Clarence Potter looked into the mirror over the sink in his apartment. He thought he looked pretty sharp: polka-dot bow tie, white shirt with blue pinstripes, cream-colored linen jacket to fight the summer heat and humidity of Charleston, straw boater cocked at a jaunty angle. Then he let out a sour laugh. How he looked wouldn't matter a dime's worth when he got to the Whig meeting tonight. Nobody there would listen to him. Nobody there ever did.
He sometimes wondered why he kept going. Pigheadedness, he supposed. No, more than pigheadedness these days. He also had the feeling that somebody had to do something about the Freedom Party. If the Whigs didn't, if they couldn't, he didn't see anyone else who could.
That cool linen jacket also concealed a shoulder holster. Nobody had tried to give him a hard time yet. But he knew he was on a Freedom Party list. The Party was thorough, if not always swift. Some people had already disappeared. Potter didn't intend to go quietly. If the stalwarts wanted him, they would have to pay the price for him.
Out the door he went, whistling. No one lurked at the bottom of the stairs or, when he checked, out on the street. He nodded to himself. They were less likely to drop on him away from his flat, because they had more trouble knowing exactly where he was then. If they didn't want him now, they likely wouldn't for the rest of the day. Whistling still, he walked on toward Whig headquarters.
A couple of blocks from the headquarters, he ran into Braxton Donovan, who was heading in the same direction. The lawyer nodded. He had more patience with Potter than most local Whigs did.
"How goes it, shyster?" Potter asked. "They still haven't decided to call you a political and run you in?"
"Not yet," Donovan answered. He was a ruddy, fleshy man with an impressive pompadour. "Of course, now that the Supreme Court is gone, they're liable to get rid of all the others next, and then where will I be?"
"Up the creek," Potter answered, and Braxton Donovan ruefully nodded. Potter went on, "Why couldn't people see it's a damnfool thing to do, electing a party that said ahead of time it wouldn't play by the rules once it got in?"
"Because too many people don't care," Donovan said. He pulled out his pocket watch. Carrying one made him on the old-fashioned side-a typical attitude for a Whig. Potter, following postwar fashion, preferred a wristwatch. Donovan said, "We're early. You want to stop at the saloon across the street and hoist a couple?"
"Twist my arm," Potter said, holding it out. Donovan did, not too hard. "I give up," Potter announced at once. "Let's hoist a couple."
But when they turned the corner, they found a line of gray-uniformed policemen and Freedom Party stalwarts in white and butternut, the cops with drawn pistols-a couple of them had submachine guns instead-and the stalwarts with bludgeons, stretched in front of the entrance to the Whig meeting hall. Angry Whigs milled about on the sidewalk and in the street, but nobody was going inside.
"What the hell's going on?" Potter said. Against a dozen policemen and twice that many stalwarts, the pistol under his left arm suddenly seemed a lot less important.
"I don't know, but I intend to find out." Braxton Donovan strode forward. In his fullest, roundest, plummiest courtroom voice, he demanded, "What is the meaning of this?"
One of the cops pointed a submachine gun at the lawyer's belly. Donovan stopped, most abruptly. A burst from a weapon like that could cut him in half. The policeman said, "No more political meetings. That there's our orders, and that there's what we're gonna make sure of."
"But you can't do that," Donovan protested. "It's against every law on the books."
"Braxton…" Potter said urgently. He took his friend's arm.
Donovan shook him off. "You want to listen to this other feller here," the cop said. This time, he didn't point the submachine gun-he aimed it. "By order of the governor in the interest of public safely, all political meetings except for the Freedom Party's are banned till after the election."
One of the stalwarts added, "And for as long as we feel like after that, too." Several of his buddies laughed.
Potter wondered whether Donovan would have a stroke right there on the spot. "Good God, are you people nuts?" the lawyer said. "I can go to Judge Shipley and get an injunction to stop this nonsense in thirty seconds flat. And then I file the lawsuits."
He was plainly convinced he had the big battalions on his side. The policeman, just as plainly, was convinced he didn't. So were the stalwarts. With a nasty grin, the one who'd spoken before said, "Judge Shipley resigned last night. Reasons of health." He leered.
What was going on had got through to Clarence Potter a little while before. The old rules didn't hold any more. In the new ones, the Freedom Party held-had grabbed-all the high cards. He watched Braxton Donovan figure that out. Donovan had been red, almost purple. Now he went deathly pale. "You wait till after the election," he whispered. "The people won't stand for this. They'll throw you out on your ear."
The policeman's finger twitched on the trigger of the submachine gun. Donovan flinched. The cop laughed. So did the Freedom Party stalwarts, in their crisp not-quite-uniforms. One of them said, "You don't get it, do you, pal? We are the people."
"I am going to declare this here an illegal assembly," the policeman said. "If you folks don't disperse, we will arrest you. Jails are crowded places these days. A lot of you big talkers end up in 'em for a lot longer than y'all expect. Run along now, or you'll be sorry."
Across the street and into the saloon counted as dispersing. Potter ordered a double gin and tonic, Braxton Donovan a double whiskey. "They can't do that," he said, tossing back the drink.
"They just did," Clarence Potter observed. "Question is, what can we do about it?"
Another Whig who'd taken refuge in the saloon said, "We've got to fight back."
"Not here," the bartender said. "You start talking politics in here, I get in trouble. I don't want no trouble. I don't want no trouble with nobody. Neither does the owner. You keep quiet about that stuff or I got to throw y'all out."
"This is how it goes," Potter said.
"How what goes?" Donovan asked.
"How the country goes-down the drain," Potter said. "The Freedom Party is doing its best to make sure we don't have elections any more-or, if we do, they don't mean anything. Its best is pretty goddamn good, too." He spoke in a low voice, in deference to the harassed-looking barkeep. Even that was an accommodation to what the Freedom Party had already accomplished.
Donovan snorted. "They won't get away with it. And when they do lose an election, there won't be enough jails to hold all of them, not even at the rate they're building."
"I hope you're right. I hope so, but I wouldn't count on it," Potter said. "Jake Featherston worries me. He's a son of a bitch, but he's a shrewd son of a bitch. The way he went after the Supreme Court… People will be studying that one for the next fifty years. Pass a law that's popular but unconstitutional, make the Court make the first move, and then land on it with both feet. Nobody much has complained since, not that I've heard."
"Who would dare, with the stalwarts ready to beat you if you try?"
But Potter shook his head. "It's more than that. If he'd really riled people when he did it, they would scream. They'd do more than scream. They'd stand up on their hind legs and tell him to go to hell. But they don't. Going ahead with that river project has given thousands of people jobs. It's given millions of people hope-hope for electricity, hope the rivers won't wash away their farms and their houses. They care more about that than they do about whether the bill's constitutional."