The Victorious Opposition Read Free

wave; he’d lost a couple of fingers from his right hand in a childhood farm accident. But he could do more with tools with three fingers than most men could with five. He’d spent years in the Navy before returning to the civilian world. He had to be close to sixty now, but he had the vigor of a much younger man.
    “Hey, Joe. Morning, Fred. What’s up, José? How are you, Virgil?” Martin nodded to the other builders, who were just getting started on the day’s work.
    “How’s it going, Chester?” Fred said, and then, “Look out—here comes Dushan. Get busy quick, so he can’t suck you into a card game.”
    “What do you say, Dushan?” Chester called.
    Dushan nodded back. “How you is?” he said in throatily accented English. He came from some Slavic corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; his last name consisted almost entirely of consonants. And Fred’s warning was the straight goods. Dushan made only a so-so builder (he liked the sauce more than he might have, and didn’t bother keeping it a secret), but what he couldn’t persuade a deck of cards to do, nobody could. Chester would have bet he picked up more money gambling than he did with a hammer and saw and screwdriver.
    “Come on, boys. Enough jibber-jabber,” Mordechai said. “Time to earn what they pay us.”
    He wasn’t the kind of foreman who sat on his hind end drinking coffee and yelling at people who did stuff he didn’t like. He worked as hard as any of the men he bossed—probably harder. If you couldn’t work for Mordechai, you probably couldn’t work for anybody.
    Nailing rafters to the ridgepole, Chester turned to José, who was doing the same thing on the other side. “You know what Mordechai reminds me of?” he said.
    “Tell me,” José said. His English was only a little better than Dushan’s. He’d been born in Baja California, down in the Empire of Mexico, and had come north looking for work sometime in the 1920s. Chester didn’t know whether he’d bothered with legal formalities. Either way, he’d managed to keep eating after things fell apart in ’29.
    “You fight in the war?” Martin asked him.
    “Oh,
sí,
” he answered, and laughed a little. “Not on the same side as you, I don’t think.”
    “Doesn’t matter, not for this. Had to be the same on both sides. If you had a good lieutenant or captain, one who said, ‘Follow me!’—hell, you could do damn near anything. If you had the other kind . . .” Martin jabbed his right thumb down toward the ground. “Mordechai’s like one of those good officers. He works like a son of a bitch himself, and you don’t want to let him down.”
    The other builder thought about that for a little while, then nodded.
“Es verdad,”
he said, and then, “You right.” He laughed again. “And now we talk, and we don’t do no work.”
    “Nobody works
all
the damn time,” Chester said, but he started driving nails again. It wasn’t just that he didn’t want to let Mordechai down. He didn’t want to get in trouble, either. Plenty of men wanted the job he had. He was every bit as much a part of the urban proletariat here as he had been at the steel mill back in Toledo.
    After a couple of nails went in, he shook his head. He was more a part of the proletariat here than he had been in Toledo. The steel mill was a union shop; he’d been part of the bloody strikes after the war that made it one. No such thing as a construction union here. If the bosses didn’t like anything about you, you were history. Ancient history.
    We ought to do something about that,
he thought, and suddenly regretted voting Democratic instead of Socialist in the last election. He held the next nail to the board, tapped it two or three times to seat it firmly, and drove it home. Another election was coming up in a little more than six months. He could always go back to the Socialists.
    Rita had packed him a ham sandwich, some homemade oatmeal cookies, and an apple in his dinner pail. Sure as