Joe Steele

XIII

When Charlie got home after another day chasing around Washington after stories that might or might not mean anything to the rest of the country, he found Esther bouncing around as if she had springs in her shoes. She waved a small cardboard rectangle at him. “Look!” she squealed. “Look!”

“I can’t,” he said irritably-he was beat. “Hold it still, why don’t you?”

She did. It was a plain postcard, creased and battered. But the message was welcome. Hey, Charlie, the familiar script said. Just a note to let you know I’m doing all right here. Hard work, but I can do it. Let Stella and the folks know I’m okay, please. I get one card a month. Wrote Stella last. Your brother, Mike. Under that was an unfamiliar number: NY24601.

Stella hadn’t let Charlie know she’d heard from Mike. The earlier card might not have got to her. Or she might still have been mad at Charlie for not getting Mike out of the labor encampment. Wouldn’t she have told his folks, though? Of course, they might not have been happy with him, either. Everybody thought he had more pull with the administration than he really did.

“It’s good news,” he said to Esther. “Or it’s news as good as you can get when the news is bad.”

She nodded. “That’s just what it is.” Then she tapped the number with the red-painted nail of her right index finger. “Isn’t this terrible? It’s like they’ve taken away his name.”

Charlie hadn’t thought of it like that. “It’s for the file clerks,” he said. “Plenty of guys named Mike Sullivan-some parts of some towns, about one in five. But there’s only one NY24601.”

“It’s like a prisoner’s number. It is a prisoner’s number. I think it’s disgusting,” Esther said.

Since he couldn’t tell her she was wrong to feel that way, he did the next best thing: he changed the subject. “How are you doing, babe?” he asked.

She answered with a yawn. “I’m sleepy. I’m sleepy all the time,” she said. “And I tossed my cookies about twenty minutes after you left, just before I was gonna go out the door.”

“Well, they call it morning sickness,” Charlie said.

“I don’t care what they call it. I don’t like it,” Esther answered. “I wasn’t doing anything much. But I just barely made it to the bathroom in time. I’ve done more puking the last couple of months than in my whole life before, I think.”

He had no idea what to say to that. He was only a man. Morning sickness was as much a mystery to him as anything else that had to do with pregnancy. Cautiously, he asked, “Do you think you’ll be okay for dinner?” Calling it morning sickness didn’t mean it couldn’t come on any old time. He’d found that out. So had Esther, from painful experience.

She shrugged now. “Who knows? I was fine till about half a minute before I had to heave this morning. Then I was running for the pot.”

She did manage to keep the dinner down. It was ground round without onions. Sometimes anything spicy would make her give it back. Sometimes she’d give back the blandest food. Sometimes she could eat anything at all and stay fine. Her insides might understand why, but she didn’t. Neither did Charlie.

He called Stella while Esther did dishes. He’d done more long-distance calling since Mike got sent West and Esther found out she was in a family way than ever before. It was expensive, but it was quick.

“No, I didn’t get that card,” Stella told him. “I would’ve let you know if I did.”

“Okay,” Charlie said, and some of the weight of worry fell from his shoulders. His sister-in-law didn’t hate him as much as she might have, anyhow. “Maybe the next one will be to you, too. He says he gets one a month.”

“That’s awful,” she said. “Is there a return address or anything, so I can write to him?”

“Lemme see.” Charlie picked up the card. “It just says ‘National Labor Encampment System.’ If you write care of them, maybe he’ll get it. I bet it’d help if you put his number on the card.”

“His number?” Stella echoed in dismay.

Charlie gave it to her again-he’d read it when he read the rest of the message, but it must not have sunk in. Then he said, “Listen, I’m gonna get off the line. I’ve got to call Mom and Pop, let them know what’s going on.”

“I’ll do it if you want, save you the money of another long-distance call,” Stella said.

“Would you? Thanks!” Charlie didn’t want to talk to his mother, who would probably answer the phone. She’d just start crying again. And he pinched pennies harder than ever now that Esther was going to have a baby. You never knew what would happen day after tomorrow. The economy wasn’t as bad as it had been at the bottom of the Depression, but it was a long way from booming. Lose a job and God only knew when you might land another one.

There were other things to worry about, too. That NY24601 pretty much summed them up. A couple of people had vanished from the AP office into the encampments. Charlie didn’t think either Scriabin or Joe Steele disliked him enough to send the Jeebies after him. His stories about the administration stayed upbeat. Unlike Mike, he knew where the line was and didn’t try to cross it.

But you never could tell.

* * *

A guard tossed Mike a big burlap sack. “Thanks,” Mike said. His voice was less sardonic than he wanted it to be. The guard checked his number off the list on his clipboard. He jerked a thumb at an enormous, fragrant pile of sawdust from the mill. Mike went over to it and started filling the sack with a shovel. Blowing sawdust made his eyes water and went up his nose to set him sneezing. He didn’t care. He worked away with more vim than he ever showed felling trees. That was for the camp and for the government that had stuck him in the camp. This was for himself.

“Don’t get it too full!” a guard shouted, as he did every couple of minutes. “You’ll need to flatten it out, remember!”

“Yes, Mommy,” John Dennison muttered from a couple of feet away. No guard could have heard him. Mike hoped his own giggles didn’t set the screws wondering what was up.

When they’d finished filling their sacks, they tied them shut with lengths of twine another guard doled out. Then they went into the supply building in a ragged line, each wrecker with his sack full of sawdust slung over his right shoulder. Yet another man inside also checked off each man’s number before reluctantly issuing him a blanket.

Mike’s was thinner than he wished it were, and almost as coarse and scratchy as if it were woven from steel wool instead of the kind that came off a sheep. Again, though, he said “Thank you” with more sincerity than he’d intended to show. The bastards who ran the camp didn’t want the wreckers to freeze to death-or at least not all of them, not right away.

Back to Barracks 17 he and Dennison went. Snow still lingered in places that didn’t get much sun. It had started in early October, which was horrible enough. Pretty soon, from what the man with WY232 on his clothes said, it wouldn’t melt back. It would just stay there, most of the way through spring. Mike had seen cold weather before, but not cold weather like that.

It would get down below zero, too. And it might stay that way for days if not for weeks. So. . blankets and these sacks of sawdust. Mike laid his on the slats where he’d been sleeping since the Jeebies sent him here. He thumped and pounded on the burlap to get it as even as he could. Then he climbed into the bunk to use his body as a steamroller to flatten the cheap makeshift mattress some more.

Cheap. Makeshift. Thin. Lumpy. All those words applied. Still, this was the most comfortable he’d been in there since he came to the camp. He wasn’t the only one who thought so, either. “Welcome to the fucking Ritz!” another wrecker exclaimed.

Mike lay back. He put his hands behind his head, fingers interlaced. Another minute and he would have fallen asleep. He could sleep anywhere these days, even, sometimes, standing up while the prisoners were being counted.

He didn’t get the minute. A guard thumped in. The Jeebies’ boots sounded louder than the wreckers’. Mike didn’t know why, but they did. “Come on, you lazy, good-for-nothin’ bums!” the guard yelled. “Y’all don’t git the goddamn rest cure this mornin’!”

Like a lot of the GBI men at the encampment, this guard came from somewhere between North Carolina and Arkansas. Mike couldn’t have said why the Jeebies got so many volunteers from that part of the country, but they did. The Southern guards were often rougher on the men they held than Jeebies from the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line, too.

Nobody told this fellow where to go. Doing that to somebody with a Tommy gun wasn’t the smartest stunt you could pull. Even an insult would set some guards shooting. Mike had never yet heard of any Jeebie getting in trouble, no matter what he did to a wrecker. And a wrecker’s word was worth nothing when set against a guard’s.

Out the men came. Mike sent a longing, fretful look back toward his bunk. Just because the wreckers had so little, that didn’t keep them stealing from one another. Things you didn’t keep an eye on had a mysterious way of walking with Jesus.

They were taken to the woods to hack down more lodgepole pines. Snow lingered there more than it did inside the encampment. It crunched under Mike’s boots. He and John attacked a tree.

“You know,” Mike said between strokes with the axe, “we shouldn’t take stuff from each other. We should be solid. We should make a waddayacallit, a popular front-us on one side, the Jeebies on the other.”

“We should do all kinds of shit,” John Dennison said. “One of the things you should do is run your mouth less, y’know? All kinds of finks who’ll rat on you for half a pack o’ Luckies.” Thunk! His axe bit into the trunk. The sap smelled halfway between turpentine and maple syrup.

Mike spat. He swung the axe again. He didn’t blister so much any more; calluses were forming where the blisters had been. “They should have an accident or something,” he said. “Yeah, or something.”

“Sometimes they do, when they get bad,” Dennison said. “But then somebody new starts feedin’ the GBI the dope. That’s a bad time, ’cause you don’t know who to trust or whether you can trust anybody.”

The lodgepole creaked. It started to sway. Dennison pointed the direction in which it would fall. Mike sang out: “Tim-berrr!”

Wreckers scrambled back. Down came the tree, pretty much where John Dennison had said it would. Snow flew up off its branches and from the ground. After the cloud subsided, Mike and John started lopping branches off the trunk.

“I don’t want to do this,” Mike said.

“Nobody wants to do this,” Dennison answered.

“I know that. I mean, I don’t want to do it now. I want to go back to the barracks and see what sleeping on a mattress feels like.”

“Why? You won’t sleep any longer or any harder than you did without the goddamn thing,” John Dennison said.

He was bound to be right about that. Mike couldn’t sleep any longer, because he’d have to tumble out of his bunk when reveille sounded tomorrow morning. And he could only sleep harder if he died after the lights went out and before reveille drove him upright again.

“I’ll be more comfortable. I won’t be so cold,” he said.

“That counts a lot for the half a minute before you fall asleep and for the five seconds between when you wake up and when you got to get up,” John said. “Otherwise, you won’t notice. So why get excited about it?”

“Gotta grab all the fun here you can,” Mike answered. Most of the time, John Dennison was a quiet man who didn’t draw attention to himself. Now he laughed like a loon. After a minute, so did Mike. When you got right down to it, the idea of fun inside the labor encampment was, well, pretty goddamn funny.

* * *

Wire and radio reports poured in from the other side of the Atlantic. Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht-renamed as he entrenched himself in power-had marched into Austria, joining it to Germany. The Anschluss wasn’t violent. By the way things looked, most Austrians who weren’t Jewish loved it. Violent or not, though, it rearranged the map of Europe. The new, enlarged Germany was the biggest country west of Russia. It was also the strongest. And now it surrounded western Czechoslovakia on three sides. With the Führer screeching that he wanted to annex the Germans in the Sudetenland, too, that wasn’t good news for the little Central European democracy.

Charlie tried to make sense of the fast-breaking story. He tried to break it down into pieces that Americans in, say, Kansas, many of whom couldn’t have found Czechoslovakia on a map if their lives depended on it, might possibly understand. He feared it was a losing effort, but he did his best.

The phone on his desk jangled. He grabbed it. “Sullivan, AP.”

“Hello, Sullivan, AP. This is Sullivan, your wife. Things have started. I just called a taxi. I’m heading for the hospital.”

“Oh, God,” Charlie said. He’d known the day would come soon. But you’re never ready, especially not the first time. “Okay, hon. I’ll see you there. Love you.”

He finished the story he was working on. Luckily, he was almost done. He took it out of the typewriter and set it on his editor’s desk. Then he said, “I’m gone, boss. Esther just called. She’s on her way to the hospital. I’ll see you in a few days.”

“Okay, Charlie,” the editor said-an advantage of being able to set things up in advance. “Shame it has to happen just when all hell’s breaking loose in Europe.”

“I know, but. .” Charlie shrugged. “It’s not our fight, and it is my kid. I’ll worry about the world again when I get back.”

“I hope it all goes well for your missus and the baby,” his editor said. “And if you have a boy, for God’s sake bring in some good cigars, not the stink bombs the last couple of guys with sons handed out.”

Laughing, Charlie said, “Promise.” He grabbed his hat and topcoat and hurried away. He flagged down a cab without much trouble.

At the hospital, he filled out papers promising he wouldn’t spirit away mother and baby without paying his bills. They allowed that he would be able to pay things off on the installment plan. That would spread his pain, as opposed to Esther’s, over some considerable stretch of time. He didn’t like the installment plan, but he liked digging deep into his savings even less.

Once papers were signed and hands shaken, they led him to a waiting room. Two other almost-fathers already sat there. One looked barely old enough to shave, and was shaking in his shoes. The other, close to forty, smoked a cigarette and leafed through a magazine. “This is our sixth,” he said. “Not like we never done it before.”

“I guess not,” Charlie said. “Just my first, though.”

The guy about his age waited till the nurse went away, then pulled a half-pint of scotch from his jacket pocket. “Have a knock of this, buddy. It’ll calm you down.”

Charlie didn’t go for scotch most of the time. Today, he made an exception. “Thanks,” he said, and swigged. It tasted like medicine, the way he remembered. It was medicine right now.

By the time anyone came into the room for him, the dose had long since worn off. He’d stepped out to buy more cigarettes, having gone through the ones with him, and to eat lunch and dinner at the hospital’s sorry cafeteria. If that place was any indication, all the nasty cracks people made about hospital food were not just true but understatements.

Kid number six for his benefactor turned out to be a girl, which evened his score at 3–3. Kid number one for the nervous youngster was a boy. The nervous guy let out what had to be the closest thing to a Rebel yell since Appomattox. Another father-to-be came in and stared at the pale green walls with Mike.

Just before midnight, a tired-looking doctor came in with his face mask down around his neck and said, “Mr. Sullivan?”

“That’s me!” Charlie jumped to his feet.

“Congratulations, Mr. Sullivan. You have a fine, healthy baby girl. She’s twenty and a half inches long, and she weighs seven pounds, nine ounces. Your wife is doing well, too. She’s worn out, but that’s to be expected.”

“A girl,” Charlie said dreamily. “We’re gonna call her Sarah.”

“Yes, that’s what your wife said.” The doctor nodded.

“Can I see them?” Charlie asked.

“That’s one of the reasons I came in here. Follow me, please.” The doc held the door open so Charlie could. They walked down the hall to a room with MOTHERS AND NEWBORNS neatly stenciled over the door. The doctor opened that one, too.

Charlie went in. Esther lay on one of those hospital beds where you could crank up the top or bottom half. The top half was partway up. She had the blanket-wrapped baby cradled in her left arm, and was giving it her breast.

“How you doin’, babe?” Charlie asked, trying not to sound nervous. She looked as if she’d just run five miles and gone a few rounds with Max Schmeling. Sweat matted her hair. She was pale as cottage cheese, except for dark circles that made you think she had a mouse under each eye.

The baby, or what Charlie could see of it, didn’t look all that hot, either. Sarah was kind of pinkish purple, with squashed features and a funny-shaped head. A little hair crowned that head, but not much.

“Like I got run over by a truck, that’s how,” Esther answered. “And hungry enough to eat a horse, too. They wouldn’t give me anything except some water while I was in labor, and hardly any of that, either. They said if I had anything much in my stomach I’d throw it up.”

As if on cue, a nurse came in through a side door with a tray. The roast beef on it looked tough enough to have peeled off an auto tire. “Here you are, dear,” the nurse said, as proud as if she’d brought something that was actually good.

“Thanks,” Esther said, and then, “Can you hold the baby, Charlie, while I eat?”

“I guess so,” he said warily. The nurse helped him, showing him how to support the baby’s head. Esther attacked the overdone roast beef and squashy boiled vegetables like a lion devouring a zebra. They disappeared in nothing flat. Sarah kicked and wiggled and screwed up her face and started to cry.

“I’ll take her,” Esther said. Charlie quickly gave her back. He knew he’d get used to holding a baby, but he hadn’t done it yet. His wife went on, “You know what? That was the best lousy dinner I ever ate.”

“Our dietary department has a good reputation.” The nurse sounded offended.

Esther laughed. “Heaven help the places they’re comparing it to, in that case. But I don’t care. How long will I be here?”

“Usually a week or so, if there are no complications after birth,” the nurse replied.

“Okay. I won’t complain about the food again-promise,” Esther said. “And Charlie will have the chance to get everything ready for when I come home. . and when Sarah does.”

“Yeah.” Charlie made himself nod. When he saw the baby there in Esther’s arms, the notion of being a father turned real. A roll in the hay wasn’t always just a roll in the hay. Sometimes it had consequences nine months down the line. In a week or so, a squawky, wiggly consequence would be coming home. High school class of 1956, Charlie remembered. Try as he would, he still had trouble imagining that.

Not quite idly, he wondered whether Joe Steele would still be President.

* * *

It was April. By the calendar, it was supposed to be spring. Trees should have been turning green. Flowers should have been popping out here and there. Birds should have been singing their heads off.

As far as Mike could tell, this stretch of Montana had never heard of calendars. He couldn’t prove it knew anything about spring, either. The lodgepole pines were the same almost-black color they’d always been. No flowers. No birds except ravens and a few gray jays.

No letup from winter, either. It was still snowing, with no sign of rain or even sleet ahead. The snow was wetter now than it had been in January. It didn’t sandpaper your face the way it had when it blew then. The wind didn’t howl down out of the north quite so savagely. But it still hadn’t warmed up to even a bad New York City winter’s day.

One man from Mike’s gang got lost when they went out to chop wood in a blizzard. The guards and bloodhounds found him three days later. He was frozen hard. A couple of other wreckers had just quietly lain down on the job and died. If you gave up here, you wouldn’t last long.

Mike had been tempted now and again. Freezing seemed a pretty easy way to go. You were cold, then you stopped caring, then you were dead. It probably didn’t hurt much. You might not even have the energy to stay scared for long.

But he didn’t want to give Joe Steele the satisfaction. He wanted to get back to the world outside the labor encampments. And he wanted to spit in the President’s eye when he did.

Of course, he knew he would have to stand in a long line to get what he wanted. He also knew Joe Steele would be soaked-if not drowned-by the time he got to the front of the line. He didn’t care. He was ready to wait his turn and take his best shot when it came.

Most of the other wreckers in the labor encampment felt the same way. He knew that, even if there wasn’t a whole lot of talk about it. You never could be sure about who would squeal on you to the guards. And what the bastards who ran the encampment called willful failure to reform could add years to your stretch here. Not even the most dedicated masochist wanted that.

Most of the wreckers couldn’t stand the President, no. But there were a few. . Four or five guys in Barracks 17 were certain their sentences were just what they deserved. “I love Joe Steele,” insisted a sad-eyed little bookkeeper named Adam Bolger. “I just couldn’t do the work my firm needed from me. If that doesn’t make me a wrecker, I don’t know what would.”

“What don’t you put a fucking sock in it, Bolger?” somebody in a top-tier bunk called. “Nobody wants to listen to your shitass sob stories.”

“All of us are guilty,” Bolger said. “Nobody works as well as he ought to all the time. That makes everyone a wrecker.”

“Then they should chuck everybody into one of these goddamn encampments, let all the people see how they like it,” his critic said. “Me, I’m in here on account of some asshole told the Jeebies lies about me. Ain’t no other reason.”

Several other men chimed in with loud, obscene agreement-in the encampment, there was usually no other kind. If you admitted you’d done anything to make yourself belong here, you won the GBI’s battle for it. So Mike thought, along with the majority.

He didn’t chime in tonight. They’d be blowing out the lanterns pretty soon. He lay in his bunk, atop the joke of a mattress and under the joke of a blanket. The stove was hot, but not much warmth reached this far. The only clothes he’d taken off were his boots. They made a crappy pillow, but they were the only pillow he had-he’d wrapped his tattered Outside clothes around his feet to help keep them warm.

He yawned. He wondered how Stella was doing. Every once in a while, most of the time when he least expected them, loneliness and horniness pierced him like a stiletto. More often than not, though, he was too weary or too hungry or-most of the time-both to conjure up anything but a shadow of the feeling he knew he ought to have. The slow extinction here reminded him too much of the beginning of death.

The other choice, of course, was an extinction not so slow. A man who’d had all he could take would try to sneak through the barbed wire without trying very hard to be sneaky. Or he’d go after a guard with an axe or a rock or his bare hands. And he’d wind up dead, most of the time without laying a glove on the Jeebie. Some wreckers said guards got bonuses for killing wreckers. That, Mike didn’t believe. Were it true, a lot more of the sorry so-and-sos with numbers on their clothes would have been holding up a lily.

Even with all the snow on the ground, some optimists-or jerks, depending on how you looked at things-ran away when their work gang went out to the woods. Then, of course, the evening count was off. As soon as the count was off, the search was on. Mike had never yet heard of anybody who got away.

Some people died trying. As long as the guards found the bodies, that didn’t worry them. A body made the count work, too. Some would-be escapees realized how far they were from any human beings who didn’t live in labor encampments. They gave themselves up. That also made the count work.

As far as Mike could see, dying was better. The encampment had a punishment barracks next to the administration building. The cells there were too small to stand up or lie down in. The punishment barracks had no stoves for heat. Rations were bread and water-piss and punk, in the jailhouse slang that lay behind so much encampment lingo. They didn’t give you much, either. By the time they let you out, you were like an inner tube with a permanent slow leak.

Mike yawned again. But what could you do? Not much, not so far as he could see. John Dennison had the best way. Take it one day at a time, get through that, and then do it again when reveille sounded the next morning. Mike leaned out of his bunk for a second. He couldn’t spot the carpenter from Wyoming, not in the dim red lamplight.

A guard banged a steel bar hanging from a rope with a hammer. That was the lights-out signal. The wreckers blew out the kerosene lamps. Only the hot embers in the stove reminded the barracks that darkness wasn’t absolute. Mike thrust his hands into the pockets on his jacket to keep them as warm as he could. His eyelids came down like garage doors. He slept.

* * *

Hitler kept screaming about the Sudetenland. As far as Charlie could see, Hitler screamed about everything, like a three-year-old throwing a tantrum. Nobody’d paddled his fanny for him when he was a three-year-old, so he still thought he could get away with that kind of nonsense. The Rhineland and the Anschluss with Austria sure hadn’t shown him he was wrong.

The only way he wouldn’t jump on Czechoslovakia with both feet in hobnailed boots to get back his pet Germans was if somebody either stopped him or handed him those Germans on a silver platter. The countries that would have to stop him, if anyone did, were France and England. Neither had its heart in the job.

Joe Steele and Leon Trotsky cheered them on from the sidelines. If war broke out, Red Russia and the USA wouldn’t have to get sucked into the fighting. Russia bordered neither Czechoslovakia nor the Third Reich; Romania, Poland, and the Baltic republics shielded Trotsky from consequences. And not only the broad Atlantic but also the Western European democracies stood between the United States and the Führer.

Charlie thought it was funny that the President and the guy the papers called the Red Czar were both cheering for the same thing when they loathed each other so much. Here more than twenty years after the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik takeover, the United States still refused to recognize the Reds as Russia’s legitimate government. That pretty much meant the USA recognized nobody as overlord of the biggest country in the world. The real Czar and his family were dead, deader, deadest. Kerensky remained in exile in Paris with so many other Russian émigrés, but not even Joe Steele, Trotsky-hater though he was, could take Kerensky seriously.

Charlie thought Joe Steele and Trotsky singing in chorus was funny till Daladier and Chamberlain, instead of fighting to save Czechoslovakia, did hand Hitler the Sudetenland on a silver platter at Munich. Hitler promised it would be his last territorial demand in Europe. If he was telling the truth, wunderbar. If he wasn’t, things didn’t look so good.

But all that was a long way away. Charlie had other things on his mind, things closer to home. Sarah was teething, which left him and Esther both even lower on shuteye than usual. And a couple of more desks near him had nobody sitting behind them. Two reporters had vanished almost without a trace. Where were they now? Somewhere between New Mexico and North Dakota-that was as much as anybody knew.

His telephone rang. He picked it up. “Sullivan, AP.”

“Scriabin, White House.” The Hammer could be viciously sardonic. “The President wants to see you.”

“About what?” Charlie asked, in lieu of a gulp.

“He’ll tell you. If he wanted me to do it, I would,” Scriabin said. “Are you coming?”

“I’m on my way,” Charlie said. If the Heebie Jeebies were going to grab him, they could do it here or at his apartment. Or, of course, if Joe Steele felt like watching J. Edgar Hoover’s men in action, they could do it at the White House. But Charlie couldn’t say I don’t want to see him. The President and all his men had long memories for slights.

When Charlie got to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a steward took him up to the oval study above the Blue Room. Joe Steele sat behind that big redwood desk, puffing on his pipe. “Sullivan,” he said with an abrupt nod.

“Mr. President.” Charlie tried not to show how nervous-hell, how scared-he was. “What do you need, sir?”

“Here.” Joe Steele shoved typewritten pages across the desk at him. “I am going to issue a statement saying how wrong France and England were to appease Hitler over the Sudetenland. None of the drafts from my writers is any damn good. You throw words around. Let’s see what you can do.” He waved Charlie to the chair on the other side of the desk.

Sinking down into it, Charlie wondered what the stakes were. If Joe Steele liked what he did, would Mike come out of the labor encampment? If Joe Steele didn’t like it, would Charlie go into one and leave another AP desk vacant? Those were. . interesting questions, weren’t they?

He pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and got to work. Joe Steele was right about one thing, anyway: as it stood now, the statement was muddy and opaque. Charlie thought of himself as a good editor and polisher. Now it seemed to be put up or shut up.

The statement wasn’t very long. He spent fifteen minutes noodling and nipping and tucking. Twice, he needed to ask the President just how specific and how sharp he wanted to be. Between puffs, Joe Steele told him.

“Here you go, sir.” Charlie passed the statement back. He waited for the sky to fall.

Joe Steele put on glasses to read what he’d done. The President used them, but seldom let himself be photographed wearing them. His hair was grayer than when he first took office. After two or three minutes, he looked at Charlie over the tops of the spectacles. As always, his eyes were unreadable.

But then, out of the blue, he smiled. Like a snake with a bird, he could be charming. “This is excellent!” he said. “Much better than anything my hacks turned out. I’ll use it, or something very close to it.”

“Thank you, Mr. President,” Charlie said. The lady, not the tiger.

“How would you like to work here?” Joe Steele asked. “I can use someone who doesn’t write English like a foreign language. I’ll raise your pay two thousand dollars over what the Associated Press gives you. With a baby in the house, money comes in handy, doesn’t it?”

One brother in a labor encampment, one working in the White House? Wasn’t that insane? But what will he do if I say no? Charlie didn’t want-didn’t dare-to find out. “Thank you, sir. I’m honored,” he muttered. Honor or not, I’d still rather walk. Walking, though, wasn’t a choice Joe Steele had offered him.