"Oh, for Christ's sake!" Chester descended as fast as he could. He was cursing, too, almost as angry at himself as he was at Stan and Dushan. He'd seen trouble coming, but he hadn't been able to stop it.
"Fight! Fight!" The shout brought construction workers running, just as it would have brought kids running on a high-school campus. Most of the workers only stood around and watched without trying to break it up. It was entertainment, something to liven up the day, something to talk about over the supper table tonight.
"Come on, let's get 'em apart," Chester said. Still enjoying the show, the men at his side looked at him as if he were crazy-till Mordechai got there a few seconds later.
Not much made Mordechai mad. Anything that slowed down work and threatened the job would do the trick, though. Swearing like the veteran Navy man he was, he shoved through the crowd of workers, most of whom were twice his size and half his age. Seeing that, Chester did some pushing and shoving of his own. The two of them grabbed Dushan and Stan and pulled them apart. Once they actually started doing that, they got some belated help from the other men.
Dushan twisted in Chester's grasp, trying to wade back into the scrap. That might have been more for form's sake than anything else. He hadn't been getting the better of it. He had a bloody nose and a black eye and a scraped cheek. He'd hung a pretty good mouse on Stan, too, but the Pole hadn't taken anywhere near so much damage as he had.
"What the hell happened here?" Mordechai couldn't have sounded more disgusted if he'd tried for a week.
Dushan and Stan both gave highly colored versions of recent events. Some of the builders who'd been watching supported one of them, some the other, and some gave versions of their own that had very little to do with anything that had really gone on-that was how it seemed to Chester, anyhow.
Mordechai listened for a little while, then threw up his hands. "Enough!" he said. "Too goddamn much." He used his mutilated right hand to point first to Stan, then to Dushan. Somehow, his two missing fingers made the gesture seem even more contemptuous than it would have otherwise. "You're fired, and you're fired, too. Get the fuck out of here, both of you. I don't want to see either one of your goddamn ugly mugs again, either. And you both blow all of today's pay."
A sigh went through the workers. Nobody'd expected anything different. Dushan never changed expression. Stan said, "Fuck you, asshole," but his bravado rang hollow. Word would get around, and get around quick. He'd have a tough time landing construction work from here on out. He was just an ordinary worker, easily replaceable by another ordinary worker.
If Mordechai had stopped there, nothing more would have come of it. But he was furious, and he held the whip hand. "And the rest of you pussies," he said, glaring at the men around him, "the rest of you pussies lose half a day's pay for standing around while all this shit was going on."
"That's not fair!" Chester Martin exclaimed. Several other men muttered and grumbled, but he was the one who spoke out loud.
Mordechai glowered. "You don't like it, you know what you can do about it."
He meant, nothing. But Martin wasn't a veteran of union strife in Toledo for nothing, or to take nothing lying down. "Yeah," he said stonily. "I know what I can do about it."
As soon as people went back to work, he started doing it. He hadn't done any union agitating for years, but he still knew how. Some of the men didn't want to listen to him. "You're gonna get your ass fired, and everybody else's, too," was something he heard more than once.
But others were ready to go along. Mordechai had hit too hard when he punished workers for something they hadn't done. And a lot of the men who'd come to California to find jobs had belonged to unions back East. They remembered the gains they'd made, gains they'd had to throw away to find any work at all out here.
"We've got to spread the word," Chester warned. "If we just strike at this site, they'll crush us. But if we strike at all the building sites around Los Angeles, the bosses will have to deal with us." He hoped they would, anyhow. And if they didn't… well, he'd gone on strike before.
When he got his pay at the end of the day-half a day's pay for a whole day's hard work-he said, "I'm taking this under protest."
The paymaster shrugged. "Take it and like it or take it and stick it up your ass." He had a couple of bully boys with pistols behind him to make sure the payroll stayed safe. He could afford to talk tough-or thought he could, anyhow.
Martin thought he was playing into the workers' hands. Several other men said, "I'm taking this under protest," too. The paymaster went right on shrugging. He didn't see the resentment he was raising-either that or, secure in his power, he just didn't care.
That evening, when Chester told Rita what had happened, she looked at him for a long time before asking, "Are you sure you want to go through with this?" He knew what she meant; now that he had a child, he'd given fortune a hostage.
He sighed. "Do you want me to knuckle under?"
His wife bit her lip. After half a minute's silence, she said, "No. They'll own you if you do." He kissed her. He'd thought-he'd hoped-she would say that. She was a stronger Socialist than he was.
He spent the next few weeks working his shift during the day and agitating during his free time. He talked with workers. He talked with Socialist Party officials. The Socialists gained seats in the House and Senate-and in the California legislature-in the off-year elections. That strengthened his hand. He hoped it did, anyhow.
One morning early in December, he got to the construction site at the same time as a pickup truck. Instead of going in to work, he grabbed a sign from the back of the truck. He wasn't the only one who did. Inside of two minutes, three dozen unfair! signs went up in a picket line. Picketers were hitting other sites all over town, too. "On strike!" Chester and the other men shouted. "Join us!" They cursed a worker who crossed the picket line. Another worker thought better of it.
"You sons of bitches!" Mordechai shouted. "You'll pay for this!"
"We've paid too much for too long already," Chester answered, wondering how much he would have to pay from here on out.
As soon as the engineer waved and the red light in the studio came on, Jake Featherston leaned toward the microphone like a lover toward his beloved. "I'm Jake Featherston, and I'm here to tell you the truth." He wondered how many times he'd said that over the years. He always believed it, at least while he was talking.
"Truth is, for the past twenty years and more, the United States of America have been holding on to what doesn't belong to them. At the end of the war, the USA stole Kentucky and Sequoyah and what they call Houston. The people in those states don't want to belong to the USA. They've made it plain every way they know how that they don't want to belong to the USA, but the United States government doesn't want to listen to them."
He paused to let that sink in, then went on, "If they held fair and honest elections in those places, the people there would show what they wanted. They would show they want to come home to the Confederate States of America. President Smith knows that as well as I do. He's a clever man, and I reckon he's an honest man."
He didn't think Smith was anything close to clever, and couldn't have cared less whether he was honest. He did want to butter up the president of the United States. He had his reasons: "I challenge President Smith to allow plebiscites in Kentucky and Sequoyah and what they call Houston. I challenge him to abide by the results of those plebiscites. I challenge him, after the Confederate States win those plebiscites, to let those states come home."