"Well, I'm a penny-pinching squarehead myself, and I won't tell you anything different," Andersen said. Cincinnatus liked him better after that; if he could insult himself as casually as he insulted everybody else, odds were none of those insults meant much.
Cincinnatus got fairly close to the price he wanted for hauling the load of bedroom furniture, too. He drove it over to a furniture store on Woodland Street on the west side of town, only a little north of the bend of the Raccoon River. After growing up by the bank of the Ohio, Cincinnatus didn't think either the Raccoon or the Des Moines was anything special.
Olaf Thorstein, who ran the furniture store, was even paler than Andersen. Cincinnatus had trouble believing anybody this side of a ghost could be. Thorstein was a tall, thin man of stern rectitude, the sort who would skin you in a deal if he could but would walk across town in the snow to give back a penny-or a hundred-dollar bill-you accidentally left in his store. With a similar streak in his own character, Cincinnatus had no trouble getting along with him.
Thorstein said, "Way you talk, you used to live in the Confederate States." He was not far from Cincinnatus' age, which meant he'd likely fought in the Great War.
"Yes, suh, that's a fact." Cincinnatus nodded. "Came to Des Moines ten years ago. Ain't been sorry, neither. This here's a lot better'n Kentucky." He remembered Luther Bliss and shivered in spite of himself.
"Well, what do you think of what's going on down there now?" the white man asked.
"Don't reckon you'll hear no black man sayin' nothin' good about the Freedom Party," Cincinnatus answered. "What do you think, Mr. Thorstein?" A surprising-or maybe a depressing-number of whites weren't the least bit shy about saying what they thought of people who didn't look like them. Had the USA had more Negroes, it probably would have had something like the Freedom Party, too.
"Me? I don't know much. I have not been there, except in the Army," Thorstein said, confirming Cincinnatus' guess. The furniture-seller went on, "I tell you this, though: I think that man Featherston will bring trouble. He lies. How can you trust a man who lies? You cannot. And any man who comes on the wireless and says, 'I am going to tell you the truth'-well, what else can he be except a liar?" Behind bifocals, his ice-blue eyes flashed. Plainly, he was condemning Jake Featherston to some chilly hell.
Cincinnatus wished getting rid of the man were that simple. But he nodded to Thorstein. Hating dishonesty of any sort, the Swede might also hate injustice of any sort. "I got me no quarrel with any o' that," Cincinnatus said.
"How could anyone quarrel with it?" Olaf Thorstein sounded genuinely bewildered. "Is it not as plain as the nose on a man's face? And yet how could the people in the Confederate States have voted for the man if they saw it? They must not have seen it. This I do not understand."
"Sometimes folk don't want to see," Cincinnatus said. "I reckon that had a lot to do with it."
"But why would anyone blind himself on purpose?" Thorstein asked, seeming more bewildered still.
Cincinnatus had asked himself the same question, more than once. He said, "Seems to me they got a choice. They can look square in the mirror and see how ugly they are, or they can be blind. Looks like they done picked what they aim to do."
"Uh- huh." Olaf Thorstein chewed on that. At last, he asked, "And what would a Freedom Party man say about what you just said?"
"Oh, that one's easy." Cincinnatus laughed. "Reckon he'd say I was an uppity nigger, a crazy nigger. Reckon he'd be right. When I used to live in the CSA, I wouldn't never've said nothin' like that. Colored fella livin' in the CSA got to be crazy to talk that way. But I been in the USA since 1914 now. This ain't no great place for black folks-don't reckon there's anywhere that's a great place for black folks-but you take it all in all an' it's a lot better than the Confederate States ever was. I got me a chance here-not a good one, maybe, but a chance. Down there?" He shook his head. "No way, nohow, not before the Freedom Party, an' not now, neither."
Again, Thorstein thought before he spoke. "I have never heard a Negro talk so freely of these things," he said, and then shrugged. "How many Negroes are there in Des Moines for me to talk to?"
"Not many. We're thin on the ground here. We're thin on the ground all over the USA," Cincinnatus said. And maybe that's why things are a little easier for us here, he thought. White folks in the USA don't like us much, but they ain't afraid of us like in the Confederate States. Not enough of us here to be afraid of.
"I hope I have not delayed you too much," the furniture-store owner said. "I know you need as much work as you can get. Who does not, the way things are these days?"
"It's all right, Mr. Thorstein. Don't you worry about it none," Cincinnatus said, for Thorstein really did sound concerned. "When I seen in the paper that that Featherston fella won, I was so upset, I didn't know what to do. Times gonna be hard for colored folks down in the CSA-gonna be real hard. Glad I got me a chance to talk about it some."
He was less glad when he got back to the railroad yard just in time to see another driver go off with a choice load that might have been his had he returned five minutes earlier. But he got a load for himself half an hour after that, when a train full of canned salmon from the Northwest puffed to a stop. Several groceries were waiting for their fish, and he took them a lot of it.
He was tired but happy-he'd made good money that day-when he got back to his apartment building and parked the truck in front of it. Joey Chang, the Chinaman who lived upstairs, was checking his mailbox when Cincinnatus walked into the lobby. "Hello," Cincinnatus said, affably enough. He got on well with Chang, who brewed good beer in a dry state.
"Hello," Chang answered, his English flavored with an accent unlike any other Cincinnatus had heard. "We talk a few minutes?"
"Sure," Cincinnatus said in some surprise. "What's on your mind?"
"Your son Achilles ask my daughter Grace to go to the cinema with him," Chang replied. "What you think of this?"
" Did he?" Cincinnatus said, and the other man solemnly nodded. Achilles had said he thought Grace Chang was cute. As Olaf Thorstein had remarked, there weren't that many Negroes in Des Moines. If Achilles found somebody he might like who wasn't a Negro… Well, if he did, what then? "What do you think of that, Mr. Chang?" Cincinnatus asked.
"Don't know what to think," Chang said, which struck Cincinnatus as basically honest. He went on, "Your Achilles good boy. I don't say he not good boy, you understand? But he not Chinese."
Cincinnatus nodded. He had similar reservations about Grace. He asked, "What's your daughter think?"
"She is modern. She wants to be modern." Mr. Chang made it sound like a curse. "She says, what difference it make? But it makes a difference, oh yes."
"Sure does," Cincinnatus said. The laundryman gave him a surprised look. Perhaps Chang hadn't thought a Negro might mind if his son wanted to take a Chinese girl to the cinema. After scratching his head, Cincinnatus went on, "Maybe we just ought to let 'em go out and not say anything about it. Going to the moving pictures together ain't like gettin' married. And if we tell 'em no, that'll only make 'em want to do it more to rile us up. Leastways, Achilles is like that. Dunno 'bout your Grace."
"Her, too," Chang said morosely. "The more I do not like, the more she does. Modern." He made the word sound even worse than he had before. Now he screwed up his face. "Yes, maybe we do this. I talk to my wife, see what she say." By his tone, whatever Mrs. Chang decided would prevail.
"Fair enough," Cincinnatus said. "I'll talk to Elizabeth, too-and to Achilles."