“Shit,” Peggy repeated, more sharply this time. She was worried about the elections, too. Who in her right mind wouldn’t be? Anybody who’d seen Hitler’s Germany with her own eyes knew the only thing you could do with it was squash it with the biggest rock you could find.
But most people in Arkansas and Nebraska and Wyoming-and Philadelphia-hadn’t seen the Third Reich with their own eyes. That was the trouble. It didn’t seem real to them. They couldn’t believe anyone would really do the kinds of things the Nazis did every day without even thinking about them. And so they didn’t care whether the English and French kept fighting. It wasn’t their worry.
Only it was. If somebody didn’t take care of Hitler now, before too very long he’d decide he could take care of the United States. The really scary thing was, he might turn out to be right.
It was rainy on election day. Peggy’s polling place was at a fire station a couple of blocks from her house. She squelched over in galoshes and under an umbrella. A bored-looking cop with a bigger bumbershoot stood watch. Every once in a while, a wardheeler would follow a voter toward the polling place.
“No electioneering within a hundred feet,” the cop would growl.
Of course the wardheelers bellyached. They were out there in the rain to snag votes any way they could. The cop ignored their complaints. He had the law on his side, and he knew it.
Peggy voted. She’d done more for FDR and his foreign policy than any of the Democratic wardheelers. She was as sure of it as the cop was about the electioneering statutes.
The fire station was warm. It smelled of tobacco smoke and something Peggy finally decided was brass polish. She didn’t want to go back out into the wet. At last, with a martyred sigh, she did.
Rain drummed down on her umbrella. The cop was going, “Louie, if you don’t knock it off, swear to God I’m gonna run you in.”
Louie, by then, had dogged a man almost to the fire-station door. “Have a heart, Walt,” he whined. Yes, he was enough of a wardheeler to know the cop by his first name. But he also must have known Walt wasn’t kidding, because he skittered away.
Tipping his fedora to Peggy as they passed, the man he’d been trailing remarked, “Those guys are harder to get rid of than the ringworm.”
“They’ve got a job to do, too.” Peggy did the same job, if at a different level. It gave her more sympathy for the wardheelers than most people felt. The man rolled his eyes and walked inside, closing his dripping umbrella as he did.
Peggy went home. The house still felt too big and too empty and too quiet. She still liked having Herb around, and she missed him when he rolled out of town on one of his hush-hush trips for good old Uncle Samuel.
To make some noise, she turned on the radio again. She sat there, not really listening, and read an Agatha Christie. She didn’t pay that much attention to the mystery, either. It was something that kept her eyes moving back and forth so she didn’t have to think about the miserable state of the world or the almost equally miserable state of her marriage.
Cigarettes were good for not thinking, too. She methodically went through them, almost the way Herb would have. At least smoking in the States was a pleasure. It had been a duty while she was stuck in Europe. You got the jitters and the jimjams if you quit. But Jesus God, the tobacco over there was awful! When it was tobacco, anyway. Maybe it was horseshit after all. Some of it sure tasted as if it was.
Bread crumbs. An egg. Chopped scallions. Salt. Pepper. A can of salmon. Some lard in the pan. A few minutes later, croquettes. Canned string beans heated in a little pot. Supper. A stiff bourbon-and-water kept her from noticing whatever deficiencies it had. After supper, she sent the bottle a longing look. A little to her own surprise, she put it back on the high shelf without opening it again.
When she turned on the radio this time, election returns were starting to come in. Her own Congresscritter got reelected handily. He was a Republican; no, her neighbors hadn’t seen the joys of the Reich for themselves, either, so they still thought of FDR as That Man In The White House. But she’d known he would win. The only way he could blow the election was by molesting a nun in the middle of the street at rush hour. Even that might not do it.
Before midnight, though, the prognosticators on NBC, CBS, and the Mutual Network agreed that the makeup of the next Congress wouldn’t be too different from this last one. “President Roosevelt does seem to have lost some ground,” Lowell Thomas intoned gravely. “Incumbents usually do in offyear elections. But it seems unlikely that the new Congress will upset his foreign-policy apple cart. In any case, the general working rule for the USA is that partisanship stops at the frontier.”
Peggy nodded to herself. She’d heard that rule before. It did seem true more often than not, no matter how little the isolationists liked it. And hearing a veteran reporter talk about it that way reassured her. Nobody was going to go and do anything stupid, anyhow.
She made a small, unhappy noise. Nobody was going to go do anything stupid? Was that the most you could hope for from government? She made the same noise again, louder now. More often than not, it was. And, a lot of the time, you couldn’t even get that much.
Rain came down on the trenches northwest of Madrid. Chaim Weinberg swore as he stumped along one. “My goddamn boots are gonna rot right off my feet,” he groused. “You think anybody’ll care? Not fuckin’ likely!”
Mike Carroll was properly sympathetic: “They’ll care, all right. The way your feet smell now, they’ll get you new boots in a minute if the stink leaks out through holes in the old ones.”
“Funny, man. Fun-ny. Har-de-har-har. See? I’m laughing my ass off.” Chaim laid on the sarcasm with an entrenching tool. “Funny like stepping on a land mine, you ask me. That’ll ventilate your boots, too. Better to venti late than never, right?”
“Right.” Mike’s tone suggested he meant anything but what he said. He went on, “We’ve been here long enough. We damn well oughta be used to living out in the rain when winter comes by now.”
“There is that,” Chaim admitted. “Man, when I got here I never figured I’d stay so long. Fight for a while, then go home and try and set things right in the States …” He shook his head. “But the Spaniards really meant it. You’re ashamed to show you don’t. And they’re in the fight till there’s two left on one side and one on the other. And when the two kill off the one, waddaya wanna bet they start fighting each other ’cause that’s all they know how to do any more?”
Carroll sent him a disapproving look. “No wonder you keep getting in trouble with the Party.”
“No wonder at all,” Chaim agreed cheerfully. “Hey, but they haven’t gone and purged me yet. Long as I’ve got a rifle in my hands, I’m more dangerous to the fuckin’ Fascists than I am to my own side.”
This time, Mike looked around to make sure none of the seriously ideological Abe Lincolns could hear him through the rain’s plashing before he answered, “That’s what the anarchists and the Trotskyists thought, too.”
There still were anarchist outfits up in the Catalan and Basque country. People who didn’t much want to be part of Spain to begin with … Well, no surprise that they wanted damn all to do with any government whatever. The Republic quietly used those regiments for cannon fodder and gave them the oldest, most beat-up equipment it had. If you didn’t approve of government, you couldn’t very well expect government to approve of you, either.
Chaim was neither Trotskyist nor anarchist. He followed Moscow’s line … in his own way, when he felt like it. He might be sure he was more dangerous to Sanjurjo’s men than to the progressive forces in Spain. But Mike had a point, too. The longer the war dragged on-and it had already passed its second birthday and grown into a big, healthy boy when the main European brawl erupted-the less patience people here had with what they called deviationists.