up instead-ain't like I got the brains to worry about gettin' 'em blown out." He pointed to the truck. "So what the hell you got for us this time?"
"Office furniture," Cincinnatus told him.
" 'Bout time that shit started gettin' here," Lou declared. "All them fancy-pants bastards in there who waste our money been bellyachin' like you wouldn't believe about how their goddamn desk drawers squeak and they can't screw their secretaries on the old swivel chairs." Lou respected nothing and nobody, least of all the elected and appointed officials of the great state of Iowa.
Cincinnatus, on the whole a straitlaced man, hadn't thought about screwing in a chair, swivel or otherwise. Now that he did, he liked the idea-provided he and Elizabeth could both be home at the same time while their children weren't, which might not prove easy to arrange. He got out of the truck with a clipboard of his own. "I got papers for you to sign off on."
Lou laughed and flourished his clipboard, which made the papers on it flutter. "Listen, pal, this here is state business. I got more papers'n you do, and you can take that to the bank. Ain't nobody in the goddamn world got more papers'n you need to do state business, unless maybe it's them cocksuckers in Philly."
Again, Cincinnatus knew nothing about the habits, sexual or bureaucratic, of Philadelphians. From other trips to the State Capitol, he did know how many papers he'd have to sign before his delivery was official. "Let's get on with it," he said resignedly, and signed and signed and signed. Lou went through the relative handful of papers on Cincinnatus' clipboard in nothing flat.
Once Cincinnatus had got to the bottom of Lou's pile of paperwork, he asked, "What do they do with all these here forms?"
"Let the mice chew 'em up-what the hell you think?" Lou answered. He raised his voice to a full-throated bellow: "Ivan! Paddy! Luigi! Get your asses over here, and get this crap outa my buddy's truck! You think he's got all day?" The workmen descended on the truck. Lou pulled a flask from his hip pocket-the opposite side from his war wound. "Want a snort?"