And so, not without regret, he said, "Reckon I better stay where I is."
Dover exhaled angrily. "Dammit, where's your get-up-and-go? And if you tell me it got up and went, I'll kick your ass, so help me Hannah."
He might have meant it literally. Scipio shrugged. "Sorry, Mistuh Dover, suh. You is a good boss." He meant that. "But you gots to see, I never want to be nobody's boss a-tall."
"All right. All right, dammit. Why didn't you say that sooner?" Jerry Dover remained disgusted, but he wasn't furious any more-now he faced something he understood, or at any rate something he thought he did. "I've seen it before. You don't want to play the white man over your own people, is that it?"
"Yes, suh," Scipio said gratefully. "Dat just it." There was even some truth in what he said. He hadn't wanted to open up his own cafe in the Terry for exactly that reason. He'd told other Negroes what to do for years in his role as butler at Marshlands, and hadn't cared for it a bit. It was less important to him than his other reason for turning the manager down, but it was there.
Dover said, "If you want to know what I think, I think you're a damn fool. Somebody's got to do it. Why not you instead of somebody else? Especially why not you if you feel that way? Wouldn't you make a better boss than some other buck who did it just to show what a slave driver he could be?"
He was shrewd. He was very shrewd, in fact, to use that last argument and to contrast Scipio, who remembered slave drivers, with one. If not wanting to boss other blacks had been the only thing troubling Scipio, the restaurant manager might have persuaded him. As it was, he shrugged again and said, "Mebbe"-disagreeing too openly with a white man wasn't smart, either.
His boss knew what that mebbe meant. Dover waved him away. "Go on. Go to work, then. I'd fire some people for telling me no, but you're too good to lose. If you don't want the extra money, I won't pay you."
With a sigh of relief, Scipio went into the dining room. Tonight, he felt much better about dealing with customers than with his own boss. The Huntsman's Lodge was not the sort of place that kept a wireless set blaring away while people ate, but he got his share of the news anyway. Sure enough, Jake Featherston was easily winning a second term. All the whites in the restaurant seemed happy about it. Every so often, somebody at one table or another would call out, "Freedom!" and glasses would go high in salute. No one asked Scipio's opinion. He didn't offer it, and wouldn't have if asked. He did pocket some larger tips than usual, as often happened when people were happy.
The rain had stopped by the time he headed for home: a little past twelve. He'd gone about half a block from the restaurant when a rattling, wheezing Birmingham pulled up to the curb alongside of him. A young black man got out. He and Scipio eyed each other for a moment. Scipio's heart thudded in his chest. All too often, Negroes stole from other Negroes, not least because whites cared little about that kind of crime.
But then the youngster grinned disarmingly. "You ain't never seen me, grandpa. You know what I'm sayin'? You ain't never seen this here motorcar, neither."
Was he fooling around with someone else's woman? That was the first thing that occurred to Scipio: no, the second, for that grandpa rankled. Still, if the required price was no higher, he could meet it. "Ain't never seen who?" he said, peering around as if someone invisible had spoken.
He got another grin for that. "In the groove, grandpa."
"Somebody talkin' to me?" Again, Scipio pretended not to see the man right in front of him. Then he started back down the street toward the Terry. Behind him, the young Negro laughed. He walked warily even so, ready to run in case the other fellow came after him. But nothing happened. The man who'd parked the Birmingham might have forgotten all about him.
By the time he woke up the next morning, he'd just about forgotten the young man. Bathsheba, who had to go to her cleaning job much earlier than he needed to leave for the Huntsman's Lodge, was heading out the door when an explosion tore through the morning air.
"Do Jesus!" Scipio exclaimed. The windows rattled and shook. He thought they might break, but they didn't.
"What was that?" Antoinette asked.
"That was somethin' blowin' up," Scipio said heavily. "Mebbe it was an accident. But mebbe it was a bomb, too."
"Oh, sweet Jesus, who'd want to blow things up?" Bathsheba burst out. "Ain't we seen enough sufferin'?" Out she went, shaking her head.
When Scipio headed for work later that day, he had to take a detour to get to the Huntsman's Lodge. He got a glimpse of the street where the bomb had gone off. The building closest to where it went off had fallen down. Windows or pieces of faзade were missing from several others. It wasn't till he looked down the street from above the Huntsman's Lodge that he realized just where the explosion had taken place. You ain't never seen me, that grinning young Negro had said. You ain't never seen this here motorcar, neither. Nobody would ever see it again. Scipio was sure of that. How much dynamite had it held?
Enough. More than enough. Even here, a good long block from where the bomb had gone off, there were bloodstains under Scipio's shoes. How many dead? How many hurt? Plenty. He could see that. "Do Jesus!" he said again.
Only shards of glass jagged as knives remained in the windows of the Huntsman's Lodge. The door had a jagged hole in it. As Scipio started to go in, a policeman barked, "Let me see your passbook, boy." He handed it over. The policeman matched the photograph and his face, then gave it back. "You work here?"
"Yes, suh," Scipio said. "I's a waiter. You kin go ask Mistuh Dover, suh."
"Never mind," the gray-uniformed cop said impatiently. "You see anything funny when you went home last night? Anything at all that wasn't regular?"
Scipio looked at him. He wore a Freedom Party pin next to his badge. "No, suh," the black man answered. "I didn't seen nothin'. I didn't see nobody. Jus' go home an' mind my business."
The policeman snarled in frustration. "Somebody must have, dammit. We catch the son of a bitch who did this, he'll be begging to die before we're through."
"Yes, suh," Scipio repeated in studiously neutral tones. "Kin I go to work, suh?" The cop didn't say no. Scipio walked into the Huntsman's Lodge without another word.
With their third Socialist president in office, with a Socialist working majority in both houses of Congress, the United States should have been a country where labor had the advantage on capital. They should have been. As Chester Martin had bitterly discovered, they weren't-and nowhere was that truer than in Los Angeles.
When construction workers picketed a site, goons often came out in force to break up their picket lines. The cops backed the goons. So did the newspapers. As far as the Los Angeles Times was concerned, strikers were Red revolutionaries who deserved hanging-shooting was too good for them.
Chester remembered the days of the steel-mill strikes in Toledo. Next to this, those had been good times. That, to him, was a genuinely frightening thought. But it was also true. Back in Toledo, he'd had a feeling of solidarity with his fellow strikers, a feeling that their hour was come round at last. They'd been doing something epoch-making: winning strikes that had always been lost before, paving the way for Socialist victories at the polls that had never been seen before.
What was another strike nowadays? Just another strike. Some were won; more were lost. Nobody except the immediate parties-and the Times-got very excited about most of them, and even the immediate parties didn't always bother. The strikes put Chester in mind of some of the later battles on the Roanoke River front during the Great War. They would tear up the landscape and cause a lot of damage and pain to both sides, but things wouldn't change much no matter who won. Either way, the next fight on the same ground would loom around the corner.