In the Balance

“Okay, boss,” the colored man said, but not until the dollar bills were in his hand. He flipped open the cart’s steel lid, used a pair of tongs to dig out the greasy tamales. He blew on them to cool them off before he gave them to Fiore, something for which, in other times, the Board of Health would have come down on him like a ton of bricks.

Bobby didn’t much care for a Negro’s breath on his hot tamales, either, but kept his mouth shut. He was glad enough to have the money to buy them. When the Lizards pushed him off their whirligig flying machine, he’d had $2.27 in his pockets, and that was counting his lucky quarter. But it was enough to get him into a poker game, and endless hours on endless train and bus rides from one minor league town to the next had honed his skills sharper than those of the local boys he sat down with. More than two bills rubbed against each other in his wallet now.

He bit through corn husks into spicy tomato sauce, onions, and meat. He chewed slowly, trying to identify it a little closer than that. It wasn’t beef and it wasn’t chicken; the last tamales he’d bought, a couple of days before, had had chicken in them. These tasted different, stronger somehow, almost like kidney but not that either.

Something his father used to say, a phrase he hadn’t thought of in years, floated through his mind: times so tough, we had to eat roof rabbit. In an instant, suspicion hardened to certainty: “You son of a bitch!” he shouted, half choking because he couldn’t decide whether to swallow or spit. “That’s cat meat in there!”

The hot-tamale man didn’t waste time denying it. “What if it is?” he said. “It’s the onliest meat I got. Case you didn’t notice, mister, ain’t nobody bringin’ no food into Cairo these days.”

“I oughta beat the crap outta you, givin’ a white man cat meat,” Fiore snarled, if he hadn’t still held a tamale in each hand, he might have done it.

The threat alone should have made the Negro cringe. Cairo not only looked like a Southern town, it acted like one. Jim Crow was alive and well here. Colored children went to their own school. Their mothers were domestics, their fathers mostly longshoremen or factory hands or sharecroppers. They knew better than to disturb the powers that be.

But the hot-tamale man just stared steadily back at Bobby Fiore. “Mister, I can’t sell you what I don’ got. An’ if you beat on me, maybe I won’t hit back, though you ain’t such a real big man as that. What I do, mister, I tell the Lizards. Y’all may be white, but them Lizards, they treats all kinds o’ folks like they was niggers. White, black, don’t make no never mind to them. We ain’t free no more, but we is equal.”

Fiore gaped at him. He looked back, steady still. Then he nodded, as peaceably as if they’d been talking about the weather, and started pushing his cart up Sycamore Street. The cowbell clanked. “Hot tamales! Git yo’ hot tamales!”

Fiore looked down at the two he’d bought. His father had known hard times. He thought he had, too, but till now he’d been wrong. Hard times were when, you ate cat and were happy you had it to eat. He ate both tamales, then deliberately licked his fingers clean.

He walked farther into town. Then he heard behind him the click of Lizards’ nails on asphalt. He turned around to look. That was a mistake. The Lizards all pointed their guns at him. One made an unmistakable gesture-come here. Gulping, he came. The Lizards surrounded him. None of them came up past his shoulder, but with their weapons, that didn’t matter.

They marched him back toward their razor-blade fence. When he passed the slow-moving tamale man, the fellow just grinned. “I’ll get you if it’s the last thing I do!” Fiore shouted. The hot-tamale man laughed out loud.

6

Warsaw knew naked war again, the crack of rifles, the harsh, abrupt roar of howitzers, the screech and whine of incoming shells, the crash when they struck and the slow rumbling crumple of collapsing masonry afterward. Almost, Moishe Russie longed for the days of the sealed-off ghetto, when dying came slow rather than of a sudden. Almost.

Ironic that Jews could come and go in the whole city now, just when the whole city became a battlefield. As the Poles had fought to the last in Warsaw against vastly superior Nazi forces, so now the Germans, embattled in turn, were making Warsaw a fortress against the overwhelming might of the Lizards.

A Lizard plane screamed overhead, almost low enough to touch but too fast for antiaircraft guns to hit. Bombs fell, one after another. The explosions that followed were bigger than those the usual run of Lizard bombs produced unaided (like everyone else in Warsaw-German, Pole, or Jew-Russie had become a connoisseur of explosions); the Lizards must have set off some German ammunition.