In At the Death

XVI

The doctor eyed Michael Pound with a curious lack of comprehension. "You can stay longer if you like, Lieutenant," he said. "You're not fully healed. You don't have to return to active duty."

"I understand that, sir," Pound answered. "I want to."

He and the doctor wore the same uniform, but they didn't speak the same language. "Why, for God's sake?" the medical man asked. "You've got it soft here. No snipers. No mines. No auto bombs or people bombs."

"Sir, no offense, but it's boring here," Pound said. "I want to go where things are happening. I want to make things happen myself. I needed to be here-I needed to get patched up. Now I can walk on my hind legs again. They can put me back in a barrel, and I'm ready to go. I want to see what the Confederate States look like now that they've surrendered."

"They look the way hell would if we'd bombed it back to the Stone Age," the doctor said. "And everybody who's left alive hates our guts."

"Good," Pound said. The doctor gaped. Pound condescended to explain: "In that case, it's mutual." He held out his hospital-discharge papers. "You sign three times, sir."

"I know the regulations." The medical man signed with a fancy fountain pen. "If you want a psychological discharge, I daresay you'd qualify for that, too."

"Sir, if I want a discharge, I'll find a floozy," Pound said. As the doctor snorted, Pound went on, "But you've even got things to really cure VD now, don't you?"

"As a matter of fact, we do. Curing stupidity is another story, worse luck." The doctor kept one copy for the file and handed back the rest. "Good luck to you."

"Thanks." Pound took the papers and limped across the street to the depot there for reassignment.

"Glutton for punishment, sir?" asked the top sergeant who ran the Chattanooga repple-depple. He was not far from Pound's age, and had an impressive spread of ribbons on his chest-including one for the Purple Heart with two tiny oak-leaf clusters on it.

"Look who's talking," Pound told him. The noncom chuckled and gave back a crooked grin. Pound asked, "What have you got for me?"

"Armor, eh?" the sergeant said, and gave Pound a measuring stare. "How long did you wear stripes on your sleeve instead of shoulder straps?"

"Oh, a little while. They finally promoted me when I wasn't looking," Pound said.

"Thought that was how things might work." The sergeant didn't have to be a genius to figure it out. A first lieutenant with graying, thinning hair and lines on his face hadn't come out of either West Point or the training programs that produced throngs of ninety-day wonders to lead platoons. Every so often, the school of hard knocks booted out an officer, too. The sergeant shuffled through papers. "What's the biggest outfit you were ever in charge of?"

"A platoon."

"Think you can swing a company?"

Pound always thought he could do anything. He was right more often than he was wrong, which didn't stop him from occasionally bumping up against a hard dose of reality. But, since he would never again be able to get back to the pure and simple pleasures of a gunner's job, he expected he could handle a larger command than any he'd had yet. "Sure. Where is it?"

"Down in Tallahassee, Florida," the personnel sergeant said. "Kinda tricky down there. They didn't see any U.S. soldiers during the war, so a lot of them don't feel like they really lost."

"No, huh?" Pound said. "Well, if they need lessons, I can give 'em some."

"There you go. Let me cut you some orders, then. I'll send a wire to the outfit down there, tell 'em they've got their man. And we'll give you a lift to the train station." The sergeant sketched a salute. "Pleasure doing business with you, sir."

"Back at you." Pound returned the military courtesy.

Seeing the train gave him pause. It said-screamed, really-that the fighting wasn't over yet. A freight car full of junk preceded the locomotive. If the track was mined, the car's weight would set off the charge and spare the engine. There was a machine gun on the roof of every fourth car, and several more gun barrels stuck out from the caboose. You didn't carry that kind of firepower unless you thought you'd need it.

He already knew what Georgia looked like. He'd helped create that devastation himself. He was moderately proud of it, or more than moderately. He changed trains in Atlanta. Walking through the station hurt, but he didn't let on. Released Confederate POWs in their shabby uniforms, now stripped of emblems, also made their way through the place. They were tight-lipped and somber. Maybe the people in Tallahassee didn't know the CSA had lost the war, but these guys did.

The new train also had a freight car in front and plenty of guns up top. Pound looked out on wrecked vehicles and burnt farmhouses and hasty graves-the detritus of war. He thought the devastation would have a sharp edge marking the U.S. stop line, but it didn't. Bombers had made sure of that. Towns had got leveled. Bridges were out. He sat there for several hours waiting for the last touches to be put on repairs to one.

"Why don't we go back or go around?" somebody in the car asked.

"Because that would make sense," Pound said, and no one seemed to want to argue with him.

He got into Tallahassee in the late afternoon, then, and not the morning as he'd been scheduled to do. It wasn't remotely his fault, but he didn't think it would endear him to his new CO, whoever that turned out to be.

A sergeant standing just inside the doorway held a sign that said LIEUTENANT POUND. "That's me," Pound said. "Sorry to keep you waiting."

"It's all right, sir. I know the railroads on the way down here are really screwed up," the noncom said. "I've got an auto waiting for you. Can I grab your duffel? Colonel Einsiedel said you were coming off a wound."

"Afraid I am." Pound took the green-gray canvas sack off his shoulder and gave it to the sergeant. "Sorry to put you to the trouble, but if you're kind enough to offer I'll take you up on it."

"Don't worry about it, sir. All part of the service." The sergeant was in his early twenties. He'd probably been a private when the war started, if he'd been in the Army at all. Michael Pound knew what his curious glance meant. You're the oldest goddamn first looey I ever saw. But the man didn't say anything except, "I've got it. Follow me."

The motorcar was a commandeered Birmingham. The sergeant drove him past the bomb-damaged State Capitol and then north and east up to Clark Park, where the armored regiment was bivouacked. It wasn't a long drive at all. "Tallahassee's the capital of Florida, isn't it?" Pound said. "I thought there'd be more of it."

"It's only about a good piss wide, sure as hell," the sergeant agreed. "Christ, the Legislature only meets for a coupla months in odd-numbered years. We had to call 'em back into session so we could tell 'em what to do."

"How did they like that?" Pound asked.

"Everybody hates us. We're Yankees," the sergeant said matter-of-factly. "But if anybody fucks with us, we grease him. It's about that simple. All of our barrels have a.50-caliber machine gun mounted in front of the commander's cupola, and we carry lots of canister, not so much HE and AP. We're here to smash up mobs, and we damn well do it."

"Sounds good to me." Pound had wished for a machine gun of his own plenty of times in the field. Now he'd have one-and a.50-caliber machine gun could chew up anything this side of a barrel. And if God wanted a shotgun, He'd pick up a barrel's cannon firing canister. Canister wouldn't just smash up a mob-it would exterminate one.

Barbed wire surrounded Clark Park. So did signs with skulls and crossbones on them and a blunt warning message: HEADS UP! MINES! U.S. guards carrying captured C.S. automatic rifles talked to the sergeant before swinging back a stout, wire-protected gate and letting the Birmingham through.

"Had trouble with auto bombs or people bombs?" Pound asked. "Do they shoot mortars at you in the middle of the night?"

"They tried that shit once or twice, sir," his driver answered. "When we take hostages now, we're up to killing a hundred for one. They know we'd just as soon see 'em dead, so they don't mess with us like they did when we first got here. Now they've seen we really mean it."

"That sounds good to me, too." Pound was and always had been a firm believer in massive retaliation.

The sergeant drove him up to a tent flying a regimental flag-a pugnacious turtle on roller skates wearing a helmet and boxing gloves-that looked as if some Hollywood animation studio had designed it. Colonel Nick Einsiedel looked as if some Hollywood casting office had designed him. He was tall and blond and handsome, and he wore the ribbons for a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.

"Good to have you with us," he told Pound. "I did some asking around-you've got a hell of a record. Shame you didn't make officer's rank till the middle of the war."

"I liked being a sergeant, sir," Pound said. "But this isn't so bad." As Einsiedel laughed, he went on, "How can I be most useful here, sir?"

"That's the kind of question I like to hear," the regimental CO replied. "We're trying to be tough but fair-or fair but tough, if you'd sooner look at it that way."

"Sir, if I've got plenty of canister for the big gun and a.50 up on my turret along with the other machine guns, you can call it whatever you want," Pound said. "The people down here will damn well do what I tell 'em to, and that's what counts."

Colonel Einsiedel smiled. "You've got your head on straight, by God."

"I've been through the mill. Maybe it amounts to the same thing."

"Wouldn't be surprised," Einsiedel said. "One thing we don't do unless we can't help it, though-we don't send a barrel out by itself. Too many blind spots, too good a chance for somebody to throw a Featherston Fizz at you."

That didn't sound so good. "I thought the locals were supposed to be too scared of us to try any crap," Pound said.

"They are-supposed to be," the regimental CO answered. "But in case they aren't, we don't want to lead them into temptation, either. Does that suit you?"

"Oh, yes, sir. I want to know what I'm getting into, that's all," Pound said.

Einsiedel gave him a crooked grin. "Whatever you get into down here, make sure you go to a pro station afterwards, 'cause chances are you'll end up with a dose if you don't."

"Understand, sir," Pound said, thinking back to his joke with the doctor before he got released. "Uh-is there an officers' brothel in town?"

"Officially, no. Officially, all the brown-noses back up in the USA would pitch a fit if we did things like that. Unofficially, there are two. Maude's is around the corner from the Capitol. Miss Lucy's is a couple of blocks farther south. I like Maude's better, but you can try 'em both."

"I expect I will. All the comforts of home-or of a house, anyway," Pound said. Colonel Einsiedel winced. Pound figured he'd got off on the right foot.

L ike most Congressional veterans, Flora Blackford spent most of her time in Philadelphia. As summer swung towards autumn every other year, though, she went back to the Lower East Side in New York City to campaign for reelection. And this was a Presidential election year, too.

She thought Charlie La Follette ought to win in a walk. But the Democrats had nominated a native New Yorker, a hotshot prosecutor named Dewey, to run against him. Dewey and his Vice Presidential candidate, a blunt-talking Senator from Missouri, were running an aggressive campaign, crisscrossing the country saying they could have handled the war better and would ride herd on the beaten Confederacy harder. President La Follette and his running mate, Jim Curley of Massachusetts, had to content themselves with saying that the Socialists damn well had won the war. Would that be enough? Unless people were uncommonly ungrateful, Flora thought it would.

Normally, she wouldn't have wanted to see Congressman Curley on the ticket. He came straight from the Boston machine, an unsavory if effective apparatus. But Dewey's would-be veep was a longtime Kansas City ward heeler, and the Kansas City machine was even more unsavory (and perhaps even more effective) than Boston's.

Visiting Socialist Party headquarters felt like coming home again. The only difference from when she worked there thirty years earlier was that the butcher's shop underneath the place was owned by the son of the man who'd run it then. Like his father, Sheldon Fleischmann was a Democrat. And, like his father, he often sent cold cuts up anyhow.

The district had changed. Far fewer people here were fresh off the boat than had been true in 1914. Native-born Americans tended to be more conservative than their immigrant parents. All the same, Flora worried more about the national ticket than her own seat. The fellow the Democrats had nominated, a theatrical booking agent named Morris Kramer, had to spend most of his time explaining why he hadn't been in uniform during the war.

"He's got a hernia," Herman Bruck said. He'd been a Socialist activist as long as Flora had. "So all right-they didn't conscript him. But do you think anybody wants a Congressman who wears a truss?"

"If he didn't wear it, his brains would fall out," somebody else said. That got a laugh from everyone in the long, smoky room. Half the typewriters stopped clattering for a moment. The other half wouldn't have stopped for anything this side of the Messiah.

"I won't give him a hard time for not going into the service," Flora said. "The voters know the story." If they didn't know it, she would make damn sure they found out before Election Day. "I want to show them what having somebody who's been in Congress for a while means to them."

"Well, you've got a chance to do that," Bruck said.

"I know," Flora answered unhappily. During the Great War, C.S. bombers hardly ever got as far north as New York City. They did little damage on their handful of raids. It wasn't like that this time around, worse luck.

Most of the Confederates' bombs had fallen on the port-most, but far from all. Some rained down on the city at random. In a place so full of people, the bombardiers must have assumed they would do damage wherever their explosions came down-and who was to say they were wrong?

Flora's district had suffered along with the rest of New York. Bombs had blown up apartment buildings and clothing factories and block after block of shops. Incendiaries had charred holes in the fabric of the city. Rebuilding wouldn't be easy or quick or cheap.

One advantage incumbency gave Flora was her connections down in Philadelphia. If she asked for money to help put her district back together, she was more likely to get it than a Congressman new in his seat.

Her campaign posters got right down to business when they talked about that. DO YOU WANT A NEW KID ON YOUR BLOCK? they asked, and showed Morris Kramer in short pants pulling a wheeled wooden duck on a string. That wasn't even remotely fair, but politics wasn't about being fair. Politics was about getting your guy in and keeping the other side's guy out. Once you'd done that, you could do all the other neat stuff you had in mind. If you stood on the sidelines looking longingly toward the playing field, all the neat ideas in the world weren't worth a dime.

"We want to make this district a better place than it was before the war," Flora said to whoever would listen to her. "Not the same as it used to be, not just as good as it used to be. Better. If we can't do that, we might as well leave the ruins alone, to remind us we shouldn't be dumb enough to fight another war."

Herman Bruck brought a blond kid in a captain's uniform up to her one afternoon at the Socialist Party headquarters. "Flora, I'd like you to meet Alex Swartz," he said.

"Hello, Captain Swartz," Flora said. "What can I do for you?" She had no doubt that the earnest young officer with a roll of papers under one arm was on the up and up. Whether Herman Bruck had an ulterior motive in introducing him…Well, she'd find out about that.

"Very pleased to meet you, ma'am," Alex Swartz said. He had broad, Slavic cheekbones and a narrow chin, giving his face a foxy cast. "I graduated from Columbia with a degree in architecture two weeks before the war started. I'm on leave right now-in a week, I go back down to occupation duty in Mississippi. But I wanted to show you some of the sketches I've made for how things might look once we put them back together."

"I'd like to see," Flora said, not exaggerating too much. If the sketches turned out to be garbage, she could come out with polite nothings, let the captain down easy, and then get on with her reelection campaign and with taking care of the damage in the district.

But they weren't garbage. As he unrolled them one by one and talked about what he had in mind, she saw she wasn't the only one who'd been thinking along those lines. The sketches showed a more spacious, less jam-packed, less hurried place than the one her constituents lived in now.

"This is a lot like what I have in mind," she said. "I particularly like the way you use green space, and the way you don't forget about theaters and libraries. The next question is, how much does it all cost?" That was the one that separated amateurs from professionals. She wouldn't have been surprised if Alex Swartz hadn't worried about it at all.

He had, though. "Here-I've made some estimates," he said, and pulled a couple of folded sheets of paper from his left breast pocket. "Not cheap, but I hope not too outrageous."

"Let's have a look." Flora peered through the bottoms of her bifocals. She found herself nodding. Captain Swartz had it just about right-what he was proposing wasn't cheap, but it wasn't too expensive, either. If you wanted to do things right, you had to spend some money. "Not bad, Captain. Not bad at all."

"Do you think…there's any chance it will happen?" he asked.

"There's some chance that some of it will," she answered. "I can't say any more than that. Nothing the government touches ever ends up looking just the way you thought it would before you started-you need to understand that right from the beginning, or else you start going crazy."

Swartz nodded. "Got you."

"Are you sure? You'd better, or you'll end up very disappointed. Most things end up as compromises, as committee decisions that don't make too many people too unhappy. Some good stuff goes down the drain. So does some crap. Which is which…depends on who's talking a lot of the time."

"Getting some of this built is better than leaving it all as pretty pictures," Captain Swartz insisted. "Pretty pictures are too easy."

"That sounds like the right attitude," Flora said.

"One thing you find out pretty darn quick in the Army-you won't get everything you want," Swartz said.

"It's no different in politics," Flora said. "We don't always have to shoot at people to make that clear, though, which is all to the good."

Captain Swartz looked about sixteen when he grinned. "I bet." Then the grin slipped. "Didn't I hear your son got wounded? How's he doing?"

"He's getting better," Flora answered. "It was a hand wound-nothing life-threatening, thank God." And it kept him out of action while the war finally ran down. Maybe it kept him from stopping something worse. She could hope so, anyway. Hoping so made her feel not quite so bad when she thought about what did happen to Joshua.

"Glad to hear it," the architect said. "I admire you for not keeping him out of the Army or getting him a job counting paper clips in Nevada or something. You would've had the clout to do it-I know that."

"Captain, I'll tell you what isn't even close to a secret. I'm his mother, after all. If he'd let me do something like that, I would have done it in a heartbeat," Flora answered. "But he didn't, and so I didn't. If, God forbid, anything worse would have happened, I don't know how I would have looked at myself in a mirror afterwards."

"Well, I can see that," Alex Swartz said. "But I can see how he feels about it, too. You don't want to think your mother's apron strings kept you out of danger everybody else had to face."

"No, and you don't want to get killed, either." Flora sighed. "He came through it, and he didn't get hurt too bad. That means I don't hate myself…too much." She tapped an unrolled drawing with the nail of her right index finger. "I really think you're on to something here with these sketches. I hope we can make some of them more than sketches, if you know what I mean. The district will be better off if we can."

His eyes glowed. "Thank you!"

"You're welcome," she said. "Remember, I grew up here, in a coldwater flat. We're too crowded. I like the open space that's part of your plan. We need more of it here. We'd be better off if the whole district had more, not just the parts the Confederates bombed."

"Using war as an engine for urban improvement-" Captain Swartz began.

"Is wasteful," Flora finished for him. She didn't know if that was what he was going to say, but it was the truth. She went on, "But if it's the only engine we've got, not using it would be a crime. And the way things are on the Lower East Side, I'm afraid it is."

"If I got out of the Army before Election Day, I was going to vote for you anyway," he said. "Now I want to vote for you two or three times."

From behind Flora, Herman Bruck said, "That can probably be arranged."

"Hush, Herman," Flora said, though she knew he might not be kidding. She turned back to Captain Swartz. "Instead of doing that, take your plans to Morris Kramer. If he wins, he can do his best to push them through, too. And they're important. They ought to go forward regardless of politics." Did she really say that? Did she really mean it? She nodded to herself. She did. When it came down to the district, you could…every once in a while.

From Virginia all the way down to Florida-except the area around Lexington, Virginia, which was the most special of special cases-Irving Morrell's word was law. Military governor was a bland title, but it was the one he had. In the Roman Empire, he would have been a proconsul. That held more flavor, at least to him. A Roman, to whom Latin came naturally, might have disagreed.

Morrell had always had a bitch of a time with Latin. He set up shop in Atlanta. It was centrally located for his current command, and it also hadn't taken the pounding Richmond had. One of these days, the states under his jurisdiction might rejoin the USA. That was the long-term outlook in Philadelphia. Morrell would believe it when he saw it. Right now, his main job was making sure smoldering resentment didn't burst into flaming revolt.

Thick tangles of barbed wire strengthened by iron and concrete pillars made sure autos couldn't come within a couple of hundred yards of his headquarters. No auto bomb was going to take out the whole building. Everyone who approached on foot, male or female, was methodically searched.

Security was just as tight at other U.S. headquarters throughout the fallen Confederacy. Neither that nor brutal retaliation for attacks had kept a couple of colonels and a brigadier general from joining their ancestors.

"And these people are supposed to become citizens?" Morrell said to his second-in-command. "How long do they expect us to wait?"

"The French and Germans don't love each other, either," Harlan Parsons replied.

"But they both know they're foreigners," Morrell said. "The Confederates speak English. These states used to belong to the USA. And because of that, the bigwigs in Philadelphia think it can happen again, easy as pie. And I've got one thing to say to that: bullshit!"

"You get to try to make it work," Brigadier General Parsons said. "Aren't you lucky…sir?"

"Yeah. I'm lucky like snow is black," Morrell answered.

His number two sent him a quizzical look. "You're the first officer I ever heard who used that line and wasn't Jewish."

"I knew I stole it from somebody. I forgot who," Morrell said.

The telephone on his desk rang. Parsons picked it up. "General Morrell's office." Maybe he could protect his superior from the slings and arrows of outrageous-or outraged-idiots. Here, though, he listened for a little while and then said, "I'll pass you through. Hold on." Putting his hand over the mouthpiece, he told Morrell, "It's Colonel Einsiedel, down in Tallahassee."

"Thanks." Morrell took the telephone. "Hello, Colonel. What's gone wrong now?" He assumed something had. People didn't call him to talk about the weather.

Sure enough, the local commander said, "We're facing a boycott here. All the locals are pretending we don't exist. And they aren't going into any of the stores that sell to us. Some of the merchants are starting to feel the pinch."

"That's a new one," Morrell said. "Any violence?"

"Not aimed at us," Colonel Einsiedel answered. "They may have used some strong-arm tactics to get their own people to go along. What are we supposed to do about it?"

"Ignore them. Wait it out," Morrell said. "What else is there?"

"Some of the storekeepers don't want to sell to us any more," the colonel said. "They're trying to get out of the deals they made. It's hard to blame them. If they keep doing business with us, they starve."

"You can't let 'em get away with that. If you do, this time tomorrow there won't be a shop in the old Confederacy where we can buy anything. We aren't niggers, and our money's good."

"Yes, sir. We'll try," Einsiedel said. "One of my lieutenants said we ought to shoot any storekeeper who won't sell to us."

Morrell laughed. "Damned if that doesn't sound like Michael Pound."

"How the devil did you know, sir?" The colonel in Florida sounded flabbergasted.

"You mean it is?" Morrell laughed again. "Well, I can't say I'm surprised. I've known Pound for twenty-five years now. He has a straightforward bloodthirstiness that would scare the crap out of any General Staff officer ever born. He's not always right, but he's always sure of himself."

"Boy, you can say that again," Einsiedel said. "All right, sir. We'll see what we can do to nip this stuff in the bud."

"Don't be too gentle," Morrell said. "We won the war. If they think they're going to win the peace, they can damn well think again."

"I sure hope so," Colonel Einsiedel said, which wasn't exactly the encouraging note on which Morrell would have wanted the conversation to end. But the colonel hung up after that, so Morrell couldn't pump him any more without calling him back. Deciding that would make more trouble than it saved, Morrell put the handset back into its cradle instead.

"Boycott, huh?" Brigadier General Parsons said. "That's…different."

"Yeah. It lets them annoy us without giving us a good excuse to shoot them," Morrell said. "Some of them are still fighting the war, even if they don't carry guns any more. Every time they make us blink, they figure they've won a battle."

"So we don't blink, then," Parsons said.

"That's about the size of it." Morrell hoped he could get his own officers to go along. Not all of them would see that this was a problem.

Michael Pound did, by God! Morrell smiled and shook his head. Pound saw problems and solutions with an almost vicious clarity. As far as he was concerned, everything was simple. And damned if watching him in action didn't make you wonder whether he had it right and everybody else looked at the world through a kaleidoscope that made everything seem much more complicated than it should have.

The telephone rang again. "General Morrell's office," Harlan Parsons said. This time, he didn't hesitate in answering on his own hook: "That's right. As of the surrender, Negroes have the same rights on ex-Confederate territory as whites do. Anyone who tries to go against that goes up against the U.S. government… Yes, that includes intermarriage, as long as the people involved want to go through with it."

After he hung up, Morrell asked, "Where?"

"Rocky Mount, North Carolina," his second-in-command answered. "Nice to know there are still some Negroes there."

"Still some Negroes all through the CSA," Morrell said. "Just not many." He'd heard so many stories of survival by luck and by stealth and by guerrilla war that they started to blur. He'd heard some of survival by the kindness of whites, but fewer than he wished he had.

"Featherston turned a whole country upside down and inside out," Parsons said. "It'll never be the same down here. Never. How many dead?"

"Six million? Seven? Ten?" Morrell shrugged helplessly. "I don't think anybody knows exactly. Maybe they can figure out how many Negroes the Confederates shipped to their camps. I bet it'd be easier to count how many are left now, though. Then subtract from how many there were before the Freedom Party started killing them, and the number you get is how many bought a plot."

"Those Freedom Party bastards had to be out of their skulls," Parsons said: far from the first time Morrell had heard that opinion. "Imagine all the effort they put into killing colored people. All the camps they had to build, all the trains they had to use…They would have done better if they aimed that shit at us."

"They would have done a hell of a lot better if they'd put their Negroes into factories to make stuff to throw at us, or if they put them in uniform and pointed them at us," Morrell said. "Or that's how it looks to me, anyhow. But they saw it different. Far as Featherston was concerned, getting rid of Negroes was every bit as important as whaling the snot out of us."

Parsons spiraled a forefinger by his right ear. "Out of his skull," he repeated.

"Yeah, I think so, too-most of the time. But for people who were crazy, they sure went at it like they knew what they were doing." Morrell shivered. "Those camps ran like barrel factories. Negroes went in, and corpses came out. If that was what they were aiming for, they couldn't have done a smoother job."

"I know. Those phony bathhouses, so the colored people wouldn't know they were gonna get it till too late…" Parsons shuddered, too. "But don't you have to be crazy to want to do something like that?"

"When the Ottomans started killing Armenians after the Great War, I sure thought so," Morrell answered. "Maniacs in fezzes…But shit, the Confederates aren't that different from us, or they weren't till they started yelling, 'Freedom!' all the damn time. Biggest difference is, they had lots of Negroes and we only had a few. So could we do something like that, too?"

Harlan Parsons looked horrified. "Christ, I hope not!"

"Yeah, well, so do I," Morrell said. "But what's that got to do with anything? If we decide we can't stand Negroes or Jews or Chinamen or whoever the hell, do we fish the designs for these asphyxiating trucks out of the file and start making our own?"

"I don't think so, sir," his second-in-command replied. "For one thing, the Confederates went and did that. Maybe we can learn our lesson from them."

"Here's hoping." Morrell nodded. "You might have something there. I sure hope you do. Who'd want to go down in history as the next Jake Featherston?" He answered his own question: "Nobody. I hope."

"Now if only the people down here could get it through their damn thick heads that what the Freedom Party did was wrong," Parsons said.

"If they would have thought it was wrong, it never would have happened in the first place," Morrell said. "If they hadn't voted Featherston in, or if they hadn't let him go after the colored people…They did, though. And you said it, General. This is a whole different landscape here now."

How would the area that had made up the CSA get along without Negroes to do the jobs whites didn't want or felt to be beneath their dignity? He'd already seen part of the answer. Lots of Mexicans had come north to work in the fields and to wait tables and cut hair and clean house. Unless the USA posted machine guns every few hundred yards along the Rio Grande, the Mexicans would keep on coming, too. They could do less and get more money for it here than they could in Francisco Josй's ramshackle empire. Without machine guns, how were you going to keep them away?

Well, that wasn't his worry. The Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of War would figure out what to do about it, and then they'd tell him. And then he would have to do it-or try to, if it turned out to be one of the stupid orders that came out of Philadelphia every now and then.

Bang! When Morrell heard that noise, he ducked first and thought later. So did Harlan Parsons. Nothing else happened, though. Parsons straightened with a sheepish smile. "I think it was only a backfire."

"I think you're right," Morrell said. "That's a relief, isn't it? One of these days, we may even be able to hear that noise without flinching."

"One of these days-but not soon," Parsons said.

Morrell nodded. The war hadn't just changed the Confederate States. It had changed his own country. And it had changed him, and changed every soldier on both sides who came through alive. Starting at loud noises was the least of it. The last time around, one Confederate soldier came out changed enough to convulse his country a generation later. Who would change things this time around-and how?

"Congratulations, Dr. O'Doull! Congratulations, Lieutenant Colonel O'Doull!" Colonel Tobin said. He was the U.S. officer in charge of this part of Alabama, and he was proud of it, God help him. He handed Leonard O'Doull the little velvet box containing a lieutenant colonel's silver oak leaves as if it were the Holy Grail.

"Thank you, sir." O'Doull was much less impressed. He also suspected Tobin had chosen to promote him to try to persuade him to stay in the Army. If so, the man was barking up the wrong tree. "Sir, I've been away from my family a long time now. With the war over and done, I'd like to arrange to return to civilian life."

"So would we all," Tobin said. "But you can't deny soldiers are still getting wounded, can you? And you can't deny they're coming down with, uh, unpleasant diseases, either." He didn't want to come right out and say VD.

"No, sir. I can't deny any of that. Still, it is peacetime-formally, anyhow. And with our new antibiotics, a medic can do just as much for syphilis and gonorrhea as I can."

Colonel Tobin winced when he heard the names. But he didn't retreat. "I'm very sorry, but the United States still need you. You did sign up to serve at the country's pleasure, you know."

That was a trump against most men in U.S. service. Against Leonard O'Doull? Not necessarily. "Sir, meaning no disrespect, but I'm going to have to get hold of my government and see what it thinks of your refusing to discharge me."

"Your government?" Tobin had bushy eyebrows, and got a good theatrical effect when he raised one. "You have a different one from everybody else's?"

"Yes, sir," O'Doull said, which made the colonel's eyebrow jump again-this time, O'Doull judged, involuntarily. He pulled a maroon passport out of his trouser pocket. "As you see, sir, I'm a citizen of the Republic of Quebec. Actually, I have dual citizenship, but I've lived in the Republic since the last war. I met a girl up there, and I stayed and started a practice in Riviиre-du-Loup."

"Good God. Let me see that." Tobin took the Quebecois passport as if it were a poisonous snake. He found the page with O'Doull's picture and grunted in surprise, as if he truly hadn't expected to see it there. Shaking his head, he handed the passport back. "You'd better get hold of your officials. If they write me and say they want you to go on home, I have a reason to turn you loose. Till then, though, you're a U.S. military physician, and we do need your services."

Damn, O'Doull thought. He had no idea whether the authorities in the Republic would send that kind of letter. But he couldn't deny that Colonel Tobin was playing by the rules. "All right, sir. I'll do that, then." O'Doull put the passport back in his pocket. Colonel Tobin seemed glad to see him go.

"Well, Doc? Any luck?" Goodson Lord asked him when he got back to the aid station.

"Depends on what you mean." O'Doull displayed his new rank insignia. Sergeant Lord shook his hand. "As for getting out," O'Doull went on, "well, yes and no. If I can get a letter from my mommy-I mean, from my government-Tobin will have a real, live piece of paper to give him an excuse to turn me loose. Till then, I'm here."

"Hope like hell they give it to you," Lord said. "If I had an angle like that, you bet your sweet ass I'd use it. Playing a horn beats the crap out of this."

"You're a good medic," O'Doull said.

"Thanks. I try. Some guy comes in bleeding, you don't want to let him down, you know what I mean?" Lord said. "Even if I am halfway decent, though, it's not like I want to do it the rest of my life."

"That seems fair," O'Doull allowed.

He wondered how long the United States would be able to occupy the Confederate States. The government might want to do it, but the soldiers on the ground were a lot less enthusiastic. They chafed under the discipline they'd accepted without thinking when their country was in peril.

They drank whatever they could get their hands on. They got into brawls with the locals and with one another. Despite all the thunderous orders against fraternizing with Confederate women, they chased skirt as eagerly as they would have back home. And what they chased, they caught. They caught all kinds of things-the penicillin they got stuck with testified to that.

"I don't know what the hell her name was," said a private most unhappy about his privates-he had one of the drippiest faucets O'Doull had ever seen. "It was dark. She said, 'Five dollars,' so I gave it to her. Then she gave it to me."

"She sure did. Bend over. I'm going to give it to you, too," O'Doull said. The soldier whined when the shot went home. O'Doull persisted: "Where was this? At a brothel? We need to know about those."

"No…" The soldier sighed with relief as the needle came out. "I was going back to my tent after I stood sentry, you know? And she called, and I felt like it, so I paid her and I screwed her in the bushes. And the bitch gave me something to remember her by."

O'Doull sighed. "Oh, God, I am so tired of this."

"Yeah, well, let me tell you somethin', Doc-it's even less fun on this end of the needle." The soldier did up his pants. "Is that it? Am I done?"

"No. You have to come back in three days for another shot," O'Doull answered. The other man groaned. O'Doull felt like groaning himself. This is why I need to get out of the Army, he thought glumly. "And I have to see your dogtags. Your superiors in the line need to know you came down venereal."

The soldier with the clap really didn't like that. If Goodson Lord and Eddie hadn't opportunely appeared, he might have stormed out of the aid station and forgotten about the second half of his cure. Eddie held a wrench; Sergeant Lord had a tire iron. O'Doull got the information he needed.

As soon as he'd written that down, he started in on the letter to the powers that be in the Republic of Quebec. Finding an envelope for it was easy. Coming up with a postage stamp wasn't. Soldiers in Confederate territory who were writing to the USA got free franking. Writing to Quebec, O'Doull didn't, and he'd used his last stamp a few days before on a letter to Nicole. He thought about using Confederate stamps, but they'd been demonetized. Eventually, a mail clerk came up with the requisite postage, and the letter went on its way.

And then he forgot about it. He went back to being a busy Army doctor, because an auto bomb killed several U.S. soldiers and wounded two dozen more. He hated auto bombs. They were a coward's weapons. You could be-and, if you had any brains, you were-miles away when your little toy went off. And you could laugh at what it did to the people you didn't like.

Digging jagged chunks of metal out of one soldier after another, O'Doull wasn't laughing. He didn't think the locals would be laughing very long, either, even though they probably were right now. "How many hostages will the authorities take after something like this?" he asked.

"Beats me," Goodson Lord answered. "But they'll shoot every damn one of 'em. You can bet your last nickel on that."

"I know. And that will make some diehard mad enough to build another bomb, and then it just starts up again. Ain't we got fun?" O'Doull said.

"Fun. Yeah," Lord said. "How's this guy doing?"

"We would have lost him in the last war-this kind of belly wound, peritonitis and septicemia would have got him for sure. But with the antibiotics, I think he'll pull through. His colon's more like a semicolon now, but you can live with that."

"Ouch!" Lord said. The pun seemed to distress him more than the bloody work he was assisting with. He'd done the work lots of times. The pun was a fresh displeasure. O'Doull had pulled it on Granny McDougald before, but not on him. I'm getting old, he thought. I'm using the same jokes over and over.

After he'd repaired as best he could the wounded who were brought to him, he took a big slug of medicinal brandy, and poured another for Goodson Lord. He wouldn't have done that during the fighting. No telling then when more casualties were coming in, and he'd wanted to keep his judgment as sharp as he could. Now he could hope he wouldn't have anything more complicated than another dose of clap to worry about for a while.

He lit a cigarette. It was a Niagara, a U.S. brand, and tasted lousy. But the C.S. tobacco firms were out of business-for the moment, anyway. Bad smokes beat no smokes at all.

Puffing on a Niagara made him think of heading north again, out of the USA and back to the country he'd adopted. Living in the Republic of Quebec meant returning to a backwater. Things happened more slowly there. Movies got to Riviиre-du-Loup months, sometimes years, after they were hits in the United States. Most of them were dubbed into French; a few had subtitles.

O'Doull's English would have got even rustier than it had if not for the need to read medical journals and try to keep up with the miracles happening in the USA-and the miracles the USA imported from Germany. Back before the United States fostered Quebecois independence, Canada tried ramming English down the locals' throats. Older people still remembered the language, but not fondly. Younger ones wanted nothing to do with it.

He could live with that if he had to. He had lived with it, for years. You took the bad with the good wherever you went. By now, his college French had picked up enough of the local accent to let people who didn't know him think he was born in La Belle Province himself. Of course, not many people in Riviиre-du-Loup didn't know him. As far as he was concerned, that was part of the good.

"Penny for 'em," Sergeant Lord said.

"Thinking about going home again," O'Doull answered.

"Figured you were," Lord said. "You're right here, but your eyes were a million miles away."

"Better than the thousand-yard stare the poor mudfoots get when they've been through the mill," O'Doull said. Lord nodded. They both knew that look too well.

O'Doull stubbed out the cigarette and lit another one. He'd done something useful today, anyhow. If Colonel Tobin had sent him home, it would have been up to Goodson Lord. The guy with the shrapnel might have died then. Granny McDougald could have pulled him through, but O'Doull didn't think Lord was up to it.

But if the Confederates kept a rebellion smoldering for years, was that reason enough for him to stay down here till it finally got stamped out, if it ever did? He shook his head. He'd paid all the dues he felt like paying-more than he'd had to pay. He wasn't so goddamn young any more. He'd had that thought not long before, too. He wanted the rest of his life for himself.

Whether the U.S. Army or the authorities in the Republic wanted him to have it might be a different question. Well, he'd done what he could along those lines. Off in the distance, a train whistle blew. He smiled. If all else failed, he could hop a freight. What did the the soldiers say when you came out with something stupid? And then you wake up-that was it.

Doctor Deserts! Heads for Home in Spite of Orders! He saw the headlines in his mind's eye. Yes, it would be a scandal. It would if they caught him, anyhow. If they didn't, he was home free. The Republic wouldn't extradite him-he was sure of that.

Stop it, he told himself. You'll talk yourself into it, and then you'll really be up the creek.

Seventeen days after he wrote his letter, one with a Quebecois stamp came back. He opened the envelope with a strange mix of apprehension and anticipation. If they said no…But if they said yes…!

And they did! In stilted English, a bureaucrat in Quebec City proclaimed that he was a valuable medical resource, and vitally needed to serve the populace of Riviиre-du-Loup. He grinned from ear to ear. He'd been called a lot of things before, but never valuable, let alone a medical resource. He hurried off to show Colonel Tobin the letter.

J onathan Moss didn't like Houston. It was even hotter and muggier than Georgia and Alabama, and that was saying something. New Orleans was supposed to be just as bad, or maybe worse, but you could have a good time in New Orleans. If you could have a good time in Houston, Moss hadn't found out how.

Defending a man he loathed sure didn't help. Defending a man who might be the biggest murderer in the history of the world made things worse. And defending a man who might be the biggest murderer in the history of the world and didn't seem the least bit sorry about it, who seemed proud of what he'd done, made things much worse.

Defending Canadians who'd fallen afoul of occupation authorities was worth doing. This, on the other hand…Moss wished Major Isidore Goldstein hadn't smashed his stupid motorcar and himself. Then he would be going through the torments of the damned right now. Moss would rather have been flying turbo fighters, even though there was no one to fly them against any more. Would he rather have been sitting on the shelf? Sometimes he thought yes, sometimes no.

Pinkard's trial, and that of guard chief Vern Green, and those of several other guards from Camp Humble and its predecessor farther west, went on in what had been the Confederate District Courthouse in Houston. The exterior was modeled after the Parthenon: all elegant columns. But it was built from cheap concrete, not marble, and it was starting to crumble in Houston's savage weather.

Filling in for Confederate judges were U.S. Army officers. They'd shot down Moss' arguments for getting Jefferson Pinkard off the hook one after another. No, he couldn't claim Pinkard was only acting on orders from Richmond.

"The charge is crimes against humanity," said the chief judge, a craggy brigadier general named Lloyd Meusel. "The defendant is assumed to have been aware that, regardless of orders, it is illegal and criminal to have murdered innocent people in literally carload lots by various ingenious methods and then either burying them in mass graves or burning them so that their passing became a stench in the nostrils of mankind forever."

"Dammit, they weren't all that innocent," Pinkard said-he wouldn't keep his mouth shut, which was something any defendant needed to know how to do. "Plenty of rebels-and they all hated the CSA."

And, of course, that gave the military prosecutor, a bright young major named Barry Goodman, the chance to pounce. He grabbed it. "May it please the court," he said, "how many of the Negroes who passed through these extermination camps were tried and convicted of any crime, even spitting on the sidewalk? Is it not a fact that the only thing they were guilty of was being colored, and that this became a capital crime in the Confederate States?"

General Meusel leaned over backwards to be fair. "Well, Major, we are here to determine whether that is a fact. We can't assume it ahead of time."

"Yes, sir," Goodman replied. "I will endeavor to demonstrate and document its truthfulness. I believe I can do that."

Jonathan Moss believed he could, too. Moss had seen the photographs taken outside of Snyder, and the documents captured from the meticulous files kept at Camp Humble. They offered overwhelming evidence of what the CSA had done. And Goodman put them into evidence, again and again.

He had letters where the gasketing of trucks was said to be tightened up "to improve their asphyxiating efficiency." Jefferson Pinkard's initials said he'd read and approved-and approved of-those letters. Goodman had other letters about the construction of the bathhouses at Camp Humble, and about the airtight doors that made sure Negroes didn't escape from the "termination chambers." He had letters to and from the people who provided the cyanide for the termination chambers. And he had a small mountain of letters complaining about the shoddy workmanship and design of the crematoria of Camp Humble.

Just listening to those letters being read into evidence pissed Pinkard off. Jonathan Moss could tell. And it wasn't because his client had written them. It was because Pinkard still wanted to slug the bastards who'd sold him a bill of goods about the body-burning ovens and their smokestacks.

After court adjourned that day, Moss badly needed a drink. Soldiers in U.S. uniform were not welcomed with open arms in most of Houston's watering holes. Out of consideration for that fact, the Army had set up an officers' club and one for enlisted men in the courthouse basement. Moss hied himself thither for a snort.

Barry Goodman was already down there, working on a double whiskey over ice. That looked so good, Moss ordered the same thing. "Every day when General Meusel turns us loose, I feel like I ought to go back to the barracks and take a bath," he said.

"Tell me about it!" the prosecutor exclaimed. "You've got it worse than I do, Counselor, because at least I'm on the side of the angels this time, but I am so sick of wading through this shit…"

"You know what the worst part is?" Moss paused to drink so the whiskey would put a temporary shield between him and his current duty.

"I'm all ears," Goodman said.

"Talk about wading through shit? We've barely got our feet wet. We ought to hang the Cyclone people-they knew what the cyanide was going for. We ought to hang the people who fixed up the trucks, and the people who made the bathhouses, and the engineers who designed the airtight doors, and the ones who designed the heavy-duty crematoria, even if they didn't know what the hell they were doing-"

"Did you see your client, Colonel? He still hates those people for botching the job," Goodman broke in.

"I know, I know," Moss said wearily. "But you can't put that into evidence, thank God."

"Like I need to," Goodman said, which was nothing but the truth. He added, "Besides, d'you think the judges didn't notice?"

"They did." Moss knocked back the drink and signaled for another. As the uniformed bartender made it, he went on, "And we need to hang the guys who built the crematoria, and the guys who installed them, and…Where does it end, Major? Does anybody down here have clean hands?"

"Good question." The prosecutor finished his drink. He also waved for a refill. "We can't kill all of them, though. I don't think we can, anyway. If we do, how are we better than they are?"

"If we don't, plenty of guilty bastards walk," Moss said. "When I was in Alabama, occupation officials were already starting to slide around the ban on using Freedom Party personnel to run things. All the people with brains and energy were in the Party, they said. Those were the people who could get things done. So they used them, and they bragged about how things were coming back to life."

The bartender brought them their fresh drinks and took away the empty glasses. Goodman stared down into his whiskey as if hoping for answers there, not just surcease. He shook his head. "I don't know what you can do. A lot of them are going to get off, and they'll brag about what they did till they're old and gray."

"Except when Yankees are around," Moss said. "Then they'll swear up and down that they didn't know what was going on. Some prick will probably write a book that shows how they didn't really massacre their Negroes after all."

"Oh, yeah? Then where'd the smokes go?" Goodman asked. "I mean, they were there before the war, and then they weren't. So what happened?"

"Well, we killed a bunch of 'em when we bombed Confederate cities." Moss was a well-trained attorney; he could spin out an argument whether he believed in it or not. "Some died in the rebellion. Some went up to the USA. Some died of hunger and disease-there was a war on, you know. But a massacre? Nah. Never happened."

Barry Goodman's mouth twisted. "That's disgusting. That'd gag a maggot, damned if it wouldn't."

"Bet your ass," Moss said. "You think it won't happen, though? Give it twenty years-thirty at the outside."

"Disgusting," Goodman repeated. "Well, we're gonna hang some people, anyway. Better believe we are. Maybe not enough, but some. And Pinkard's one of 'em."

"I've got to do everything I can to stop you," Moss said. "And I will."

"Sure." Major Goodman didn't despise him for playing on the other side, the way several military prosecutors up in Canada had. That was something, anyhow. "You have a job to do, too. But they aren't just asking you to make bricks without straw. They're asking you to make bricks without mud, for cryin' out loud."

Since Moss knew exactly the same thing, he couldn't very well argue. He just sighed. "I'd feel better about defending him if he thought he was a murderer, you know? If he felt bad about it, if he felt guilty about it, he'd be somebody I could give a damn about. I'd want to get him off the hook. It wouldn't be just an assignment. But as far as he's concerned, everything he did was strictly line of duty, and every one of the Negroes he got rid of had it coming."

"I know. I've seen the documents, and I've seen him in court. What he was doing, it was a job for him. He turned out to be good at it, so they kept promoting him." Goodman shook his head. "And look where he ended up."

"Yeah. Look." Moss looked at his glass. It was empty again. How did that happen? Two quick doubles were making his head spin, so that was how it happened. If he got another one…If he got another one, he'd stagger back to BOQ, and he'd need aspirins and coffee in the morning. His client deserved better than that. On the other hand, his client also deserved worse than that. He glanced over to Goodman. "I'll have another one if you do." That would even things up-and salve his conscience.

The prosecutor laughed. "I was going to say the same thing to you. I need another one, by God." They both waved to the barkeep. Stolidly, the enlisted man built two more doubles.

Moss got about halfway down his before a really ugly thought surfaced. "What if we elected somebody because he wanted to get rid of all the people with green eyes in the country? Do you think he could find guys like Pinkard to do his dirty work for him?"

Barry Goodman frowned. "It'd be harder," he said slowly. "We haven't hated people with green eyes since dirt, the way whites hate blacks in the CSA."

"Yeah, that's true." Moss conceded the point. Why not? They weren't in court now. "All right-suppose we elected a guy who wanted to get rid of our Negroes, or our Jews. Could he get help?" Was Goodman Jewish? With a name like that, maybe yes, maybe no. His looks didn't say for sure, either.

Whatever he was, he answered, "I'd like to tell you no, but I bet he could. Too damn many people will do whatever the guy in charge tells 'em to. They figure he knows what he's doing, and they figure they'll get in trouble if they don't go along. So yeah, our Featherston could get his helpers. Or do you think I'm wrong?"

"Christ, I wish I did," Moss answered. "But the Turks did it to the Armenians way back when, and the Russians have been giving it to the Jews forever. So it's not just the Confederates going off the deep end. They were more efficient about it than anybody else has been, but we could do that, too."

"Now we've got this big, ugly, bad example staring us in the face," Goodman said. "Maybe it'll make everybody too ashamed to do anything like it again. I sure want to think so, anyhow. It'd give me hope for the goddamn human race."

"I'll drink to that. To the goddamn human race!" Moss raised his glass. Goodman clinked with him. They drank together.

U.S. authorities in Hugo, Alabama, took their own sweet time about trying the Negro accused of raping a white woman there. They wanted to let things calm down. Armstrong Grimes approved of that. He'd managed to stave off one riot in front of the jail. He knew he might not be so lucky the second time around.

He'd lost his enthusiasm for the uniform he wore. He'd gone through the whole war from start to finish. All right, fine. He'd seen the elephant. He'd got shot. He'd paid all the dues anybody needed to pay. As far as he was concerned, somebody else could come down and occupy the CSA.

The government cared for his opinion as much as it usually did. It already had him down at the ass end of Alabama, and it would keep him here as long as it wanted to. If he didn't like it, what could he do about it? Not much, not when his only friends for hundreds of miles were other U.S. soldiers in the same boat he was.

So all right. He was stuck here. But he was damned if he'd give the U.S. Army a dime's worth more than he had to. Sitting quiet and not stirring up the locals looked mighty good to him.

To his surprise, Squidface stayed all eager-beaver. "You outa your mind?" Armstrong asked the Italian kid. "The more you piss these people off, the more likely it is somebody'll shoot at you."

"Somebody's gonna shoot at us. You can bet your ass on that," Squidface answered. "But if we keep these shitheads off balance, like, it'll be penny-ante stuff. We let 'em start plotting, then half the fuckin' state rises up, and we have to level everything between here and the ocean to shut it down. You know what I'm sayin', man?"

Armstrong grunted. He knew, and didn't like knowing. He wanted to think like a short-timer, somebody who'd escape from the Army soon. To Squidface, who wanted to be a lifer, the problem looked different. Squidface wanted long-term answers, ones that would keep this part of Alabama not quiet but quieter for years to come. Armstrong didn't give a damn what happened in 1946 if he'd be out of here by 1945.

If. That was the question. The Army seemed anything but eager to turn soldiers loose. Despite taking hostages, despite shooting lots of them, it hadn't clamped down on the diehards in the CSA. No matter what the surrender orders said, everybody knew Confederate soldiers hadn't turned in all their weapons or all their explosives. And they were still using what they'd squirreled away.

"You think they can make us sick enough of occupying them, we give it up and go home?" he asked Squidface.

The PFC's mouth twisted. "Fuck, I hope not. We'll just have another war down the line if we do. And they gotta have more guys down here who know how to make superbombs. Genie's out of the bottle, like. So if it's another war, it's a bad one."

"Yeah." Armstrong agreed unenthusiastically, but he agreed. "But if they hate us forever and shoot at us from behind bushes forever, how are we better off? It's like a sore that won't scab up."

"Maybe if we kill enough of 'em, the rest'll figure keeping that shit up is more trouble than it's worth." Squidface had an odd kind of pragmatism, but Armstrong nodded-he thought the same way.

Two days later, a sniper killed a U.S. soldier. When that happened these days, people in Hugo tried to get out of town before anybody could grab them as hostages. The occupying authorities discouraged that by shooting at them when they saw them sneaking off.

Armstrong ended up leading a firing squad. The rifles issued to the men doing the shooting had one blank round per squad per victim. If you wanted to, you could think that maybe you hadn't really killed anybody. You could also think you could draw four to a king and end up with a royal flush. By the time you'd pulled the trigger twenty times, your odds of innocence were about that low.

After the shootings, a U.S. officer spoke to the people left in Hugo: "Get it through your heads-we will punish you. If you know beforehand that somebody's going to shoot at us, you'd better let us know. If you don't, we'll keep shooting people till we run out of people to shoot."

Armstrong got drunk that night. He wasn't the only one from the firing squad who did. He hated the duty. Shooting people who could shoot back was one thing. Shooting blindfolded people up against a wall? That was a different business, and a much nastier one.

"No wonder those Confederate assholes invented all those fancy ways to kill niggers," he said, very far in his cups. "You shoot people day after day, you gotta start going bugfuck, don't you?"

"Don't sweat it, Sarge," said Squidface, who'd also poured down a lot of bad whiskey. "You're already bugfuck."

"You say the sweetest things." Armstrong made kissing noises.

For some reason-no doubt because they were smashed-they both thought that was the funniest thing in the world. So did the other drinkers. Pretty soon everybody was pretending to kiss everybody else. Then somebody really did it, and got slapped. That was even funnier-if you were drunk enough.

Nothing seemed funny to Armstrong the next morning. Strong coffee and lots of aspirins soothed his aching head and gave him a sour stomach instead. He got a different kind of headache when he went into Hugo to buy a ham sandwich for lunch instead of enduring rations.

"I don't want your money," said the man who ran the local diner. "I don't want to serve you. I don't aim to serve any Yankee soldier from here on out, but especially not you."

"What did I do?" Armstrong was still hung over enough to be extra grouchy. I don't need this shit, he thought unhappily.

"You told those bastards to shoot my brother-in-law yesterday, that's what. Your damn captain made me watch you do it, too. I ought to feed you, by God, and put rat poison in your sandwich. I'd do it, too, if you bastards wouldn't murder more folks who never done you no harm."

"You're gonna get your ass in a sling," Armstrong warned. All he wanted was a sandwich, not an argument.

"I ain't hurting nobody," the local said. "I don't aim to hurt nobody, neither. But I don't want Yankee money any more. I don't reckon anybody in this here town wants Yankee money any more."

If he hadn't said that last, Armstrong might have walked out in disgust. As things were, he growled, "Conspiracy, huh? You are gonna get your ass in a sling." He didn't just walk out; he stomped out.

And he reported the conversation to the first officer he found. "A boycott, eh?" the captain said. "Well, we'll see about that, by God!"

They did, in short order. By the end of the week, nobody in Hugo would sell U.S. soldiers anything. On Friday, an edict came down from the military governor in Birmingham. It banned "failure to cooperate with U.S. authorities." If you tried going on with the boycott, you'd go to jail instead.

Naturally, the first question that went through Armstrong's mind was, "If a girl doesn't put out, can we arrest her for failure to cooperate?"

"Sure, Grimes," said the major who was getting the troops up to speed on the new policy. "Then you can arrest yourself for fraternizing."

"Ah, hell, sir," Armstrong said. "I knew there was a snatch-uh, a catch-to it."

"Thank you, Karl Engels," the major said dryly. "Can we go on?" Armstrong nodded, grinning. Karl was his favorite Engels Brother. He'd even talked about growing a long blue beard and joining the comedy troupe himself.

Maybe the people who joined the boycott figured they were safe because they weren't doing anything violent. The failure-to-cooperate order was announced over bullhorns and posted in notices nailed to every telegraph pole in the towns where boycotters were trying to show their displeasure.

As soon as somebody said he wouldn't sell a soldier something after that, the offender disappeared. "Where you taking old Ernie?" a local asked Armstrong when he was one of the men who arrested the man who ran the Hugo diner.

"To a camp," Armstrong answered.

"A camp? Jesus God!" The local went pale.

Armstrong laughed a nasty laugh. "What? You think we're gonna do to him like you did to your niggers? That'd be pretty goddamn funny, wouldn't it?"

"No," the local said faintly.

"Well, I don't think we'll waste his sorry ass-this time," Armstrong said. "But you bastards need to get something through your heads. You fuck with us, you lose. You hear me?" When the Alabaman didn't answer fast enough to suit him, he aimed his rifle at the man's face. "You hear me?"

"Oh, yeah." The local nodded. He was old and wrinkled himself, but he was game. "I hear you real good."

"You better, Charlie, 'cause I'm not bullshitting you." Armstrong lowered the weapon.

And the boycott collapsed even faster than it had grown. Some of the men and women who got arrested came back to Hugo. Others stayed disappeared. Armstrong didn't know what happened to them. His best guess was that they were in prison camps somewhere. But he couldn't prove that the United States weren't killing them the way the Confederate States had killed Negroes. Neither could the locals. It made them uncommonly thoughtful.

"See?" Squidface said. "This is how it's supposed to work. We keep these bastards on their toes, they can't do unto us."

"I guess," Armstrong said.

The next day, a land mine ten miles away blew a truck full of U.S. soldiers to kingdom come. U.S. authorities methodically took hostages, and shot them when the fellow who'd planted the mine didn't come forward. Rumor said that one of the soldiers who'd done firing-squad duty shot himself right afterwards.

"Some guys just can't stand the gaff," was Squidface's verdict.

"I guess," Armstrong said. "But I don't like firing-squad duty myself. I feel like a goose just walked over my grave."

That was the wrong thing to say around Squidface, who goosed him. The wrestling match they got into was more serious-more ferocious, anyhow-than most soldierly horseplay. Squidface eyed a shiner in a steel mirror. "You really do have this shit on your mind," he said.

Armstrong rubbed bruised ribs. "I fuckin' told you so. How come you don't listen when I tell you something?"

"'Cause I'd have to waste too much time sifting through the horseshit," Squidface answered, which almost started another round.

But Armstrong decided his ribs were sore enough already. "They let soldiers vote, who'd you vote for?" he asked.

"Dewey," Squidface answered at once. "He's got a chickenshit mustache, but the Dems wouldn't've been asleep at the switch the way the Socialists were when Featherston jumped on our ass. How about you?"

"Yeah, I guess," Armstrong agreed. "I bet the Socialists'd pull us out of here faster, though."

"Just on account of you think like a short-timer doesn't make you one," Squidface said. Armstrong sighed and nodded. Wasn't that the truth?