Drive to the East

XV

Brigadier General Abner Dowling’s guards now enforced a wider perimeter around the house he was using than they had before. He wondered if they joked that he had a wide perimeter, too. He wouldn’t have been surprised. The perimeter around the place, though, was no laughing matter. It came by direct order from the War Department.

“People bombs,” Dowling said as he showed his adjutant the order. “Not just auto bombs anymore, but people bombs, too. What on God’s green earth are we coming to? That’s all I want to know.”

Captain Angelo Toricelli studied the order. “The Mormons have done this in the USA,” he said. “Negroes have done it in the CSA. It doesn’t say white Confederates have started doing it anywhere.”

“If they haven’t, it’s only a matter of time till they do,” Dowling said gloomily. “If you think the Freedom Party doesn’t have people who’d martyr themselves for St. Featherston, you’re out of your tree. Plenty of fanatics who’d thank him for the chance to blow up a damnyankee or three. Go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong. I dare you.”

“I wish I could, sir.” Toricelli sounded mournful, too. He went on, “I don’t think the world is ever going to be the same. From now on, if you’re in a big city or if you’re in politics or the military, you won’t be able to go down to the corner diner for a cup of coffee or a ham on rye without wondering whether the quiet fellow in the next booth is going to blow himself to hell and gone-and you along with him.”

“You’re in a cheerful mood today, aren’t you?” But Dowling feared the younger officer was right-dead right. “One thing consoles me, anyhow.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“Bound to be more people who want to blow up Jake Featherston than ones who want to see me dead bad enough to kill themselves to get me.”

“Sir, I believe they call that a dubious distinction.”

“And I believe you’re right.” Dowling laughed, but on a note not far from despair. “What is the world coming to, Captain? Just before the war started, I listened to a fellow named Litvinoff going on and on about nerve agents-he wouldn’t call them gases. He was happy as a clam in chowder, you know what I mean?”

“Oh, yes, sir.” Toricelli nodded. “I’ve met people like that. It’s their toy, and they don’t care what it does, as long as it does what it’s supposed to.”

“That’s right. That’s exactly right.” Dowling nodded, too. “And now this. Is there anything we won’t do to each other?”

Toricelli considered that. “I don’t know, sir. I’m not sure I’m the right person to ask,” he said. “Don’t you think you ought to talk to one of the Negroes in a Freedom Party camp instead? But ask fast, while there are still some left.”

“Ouch!” Abner Dowling winced. “Well, you got me there. Maybe I ought to put it a different way: aren’t there some things we shouldn’t do to each other?”

“We’ve got the Geneva Convention,” Toricelli said.

“It doesn’t talk about people bombs,” Dowling said. “It doesn’t talk about those camps, either. It doesn’t talk about gas, come to that. Nobody wanted to talk about gas when they were hammering it out, because everybody figured he might need it again one of these days.”

Now Toricelli eyed Dowling with a certain bemusement. “You’re just about as cheerful as I am, aren’t you, sir?”

“I’m as cheerful as I ought to be,” Dowling answered. He looked out the window. An auto painted U.S. green-gray was coming up to his headquarters. The guards stopped it before it got too close. Anybody could paint a motorcar. Who was inside mattered far more than what color it was.

But the driver seemed to satisfy the guards. He got out of the Chevrolet and hurried toward the building. “I’ll see what he wants, sir,” Captain Toricelli said.

“Thanks,” Dowling told him.

His adjutant returned a few minutes later with the man from the auto-a sergeant. “He’s from the War Department, sir,” Toricelli said. “Says he’s got orders for you from Philadelphia.”

“Well, then, he’d better give them to me, eh?” Dowling did his best not to show worry. Orders from Philadelphia could blow up in his face almost as nastily as a people bomb. He could be cashiered. He could be summoned before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War again-and wasn’t even once cruel and unusual punishment? He could be ordered back to the War Department to do something useless again. The possibilities were endless. The good possibilities seemed much more sharply limited.

“Here you are, sir,” the sergeant said.

Dowling opened the orders and put on his reading glasses. If this noncom had orders to report on how he took bad news, he was damned if he’d give the man any satisfaction. Wounded soldiers bit back screams for the same reason.

He skimmed through the orders, blinked, and read them again more slowly. “Well, well,” he said when he’d finished.

“May I ask, sir?” Captain Toricelli was sensitive to everything that might go wrong. What hurt Dowling’s career could hurt his, too.

“I’ve been relieved of this command. I’ve been transferred,” Dowling said.

Toricelli nodded. Like Dowling, he didn’t want to show a stranger his wounds hurt. “Transferred where, sir?” he asked, trying to find out how badly he was hit.

“To Clovis, New Mexico, which is, I gather, near the Texas border,” Dowling answered. He couldn’t keep the amazement out of his voice as he went on, “They’ve appointed me commander of the Eleventh Army there. They want somebody to remind the Confederates there’s a war on in those parts. And-”

“Yes, sir?” Toricelli broke in, eyes glowing. He might have been a soldier who’d discovered a bullet had punched a hole in his tunic without punching a hole in him.

“And they’ve given me a second star, Major Toricelli,” Major General Abner Dowling said. He and Toricelli shook hands.

“Congratulations, sir,” the sergeant from the War Department said to Dowling. The man turned to Toricelli. “Congratulations to you, too, sir.”

“Thank you,” Dowling said, at the same time as Toricelli was saying, “Thank you very much.” Dowling went back to his desk and pulled out the half pint. He eyed how much was left in the bottle. “About enough for three good slugs,” he said as he undid the cap. He raised the little bottle. “Here’s to Clovis, by God, New Mexico.” He drank and passed it to Angelo Toricelli.

“To Clovis!” Toricelli also drank, and passed it to the sergeant. “Here you go, pal. Kill it.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” the noncom said. “To Clovis!” He tilted his head back. His Adam’s apple worked. “Ah! That hits the spot, all right. Much obliged to you both.” He would still have a story to tell when he got back to the War Department, but it wouldn’t be one of frustration and rage and despair. Sergeants didn’t drink with generals-or even majors-every day.

One swig of whiskey didn’t turn him into a drunk. He drove off toward Philadelphia. That left Dowling and his adjutant in a pleasant sort of limbo. “What the deuce is going on in New Mexico?” Toricelli asked.

“All I know is what I read in the newspapers, and you don’t read much about New Mexico there.” Dowling figured he was heading to Clovis to fix that, or try. “Only thing I can really recall is that bombing raid on Fort Worth and Dallas a few months ago.”

“Probably a good idea to find out before we get there,” Toricelli said.

“Probably,” Dowling agreed. He was sure that never would have occurred to George Custer. Custer would have charged right in and started slugging with the enemy, regardless of what was going on beforehand. Nine times out of ten, he and everyone around him would soon have regretted it. The tenth time… The tenth time, he would have ended up a national hero. Dowling didn’t make nearly so many blunders as his former boss. He feared he would never become a national hero, though. His sense of caution was too well developed.

“I’m sure we’ll stop in Philadelphia on our way to Clovis,” his adjutant said. “The War Department can brief us there.” Captain-no, Major-Toricelli had a well-developed sense of caution, too.

Not even the stars on his shoulder straps kept Dowling from being searched before he got into the War Department. “Sorry, sir,” said the noncom who did the job. “Complain to the Chief of Staff if you want to. Rule is, no exceptions.”

Dowling didn’t intend to complain. As far as he could see, the rule made good sense. “How many people bombs have you had?” he asked.

“Inside here? None,” the sergeant answered. “In Philadelphia? I think the count is five right now.”

“Jesus!” Dowling said. The man who was patting him down nodded sadly.

He felt like saying Jesus! again when he got a look at the situation map for the Texas-New Mexico border. The so-called Eleventh Army had a division and a half-an understrength corps-to cover hundreds of miles of frontier. The bombers that had plastered Dallas and Fort Worth had long since been withdrawn to more active fronts.

Only one thing relieved his gloom: the Confederates he was facing were just as bad off as he was. Where he had a division and a half under his command, his counterpart in butternut commanded a scratch division, and somebody had been scratching at it pretty hard. Dowling thought he could drive the enemy a long way.

After studying the map, he wondered why he ought to bother. If he advanced fifty miles into Texas, even a hundred miles into Texas-well, so what? What had he won except fifty or a hundred empty, dusty miles? All those wide-open spaces were the best shield the Confederacy had. Advance fifty or a hundred miles into Virginia and the CSA staggered. Advance fifty or a hundred miles into Kentucky and you cut the enemy off from the Ohio River and took both farming and factory country. Texas wasn’t like that. There was a lot of it, and nobody had done much with a lot of what there was.

“Are you sending me out there to do things myself, or just to keep the Confederates from doing things?” he asked a General Staff officer.

That worthy also studied the map. “For now, the first thing is to make sure the Confederates don’t do anything,” he replied. “If they take Las Cruces, people will talk. If they go crazy and take Santa Fe and Albuquerque, I’d say your head would roll.”

“They’d need a devil of a lot of reinforcements to do that,” Dowling said, and the colonel with the gold-and-black arm-of-service colors didn’t deny it. Dowling went on, “They’d have to be nuts, too, because even taking Albuquerque won’t do a damn thing about winning them the war.”

“Looks that way to me, too,” the colonel said.

“All right, then-we’re on the same page, anyhow,” Dowling said. “Now, the next obvious question is, who do I have to kill to get reinforcements of my own?”

“Well, sir, till we settle the mess in Pennsylvania, you could murder everybody here and everybody in Congress and you still wouldn’t get any,” the General Staff officer said gravely. That struck Dowling as a reasonable assessment, too. The colonel added, “I hope you’ll be able to hold on to the force you’ve got. I don’t promise, but I hope so.”

“All right. You seem honest, anyhow. I’ll do what I can,” Dowling said.

When he headed to the Broad Street Station for the roundabout journey west, he discovered fall had ousted summer while he wasn’t looking. The temperature had dropped ten or twelve degrees while he was visiting the War Department. The breeze was fresh, and came from the northwest. Gray clouds scudded along on it. No red and gold leaves on trees, no brown leaves blowing, not yet, but that breeze said they were on their way.

Home. Cincinnatus Driver had never imagined a more wonderful word. While he lived in it, the apartment in Des Moines had seemed ordinary-just another place, one where he could hang his hat. After almost two years away, after being stuck in a country that hated his-and hated him, too-that apartment seemed the most wonderful place in the world.

The apartment and the neighborhood seemed even more amazing to his father. “Do Jesus!” Seneca Driver said. “It’s like I ain’t a nigger no more. Don’t hardly know how to act when the ofay down at the corner store treat me like I’s a man.”

Cincinnatus smiled. “It’s like that here. I tried to tell you, but you didn’t want to believe me.” Of course one reason it was like that was that Des Moines didn’t have very many Negroes: not enough for whites to flabble about. The United States as a whole didn’t have very many. Cincinnatus’ smile slipped. The USA didn’t want many Negroes, either. That left most of them stuck in the CSA, and at the tender mercy of Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party.

No such gloom troubled his father. “Bought me a pack of cigarettes, an’ I give the clerk half a dollar. An’ he give me my change, an’ he say to me, ‘Here you is, sir.’ Sir! Ain’t nobody never call me ‘sir’ in all my born days, but he do it. Sir!” He might have been walking on air. Then something else occurred to him. “That clerk, he call a Chinaman ‘sir,’ too?”

“Reckon so,” Cincinnatus answered. “What color you are don’t matter-so much-here. Achilles and Amanda, they both graduated from high school. You reckon that happen in Kentucky? And you got yourself two grandbabies that are half Chinese, and another one on the way. You reckon that happen in Kentucky?”

“Not likely!” His father snorted at the idea. “I seen Chinamen in the moving pictures before, but I don’t reckon I ever seen one in the flesh in Covington. Now I ain’t just seen ’em-I got ’em in the family!” He thought himself a man of the world because of that.

“They’ve got you in the family, too,” Cincinnatus said. Achilles’ wife, the former Grace Chang, really seemed to like Cincinnatus’ father, and to be glad Cincinnatus himself was home. Her parents had much less trouble curbing their enthusiasm. They weren’t thrilled about being tied to Achilles or Cincinnatus or Seneca. The funny thing was, they would have been just about as dismayed if the Drivers were white. What bothered them was that their daughter had married somebody who wasn’t Chinese.

“They is welcome in my family, long as they make that good beer,” Seneca Driver said. Cincinnatus nodded. Homebrew mattered in Iowa, a thoroughly dry state. He first got to know Joey Chang because of the beer his upstairs neighbor brewed. Achilles and Grace got to know each other in school. The rest? Well, the rest just happened.

Cincinnatus wondered how the Freedom Party would look at that marriage. Who was miscegenating with whom? He didn’t have to worry about that here. He didn’t have to worry about all kinds of things here, things that would have been matters of life and death in the Confederate States. He could look at a white woman without fearing he might get lynched. He didn’t much want to-he’d always been happy with Elizabeth-but he could. He could testify in court on equal terms with whites-and with Chinese, for that matter. And…

“You’re a U.S. citizen, Pa,” he said suddenly. “Once you’ve lived in Iowa long enough to be a resident, you can vote.”

His father was less delighted than he’d expected. “Done did that once in Kentucky,” Seneca Driver replied. “There was that plebiscite thing, remember? I done voted, but they went ahead an’ gave her back to the CSA anyways.” He plainly thought that, since he’d voted, things should have gone the way he wanted them. Cincinnatus wished the world worked like that.

Elizabeth came out of the kitchen and into the front room. “You two hungry?” she asked. “Got some fried chicken in the icebox I can bring you.” She thought Cincinnatus and his father were nothing but skin and bones. Since they’d eaten too much of their own cooking down in Covington, she might have been right.

“I would like that. Thank you kindly,” Seneca said. Cincinnatus nodded, but he was less happy than his father sounded. To Seneca Driver, his son’s family seemed rich. Compared to anything the older man had had in Kentucky, they were. But Cincinnatus knew money didn’t grow on trees, and neither did chickens. Elizabeth had done cooking and cleaning to make ends meet while he was stuck in Covington. Achilles had helped out, too. All the same…

Cincinnatus knew his hauling business was dead. His wife had sold the Ford truck he’d been so proud of. He didn’t blame her for that; if she couldn’t pay the rent, the landlord would have thrown her out onto the street. But he didn’t have enough money to buy another one. He wasn’t going to be his own boss anymore. He would have to work for somebody else, and he hadn’t done that since the end of the Great War. He hated the idea, but he didn’t know what he could do about it.

Were there jobs for a middle-aged black man with a bad leg and a none too good shoulder? There, for once, Cincinnatus wasn’t so worried. With the war sucking able-bodied men out of the workforce, there were jobs for all the people who wanted them. He’d seen how many factories and shops had NOW HIRING signs out where folks could see them. Women were doing jobs that had been a man’s preserve before the war. He figured he could find something.

Elizabeth came back with a drumstick for his father, a thigh for him, and two more glasses of beer. “You holler if you want anything else,” she said. She swung her hips as she walked off. In some ways, Cincinnatus was glad to discover, he wasn’t crippled at all. His homecoming had been everything he hoped it would be along those lines.

“Sure is good,” his father said, taking a big bite out of the chicken leg and washing it down with a sip of Mr. Chang’s homebrew. “They always said folks in the USA had it good. I see they was right.”

All he had to do was enjoy it. He didn’t have to worry about where it came from. For the past couple of years, Elizabeth had done that. Cincinnatus was sure she’d done a lot of worrying, too. But she’d managed. Now that Cincinnatus was finally home, the worrying fell on his shoulders again.

He’d hoped the government would help him out. No such luck. To those people, he’d been in Kentucky on his own affairs, and never mind that the plebiscite and its aftermath were what had stuck him there.

Amanda came into the apartment. She’d found work at a fabric plant, and her paycheck was helping with the bills now, too. She smiled at Cincinnatus and Seneca. “Hello, Dad! Hello, Grandpa!” she said, and kissed them both on the cheek. She’d always got on better with Cincinnatus than Achilles had. There was none of that young goat bumping up against old goat rivalry that sometimes soured things between Cincinnatus and his son.

“How are you, sweetheart?” he asked her.

She made a face. “Tired. Long shift.”

Seneca laughed. “Welcome to the world, dear heart. You better git used to it, on account o’ it gonna be like dat till God call you to heaven.”

“I suppose.” Amanda sighed. “I wish I could have gone on to college. I’d be able to get a really good job with a college degree.”

“Lawd!” The mere idea startled Cincinnatus’ father. “A child o’ my child in college? That woulda been somethin’, all right.”

“Even if you had started college, hon, reckon you would’ve gone to work anyways with things like they were,” Cincinnatus said. “Sometimes you just can’t help doin’ what you got to do.”

“I suppose,” his daughter said again. She went into the kitchen to say hello to Elizabeth. When she came back, she had a glass of beer in her hand.

Cincinnatus raised an eyebrow when she sipped from it. “When did you start drinking beer?” he asked.

“I knew you were going to say that!” Amanda stuck out her tongue at him. “I knew it! I started about a year ago. I needed a while to get used to it, but I like it now.”

Cincinnatus smiled, remembering how sour beer had tasted to him the first few times he tasted it. “All right, sweetheart,” he said mildly. “I ain’t gonna flabble about it. You’re big enough. You can drink beer if you want to. But when I went away, you didn’t.” He didn’t want to get upset about anything, not here, not now. He was so glad to see his daughter, he wouldn’t worry about anything past that.

She looked relieved. “I was afraid you’d get all upset, say it wasn’t ladylike or something.”

“Not me.” He shook his head. “How could I do that when your mama’s been drinkin’ beer a whole lot longer’n you’ve been alive?”

“You could have,” Amanda said darkly. “Some people think what’s fine for older folks isn’t so fine for younger ones.”

So there, Cincinnatus thought. “Yeah, some people do that,” he admitted. “But I ain’t one of them.” He listened to the way his words sounded compared to those of the people around him. After so many years in Iowa, he’d seemed more than half a Yankee whenever he opened his mouth in Covington. But Amanda and Achilles had taken on much more of the flat Midwestern accent of Des Moines than he had. Next to them, he sounded like… a Negro who’d just escaped from the Confederate States. Well, I damn well am.

“When I was jus’ a li’l pickaninny-this here was back in slavery days-my pa give me my first sip o’ beer,” his father said in an accent far thicker and less educated than his own. He screwed up his face at the memory. “I axed him, ‘Am I pizened?’ An’ he tol’ me no, an’ he was right, but I done pizened myself with beer a time or two since. Yes, suh, a time or two.”

“Oh, yeah.” Cincinnatus remembered times when he’d poisoned himself, too, some of them not so long ago. He wondered how the Brass Monkey and the dedicated drinkers-and checker-players-who made it a home away from home were doing. Already, the time when he was stuck in Covington was starting to seem like a bad dream. He remembered waking up in the hospital. If only that were a bad dream! The pain in his leg and shoulder and the headaches he still sometimes got reminded him it was all too real.

He still didn’t remember the motorcar hitting him. The doctors had told him he never would. They seemed to be right. From what they said, lots of folks didn’t remember what happened when they had a bad accident. If his were any worse, they would have planted him with a lily on his chest.

“Glad you’re home, Dad,” Amanda said. Dad. There it was again. Down in Covington, she would surely have called him Pa. She had called him Pa for years. When had she changed to this Yankee usage? Whenever it was, he hadn’t particularly noticed-till he went away and came back and got his nose rubbed in it.

“I’m glad I’m home, too,” Cincinnatus said. When you got right down to it, he didn’t much care what she called him. As long as she could call him anything and he was there to hear it, nothing else mattered.

He thought about the Brass Monkey again, and about Lucullus Wood’s barbecue place, and about his father and mother’s house, now empty and, for all he knew, standing open to the wind and the rain. And he thought about the barbed wire and the guards around Covington’s colored quarter. Autumn was coming to Des Moines, but winter lived in his heart when he remembered that barbed wire.

Allegheny. Monongahela. Beautiful names for rivers. Even Ohio wasn’t a bad name for a river. When you put the three of them together, though, they added up to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh hadn’t been beautiful for a long time. The way things looked to Tom Colleton, it would never be beautiful again.

The damnyankees were not going to give up this town without a fight. They poured men into it to battle block by block, house by house. Crossing a street could be and often was worth a man’s life. Barrels came in and knocked houses flat and machine-gunned the men who fled from the ruins. Then some damnyankee they hadn’t machine-gunned threw a Featherston Fizz through an open hatch and turned a barrel into an iron coffin for the men inside. And then a counterattack went in and threw the Confederates back six blocks.

Somebody not far away started banging on a shell casing with a wrench or a hammer or whatever he had handy. “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Tom said, and grabbed for his gas mask. The weather seemed to have broken; it wasn’t so hot and sticky as it had been. But the gas mask was never any fun. If U.S. artillery was throwing in nerve gas, he’d have to put on the full rubber suit. He’d be sweating rivers in that even in a blizzard.

Confederate shells crashed down on the factories and steel mills ahead. The bursts sent up smoke that joined the horrid stuff belching from the tall stacks. Air in Pittsburgh was already poisonous even without phosgene and mustard gas and the nerve agents. They called the thick brown eye-stinging mix smog, jamming together smoke and fog. What they got was more noxious than the made-up word suggested, though.

Tom wouldn’t have wanted to work in one of those places with shells bursting all around. But the factories kept operating till they burned or till the Confederates overran them. Trucks and trains took steel and metalware of all kinds east. Barges took them up the Allegheny, too. Confederate artillery and dive bombers made the Yankees pay a heavy price for what came out of the mills and factories. Some of it got through, though, and they must have thought that was worthwhile.

Barrels painted butternut ground forward. Telling streets from blocks of houses wasn’t so easy anymore. Confederate-occupied Pittsburgh was nothing but a rubble field these days. The whole town would look like that by the time Tom’s countrymen finished driving out the damnyankees… if they ever did.

A machine gun fired at the barrels from the cover of a ruined clothing store. Bullets clanged off the snorting machines’ armor. Tom didn’t know why machine gunners banged away at barrels; they couldn’t hurt them. Bang away they did, though. He wasn’t sorry. The more bullets they aimed at the barrels, the fewer they’d shoot at his foot soldiers, whom they really could hurt.

Traversing turrets had a ponderous grace. Three swung together, till their big guns bore on that malevolently winking eye of fire. The cannons spoke together, too. More of the battered shop fell in on itself. But the machine gun opened up again, like a small boy yelling, Nyah! Nyah! You missed me! when bigger kids chucked rocks at him. The crew had nerve.

All they got for their courage was another volley, and then another. After that, the gun stayed quiet. Had the barrels put it out of action, or was it playing possum? Tom hoped his men wouldn’t find out the hard way.

And then, for a moment, he forgot all about the machine gun, something an infantry officer hardly ever did. But a round from a U.S. barrel he hadn’t seen slammed into the side of one of the butternut behemoths. The Confederate barrel started to burn. Hatches popped open. Men dashed for cover. The U.S. barrel was smart. It didn’t machine-gun them and reveal its position. It just waited.

The other two C.S. barrels turned in the general direction from which that enemy round had come. If the U.S. barrel was one of the old models, their sloped front armor would defeat its gun even at point-blank range. But it wasn’t. It was one of the new ones with the big, homely turret that housed a bigger, nastier cannon. And when that gun roared again, another Confederate barrel died. This time, several soldiers pointed toward the muzzle flash. By the time the last C.S. barrel in the neighborhood brought its gun to bear, though, the damnyankee machine had pulled back. Tom Colleton got glimpses of it as it retreated, but only glimpses. The butternut barrel didn’t have a clear shot at it, and held fire.

He sent men forward to keep the enemy from bringing barrels into that spot again. He was only half surprised when the machine gun in the ruined store opened up again. His men were quick to take cover, too. He didn’t think the machine gun got any of them. He hoped not, anyway.

The Confederate barrel sent several more rounds into the haberdashery. The machine gun stayed quiet. Ever so cautious, soldiers in butternut inched closer. One of them tossed in a grenade and went in after it. Tom wished he had a man with a flamethrower handy. The last fellow who’d carried one had got incinerated along with his rig a few days earlier, though. No replacement for him had come forward yet.

Not enough replacements of any kind were coming forward. Little by little, the regiment was melting away. Tom didn’t know what to do about that, except hope it got pulled out of the line for rest and refit before too long. However much he hoped, he didn’t expect that would happen soon. The Confederates needed Pittsburgh. They’d already put just about everybody available up at the front.

After a minute or so, the soldier came out of the wreckage with his thumb up. There was one damnyankee machine gun that wouldn’t murder anybody else. Now-how many hundreds, how many thousands, more waited in Pittsburgh? The answer was too depressing to think about, so Tom didn’t.

One thing he hadn’t seen in Pittsburgh: yellowish khaki Mexican uniforms. The Mexicans hadn’t done badly in Ohio and Pennsylvania, but they weren’t the first team, and everybody knew it. They held the flanks once the Confederates went through and cleared out the Yankees. They were plenty good enough for that, and it let the Confederates pile more of their own troops into the big fight.

A rifle shot rang out. A bullet struck sparks from the bricks just behind the head of the soldier who’d thrown the grenade. He hit the dirt. Three other Confederates pointed in three different directions, which meant nobody’d seen where the shot came from. The machine gun might be gone, but the Yankees hadn’t given up the fight for this block. It didn’t seem as if they would till they were all dead.

Down in the CSA, some people-mostly those who hadn’t been through the Great War-still believed U.S. soldiers were nothing but a pack of cowards. Tom laughed as he ducked down into a shell hole to shed his mask and smoke a cigarette-he didn’t turn blue and keel over, so it was safe enough. And much better not to let the match or the coal give the damnyankee sniper a target. He just wished Confederate propaganda were true. Pittsburgh would have fallen long since.

A runner came skittering back to him, calling his name. “Here I am!” he shouted, not raising his head. “What’s up?”

“Sir, there’s a Yankee with a flag of truce right up at the front,” the runner replied. “Wants to know if he can come back and dicker a truce for the wounded.”

The last time a U.S. officer proposed something like that, he’d scouted out the C.S. positions as he moved with his white flag. The damnyankees kept the truce, but they knew just where to strike after it ended. Tom threw down the half-finished smoke. “I’ll meet the son of a bitch at the line,” he growled.

He made his own flag of truce from a stick and a pillowcase, then went up with the runner. The truce already seemed to be informally under way. Firing had stopped. Confederates were swapping packs of cigarettes for U.S. ration cans. Both sides deplored that. Neither could do anything about it. Commerce trumped orders. The Yankees had better canned goods and worse tobacco, the Confederates the opposite.

A U.S. captain in a dirty uniform waited for Tom. “I could have come to you,” the man remarked.

Colleton smiled a crooked smile. “I bet you could,” he said, and explained why he didn’t want the Yankee back of his lines.

“I wouldn’t do a thing like that,” the U.S. officer said, much too innocently. “And I’m sure you wouldn’t, either.”

“Who, me?” Tom said with another smile like the first. The U.S. captain matched it. They’d been through the mill, all right. Tom got down to business: “Is an hour long enough, or do you want two?”

“Split the difference?” the damnyankee suggested, and Tom nodded. The captain looked at his watch. “All right, Lieutenant-Colonel. Truce till 1315, then?”

“Agreed.” Tom stuck out his hand. The U.S. captain shook it. They both turned back to their own men and shouted out the news. Corpsmen from both sides came forward. Ordinary soldiers did some more trading. Somebody had a football. C.S. and U.S. soldiers tossed it back and forth. Tom remembered the 1914 Christmas truce, when the Great War almost unraveled. He knew that wouldn’t happen here. Both sides meant it now.

Corpsmen poked around through rubble. They called outside of smashed houses. Sometimes they got answers from smashed people trapped inside. Soldiers helped move wreckage so the medics could do their job. When U.S. corpsmen found wounded C.S. soldiers, they gave them back to the Confederates. Corpsmen in butternut returned the favor for the Yankees.

Tom and the officer in green-gray-his name was Julian Nesmith-hadn’t agreed to that, but neither of them tried to stop it. “Won’t change how things end up one way or the other,” Nesmith remarked.

“I was thinking the same thing about smokes and grub a little while ago,” Tom agreed. He’d handed Captain Nesmith a couple of packs of Raleighs, and was now the proud possessor of two cans of deviled ham, a delicacy esteemed on both sides of the front. His mouth watered. If he could scrounge up some eggs… Even if he couldn’t, the ham would be a treat.

“We might as well be comfortable as we can while we slaughter each other,” Nesmith said.

“We’re enemies,” Tom said simply. “You won’t make me believe the United States wants to do anything but to squash my country, and I don’t expect I can persuade you the Confederate States aren’t full of villains.”

“It wouldn’t matter if you did,” Nesmith answered. “As long as you’ve got villains at the top, all they have to do is shout loud enough to make everybody else go along.”

That came close to hitting below the belt. Tom hadn’t much cared to listen to Jake Featherston on the wireless at all hours of the day and night. But Jake Featherston had got Kentucky and Houston back into the CSA after the damnyankees stole them at gunpoint in 1917. The Whigs hadn’t come close to managing that. Featherston was doing something about the Negroes in the Confederate States, too. The Whigs hadn’t known what to do. And so…

“Who’s a villain and who isn’t depends on how you look at things,” Tom said.

“Sometimes,” Julian Nesmith replied.

They shook hands again when the truce ended. Corpsmen disappeared. Men got back under cover. Almost ceremoniously, a U.S. soldier fired a Springfield to warn anybody who hadn’t got the word. In that same spirit, a Confederate soldier answered with one round from a Tredegar.

Then another Confederate squeezed off a burst from his automatic rifle. A U.S. machine gun opened up. Tom sighed. The little peace had been nice while it lasted.

Salt Lake City wasn’t hell, but you could see it from there. Armstrong Grimes peered toward the rubble of the Mormon Temple-twice built and now twice destroyed. He peered very cautiously. All the Mormons still fighting were veterans. Some of them were veterans of two uprisings. Show any body part, and they’d put a bullet through it faster than you could say Jack Robinson.

Armstrong wondered who the hell Jack Robinson was. He also wondered how life would change now that he was a sergeant instead of a corporal. He’d hesitated before sewing the new stripes onto his sleeve. The Mormons’ snipers liked to pick off officers and noncoms.

Yossel Reisen had two stripes now. He wore them, too. Their promotions both came through while the regiment was in reserve in Thistle. Somebody must have thought they were on the ball when that woman blew herself up in Provo. All Armstrong knew was that the two of them hadn’t got badly hurt when the people bomb went off, and afterward he’d done what anybody else would have. That must have been enough to impress one officer or another.

He turned to Reisen, who crouched behind a stone fence not far away. “You hear the skinny last night?” he said. “They figure Sergeant Stowe’s gonna make it.”

“Yeah, somebody told me.” Yossel nodded. “I would’ve thought he was a goner for sure. He looked like hell.”

“Boy, didn’t he?” Armstrong said.

“He’s lucky.”

“Hunh-unh.” Now Armstrong shook his head. “We’re lucky. We didn’t catch shrapnel. We aren’t in the hospital with our guts all messed up. If Stowe was lucky, he’d still be here, same as we are. Instead, he’s in a bed somewhere, and they probably have to shoot morphine into him all the goddamn time. Belly wounds are supposed to hurt like anything.”

His vehemence surprised him. It must have surprised Yossel Reisen, too. Armstrong didn’t usually argue with him. Yossel was older and more experienced, even if he didn’t care about rank. Here, though, Armstrong couldn’t keep quiet. And after a few seconds, Yossel nodded. “Well, you’re right,” he said. “He’s alive, and that’s good, but he still isn’t lucky.”

“There you go,” Armstrong said. “That’s how it looks to me, too.”

“Sarge! Hey, Sarge!” somebody yelled.

Armstrong needed a moment to remember that meant him. “Yeah? What is it?” he said, a beat slower than he should have.

“Mormon coming up with a flag of truce.”

Firing had died away. Armstrong hadn’t noticed that, either. He felt as far down on sleep as he had before his regiment got R and R. Cautiously, he stuck his head up again. Sure as hell, here came a Mormon in what the rebels used for a uniform: chambray shirt, dungarees, and boots. “Hold it right there, buddy, or you’ll never know how your favorite serial comes out on the wireless!” Armstrong yelled.

The Mormon waved the white flag. “I want to talk to an officer. I mean no harm.”

“Yeah, now tell me another one,” Armstrong said. “How do I know you’re not a goddamn people bomb waiting to go off?”

“Because I say I am not,” the rebel answered. “I am a major in the Army of the State of Deseret.” Armstrong could hear the capital letters thud into place.

Capital letters didn’t impress him. “And I’m the Queen of the May,” he said. “You want to come forward?” He waited for the Mormon to nod, then made a peremptory gesture. “Strip. Show me you’re not loaded with fucking TNT.”

If looks could kill… But they couldn’t, and TNT might. Fuming, the Mormon major shed his boots, his jeans, and his shirt. He even took off his Stetson. That left him in a peculiar-looking undershirt and longish drawers. It was getting toward long-underwear time-nights were downright chilly-but it hadn’t got there yet. The strange getup didn’t particularly bother Armstrong; he’d seen it on other Mormons. Some sort of religious rule said they had to wear it.

That didn’t mean he had to trust it. “Lift up the shirt,” he called. “The drawers are snug enough-don’t bother with those.” The Mormon did, showing a hard belly covered with hair a shade darker than the blond hair on his head. Armstrong waved to him. “Now turn around.” After the rebel did, Armstrong reluctantly nodded. “All right. Looks like you’re clean. Put your stuff back on and come ahead.”

As the Mormon major dressed, he said, “I ought to complain to your officers.”

“Go ahead, buddy,” Armstrong said. “You think they’ll come down on me? I think they’ll pat me on the back. They don’t trust you people any further than I do, and I don’t trust you at all.”

“Believe me, we feel the same way about you,” the Mormon said, bending to tie his bootlaces. “If you would only leave us alone-”

“If you hadn’t risen up, I’d be back east somewhere with Confederates trying to shoot me,” Armstrong said. “And you’d be here in Utah, happy as a goddamn clam. They didn’t even conscript you people.”

“We want to be free. We want to be independent,” the Mormon said as he picked up his white flag. “What’s so wicked about that?” He came toward the U.S. lines.

Armstrong laughed a dirty laugh. “You want to have lots of wives. Are they all in the same bed when you screw ’em? Does one lick your balls while another one gets on top?”

The Mormon’s jaw set. “It’s a good thing I don’t know your name, Sergeant.” He walked past Armstrong as if he didn’t exist. Armstrong called for a couple of privates to take him back toward the rear.

“He’s going to put you on a list even if he doesn’t know your name,” Yossel said. “You’ll be the sergeant in so-and-so sector, and those bastards will be gunning for you.”

“Big fucking deal.” Armstrong laughed again. “Easy enough to get shot around here even when the bastards aren’t gunning for you. Won’t make a whole hell of a lot of difference one way or the other.”

“You better hope it won’t.” Yossel seemed willing to look on the gloomy side of life.

“Screw it. Nobody’s even shooting right now.” Armstrong lived for, and in, the moment. The less you thought about all the horrible things that had happened, the horrible things that would happen, and the horrible things that might happen, the better off you were.

After a bit, Captain Lloyd Deevers came over and got down in the hole with him. Armstrong liked Deevers a lot better than Lieutenant Streczyk, who ran the platoon. Deevers actually had a pretty good idea of what he was doing. He nodded to Armstrong now and said, “I don’t think that Mormon likes you.”

“Now ask me if I care, sir,” Armstrong answered. “I don’t like him, either.”

Deevers chuckled. “All right. I’m not going to flabble about it-except if you want to transfer to some other outfit on the line, I won’t say no.”

“No, thanks, sir. I already told Reisen I can stop one as easy somewhere else as I can here,” Armstrong said. Captain Deevers grinned and slapped him on the back. Armstrong asked, “Did that Mormon say why he wanted the truce?”

“Not to me,” Deevers answered. “He wanted to talk to the high mucky-mucks. I passed him back to Division HQ, and we’ll see what they do with him. If I had to guess, I’d say he wants to dicker a surrender that isn’t really a surrender, if you know what I mean. But that’s only a guess.”

“Good fucking luck, uh, sir,” Armstrong said. Lloyd Deevers laughed.

“He would have had a better chance before they started blowing themselves up,” Yossel said. “If we let ’em off the hook now, it’s like they screwed it out of us. And if they want something else, they’ll think all they have to do is use a few more people bombs to make us give in.”

“That’s how it looks to me, too, especially since we’ve almost got ’em licked,” Armstrong said.

“Well, boys, I won’t argue with either one of you, ’cause I think you’re dead right,” Deevers said. “But it isn’t up to me, any more than it’s up to you. We’ll see what the fellows with the stars on their shoulders have to say-and maybe the fellows in the cutaway coats, too.”

“They’ll screw it up,” Armstrong predicted. “They always do.” He waved a hand at the devastation all around. The wreckage and the smell of corpses might not prove his point, but they didn’t come out and call him a liar, either.

Captain Deevers just shrugged. “Like I told you, I can’t do anything about it, either. I suppose what they decide to do here depends a lot on how things look in Pennsylvania and up in Canada.”

That made sense. Armstrong might have been happier if it didn’t. Soldiers in Utah didn’t hear much news from Pennsylvania. Not hearing news was a bad sign all by itself. When things went right, nobody on the wireless would shut up about it. That same ominous quiet came out of Canada. For all Armstrong knew, hordes of pissed-off Canucks were swarming over the border toward Minneapolis and Seattle.

“We’re off in the back of beyond,” Yossel said. “Nobody tells us anything.”

“Wonder how much news about us gets out,” Captain Deevers said musingly.

“You ought to ask your aunt,” Armstrong told Yossel. He kept an eye on the company CO as he spoke. Deevers didn’t blink. He was fairly new to the unit, but he knew it had a VIP’s nephew.

Yossel said, “She doesn’t tell me a whole lot-nothing I’m not supposed to know. She’s got to worry about security like anybody else.”

“Too bad,” Armstrong said. “What’s the point of being related to a big shot if you don’t get anything out of it?”

“People always say that,” Yossel Reisen answered. “But if somebody important gives you a hand all the time, how do you know what you’re good for by yourself?”

He had a point. Armstrong could see it. His family, though, had no fancy connections. He thought not having to worry about money or a good job or the right college would be awfully nice. No doors had opened for him because he was so-and-so’s nephew. His family had plenty of so-and-sos in it, but not that kind.

Somebody called a question across the line to the Mormons: “How long is this truce supposed to last?”

“Till the major comes back,” a rebel answered. “Then we give you thieving wretches more of what you deserve.”

Thieving wretches. Armstrong smiled in spite of himself. The Mormons seldom came right out and cussed. Some of the insults they used instead sounded pretty funny.

Men on both sides walked around and stretched, showing their faces without fear of taking a bullet if they did. The Mormons were scrupulous about honoring truces. U.S. soldiers smoked. Some of them probably had something better than water in their canteens. The Mormons weren’t supposed to use tobacco or alcohol, and most of them didn’t. Armstrong figured that meant screwing was the only way they could have a good time. They sure did that. They’d raised up a big new generation of rebels after getting one killed off in their uprising during the Great War.

In midafternoon U.S. soldiers passed the Mormon officer back through the lines to his own side. His face was a thunderstorm of fury. He hardly even had an extra glare for Armstrong as he went by. The Mormons fired a warning shot into the air. A U.S. soldier answered it. A couple of minutes later, a screaming meemie came down on Armstrong’s company, and then another one. All things considered, maybe he would rather have stayed anonymous.

Leonard O’Doull had worked in a hospital before. He’d met his wife working in one outside of Riviere-du-Loup during the last war. If the authorities hadn’t decided Lucien Galtier was an unreliable nuisance and confiscated his land for the building, Nicole never would have come to work there. O’Doull knew he wouldn’t have settled in the Republic of Quebec if he hadn’t made family ties. Sometimes very strange things could twist a man’s fate.

He was in a fancier hospital now. The University of Pittsburgh had had one of the best medical schools in the USA, and a large hospital where staff members trained residents, interns, medical students, and nurses. Now the hospital was full of wounded and gassed soldiers. Along with the people in training-those who hadn’t put on the uniform-the staff were getting trained themselves, by experts like Leonard O’Doull and Granville McDougald.

“Speed,” McDougald told a surgeon with an old-fashioned, upturned Kaiser Bill mustache. “The faster we can get to ’em, the better they do. If we’re operating less than an hour after they get hit, they’ll probably make it. Every minute after that hurts their chances.”

The white-mustached healer nodded. “I’ve also seen this in motorcar accidents,” he said.

“It’s even more critical with gunshot and shrapnel wounds, because the trauma’s usually worse,” McDougald said. The surgeon nodded again, thoughtfully, and walked down the corridor. McDougald looked over at Leonard O’Doull and grinned. “Look at me, Doc, going on just like I know what I’m talking about.”

“Don’t sandbag, Granny,” O’Doull answered. “When it comes to wounds, who’s seen more than you?”

“Nobody this side of the guy who cuts up steers in a Chicago slaughterhouse,” McDougald said. “But he always sees the same ones. Not like that in our line of work, is it?”

“Always something new,” O’Doull agreed. “People keep coming up with new ways to maim their fellow man. I don’t know why I don’t despair of the human race.”

“Somebody once said people were the missing link between apes and human beings,” McDougald said wistfully. “Damned if he didn’t hit that one on the button.”

“Didn’t he just?” O’Doull listened to the artillery outside. “If the Confederates get over the Allegheny, we’re going to be even busier than we are already.”

“So will they,” McDougald said. “They’ll be busier than a one-armed paper hanger with the hives. They may take this place away from us, but Christ! — they’re paying through the nose.”

Leonard O’Doull nodded. It looked that way to him, too. The dashing C.S. barrels weren’t dashing, not in Pittsburgh. They had to fight their way forward house by house, and a lot of them ended up as burnt-out hulks. Confederate infantry had trouble advancing without the barrels, too. Local U.S. counterattacks meant the hospital held a good many wounded Confederates along with U.S. soldiers. That might have been for the best-the more of their own men in this place, the less inclined the Confederates would be to hit it “by accident.”

“Wouldn’t put it past ’em,” McDougald said when O’Doull remarked on that. “They fought as clean as we did the last time around. Here? Now?” He made a sour face. “I think they cheat when they use the Red Cross, and I think they think we cheat, too. Makes them more likely to hit our aid stations and hospitals and ambulances. Featherston’s fuckers, sure as hell.”

“I hope that isn’t true.” O’Doull let it go there. The bad news seemed more likely to be true with each unfolding day. There were even rumors Featherston himself traveled in an ambulance to keep U.S. fighters from shooting him up.

“Well, Doc, if you want some consolation, the bastards in butternut aren’t as bad as they could be,” Granville McDougald said. “It sounds like the Action Francaise boys really abuse the Red Cross.”

“Yeah. I’ve heard that, too,” O’Doull said. “There’s another war as big as this one going on over there-”

“Bigger,” the medic said.

“Bigger, all right.” O’Doull accepted the correction. “But it’s like noises in another room to us. Oh, we’re working with the German High Seas Fleet where we can, but mostly we’ve got our troubles, and Germany and Austria-Hungary have theirs.”

“Austria-Hungary’s got more troubles than you can shake a stick at,” McDougald observed. “All the uprisings in the Balkans make what’s going on in Utah and Canada look like pretty small potatoes.” He grinned crookedly at O’Doull. “Might as well be Ireland, matter of fact.”

“Heh,” O’Doull said sourly-something that sounded like a laugh but really wasn’t. With U.S. help, Ireland had thrown off the English yoke after the Great War. The first thing Winston Churchill’s government did when the new round of fighting flared was send in barrels and bombers and battleships. The Union Jack flew again in Belfast and Dublin and Cork-and the island heaved with rebellion. “I wonder how long it’ll be before Irish people bombs start going off in London.”

McDougald winced. “Those damned Mormons let the genie out of the bottle with that one,” he said. “How do you stop somebody who’s already decided to die?” By the evidence available so far, you couldn’t stop somebody like that, not often enough. McDougald added, “They’ll feel it in Vienna and Budapest, too.” Serbs and Romanians and Bosnians and God only knew how many others from the Balkan patchwork quilt of peoples and competing nationalisms bushwhacked the King-Emperor’s soldiers where and as they could. Russia encouraged them and sent them arms and ammunition, the way the British helped the Canucks, and the Confederates armed the Mormons.

Of course, the USA armed Negroes in the CSA. (O’Doull didn’t even think about U.S. support for the Republic of Quebec, which would still have been a Canadian province absent the Great War.) Germany played those games with Finns and Jews and Chechens and Azerbaijanis inside the Tsar’s empire. And both sides helped their own sets of guerrillas inside the Ukraine, which was, in technical terms, a mess.

An orderly trotted up to O’Doull and McDougald. “We’ve got a man with a leg wound in OR Seven,” he said.

“We should do something about that,” McDougald said, and O’Doull nodded. They hurried toward the OR. Working in an actual operating room was an unaccustomed luxury for O’Doull. It beat the hell out of doing his job under canvas. He had a real operating table, surgical lights he could aim wherever he wanted, and all the other amenities he’d almost forgotten in the field.

And he had a nasty case waiting on the table for him. A leg wound hardly did the injury justice. “Get him under fast, Granny,” O’Doull said after one glance at the shattered appendage.

“Right,” McDougald said, and not much else till the soldier was mercifully unconscious. Then he asked, “You’re not going to try and keep that on, are you?”

“Good God, no,” O’Doull answered. “Above the knee, too, poor bastard.” He picked up a bone saw and got to work.

Like most amputations, it was bloody but fast. The wounded soldier was young and strong and healthy. O’Doull thought he would do well-or as well as you could do after you’d been maimed. How many men on both sides of the border were short an arm or a leg? Too many, that was for sure.

As he closed up the stump, O’Doull asked, “Ever see a real basket case, Granny?”

“No arms, no legs?” McDougald asked, and O’Doull nodded. The medic shook his head. “No, not me. You always hear about ’em, but I’ve never seen one. You get wounded like that, most of the time they take your pieces back to Graves Registration, not to an aid station. How about you?”

“The same,” O’Doull answered. “You hear about ’em all the time. Hell, people talk about basket cases when they mean somebody who’s just all messed up. But I’ve never seen the real McCoy, either.”

“I suppose there really are some,” McDougald said. “Would we have the name if we didn’t have the thing?”

“Beats me,” O’Doull said. “We have names for truth and justice and liberty, too. How often do you really see the things those names point at?”

“Touche, Doc.” Granville McDougald gave him another sour laugh. “And then we’ve got ‘Freedom!’ too.” By the way he said the word, he might have been a stalwart in white shirt and butternut trousers getting ready to go out there and break some heads.

“God damn Jake Featherston up one side and down the other,” O’Doull said wearily as he went to the sink and washed the now one-legged soldier’s blood from his hands. How much blood did Featherston have on his hands? But he didn’t care about washing it off. He reveled in it.

McDougald stood beside him and scrubbed down, too. “I’ve been wishing that very same thing,” he said, holding out his arms in front of him with the wrists up so water would flow down from his hands and carry germs away with it. “I’ve been wishing for it since before the war started, matter of fact, and God hasn’t done thing one. Far as I can tell, He’s at a football game-probably standing in line to get Himself a couple of franks and a beer.”

That was blasphemous, which didn’t mean it didn’t hold a lot of truth. “I don’t know how anybody’s going to be able to believe in anything by the time this damn war is done,” O’Doull said.

“I don’t know how anybody believed anything after the last one,” McDougald said. “But you’re right. This one’s worse. The poison gas is more poisonous. We’re better at dropping bombs on the Confederates’ cities, and they’re better at dropping them on ours. ‘O brave new world, that has such people in’t!’ ” He quoted Shakespeare with malice aforethought.

“You forgot one,” O’Doull said. McDougald raised a questioning eyebrow. The doctor explained: “We didn’t slaughter people just because of who they were the last time around.”

“Oh, yeah? Tell it to the Armenians. And the Turks were on our side,” McDougald said. O’Doull winced. He’d forgotten about the Armenian massacres. He was sure most people in the USA had. McDougald went on, “But you’re right-we didn’t, not on this continent. And Jake Featherston probably noticed nothing much ever happened to the Turks, and he must have figured nothing much would happen to him if we went after his spooks. And you know what else? Looks like he’s right.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” O’Doull said unhappily.

“I don’t think a whole lot of people in the USA like smokes a whole hell of a lot,” McDougald said. “I’d be lying if I said I liked ’em a whole hell of a lot myself. Don’t know very many. Don’t know any very well-aren’t that many here to know, and that suits me fine. What I do know… Well, you can keep ’em, far as I’m concerned. But there’s a lot of difference between saying that and wanting to see ’em dead.”

“I’m with you,” O’Doull said. “I don’t think I saw a Negro all the time I was up in Riviere-du-Loup, and I didn’t much miss ’em, either. Lots and lots of ’em in the CSA, so the Confederates can’t pretend they aren’t there, the way we can. But making so they really aren’t there-that’s filthy.”

“Yeah, we’re on the same page again, Doc,” Granville McDougald said. “And you know what else?” O’Doull raised an interrogative eyebrow. The medic went on, “It won’t do those poor sons of bitches one damn bit of good.” Leonard O’Doull sadly nodded, because that was much too likely to be true.

Coming back to the Lower East Side of New York City always felt strange to Flora Blackford. It was only a couple of hours by fast train from Philadelphia, but it was a different world. As she made a campaign visit just before the 1942 Presidential elections, she found it different in some new ways.

Confederate bombers hadn’t hit her hometown nearly so hard as they’d hit Philadelphia. Those extra 90 miles-180 round trip-meant more fuel and fewer bombs aboard. They also meant U.S. fighters had all that extra time to try to shoot the Confederates down. And most of the bombs that had fallen in New York City had fallen on Wall Street and the publishing district, and on and around the factories in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The neighborhood where she’d grown up was-oh, not untouched by war, but not badly damaged, either.

She spoke in a theater where she’d debated her Democratic opponent during the Great War. This time, the Democrats were running a lawyer named Sheldon Vogelman. He stood well to the right of Robert Taft, and only a little to the left of Attila the Hun. He was the sort of man who, if he weren’t Jewish, probably would have been a raving anti-Semite. Instead, he raved about plowing up the Confederates’ cities and sowing them with salt so nothing ever grew there again. He also wanted to plow up anybody in the USA who presumed to disagree with him.

“My opponent,” Flora said, “would ship salt from the Great Salt Flats in Utah especially for the purpose. Digging up the salt and bringing it east for his purposes would create jobs. I’m afraid that’s his entire definition of a full-employment policy.”

She got a laugh and a hand. The Democrats could nominate a right-wing lunatic in this district because they weren’t going to win no matter whom they nominated. Vogelman blew off steam for their party. He was loud and obnoxious and, for all practical purposes, harmless.

“We made mistakes,” Flora said. “I’m not going to try to tell you anything else. We should have been tougher on Jake Featherston as soon as he made it plain he was building up a new war machine. But Herbert Hoover was President of the United States from 1933 to 1937, and he and the Democrats didn’t do anything about Jake Featherston then, either.”

“That’s right!” somebody in the audience shouted. A few hecklers booed. But there weren’t many. Sheldon Vogelman was not only a reactionary nut, he was an ineffective reactionary nut. Best kind, Flora thought. The best-or worst-example of the other kind was Featherston.

She and Vogelman agreed on one thing: the war had to be fought to a finish. They had different reasons, but they agreed. She didn’t know of any Socialists, Democrats, or even Republicans running on a peace-at-any-price platform. Jake Featherston had been effective at uniting the United States against him, too.

“When this war is over-when we have won this war-” Flora began, and had to stop for a flood of fierce applause. “When we have won, I say, Featherston and his fellow criminals will face the bar of justice for their aggression against the United States”-more ferocious cheers-“and for their cold-blooded murder of tens of thousands of their own people.”

She got cheers for that, too, but not so many, even if she didn’t call a spade a spade. The painful truth was that not even her mostly Jewish audience could get excited about the fate of Negroes in the CSA. Flora had been banging her head against that truth ever since she started speaking out about Jake Featherston’s persecutions.

“Don’t you see?” she said. “Pogroms are wrong. How many of your ancestors-how many of you, ladies and gentlemen-came to the United States because of the Tsar’s pogroms? Come on-I know it’s more than that.”

All over the hall, hands went up. People raised them reluctantly and lowered them as soon as they could. If they’d had their druthers, they wouldn’t have raised them at all. They didn’t want to think about why they’d come to America. They especially didn’t want to compare their past to the Confederate Negroes’ present.

Flora wanted to make sure they remembered. She wanted that even if it cost her votes. Against a candidate like Sheldon Vogelman, losing a few didn’t much matter. If the Democrats had run someone stronger, she hoped she would have done the same thing.

“If you turn your back on other people when they’re in trouble, who’ll look out for you when you are?” she asked. “Don’t you see? If we don’t look out for the Negroes in the CSA, in an important way we don’t look out for ourselves, either.”

“We don’t want those people here!” somebody shouted. Several people clapped their hands. They weren’t all hecklers. She knew where the hecklers were sitting. Listening to them hurt more because they weren’t.

“The Democrats are the party for people who only care about themselves,” Flora said. “If your fellow man matters to you, you’ll vote Socialist next week. I hope he does. I hope you do. Thank you!”

She got a good hand as she stepped away from the lectern. She could have been caught pulling hundred-dollar bills out of a contractor’s pocket with her teeth, and she still would have won here this time around.

For lunch the next day, she faced a more critical audience. David Hamburger had come out of the Great War with one leg and with politics not far from Vogelman’s. He and Flora still got on well when they stayed away from political matters. When they didn’t-and they couldn’t all the time-sparks flew.

They met at Kaplan’s, a delicatessen that had been around at least as long as Flora had. David was waiting for her when she came in. That was probably just as well; she didn’t have to watch the rolling gait required by an artificial leg that started above the knee.

“Hello, there,” he said as she joined him. “So how does it feel to be slumming in your old stomping grounds?”

“Kaplan’s isn’t slumming,” Flora said. “Don’t be silly. Not a place in Philadelphia comes close to it.” The waiter was bald and had a gray mustache. Flora ordered corned beef on rye. Her brother chose pastrami. They both ordered beer. The waiter nodded and hurried away. “How have you been?” Flora asked.

“Not too bad-middle-class, or somewhere close.” David shrugged. “My son’s too little to conscript in this war, so that’s good.”

“Yes,” Flora said tonelessly. Her own son was heading toward eighteen, and Joshua wouldn’t hear of her doing anything to keep him out of the conscription pool. Having a nephew in harm’s way was bad enough. Having a son on the front lines would be ten thousand times worse.

The food and the beers came quickly. Flora took a long pull at hers. David drank more slowly. He pulled a dill pickle from the jar on the table and nibbled it with his sandwich and his beer. After a bit, he said, “Looks like you’ll be away for another couple of years.”

“Well, I hope so,” Flora said.

“You’ve done a good job, and Vogelman’s meshuggeh,” David said. “Between the two, that ought to do the job. If it doesn’t, this district is even more verkakte than I give it credit for-and I didn’t think it could be.”

Hearing the Yiddish made Flora smile. Like her brothers and sisters, she’d grown up speaking it more often than English at home. Now, though, she never heard it, never spoke it, unless she came back to the district. No one she knew in Philadelphia used it. Her husband, a gentile from Dakota, had learned a few phrases from her, but that was all. Joshua knew a few phrases, too. He couldn’t begin to speak it. Flora wasn’t so sure she could speak it herself anymore.

She thought, and then did bring out a Yiddish sentence: “What’s going to happen to this language in a couple of generations?”

“I don’t know,” David answered, also in Yiddish. He dropped back into English to go on, “And I won’t lose much sleep over it, either. We brought Yiddish from the old country. Now we’re Americans. They speak English here. So, fine-I’ll speak English.”

“I suppose so,” Flora said. “Joshua doesn’t seem much interested in learning it, anyhow. But I can’t help wondering whether my grandchildren or great-grandchildren won’t think they missed out on something special because they didn’t get the chance to learn it.”

“Well, if they do, there’s always night school,” David said, and Flora nodded. How many immigrants had learned all sorts of different things in night school? Hundreds of thousands, surely. Some were accountants, some were lawyers, because of the courses they’d taken in hours snatched from sleep and rest. Still…

“It won’t be the same,” she said. “What you learn in school isn’t like what you pick up around the house.”

“I can’t do anything about it.” David pulled another pickle spear out of the jar and aimed it at her like a bayonet. “I can’t-but you can. You can pass the Preservation of Yiddish Act and make it a crime for all the alter kackers”-he tacked the English plural onto the Yiddish word-“who can still yatter away in the old language to use English instead. And you can make it another crime for anybody Jewish not to listen to them and talk back in Yiddish.”

Flora laughed so hard, she almost choked on her sandwich. “You,” she said severely, “are ridiculous.”

“Thank you,” her brother answered, which only made her laugh harder. “And while you’re at it, you can have them make the Lower East Side a national park. Buffalo have Yellowstone. Why shouldn’t people who speak Yiddish have their own game preserve, too? And if we get too crowded, you could issue hunting licenses to anti-Semites, and they’d come in here and thin us out. Only difference between us and the buffalo is, we might shoot back.”

“You-” Flora stopped. She had to reach into her purse for a handkerchief to wipe her streaming eyes. She tried again: “You ought to sell that routine to the Engels Brothers. If they wouldn’t pay you for it, I’m a Chinaman.”

“You could do the same thing for Chinamen, here and in San Francisco,” David said, warming to his theme. “And think of the chances Jake Featherston’s missing. If he charged fees to get into the hunting preserves for shvartzers, he could probably cut taxes in half.”

That killed Flora’s laughter. “It isn’t hunting down there,” she said. “It’s slaughter, nothing else but.”

“They might as well be Mormons, eh?” David insisted on being difficult.

“It’s worse,” Flora insisted. “We’re fighting the Mormons, but we aren’t murdering the ones in the land we’ve taken. The Confederates are emptying out one town after another, taking the Negroes off to camps and killing them once they get there. It’s… about as bad as it can be down there.”

“And it’s just pretty bad up here,” David said. “Well, nice to know we’ve still got room for improvement.”

That wasn’t funny, either-or, if it was, only in the blackest way. When Flora laughed this time, it was only to keep from sobbing.