In At the Death

XIV

D r. Leonard O'Doull donned a professional scowl and glared at the unhappy young PFC standing in front of him. "That's one of the most disgusting chancres I've ever seen," he growled. It was red and ugly, all right, but he'd run into plenty just like it. The kid didn't have to know that, though.

Quivering, the PFC said, "Sorry, sir." He looked as if he was about to cry.

"Were you sorry while you were getting it?" O'Doull asked.

"Uh, no, sir." The youngster in green-gray turned red.

"Why the hell didn't you wear a rubber?"

"On account of I didn't figure I needed to. She was a nice girl, dammit. Besides, it feels better when you're bareback."

It did. O'Doull couldn't quarrel about that. He could ask, "And how does it feel now?" The PFC hung his head. O'Doull went on, "Do you still think she was a nice girl?"

"No, sir," the kid said, and then, apprehensively, "What are you going to do to me, sir?"

"Me? I'm going to fix you up, that's what." O'Doull raised his voice: "Sergeant Lord! Let me have a VD hypo of penicillin."

"Coming up, Doc." Goodson Lord produced the requisite syringe.

The PFC stared at it with something not far from horror. "Jeez Louise! You could give an elephant a shot with that thing."

"Elephants don't get syphilis. Far as I know, they don't get the clap, either." O'Doull nodded to the kid, who wasn't far wrong there, either-it was a big needle. "Bend over."

Most unwillingly, the U.S. soldier obeyed. "Shit," he muttered. "I went through the last year and a half of the war. I got a Purple Heart. And I'm more scared of your damn shot than I was of the screaming meemies."

He wasn't the first man to say something like that. With bullets and shells and rockets, you could always think they'd miss. When somebody aimed a hypodermic at your bare ass, he'd damn well connect.

And O'Doull did. The PFC let out a yip as he pressed home the needle and pressed in the plunger. "You get one on the other side three days from now. If you don't show up, you're in a lot more trouble than you are for coming down venereal. You got that?"

"Yes, sir," the kid said miserably. "Can I go now, sir?"

He really did want to escape if he was that eager to return to the clutches of his regular superiors. O'Doull couldn't do anything but stick him, but they could-and would-give him hell. Still, he wasn't quite finished here. "Not yet, son. You need to tell me the name of the woman you got it from, where she lives, and the names of any others you've screwed since. We don't want 'em passing it along to any of your buddies, you know."

"Oh, hell-uh, sir. Do I gotta?"

"You sure do. VD puts a man out of action just as much as a bullet in the leg does. So…who was she? And were there any others?"

"Damn, damn, damn," the PFC said. "There's just the one, anyway. Her name is Betsy, and she lives a couple of miles from here, on a farm outside of Montevallo."

Montevallo was a pissant little town south of Birmingham. It boasted a small college for women; O'Doull had wondered whether the soldier got his disease from a student with liberal notions. Evidently not. Montevallo also boasted a large oak called the Hangman's Tree, which had come through the war undamaged. The doctor wondered whether the tree and the college were related. The PFC wouldn't know about that, though.

"You have a last name for Miss Betsy?" O'Doull asked. The soldier shook his head. O'Doull sighed. "One of the things you'll do between now and when I stick your ass again is take some men and get her and bring her back here so we can treat her, too. Got that?"

"Yes, sir." It was hardly more than a whisper.

"You'd better have it. And now you can go," O'Doull said. The PFC slunk away. O'Doull sighed. "Boy, I enjoyed that."

"I bet," Sergeant Lord said. "Still, it beats the crap out of trying to take out a guy's spleen, doesn't it?"

"Well, yeah," O'Doull admitted. "But damn, we've had a lot of venereals since the shooting stopped." He sighed one more time. "Don't know why I'm so surprised. The guys can really go looking for pussy now, and the Confederate women know they've lost, so they'd better be nice to our troops. But I keep thinking about Donofrio, the medic you replaced. VD isn't the only thing that can happen to you."

"You told me about that before," Lord said, so politely that O'Doull knew he'd told him at least once too often. The medic went on, "I'm not going to make a fuss about any silly bitch down here."

"Well, good," O'Doull said, and wondered if it was. Would Goodson Lord make a fuss about a silly boy instead? O'Doull hoped not. If the sergeant was queer, he seemed to be discreet about it. As long as he stayed that way, well, what the hell?

Betsy came in the next day, cussing out the soldiers who brought her in a command car. She was about eighteen, with a barmaid's prettiness that wouldn't last and a barmaid's ample flesh that would turn to lard before she hit thirty. "What do you mean, I got some kind of disease?" she shouted at O'Doull.

"Sorry, miss," he said. "Private, uh, Eubanks"-he had to remember the soldier's name-"says you left him a little present. We can cure you with a couple of shots."

"I bet he didn't catch it from me. I bet the dirty son of a bitch got it somewhere else and gave it to me!" she screeched.

From the freshness of the U.S. soldier's chancre, O'Doull doubted that. Out loud, he said, "Well, you may be right," which was one of the useful phrases that weren't liable to land you in much trouble. It didn't matter one way or the other, anyhow. "I'm going to need to examine you, maybe draw some blood for a test, and give you a shot, just in case."

"What do you mean, examine me? Examine me there?" Betsy shook her head, which made blond curls flip back and forth on either side of her face. She would have seemed more alluring-to O'Doull, anyway-if she'd bathed any time lately. "You ain't gonna look up my works, pal, and that's flat, not when I never set eyes on you till just now. What kind of girl d'you reckon I am?"

Had O'Doull told the truth there, he would have had to listen to more screeching. "This is a medical necessity," he said. "I'm a doctor. I'm also a married man, in case you're wondering."

Betsy tossed her head in splendid scorn. "Like that makes a difference! I know you're just a dumb damnyankee, but I didn't think even damnyankees were that dumb."

O'Doull sighed. It didn't make any difference; he'd seen as much plenty of times in Riviиre-du-Loup. He wished he were back there now. Better-much better! — sweet Nicole than this blowsy, foul-mouthed gal. "Get up on the table, please," he said. "No stirrups, I'm afraid. It wasn't made with that in mind."

"Stirrups? What the hell are you talkin' about?" Betsy said. "And I done told you I don't want to get up there."

O'Doull's patience blew out. "Your other choice is the stockade," he snapped. "Quit fooling around and wasting my time."

"Oh, all right, goddammit, if I gotta." Betsy climbed onto the table and divested herself of her drawers. O'Doull put on rubber gloves. He felt as if he needed them more here than with most of the ordinary war wounds he'd treated. "Having fun?" she asked him as he got to work.

"In a word, no," he answered, so coldly that she not only shut up with a snap but gave him a fierce glare, which he ignored. He went on, "You've got it, all right. You ought to thank your boyfriend for getting you over here."

"Not likely!" she said, and added some verbal hot sauce to the comment.

"However you please," O'Doull told her. "Roll over onto your stomach so I can give you your first shot." Goodson Lord ceremoniously handed him a syringe.

"Will it hurt?" she asked.

"A little." O'Doull jabbed the needle home. She yipped. He didn't care. "You need to come back in three days for your second injection," he told her.

"What happens if I don't?" Betsy sure hadn't said no to PFC Eubanks-or, odds were, to a lot of guys before him-but she was cooperating with O'Doull as little as she could.

"Two things," O'Doull said. "We come and get you, and we tell your folks and everybody in Montevallo how come we came and got you."

"You wouldn't do that!"

"When it comes to getting rid of VD, we'll do whatever it takes. Dammit, this is for your own good."

"Then how come it hurts?" Betsy whined.

"If we didn't treat you, you'd hurt more down the line," O'Doull said. Actually, a lot of syphilis patients didn't have symptoms for years after the primary lesions went away. Some never did. But syphilis was also the great pretender; a lot of ills that seemed to be other things really went back to the spirochete that caused it. If you could get rid of the germ, you needed to.

"Might as well get used to it, Doc," Sergeant Lord advised. "This is what we'll see from here on out-guys with drippy faucets, guys in auto crashes, every once in a while a guy who steps on a mine or something."

"Could be worse," O'Doull said. "Long as we don't start having lots of guys who guerrillas shot, I won't kick."

"Amen to that," the medic said.

"Can I go now?" Betsy asked, much as her boyfriend in green-gray had.

"Yes, you can go," O'Doull answered. "If you don't come back for your next shot, remember, we'll make you sorry you didn't."

"I won't forget," she said sullenly. "My pa, he'll kill me if he finds out." By the way she scurried away from the aid tent, she meant that literally.

"Wonder how many round-heeled broads we'll give the needle to," Lord said.

"Quite a few, I bet," O'Doull said. "And if it's going to be that kind of practice, you can handle it as well as I can." He was thinking about home again. He wasn't a career soldier; he had a life away from the Army. He had it, and he wanted to go back to it.

Goodson Lord gave him a shrewd look. "Won't be too long before they start figuring out how to turn people loose, I bet. You paid your dues and then some."

"Yeah." O'Doull nodded. And once I get back into the Republic of Quebec, they'll never pry me out again. There had been times when his practice in Riviиre-du-Loup bored him. He hadn't been bored the past three years. Scared out of his mind? Astonished? Appalled? All of those, and often, but never bored. He was amazed at how wonderful ennui seemed.

Abner Dowling stared at Lexington, Virginia, with nothing less than amazement. He turned to his adjutant and said, "Damned if it doesn't look like they used a superbomb on this place."

Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli nodded. "Yes, sir. The fun we had getting here should have given us a hint, I suppose."

"Fun? Heh. That's one word for it, I guess," Dowling said. As the crow flew, Lexington was only about 110 miles from Richmond. Dowling wished he'd flown from the capital-the former capital? — of the CSA. He'd gone by command car instead, and the roads were disastrously bad…which said nothing about the wrecked bridges and the places where mines were still being cleared. What might have been a two-and-a-half-hour drive ended up taking a day and a half.

Something moved in the rubble. At first he thought it was a stray dog. Then he realized what it really was: a possum. It looked like a cat-sized rat that had got its nose stuck in a pencil sharpener. The long, bare pinkish tail seemed vaguely obscene. Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli was looking in the same direction. "If that's not the ugliest thing God ever made, damned if I know what is," he said.

"Now that Jake Featherston's dead, I agree with you," Dowling said, which jerked a laugh from the younger man.

Washington University lay on the north side of town. U.S. soldiers who'd come down from the north right after the surrender were already thick on the ground there. The only way you could tell the university grounds from the rest of Lexington these days was that they'd taken an even heavier pounding from the skies.

It didn't do enough, dammit, Dowling thought. In spite of everything that came down on their heads, the Confederate physicists managed to put together a superbomb. Abstractly, Dowling admired the achievement. Staying abstract when they'd blown a big chunk of Philadelphia off the map wasn't so easy, though.

The surviving physicists were housed in tents surrounded by barbed wire and machine-gun nests. A U.S. colonel named Benjamin Frankheimer was in charge of them. Before he let Dowling in to talk with the prisoners, he checked with the War Department.

"Weren't you told to expect me?" Dowling asked.

"Yes, sir," Frankheimer replied. "But we haven't met, and I wanted to make sure they confirmed that a man of your description went with your name."

"You're…a careful man, Colonel."

"Taking care of people who know this kind of stuff, I need to be, sir." Frankheimer scratched his nose. It was much the most prominent feature on his face: he was little and skinny and looked very, very Jewish. Dowling guessed he'd got this job because he was a scientist himself…till he noticed the fruit salad on the colonel's chest. It showed he'd won a Distinguished Service Cross, a Silver Star with oak-leaf cluster, and a Purple Heart with oak-leaf cluster. Frankheimer had had himself a busy war.

"Well?" Dowling said. "Am I who I say I am?"

"Oh, yes, sir. No doubt about it," Frankheimer answered. "You're free to go in and do whatever you need to do-now."

"Thanks." Dowling sounded less sarcastic than he might have. The men inside this heavily guarded compound weren't just dynamite-they were a hell of a lot more explosive than that, and they'd proved it.

He wasn't astonished when he and Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli had to surrender their sidearms before going in, either. He didn't think of physicists as tough guys, but you never knew. If the fellows with the white lab coats and the slide rules didn't have the chance to grab any weapons, they wouldn't be tempted.

The first man he saw inside the compound sure didn't look like a tough guy. The fellow was about fifty, on the skinny side, and walked with a limp and a cane. "Can you tell me where Professor FitzBelmont is?" Dowling called to him.

"That tent there." The middle-aged man pointed.

"Thanks." Dowling ducked inside.

He recognized FitzBelmont right away; the photos he'd studied were good likenesses. Tall, tweedy, bespectacled: he looked like a physicist, all right. He gave Dowling a grudging nod. "Pleased to meet you," he said, and then, "I've already met a lot of U.S. officers"-so he probably wasn't very pleased.

"Come outside with me, Professor," Dowling said. "We've got some talking to do."

"If you like," FitzBelmont said. "But anything you say to me, my colleagues can also hear. What are you going to do with us, anyway?"

"Well, that's one of the things I'm here to talk about," Dowling answered. "More than a few people in Philadelphia who want to string you up by the thumbs, paint you with gasoline, and light a match. Then there are the ones who think that's too good for you."

Some of the scientists and technicians in there with FitzBelmont flinched. He didn't. "I don't understand why," he said. "We were serving our country in the same way that your scientists were serving the United States. If your service is permitted, even heroic, why shouldn't ours be, as well?"

He had a scientist's detachment-or maybe he was just a natural-born cold fish. "There is a difference, Professor," Dowling said.

"I fail to see it," Henderson FitzBelmont said.

"Why am I not surprised?" Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli murmured.

"Hush," Dowling said, and then, to FitzBelmont, "It's simple. I'll spell it out for you. We won. You lost. There. Is that plain enough?"

"To the victors go the spoils?" FitzBelmont said. "Is that what this war was about?"

"That's part of it. If you don't believe me, ask Jake Featherston," Dowling answered. FitzBelmont turned red, so maybe at one point or another he had asked the late, unlamented President of the CSA. Dowling continued, "The other part is, now you can't go on murdering your own smokes any more."

FitzBelmont got redder. "I didn't know anything about that."

"I ought to kick your scrawny ass for lying, you miserable son of a bitch," Dowling said with weary revulsion. "If I had a dime for every Confederate shithead who told me the same thing, I'd be too rich to wear this uniform-you'd best believe I would. Where the hell did you think all the coons in fucking Lexington disappeared to? You think somebody swept 'em under the goddamn rug?"

"I never even considered the issue," Professor FitzBelmont said.

Dowling almost did haul off and belt him. But the way FitzBelmont said it gave him pause. Unlike most of his countrymen, the physicist might have been telling the truth. From the reports the USA had on FitzBelmont, he had trouble noticing anything bigger than an atomic nucleus.

"How many millions did they do in, Angelo?" Dowling asked.

"Best guess right now is about eight million, sir," his adjutant replied. "But that could be off a million either way, easy."

"And you never considered the issue?" Dowling tried to wither Henderson FitzBelmont with his scorn.

"I'm afraid not," FitzBelmont said, unwithered. "We had no Negroes at all involved in the project. Even our cooks and janitors were whites or Mexicans. Negroes were deemed to be security risks, and so we did not see them. It's as simple as that, I'm afraid."

The Confederates had good reason to think Negroes might be security risks. Blacks had brought the USA lots of good intelligence data. Dowling didn't know how much in the way of physics a cook or janitor could understand. Understand it or not, anybody could steal papers, though. Which reminded him…

"Under the terms of the surrender, you're supposed to keep all your paperwork intact. You've done that?"

"What survives of it, yes, certainly."

"What's that mean?" Dowling demanded.

"You ought to know," Professor FitzBelmont said. "Your airplanes have been bombing Lexington for the past year. Do you think you didn't do any damage? You'd better think again."

"Huh," Dowling said. The Confederate physicist had a better excuse than The dog ate my homework. He and his pals could have destroyed anything, and then blamed it on U.S. bombers. Dowling didn't know what he could do about it, either.

"It is possible for you to expect too much of us, you know," FitzBelmont said.

"Maybe. I'm not the expert," Dowling agreed. "But you will be interrogated by people who are experts-I promise you that. Even if your paperwork is gone, they'll figure out what you were up to. And yes, you're obliged to cooperate with them."

"If we don't?" the physicist asked.

Dowling made hand-washing motions. "God help you, in that case. You can bet your bottom dollar nobody else will."

"You have an unpleasant way of making your point," Professor FitzBelmont said.

"Thank you," Dowling answered, which stopped FitzBelmont in his tracks.

After a moment, the physicist asked, "When will they let us go?"

"Beats me," Dowling answered cheerfully. "Suppose you'd won. When would you have let our superbomb people go? Ever?"

"I…don't know," the Confederate scientist said slowly. That, at least, struck Dowling as basically truthful. Henderson FitzBelmont went on, "Surely you understand that we can't be dangerous to the United States without facilities like the ones we had here. You can't make a superbomb with a blackboard and chalk."

"I don't know anything about that. It's not my call to make, anyhow," Dowling said. "My job is to make sure you're here, to make sure you're well protected, and to put you at the disposal of our scientists when they get around to needing you. I'm taking care of that right now."

"How about making sure we're well treated?" FitzBelmont asked.

"Believe me, Professor, you are," Dowling said. "You have shelter. You have enough to eat. You have a doctor and a dentist when you need one. Compared to the average white man in the CSA these days, you're in hog heaven. Compared to the average Negro in the CSA…Hell, you're alive. That puts you ahead of the game right there."

Professor FitzBelmont looked severe. "If that's a joke, General, it's in poor taste."

"Who's joking?" Dowling said. "You're the one who didn't look at what was going on with your Negroes, you say? We're going to hang some of the bastards who did that to them. Crimes against humanity, we're calling it. Considering what happened in Philadelphia, you ought to thank your lucky stars we aren't charging you with the same thing…yet."

"How could you do that when your own scientists built the bombs that blew up Newport News and Charleston? Where is the justice there?"

Dowling shook his head. FitzBelmont really didn't get it. "How much justice would you have given our guys if you won? As much as you gave your own smokes? We don't need justice, Professor-I told you that once already. We may use it, but we don't need it. We damn well won."

C olonel Roy Wyden eyed Jonathan Moss with what looked like real sympathy. "What are we going to do with you?" Wyden asked.

"Beats me, sir," Moss answered. "Not much call for a fighter jockey any more, is there? Especially one who's my age, I mean."

"I'm sorry, but there isn't," Wyden said. "Your file shows you weren't in the military straight through. What did you do between the wars?"

"I'm a lawyer, sir."

Wyden brightened. "Well, hell, you'll make more money after you muster out than you're pulling down now."

Moss laughed harshly. "It ain't necessarily so. My specialty was occupation law. For one thing, the Canadian uprising's still going. For another, they'll change all the rules once they finally do knock it flat. And, for another, I don't want to go back to it anyway. A terrorist blew up my wife and my daughter. Maybe the bomb was meant for me-I don't know. But that's the big reason I rejoined. So I don't really have anywhere else to go."

"Jesus! I guess you don't. I'm sorry. I didn't know your story," Wyden said.

"Not like I'm the only one who's had the roof fall in on him," Moss said. "I'll land on my feet one way or another."

"If you think you will, chances are you're right," Wyden said. "Let me make a few telephone calls for you, see if I can line something up."

"What have you got in mind?" Moss asked.

"I don't want to tell you yet, in case it doesn't pan out," Wyden answered. "Are you willing to give me a couple of days to see if it will?"

"Sure. Why not?" Moss managed a wry grin. "It isn't like I've got a hell of a lot of other stuff going on." He left Colonel Wyden's tent more intrigued than he'd thought he would be.

Wyden didn't summon him back for three days. When he did, he came straight to the point: "How would you like to go to the Republic of Texas?"

"To do what?" Moss inquired.

"They're going to try the bastards who ran Camp Determination and then Camp Humble," Wyden answered. "They've got guys lined up from here out the door to prosecute them, but their number one defense lawyer, a guy named Izzy Goldstein, was in an auto wreck last week. He's in the hospital, pretty torn up-no way he'll be able to fill that slot now. So they're looking for a legal eagle. Are you game?"

Moss whistled softly. "I don't know. I mean, I think those guys are guilty as shit. Don't you?"

"Of course I do," Wyden answered. "You're the lawyer, though. Don't guilty people deserve to have somebody on their side, too?"

That was a commonplace argument in law school. Moss had always believed it there. He'd acted on it, too, when he was doing occupation law up in Canada. A lot of his clients there weren't guilty of anything worse than falling foul of U.S. occupation procedures. This…This was a different story. "Only thing worse would be defending Jake Featherston himself."

"Funny you should mention that," Wyden answered. "The people I talked to said they were gonna shoot him without trial if they caught him. That colored kid just took care of it for them, that's all. Look, you don't have to do this if you can't stomach it. I'm not giving you orders or anything-I wouldn't, not for this kind of thing. But you were at loose ends, and it's military justice, so you're qualified, you know what I mean? Your call. One of the guys there remembers you from Canada. He said you were a son of a bitch, but you were a smart son of a bitch."

"From a military prosecutor, that's a compliment…I guess," Moss said. Colonel Wyden grinned and waited. Moss lit a Raleigh to help himself think. "Damn," he muttered, sucking in smoke. He blew it out in what was at least half a sigh. "Tell you what. Why don't I go over there and talk to one of those assholes? If I decide to take it on, I will. If I don't…I won't, that's all." The Army couldn't put much pressure on him. If it did, he'd damn well resign his commission. Then he'd have to figure out what to do with the rest of his life as a civilian, that was all.

Roy Wyden nodded. "Sounds fair enough. If you do tackle it, you'll be doing them a favor, not the other way around. I'll cut you orders for transit to Houston-the city, not the state. That's gonna confuse the crap out of people for a while."

And so Jonathan Moss found himself riding a train across Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. It was, perhaps, the most surreal journey of his life. He passed through the part of the Confederacy that the United States hadn't occupied during the war. Not many soldiers in green-gray had entered that part of the country yet. It felt very much like going into enemy territory.

The Confederate States still felt like a going concern there, too. The Stars and Bars flew from flagpoles. Soldiers in butternut still carried weapons. Nobody gave him any trouble, though, for which he was duly grateful.

His train had an hour's layover in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He got out to stretch his legs and grab a sandwich and a Dr. Hopper-he'd spent enough time in the CSA to get used to the stuff. When he came back to the platform, he found three or four Confederate soldiers facing off with a squad of men in green-gray who'd just got off a truck. Plainly, the U.S. troops were there to let the town know things really had changed and the surrender was no joke.

Just as plainly, the C.S. soldiers didn't want to believe it. "Well, hell," one of them said, "y'all may have whupped those sorry bastards back East, but you never licked us." His pals nodded.

As if by magic, all the U.S. soldiers brought up their weapons at the same time. Their sergeant stepped forward and shoved the mouthy Confederate to the floor. He kicked him in the ribs-probably not hard enough to break any, but not with any token little thump, either. "How about now, fucker?" he asked. "Have we licked you yet, or do we have to blow your goddamn head off to get the message across? Talk fast, or you're dead meat."

"Reckon…maybe…I'm licked," the man in butternut wheezed.

"Bet your sweet ass you are." The sergeant kicked him again, then stepped back. "Get it straight-you fuck with us, we make you sorry you tried, on account of we'd sooner kill you than look at you."

As long as U.S. forces felt that way, Moss judged, they at least had a chance of staying ahead of any Confederate insurgency. The soldier in butternut struggled to his feet. His buddies helped him get away from the men in green-gray. All the new occupiers looked ready to spray bullets around the train station. They grinned at Moss. "We showed him!" one of them crowed.

"You bet," Moss replied, and their grins got wider. What would they say if they found out he was heading west to see if he wanted to defend the Confederate officers who ran a murder factory? Nothing he wanted to hear-he was sure of that. And so he didn't tell them.

When he passed from Louisiana to Texas, the Lone Star flag replaced the Stars and Bars. He wondered how long the United States would go on letting the Texans pretend they were independent. Recognizing their secession from the CSA had been a useful way to get them out of the war, but he didn't think it was likely to last.

A Texas Ranger stood on the platform holding a small cardboard sign with his name on it. When Moss admitted who he was, the Texan-who was short and wiry, going dead against the image the men of his state liked to put across-said, "I'm here to take you to the city jail, sir."

"Then let's go," Moss answered.

The Ranger didn't have much to say. Houston seemed almost intact. Not many Confederate cities were farther from U.S. bomber bases. People on the street wore old, shabby clothes, but they didn't look hungry.

"How do you feel about working with the United States?" Moss asked when the auto-a Confederate Birmingham-stopped in front of the red-brick fortress that housed prisoners.

"Sir, where we were at, it looked like the best thing to do." With that less than ringing endorsement, the Texas Ranger killed the engine. He hopped out and held the door open for Moss.

U.S. officers meticulously checked Moss' ID and then patted him down before admitting him to the building. He got checked and searched again when he went into the visitors' room. A tight steel mesh separated his side from that of the man he might be representing.

In came Jefferson Pinkard. The fellow who'd run Camp Determination and Camp Humble was about Moss' age. He had a big, burly frame: muscles with a lot of fat over them. He looked tough, but not vicious. Moss knew how little that proved, but found it interesting all the same.

Pinkard was giving him the once-over, too. "So the damnyankees found another bastard willing to speak up for me?" he asked in a Deep-South drawl.

"I don't know that I am yet," Moss answered. "Why did you want to kill off as many Negroes as you could?"

Had Pinkard denied it, Moss would have walked out. He didn't, though. He said, "Because they were enemies of my country. They were shooting at us before we started fighting you Yankee bastards."

"Men, women, and children?" Moss said.

"They're black, they don't like us," Pinkard said. "'Sides, what business of yours is it, anyway? They were Confederate niggers. We can do what we damn well please in our own country. Far as I know, we didn't do anything to coons from the USA."

As far as Moss knew, that was true. He thought it was Pinkard's strongest argument. A country was sovereign inside its own borders, wasn't it? Nobody had gone after the Ottoman Sultan for what he did to the Armenians or the Tsar for pogroms against Jews…or the United States for what they did to their Indians. But…"Nobody ever made camps like yours."

"Nobody ever thought to." Jefferson Pinkard didn't sound repentant-he sounded proud. "Fuck, you assholes are gonna hang me. You won, and I can't do shit about it. But the only thing I was doing was, I was doing my job. I did it goddamn well, too."

"I read that the mayor of Snyder killed himself after he got a look at the mass graves your camp had there," Moss said.

"Some people are soft," Pinkard said scornfully. "Yeah, we lost the war. But we'll never have to worry about niggers down here, not the way we did before. Hell, you can even ask these chickenshit Texas traitors-they'll tell you I'm all right in their book. I helped clean out Texas along with the rest of the CSA. You can defend me or not, however you please. I know what I did, and I'm damned if I'm sorry."

You're damned, all right, Moss thought. Did guilty people really and truly need lawyers just like anybody else? Did he want to be one of them? There were all kinds of ways to go down in history. Was this the one he really had in mind?

If he didn't do it, who would? Whoever it was, would the fellow do as good a job as Moss would himself? He had to doubt it, especially with the Army's chief defense lawyer already down for the count. He didn't believe anybody could get Pinkard off, but he'd always enjoyed giving military prosecutors a run for their money.

In the end, that-and being at loose ends as a pilot with the war over-decided him. "Do you want me to defend you? I'll give it my best shot."

"D'you reckon you can get me loose?" Pinkard asked. "Or was I right the first time?"

"Long odds against you, mighty long. Anybody who tells you different is lying, too, just so you know."

The camp commandant grunted. "Fuck. It looked that way to me, too, and to that Goldstein guy, but I was hoping maybe you saw it different. But, shit, even if you don't, Colonel Moss, I'm mighty glad to have you. Do whatever the hell you can, and see if you can embarrass 'em before they put a noose around my neck."

He didn't have unreasonable expectations, anyhow, which was the start of being a good client. "I think we've got ourselves a deal," Jonathan Moss said. Because of the wire screen, they couldn't even shake on it.

A lot of the Confederate officers at Camp Liberty! sank into despair when they finally believed their country had surrendered. Most of the ones who took the surrender hardest had been in there longest. They hadn't seen the disasters of the past year and a half with their own eyes. Jerry Dover had. He knew damn well that the Confederate States were licked.

"Yeah, we lost," he'd say whenever somebody asked him about it-or sometimes even when nobody did.

"Why don't you soft-pedal the doom and gloom, Dover?" Colonel Kirby Smith Telford asked him. The senior C.S. officer was convinced Dover wasn't a Yankee plant, which didn't mean he was happy with him. "People already feel bad enough without you rubbing it in."

"Christ on a crutch, it's over. We're licked," Dover said. "How can it be doom and gloom after we're doomed?"

"Keeping our chins up means we can respect ourselves," Telford answered. "It makes U.S. forces respect us more, too."

That last might even have been true. It left Dover no happier. "What difference does it make?" he demanded. "We don't even have a country any more. The United States are occupying the whole CSA. Far as I can see, that turns us into damnyankees."

"My ass," Telford said. "I'll see them in hell before I bow down and worship the goddamn Stars and Stripes."

"Yes, sir. I feel the same way," Dover said. "Only problem is, as long as we feel that way, why should the Yankees let us out of this place?"

"Why? Because the war's over, dammit, that's why." But not even Kirby Smith Telford could make himself sound as if he thought that was reason enough.

The U.S. authorities showed no signs of letting their commissioned POWs go free. After a few days, Colonel Telford asked them why not. The answer he got left him scowling.

"They say they're investigating to see if they need to charge any of us with this 'crimes against humanity' crap," he reported.

Jerry Dover didn't like the sound of that. It struck him as being vague enough to let the United States do whatever they pleased. "What exactly do they mean by that?" he asked.

"Well, what they were mostly talking about with me was finding out whether we ever gave niggers up to the people who shipped 'em off to the camps," Telford answered.

"Oh." Dover relaxed. About the most hideous thing he'd done as a quartermaster officer was send gas shells up to the front. Since the damnyankees had used gas themselves, they couldn't very well get their bowels in an uproar about it…unless they felt like getting their bowels in an uproar. If they did, who was going to stop them?

Nobody this side of the Kaiser, that was who.

Someone said, "They can't treat us this way," so maybe he thought he was the Kaiser, or else somebody even more important.

Kirby Smith Telford looked bleak and sounded bleaker. "Not much we can do about it. Not anything we can do about it, far as I know. If they decide to line us up and shoot us, who's going to complain to them?"

"It ain't right," the other Confederate officer said. Telford only shrugged.

Who'd complained when the Confederacy got rid of its Negroes? Dover knew he hadn't. He also knew his fellow officers wouldn't appreciate his pointing that out. Sometimes the smartest thing you could do was just keep your big mouth shut. Dover, a man who liked to yell at people, had been a long time learning that. He had the lesson now, though.

One by one, the officers in his barracks hall got summoned to their interrogations. A few left Camp Liberty! not much later. The rest stayed where they were, fuming and cursing their damnyankee captors. Dover wondered how smart the victors were. If these POWs hadn't been embittered Yankee-haters who would do anything they could to hurt the USA once they finally got free, they were more likely to turn into men with views like that the longer they sat and stewed.

Of course, maybe the U.S. authorities didn't intend to let them go at all. Dover imagined stooped, white-haired POWs dying of old age as the twentieth century passed into the twenty-first. He shivered. Not even the Yankees could stay vengeful for upwards of half a century…could they?

They seemed to be questioning prisoners in roughly the order the Confederates had been captured. That meant Jerry Dover had quite a while to wait. He was perfectly willing to be patient.

Kirby Smith Telford came back from his grilling hot enough to cook over. "I'm a special case, the sons of bitches say," he rasped.

"How come?" Dover asked. "You were just a combat soldier, right? Why are they flabbling about you, then?"

"On account of I'm from Texas, that's why," Telford answered. "From the goddamn traitor Republic of Texas, now. If I'm gonna get outa here, I have to swear to be loyal to a country"-he made as if to spit at the very idea-"that betrayed the country I grew up in."

"You could just ask them to ship you back to some other part of the CSA," Dover said.

"I tried that. It only made things worse," Telford said bleakly. "They reckoned I said that because I wanted to raise trouble for them. I didn't mean it that way-not then I didn't. But Jesus God! If I get out of here now…" He didn't say what he would do then. What he didn't say, nobody could report to the authorities. Dover didn't have much trouble figuring it out, though.

"Probably should have done whatever they told you to do, and then gone on about your business afterwards," he said.

"Yeah. I figured that out, too, only not quick enough to do me any goddamn good." Kirby Smith Telford sounded almost as disgusted at himself as he did at his Yankee interrogators.

Dover's turn came about a week later, on a summer day as hot and sticky as any in Savannah. The officer who questioned him was a major about half his age, a fellow named Hendrickson. He had a manila folder with Dover's name on it. It was fat with papers. Dover wondered whether that was a good sign or a bad one.

"You were in the Quartermaster Corps," Major Hendrickson said. He had a prissy little hairline mustache that didn't go with the shape of his face.

"I sure was," Dover said.

"You were taken outside of Huntsville."

"That's right."

"You fought in the Great War, but you're not career military."

"Right again." This ground seemed safe enough.

Hendrickson lit a cigarette-a nasty U.S. brand. He didn't offer one to Dover. Instead, he went through some of the papers in the folder. "Tell me what you did between the wars."

"I managed a restaurant in Savannah, Georgia," Dover replied. Hendrickson asked him for the name of the place. "The Huntsman's Lodge," Dover said, wondering why that could possibly matter.

It seemed to; Major Hendrickson grunted and checked something off. Dover tried to see what it was, but he couldn't read upside down well enough to tell. The interrogator went on, "Did you employ Negroes in this restaurant?"

"Yeah," Dover said. "Cooks and waiters and cleanup crew. Couldn't hardly get along without 'em."

"We don't seem to have any trouble," Hendrickson said primly. Dover only shrugged; he didn't care how damnyankees ran their eateries. The interrogator riffled through his papers some more. "Was one of these Negroes a man named, uh, Xerxes?"

He botched the name, so Dover almost didn't recognize it. "Xerxes?" He said it the right way, as if the first X was a Z. "Yeah, he worked for me for years. Hell of a smart guy. Probably would've been a lawyer or a Congressman if he was white. But how the devil did you know that?"

Annoyingly, Hendrickson answered a question with another question: "Do you remember his son's name?"

"Have to think about that-I only met him a couple of times. He was…Cassius. How come?" Before the Yankee major answered, Dover's jaw dropped. "Sweet suffering Jesus! Not that Cassius?" The U.S. wireless wouldn't shut up about the Negro who'd shot Jake Featherston.

Major Hendrickson nodded. "The very same. And it just so happened your name came up a couple-three times when we questioned him."

"Oh, yeah?" Dover had never imagined his fate could rest on a black man's-hell, on a black kid's-word. "What'd he have to say?"

Before answering, Hendrickson shuffled papers, even though he had to know already. Dover wanted to clout him, but made himself sit tight. "He said you treated his old man pretty decent. Said you saved his whole family from a cleanout once. Is that a fact?"

"Yeah." Dover didn't want to make a big deal out of it now. He'd saved Scipio and his family-and several other colored workers and theirs-as much to keep the Huntsman's Lodge going as for any other reason. But this U.S. soldier didn't need to know that. "What about it?"

"Well, it means you aren't real likely to be a hardcore Freedom Party man," Hendrickson said. "Will you swear an oath to live peacefully in Georgia and not to cause trouble for the United States if we let you go?"

"Major, I have lived through two wars now. I have had enough trouble to last me the rest of my days," Dover said. "Read me out your oath. I will swear to it, and I will live up to it."

"Raise your right hand," Hendrickson said. Dover did. The oath was what the U.S. soldier said it was. Dover repeated it, swore to it, and then signed a printed copy in triplicate. "Show one copy to U.S. military authorities on request," Hendrickson told him. "We will give you the balance of your back pay and a train ticket to Augusta. You can wear your uniform, but take off your rank badges before you leave the camp. The C.S. Army is out of business."

Kirby Smith Telford scowled at Dover as he packed a meager duffel and took the stars off his collar. Other POWs eyed him with varying mixtures of envy and hatred. He didn't care. He was going home.

A young captain looked at Cincinnatus from across a no-doubt-liberated card table that did duty for a desk. "You are Cincinnatus Driver," he said.

"Yes, sir. I sure am," Cincinnatus agreed.

"You have been serving as a civilian truck driver attached to the U.S. Army since the end of 1942," the captain said.

"That's right, too. Did the same thing in the las' war," Cincinnatus said.

"Yes-so your records indicate. According to your superiors, you always performed your duties well, in spite of your physical limitations."

"Always done the best I could," Cincinnatus answered. "I had to stick around when it got tight-couldn't hardly run."

"You're probably eager to return to your family in, uh, Des Moines"-the captain had to check Cincinnatus' papers before naming his home town-"now that we have achieved victory."

Cincinnatus nodded. "Sure am. You know anybody who ain't?"

To his surprise, the officer took the question seriously. "There are always some who are more comfortable in the Army. They don't have to think for themselves here-they just have to do as they're told. And they never have any doubts about who's on their side and who isn't."

The young officer was probably right. No, he was bound to be right. "Hadn't thought of it that way, sir," Cincinnatus said. "But me, I'm a big boy. I can take care of myself, and I can make up my own mind. And if the government's ready to muster me out, I'm real ready to go home."

"That's what you're here to arrange," the captain said. "I have your final pay warrant here, and I have a train ticket to get you home."

"Ask you a favor, sir?"

"I don't know. What is it?"

"Can you arrange my train route to take me through Covington, Kentucky? I was born and raised there, and I want to see if any of my people in the colored quarter came through in one piece."

"It's irregular. It's an extra expense…" The officer in green-gray frowned, considering. "Let me talk to my superiors. You may have to stay in Alabama an extra day or two while we set things up-if they approve, that is."

"I don't mind," Cincinnatus said. "Not even a little bit."

He stayed an extra three days, in fact. The rest of the drivers in his unit headed for home long before he did. Hal Williamson shook his hand and said, "Good luck to you, buddy. Goddamn if I didn't learn something from you."

"What's that?" Cincinnatus asked.

"Colored guys-you're just like anybody else, only darker," Hal answered.

Cincinnatus laughed. "Shit, I'll take that. Good luck to you, too, man."

He got the travel orders he wanted. Back in Confederate days, he would have had to ride in a separate car. No more. Some white passengers looked unhappy at sharing a row with him, but nobody said anything. That suited him well enough. He didn't ask to be loved: only tolerated.

The Stars and Stripes flew over Covington. A blue X that stood for the C.S. battle flag showed up on walls all over town. So did the word FREEDOM! The CSA had lost the war, but not everybody had given up.

Buses were running. He took one east from the train station to the colored quarter by the Licking River, or what was left of it. He sat up near the front of the bus, the first time he'd been able to do that here regardless of whether Covington flew the Stars and Stripes or Stars and Bars.

Not all the fences and barbed wire that sealed off the colored quarter had come down yet. But ways through the stuff were open now. Cincinnatus got off the bus a couple of blocks from Lucullus Wood's barbecue place. If anyone had come through what the Confederates did to their Negroes, he would have bet on the Red barbecue cook.

Houses and shops stood empty. Windows had broken panes; doors sagged open. Leaves drifted on lawns. Ice shivered up Cincinnatus' spine. What was that fancy word people used when they talked about dinosaurs? This place was extinct.

A stray cat darted across the street and behind some untrimmed bushes. Cats could take care of themselves without people. Cincinnatus didn't hear any barking dogs. He should have, if the colored quarter had any life left to it.

When he saw somebody else on the street, he jumped in surprise and alarm. It was an old white man in a cool linen suit, his white hair shining under his Panama hat. The white man seemed as startled to spot a Negro as Cincinnatus was to see him. Then, all of a sudden, he wasn't. "I might have known it would be you," he said. "You're tougher to kill than a cockroach, aren't you?"

"Go to hell, Bliss," Cincinnatus said wearily. "Lucullus still alive?"

"His place looks as dead as the rest of this part of town," Luther Bliss answered. The longtime head of the Kentucky State Police sighed. "I tried to get him out once they closed off the colored quarter, but I couldn't do it. Don't know what happened to him, but I'm afraid it's nothing good. Damn shame."

"They go and kill everybody?" Cincinnatus asked. "They really go an' do that?"

"Just about," Bliss said. "And you were in bed with 'em for a while. Doesn't that make you proud?"

"Fuck off and die," Cincinnatus said coldly. "I was never in bed with the goddamn Freedom Party, and you know it."

Luther Bliss spat. "Maybe. I never knew anything about you for sure, though. That's how come I never trusted you."

Cincinnatus laughed in his face. "Don't give me that shit. You never trusted your own grandma."

"If you'd known the old bat, you wouldn't've trusted her, either. She was an evil woman." Nothing fazed Bliss. His mournful hound-dog eyes pierced Cincinnatus. "So you drove a truck, did you?"

"Keepin' tabs on me?"

"Damn straight I was," Bliss replied. "You deserve it. But things are all over now. The United States won, and if we kill enough Confederates to keep the rest quiet we'll do all right."

He waited. Cincinnatus laughed again. "What? You reckon I'm gonna argue with you? We better kill a lot of them bastards. Otherwise, they'll be killin' us too damn soon."

"Well, we agree about something, anyway," Luther Bliss said. "I hope to God I never see you again. You gave me too much to worry about-more than Lucullus, even. He was smarter than you, but I always knew where he stood. With you, I had to wonder."

"You son of a bitch," Cincinnatus said. "You kept me in jail for two years. Wasn't for that Darrow ofay, you never woulda let me out."

"I still say I was doing the USA a favor by keeping you in." Nothing would ever make Bliss back up or admit he might have been wrong, either.

The two men warily sidled past each other. Cincinnatus went on toward the barbecue shack. He didn't trust Bliss' word about anything-he had to see with his own eyes. But the secret policeman wasn't lying here. The place Lucullus had taken over from his father sat quiet and deserted. Oh, the building still stood, but piles of dead leaves and broken windows said no one had come here for a long time. Even the wonderful smell that had always wafted from the shack was gone. You could gain weight just from that smell. No more, dammit. Nothing in Covington would ever be the same.

Sighing, Cincinnatus walked on to the house his father and mother had shared till she passed away. He'd lived there himself, getting over his accident, helping to take care of her as she slid deeper into senility, and then simply trapped in Covington. The house was still standing, too. Cincinnatus supposed his father still owned it. Even with a shell hole in the front yard and a little shrapnel damage, it was bound to be worth something.

Who would want to buy a house in the colored district, though? How many Negroes would want to live here, even with Covington passed back to the USA? How many Negroes were left to live in Covington and all the other towns that had flown the Stars and Bars? Not enough. Nowhere close to enough. Would whites eventually settle in this part of town, too? Or would they tear everything down and try to pretend Negroes had never been a part of life south of the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio?

Cincinnatus couldn't know which, but he sure knew which way he'd bet.

Sore and sad, he walked on through the almost-deserted quarter instead of heading back to the bus stop and the train ride on to his family. His feet knew where he was going better than his head did. Before long, he found himself in front of the Brass Monkey. He'd drowned a lot of sorrows in that bar while he was stuck here.

He almost jumped out of his shoes when a voice floated out through the door: "C'mon in! We're open!"

"Do Jesus!" Cincinnatus walked inside. There was no electricity, so his eyes needed a little while to adjust to the dimness. A black man sat at the bar, nursing a whiskey. Another one stood behind it, fanning himself. It was the same bartender who'd been there before. "Didn't reckon I'd see you alive," Cincinnatus remarked.

"I could say the same thing about you," the man answered. "When the police done took you away, I reckoned you was dead meat."

"I was on a list," Cincinnatus said.

"Figured you was. That's why they took you away."

"No, a different kind o' list. They went an' exchanged me an' my pa fo' a couple of Confederates who got stuck up in the USA."

"Lucky," the bartender observed.

"Yeah, I reckon," Cincinnatus said. "How'd you get by?"

"Me? I was lucky a different kind o' way." The bartender fanned harder and didn't go on.

The black man at the bar said, "Cambyses, he done the butternut bastards enough favors, they didn't take him off to no camp."

"Shut your mouth!" the bartender squawked indignantly.

"Shit, don't make no difference now," the other man said. "Me, I done the same damn thing. I ain't what you call real proud o' myself, but I ain't dead, neither, an' a hell of a lot o' folks is."

Cincinnatus had been about to buy himself a drink-he could have used one. Instead, he turned around and walked out. Had those two Negroes survived by ratting on their fellows? He'd always wondered about Cambyses, and he seemed to have been right to wonder. Had they bought their lives at too high a price?

They wouldn't say so. As for Cincinnatus, he was mostly surprised the Confederates had let them live. Maybe the whites just hadn't had time to kill them before Covington fell. How many Negroes down here had made the same Devil's bargain to survive? He was heading back to Des Moines, back to the USA. He thanked God he wouldn't have to find out.

With a wheeze that said it might not get much farther, the train stopped at the little station in Baroyeca. Jorge Rodriguez wore his butternut uniform, shorn of his stripes and all Confederate insignia. It was all the clothing he had. He'd been living on the ration cans the Yankees gave him when they let him out of the POW camp. If he never ate anything that came from a tin can again, he wouldn't be sorry. He was even sick of the famous deviled ham. Enough was enough, and then some.

Jorge was the only one who got off at Baroyeca. There on the platform stood his mother, his brother Pedro, and his sister Susana and two of her little children. Jorge hugged everybody and kissed everybody and slapped Pedro on the back. His older brother had been a POW much longer than he had.

"Do you know when Miguel is getting home?" Jorge asked.

Their other brother had been captured, too, and wounded as well. Pedro shook his head. "I haven't heard anything. One of these days, that's all."

"Soon, God, please." Their mother crossed herself.

When Jorge saw the alcalde's house, he saw the Stars and Stripes flying above it. "Even here!" he said in dismay.

"Even here," Pedro agreed. "We lost. You can get into big trouble if you show the Confederate flag. All we can do is what the Yankees tell us-for now."

He sounded as if he was ready to pick up the fight again if he ever saw the chance. Jorge wasn't so sure. He'd seen a lot more war than his brother had-enough to satisfy him for a long, long time, if not forever. As long as you could live your life, how much difference did it really make which flag flew over the alcalde's house?

There was Freedom Party headquarters, where his father spent so much time. It stood empty, deserted. "What happened to Seсor Quinn?" Jorge asked.

"He went off to war himself, when things got hard and they started calling in older men," his mother answered. "After that, nobody here knows. He hasn't come back-I know that."

"Maybe he will," Jorge said. Who could guess how long all the Confederate soldiers would need to come home, especially if they lived in out-of-the-way places like Baroyeca? Maybe Robert Quinn lay in a U.S. hospital. Maybe he was still in a camp. As the war ran down and surrender finally came, the Yankees took prisoners by the tens, maybe by the hundreds, of thousands.

"Let's go home," his mother said. Actually, what she said was Vamos a casa. She mixed English and Spanish indiscriminately. Most people her age did. Jorge and Pedro smiled at each other. They'd used more English even when they lived here. Since going into the Army, the only time Jorge had spoken any Spanish was when he ran into another soldier from Sonora or Chihuahua. Even then, he and the other man would mostly speak English so their buddies from the rest of the CSA wouldn't tab them for a couple of dumb greasers.

Home was a three-mile walk. Jorge carried his little nephew part of the way. After a sixty-pound pack and a rifle on his back, Juanito didn't seem to weigh much. It was hot, but Jorge was used to heat. The air was dry, anyhow; he wouldn't have to wring himself out when he got to the farmhouse.

"Better weather than farther east," he said, and Pedro nodded.

A black-headed magpie-jay sat on a power line and screeched at the people walking by below. Jays in the rest of the CSA were smaller, with shorter tails. They didn't sound the same-but they did sound like cousins.

When he got to the farmhouse, it seemed smaller than he remembered. It also seemed plainer and poorer. He hadn't thought anything of the way he lived before he went into the Army. People who lived around Baroyeca either scratched out a livelihood from farms like this one or went into the mines and grubbed lead and silver-never quite enough silver-out of the ground.

By local standards, his family was well off. They had running water and electricity, though they hadn't when Jorge was younger. They'd talked about getting a motorcar. Jorge had needed to go up into the rest of the CSA, the part where everyone spoke English all the time, to realize how much he'd grown up without. If nobody around you had it, though, you didn't miss it.

"Like old times, having two of my sons home and the third one on the way." His mother was invincibly optimistic. He thought so, anyhow, till her face clouded and she went on, "If only your father were here to see it."

"Sн," Jorge said. Nobody seemed to want to say any more than that. Hipolito Rodriguez's death, so far from all his family, would cast a shadow over them for the rest of their lives. Why had he shot himself? He'd been doing work he thought the country needed, and doing it for his Army buddy from the last war. What could have gone wrong?

It was almost as if he'd listened to Yankee propaganda about the camps, and that even before there was much Yankee propaganda. If mallates were people like anybody else, then putting them in those camps was wrong. If. No matter what the damnyankees said, Jorge had trouble believing it. Most Confederate citizens would. His father would have-he was sure of that.

Could something he saw, something that happened at the camp, have changed his mind? Jorge also had trouble believing that. And, with no way to look inside his father's mind and understand what he was thinking, it would stay a mystery forever.

His mother cooked tacos stuffed with shredded pork and spices fiery enough to make his nose run-he wasn't used to them any more. He ate and ate. Yes, this kind of food beat the devil out of canned deviled ham. And there were chicharrones-pieces of pigskin fried crisp and crunchy that gave your teeth a workout.

"This is wonderful," Jorge said. "I ate boring food so long, I forgot how good things could be."

His older brother laughed. "I said the very same thing when I got here-didn't I, mamacita?"

"Yes, exactly the same thing," Magdalena Rodriguez answered.

"Let's hope we can hear Miguel say it, too," Susana said.

"And soon, please, God," their mother said. Someone knocked on the door. "It's the postman." She got up to see what he had.

There were a couple of advertising circulars and a large envelope that looked official. And it was: it came from something called the U.S. occupying authority in the former state of Sonora. Magdalena Rodriguez fought through the pronunciation of that. When she opened the envelope and unfolded the piece of paper inside, she made a face.

"All in English," she said.

"Let me see." Jorge could read English well enough. And, in fact, the paper was aimed at Pedro and him. He frowned at the eagle in front of crossed swords on the letterhead; people using that emblem had done their level best to kill him. Now they were telling him what he had to do as a returned prisoner of war.

And they weren't kidding around, either. Returned POWs had to report to the alcalde's office once a week. They had to renounce the Freedom Party. They had to report all meetings of more than five people they attended.

Pedro laughed when Jorge said that. "More than five people here now," he observed. "Do we report this?"

"I wouldn't be surprised," Jorge said. He kept reading. Returned POWs could not write or subscribe to forbidden literature. They couldn't keep weapons of caliber larger than.22-either pistols or longarms.

"I'm surprised they let you have any," his sister said when he read that.

"Somebody who was writing the rules had to know every farm down here has a varmint gun," Jorge said. His father had taught him to shoot, and to be careful with firearms, when he was a little boy. "If they said we couldn't keep guns at all, we wouldn't pay any attention to them. They think this keeps them out of trouble."

"You can kill somebody with a.22," Pedro said.

"Sure," Jorge agreed. "But you have to hit him just right."

"Are you sure they really let us out of the camps?" his brother asked.

He shrugged. "We're here. This isn't so good, but they'll get tired of it after a while. They have to. How many soldiers can they put in Baroyeca?"

"As many as they want," Pedro said.

But Jorge shook his head. "I don't believe it. They'd have to stick soldiers in every little town from Virginia to here. Even the Yankees don't have that many soldiers…I hope."

Pedro thought about it. "Mm, maybe you're right. The war is over. The Yankees will want to go home, too."

"Sure they will. Who wouldn't?" Jorge said. "Being a soldier is no fun. You march around, that's not so bad. But when you fight, most of the time you're bored and uncomfortable, and the rest you're scared to death."

"And you can get hurt, too," their mother said softly, and crossed herself again.

Jorge and Pedro had both been lucky, coming through the war with nothing worse than a few scratches. Their brother hadn't. The roll of the dice, the turn of the card…Some guys had a shell burst ten feet away from them and didn't get badly hurt. Some turned into hamburger. Who could say why? God, maybe. From everything Jorge had seen, He had a rugged sense of humor.

One of these days, he wanted to talk that over with Pedro-and with Miguel, too. Not here, though. Not now. Not with their mother listening. She believed, and she hadn't seen so many reasons not to believe.

Well, all that could wait. It would have to, in fact. "How is the farm?" he asked his mother. He would be here for a long time. This was what counted now.

"Not so bad," she answered, "but not so good, either. We all did everything we could. With so many men in the Army, though"-she spread her hands-"we couldn't do everything we wanted to. The livestock is all right. The crops…Well, we didn't go hungry, but we barely made enough to pay for the things we need and we can't get from the land."

"It's about what you'd expect," Pedro said. "If we work hard, we can bring it back to the way it was before the war-maybe better. If the Yankees let us, I mean."

"I think maybe they will. They don't care so much about us-we're too far away," Jorge said. "Virginia, Tennessee-they really hate the people there. And Georgia, too. I think they'll come down on them harder and leave us alone unless somebody here does something stupid like try to rise up."

Pedro didn't say anything. Jorge realized that wasn't necessarily good news. No, his brother hadn't seen so much fighting as he had. Maybe Pedro was still ready for more. Jorge knew damn well he wasn't. Bombers dropping loads on Baroyeca, without even any antiaircraft to shoot back? Believe it or not, the mere idea made him want to cross himself.