"Zero," Miss Thornton said crisply, and wrote it in the roll book. She asked Herb Rosen. Herb didn't just read Chaucer for fun; he even read textbooks for fun.
"Because now their president can be elected for lots of terms, not just one," he answered. "It looks like the Freedom Party is setting things up for him to be president for life."
A girl stuck up her hand. Miss Thornton nodded to her. She said, "I don't think that's true. Our presidents can be elected more than once, and nobody's ever been president for life."
"That's because we've got a custom of stopping after two terms. Even Teddy Roosevelt lost when he tried for a third one," Herb said. That touched off a discussion about the role of unwritten custom in government.
Armstrong Grimes listened with no more than half an ear. Somebody was going to be on top, and somebody else was going to get it in the neck. That was how things worked, as far as he could see, and nobody could do anything much about it. The most you could do was try to be the fellow who came out on top.
Miss Thornton left him alone for the rest of the period. But when the class ended, he had to go on to algebra, and he got it in the neck. Mr. Marr, the algebra teacher, had lost his right arm during the war. He'd had to teach himself to write and eat lefthanded. He'd done it, too, and come away convinced that anybody could teach himself to do anything. But Armstrong hadn't been able to teach himself to do algebra.
He had to go up to the board to try a problem. He butchered it. Mr. Marr glared at him. "If you multiplied one side of the equation by six, why didn't you multiply the other side by six, too?" he snapped.
"Uh, I don't know," Armstrong answered helplessly.
"Well, that's obvious," Mr. Marr said. "Sit down." He did the problem himself. When he did it, it looked easy. Multiply, subtract, and what do you know? X equals seven. Armstrong knew he wouldn't be able to do it himself, not if he lived to be a hundred.
"Not your day today," somebody said when the bell rang and they escaped to lunch: a period's worth of freedom.
"No kidding," Armstrong said. "They can't teach for beans, and I'm the one who gets in trouble on account of it." That a lot of the other students in his classes were having no trouble at all didn't occur to him. Far easier to blame his teachers than himself.
After lunch came chemistry. He'd had hopes for chemistry. If they'd shown him how to make things that blew up, he would have worked hard. But learning that lithium was always +1, oxygen was always -2, and carbon was ±4 left him cold. He staggered through a quiz, and hoped he got a C.
Wood shop went better. His hands had some skill in them, even if he'd never make a big brain. He was making a spice rack for the kitchen, and everything was going about as well as it could. Mr. Walsh stopped and watched him work with a file and sandpaper. The shop teacher nodded. "Not bad, Grimes," he said. "You keep it up, and you'll have no trouble finding a job when you get out of high school."
The only reason Armstrong intended to graduate was that he knew his old man would murder him if he didn't. He didn't tell that to Mr. Walsh. If the teacher hadn't heard it a million times before, he would have been amazed.
At last PE, and Armstrong came into his own. He was stronger and faster than most of the other boys in his class, and he reveled in it. And from PE he went straight to football practice. He was only a second-string defensive end, but he threw himself into every play as if his life depended on it. The harder he practiced, the more playing time he'd get when the game came Friday night.
And there across from him, taking snaps in the single wing, was Frankie goddamn Sprague. Think you're going to get your hand under Lucy Houlihan's blouse, do you? Armstrong spun past the tackle trying to block him, steamrollered the fullback, and knocked Frankie Sprague right on his ass.
XI
"I'm off." Chester Martin blew Rita a kiss and Carl another one. His wife and their son sent kisses through the air back toward him, too. He was glad to get them as he went out the door and headed for the bus stop.
It had rained the day before, the first rain of the season in Los Angeles. The sky was a brilliant blue now, as if the rain had washed it clean. Even late in October, the weather would get up into the seventies. Chester remembered Toledo with a fondness that diminished every year he stayed in California. You couldn't beat this weather no matter how hard you tried.
A bum slept in a doorway, a blanket wrapped around him. Living here without money was easier than it was in the eastern USA, because people didn't have to worry so much about shelter. Idly, Martin wondered if Florida and Cuba had more than their share of out-of-work people in the CSA for the same reason.
He needed a southbound trolley today. He was heading down to Hawthorne, a suburb south of the airport and not far from the beach. Mordechai's crew was running up a pair of apartment buildings. People with jobs kept moving to Southern California, too, and they all needed places to live.
When the trolley rolled up, Martin threw his nickel in the fare box, paid two cents more for a transfer, and then sat down with his toolbox in his lap. Even though that toolbox was a sign he had work to go to, he didn't stop worrying. The way things were these days, who could? He wondered if he would be able to go on working after Mordechai retired. The foreman with the missing fingers on his right hand had to be past sixty. Whoever replaced him might have new favorites who needed jobs. In a trade without a union, that sort of thing was always a worry.
Posters praising candidates for the upcoming Congressional elections sprouted like toadstools on walls and fences and telephone poles: Democratic red, white, and blue against Socialist red and, here and there, Republican green. Trying to guess who'd win by seeing who had the most posters up was a mug's game, which didn't mean people didn't play it all the time. By the way things looked here, the two big parties were running neck and neck. Outside of a few states in the Midwest, Republicans had a hard time getting elected. Their ideas were stuck between those of the Democrats and the Socialists, and old-timers still associated them with the nineteenth-century disasters the USA had suffered under Lincoln and Blaine.
Martin changed lines on El Segundo. He got off the trolley at Hawthorne Boulevard and walked two blocks south and three blocks east. Mordechai waved to him when he came up, calling, "Morning, Chester."
"Morning," Martin answered. About half the crew-who lived all over the Los Angeles area-were already there. It was still only a quarter to eight. Chester didn't expect many people to show up after eight o'clock. You did that more than once-twice if you were lucky-and some hungry son of a bitch would grab your job with both hands.
This morning, only Dushan came in late. He was plainly hung over. Mordechai said something to him. He nodded in a gingerly way, then got to work. He depended on construction work less than most of the other men, for he could make cards and dice behave the way he wanted them to. That let him-or he thought that let him-get away with showing up late every once in a while.
He buckled down willingly enough, even if the banging of hammers made him turn pale. The fellow working alongside Chester, a big Pole named Stan, said, "Goddamn if Dushan don't look like a vampire left out in the sun."
The past few years, there'd been a lot of films about vampires and werewolves and other things that should have been dead but weren't. That probably put the comparison in Stan's mind. It was good enough to make Martin nod. All the same, he said, "Don't let Dushan hear that. He's from the old country, and he's liable to take it the wrong way."
"Let him. I ain't afraid," Stan said. He was bigger and younger than Dushan, so he had reason to be confident. Still…
"Don't push it." Now Chester sounded a plain warning. "Why start trouble?"