There stood the conductor, as important a man on a freight train as the supercargo was on a steamboat. Cincinnatus hit the brakes, jumped out of his truck, and ran over to the man with the clipboard in his hand. "Ain't seen you in a while, Mr. Navin," he said, touching the brim of his soft cloth cap. "What you got for me to haul today?"
"Hello, Cincinnatus," Wesley Navin said. Cincinnatus wondered how many conductors came through Des Monies. However many it was, he knew just about all of them. By now, they knew him, too. They knew how reliable he was. Only a handful of them refused to give him business because he was colored. Navin wasn't one of those. He pointed down the train to a couple of boxcars. "How you fixed for blankets and padding? I've got a shipment of flowerpots here, should be enough for this town for about the next hundred years."
"Got me plenty," Cincinnatus answered. "How many stops I got to make on this here run?"
"Let me have a look here…" Navin consulted the all-important clipboard. "Six."
"Where they at?" Cincinnatus asked. The conductor read off the addresses. Cincinnatus spread his hands, pale palms up. "You runnin' me all over creation. I got to ask four dollars. Oughta say five-I might not make it back here to git me another load today."
"Pay you three and a quarter," Navin said.
"My mama didn't raise no fools," Cincinnatus said. "I get my ass over to the riverside. I get honest pay for honest work there."
"You're the blackest damn Jew I ever seen," Navin said. Cincinnatus only grinned; that wasn't the first time people had said such things about him. Still grumbling, the conductor said, "Well, hell, three-fifty. Since it's you."
"Don't do me no favors like that," Cincinnatus told him. "I ain't goin' nowhere till I don't lose money on the way, and you ain't got there yet."
They settled at $3.75. A few years earlier, that wouldn't have been enough to keep Cincinnatus in the black. But he was more efficient now than he had been-and prices on everything had come down since money got so tight.
He loaded what seemed like nine million flowerpots into the back of the Ford, using ratty old blankets to keep one stack from bumping another. Anything he broke, of course, he was stuck with. He winced every time the truck jounced over a pothole. He'd done a little thinking before leaving the railroad yard with the flowerpots. The couple of minutes he spent probably saved him an hour of travel time, for he worked out the best route to take to get to all six nurseries and department stores. That was part of what being efficient was all about.
It let him get back to the railroad yard just past two in the afternoon: plenty of time to get more cargo and deliver it before sundown. With the sun setting as he finished the second load, he drove home, parking the truck in front of his apartment building. When he walked into the apartment, his daughter Amanda was doing homework at the kitchen table, while Elizabeth, his wife, fried ham steaks in a big iron spider on the stove.
Cincinnatus gave Elizabeth a quick kiss, then said, "Where's Achilles at? He in his room?"
She shook her head. She was cooking in the maid's clothes she'd worn to work. "He blew in a little before you got home, stayed just long enough to change his clothes, and then he done blew out again," she said.
"Why'd he bother changin'?" Cincinnatus asked. "What he does, he don't need to." Thanks not least to Cincinnatus' insistence-sometimes delivered with a two-by-four-his son had earned his high-school diploma. Then he'd amazed everyone-including, very likely, himself-by landing a clerk's job at an insurance company. He wasn't likely to work up much of a sweat filing papers or adding up columns of numbers.
But Elizabeth said, "Why you think? He takin' Grace out to the movin' pictures again."
"Oh." Cincinnatus didn't know how to go on from there. Grace Chang lived in the apartment right upstairs from his own. Her father ran a laundry and brewed excellent beer (a very handy talent in a state as thoroughly dry as Iowa). Cincinnatus couldn't deny that Grace was a sweet girl, or that she was a pretty girl. No one at all could deny that she was a Chinese girl.
She'd been going out with Achilles for more than a year now. It made Cincinnatus acutely nervous. These weren't the Confederate States, and Grace wasn't white, but even so… Having the two of them go out together also made Mr. Chang nervous. He liked Achilles well enough-he'd known him since he was a little boy-but there was no denying Achilles wasn't Chinese.
"Ain't nothin' good gonna come o' this," Cincinnatus said heavily.
Elizabeth didn't answer right away. She flipped the ham steaks over with a long-handled spatula. "Never can tell," she said when they were sizzling again. "No, never can tell. Mebbe grandkids come o' this."
"Do Jesus!" Cincinnatus exclaimed. "You reckon he wants to marry her?"
His wife used the spatula on a mess of potatoes frying in a smaller pan. Then she said, "Don't reckon he go with a gal for more'n a year unless he thinkin' 'bout that. Don't reckon she go with him unless she thinkin' 'bout it, too."
"What do we do, he ends up marryin' the Chinaman's daughter?" Cincinnatus asked.
Elizabeth turned more potatoes before answering, "Upstairs right about now, I reckon Mr. Chang sayin' to his missus, 'What we do, they git married?' " Her effort to reproduce a singsong Chinese accent was one of the funnier things Cincinnatus had heard lately.
But that bad accent wasn't the only reason he started laughing. Even though Achilles and Grace had been going out for more than a year, nobody outside their families had said a word to either one of them about their choice of partner. It was as if white Des Moines-the vast majority of the town- couldn't get excited about what either a Negro or a Chinese did, so long as it didn't involve any whites.
Supper was fine. Cincinnatus wanted to stay up and wait for Achilles, but the day he'd put in caught up with him. He went to bed, where he dreamt he was trying to sneak into the USA in his truck so he could take Grace Chang to the moving pictures, but people kept throwing flowerpots at him, so he couldn't get in.
A snore came from behind Achilles' door when Cincinnatus got up. His son didn't have to be at the office till nine o'clock, so he got to sleep late. That meant Cincinnatus had to head out before Achilles got up. It also meant Cincinnatus couldn't talk to him about Grace. He had told Achilles an education would come in handy all sorts of ways. Now, to his chagrin, he discovered just how right he was.
Lucien Galtier got into his motorcar for the drive up to Riviиre-du-Loup. The Chevrolet started when Galtier turned the key. One thing any Quebecois with an auto soon learned was the importance of keeping the battery strongly charged in winter-and, up there by the St. Lawrence, winter lasted a long time.
"Here we go," Galtier said. He was a small, trim man who'd just turned sixty. He looked it-a life outdoors had left his skin wrinkled and leathery- but he was still vigorous, his hair no lighter than iron gray. When he drove a wagon up into town, he'd had endless philosophical discussions with the horse. The motorcar made a less satisfying partner for such things than the horse had, but enjoyed certain advantages the beast lacked. No horse yet had ever come with a heater.
The highway was a black asphalt line scribed on the whiteness of fresh snow. By now, with so many years of weathering behind them, the shell holes from the Great War were hard to spy with snow on the ground. Oh, here and there a pockmark gave a clue, but little by little the earth was healing itself.
Healing, however, was not the same as healed. Every so often, the cycle of freeze and thaw brought to the surface long-buried shells, often rotten with corrosion. Demolition experts in the blue-gray uniforms of the Republic of Quebec disposed of most of those. The spring before, though, Henri Beauchamp had found one with his plow while tilling the ground. His son Jean-Marie now had that farm, a couple of miles from Galtier's, and there hadn't been enough left of poor luckless Henri to bury. Lucien didn't know what to do about that danger. If he didn't plow, he wouldn't eat.