In At the Death

XX

"You! Pinkard!" After Jeff Pinkard got convicted in the Yankees' military court-kangaroo court, he thought of it still-U.S. personnel replaced all the Texans at the Houston jail. He hated those sharp, harsh, quick accents.

"Yeah?" he said. "What is it?"

"Get up," the guard told him. "You got visitors."

It was only a week till they hanged him. "Yeah?" he said again, heaving his bulk off the cot. "Visitors?" That roused his curiosity. The only person he'd seen lately was Jonathan Moss, here to tell him another appeal had failed. He had none left-the President of the USA and the U.S. Supreme Court had declined to spare him. "Who?"

"You'll find out when you get there, won't you?" The guard unlocked his cell. Other men in green-gray stood by with submachine guns at the ready. If Jeff got cute, he'd die a week early, that was all. And nobody'll miss me, either, he thought miserably. When you were going to hang in a week, self-pity came easy.

He went down the hall in front of the guards. Was getting shot a quicker, cleaner way to go than the rope? He didn't want to go at all, dammit. As far as he was concerned, he hadn't done anything to deserve killing.

When he got to the visiting room, he stopped in his tracks. There on the other side of the wire were Edith and Willie and Frank, and little Raymond in his wife's arms. All of them except Raymond started to cry when they saw him.

"Aww," Jeff said, and then, "You shouldn't have come."

"We would've done it more, Papa Jeff," Willie said, "only the damnyankees wouldn't let us for a long time."

"We're here now," Edith said. "We love you, Jeff."

"Yeah, well, I love y'all, too," Jeff said. "And a whole fat lot of good it's gonna do anybody."

He went up to the mesh that separated him from his family. He pressed his hands against it as hard as he could. They did the same thing on the other side. Try as he would, he couldn't quite touch them.

"It's not right, Papa Jeff," Frank said. "They got no business messin' with you. It was only niggers, for heaven's sake."

"Well, you know that, and I know that, and everybody down here knows that, too," Jeff answered. "Only trouble is, the Yankees don't know it, and they're the ones who count."

"Can't anybody do anything?" Edith asked.

"Doesn't look like it. Oh, people could do something, but nobody wants to. What do you expect? They're Yankees."

His wife started crying harder. "It's not fair. It's not right. Just on account of they won the damn war…What am I gonna do without you, Jeff?"

"You'll do fine," Jeff said. "You know you will." What am I gonna do without me? he wondered. That, unfortunately, had no good answer. He was going to die, was what he was going to do. "And don't you worry none about me. I'll be up in heaven with God and the angels and stuff."

He didn't really believe in heaven, not with halos and harps and white robes. Playing the harp all day got old fast, anyway. But Edith was more religious than he was. If he could make her feel better, he would.

She went on crying, though, which made Willie and Frank snuffle more, too. "I don't want to lose you!"

"I don't want it to happen, either, but I don't have a whole lot to say about it," he replied.

"You've got a baby. You've got me. You've got my boys, who you raised like you were their daddy," Edith said.

All of that was true. It cut no ice with anybody up in Yankeeland. The Yankees went on and on about all the Negroes he'd killed. As if they'd cared about those Negroes alive! They sure hadn't wanted them going up to the USA. From what he heard, they still didn't want Negroes from the CSA going up to the USA.

They were going to hang him anyhow. They could, and they would.

A guard came in on the other side, the free side. "Time's up," he said.

"We love you, Jeff!" Edith said through her tears. She carried Raymond out. The boys were still crying, too.

"Come on, Pinkard," said a guard on Jeff 's side of the visiting room. "Back to the cell you go."

Back he went. The cell was familiar. Nothing bad would happen to him while he was in it. Pretty soon, though, they'd take him out one last time. He wouldn't be going back after that. Well, what else did one last time mean?

Two days later, he had another visitor: Jonathan Moss again. "Thought you gave up on me," he said through the damned unyielding mesh.

"I don't know what else I can do for you," Moss said. "I wish I did. I haven't got a hacksaw blade on me or anything. Even if I did, they would have found it when they searched me."

"Yeah," Pinkard said. "So-no reprieve from the governor. Hell, no governor. Son of a bitch thinks he's President of Texas now. No reprieve from the President of the USA. No reprieve from the assholes on the Yankee Supreme Court. So what else is there?"

"Well, you're not the only one they're coming down on, if that makes you feel any better," Jonathan Moss replied.

"You mean, like misery loves company?" Jeff shrugged. "I'd love it if I didn't have the misery. But yeah, go ahead-tell me about the others. I don't have a wireless set, and they don't give me papers, so I don't know jack shit about what's going on out there."

"They hanged Ferdinand Koenig and Saul Goldman yesterday."

"Goddamn shame," Pinkard said. "They were good men, both of 'em. Confederate patriots. Why else would you Yankees hang people?"

"For murdering millions? For telling lies about it in papers and magazines and on the wireless?" Moss suggested.

"We didn't get rid of anybody who didn't have it coming," Jeff said stubbornly. "And like your side didn't tell any lies to your people during the war. Yeah, sure."

The military attorney sighed. "We didn't tell lies about things like that. We didn't do things like that-not to Negroes, not to Jews, not to anybody."

He undercut what Jeff would have said next: that the USA didn't have many Negroes to get rid of. The United States were crawling with Jews. Everybody knew that. Instead, he said, "What other kind of good news have you got for me?"

"If it makes you feel any better, you aren't the only camp commandant and guard chief to get condemned," Moss told him. "Vern Green goes right with you here. And…you knew Mercer Scott back in Louisiana, right?"

"Yeah." Pinkard scowled at him. "You know what? It doesn't make me feel one goddamn bit better."

"I'm sorry. If there were anything else I could try, I'd try it. If you have any ideas, sing out."

Jeff shook his head. "What's the use? Nobody in the USA cares. Nobody in the USA understands. We did what we had to do, that's all."

"'It looked like a good idea at the time.'" Moss sounded like somebody quoting something. Then he sighed. "That isn't enough to do you any good, either."

"Didn't reckon it would be," Jeff said. "Go on, then. You tried. I said that before, I expect. Won't be long now."

In some ways the days till the hanging crawled past. In others, they flew. The last days of his life, and he was stuck in a cell by himself. Not the way he would have wanted things to turn out, but what did that have to do with anything? He asked the guards for a copy of Over Open Sights.

"Wouldn't you rather have a Bible?" one of them said.

"If I wanted a Bible, don't you reckon I would've told you so?" Jeff snapped.

A little to his surprise, they brought him Jake Featherston's book. He paged through it. Everything in there made such good sense. A damn shame it hadn't worked out for real. But the Negroes in the CSA were gone, or most of them were, and the damnyankees couldn't change that even if they did win the war.

The night before they were going to hang him, the guards asked what he wanted for supper. "Fried chicken and fried potatoes and a bottle of beer," he answered. They gave it to him, except the beer came in a tin cup. He ate with good appetite. He slept…some, anyhow.

They asked him what he wanted once more at breakfast time. "Bacon and eggs and grits," he told them, and he got that, too. He cleaned his plate again, and poured down the coffee that came with the food.

"Want a preacher?" a guard asked.

Pinkard shook his head. "Nah. What for? I've got a clean conscience. If you don't, you need a preacher worse'n I do."

They cuffed his hands behind him and led him out to the prison yard. They'd run up a gallows there; he'd listened to the carpentry in his cell. Now he saw it was a gallows built for two. Another party of U.S. guards led Vern Green out from a different part of the jail.

Vern looked like hell. His nerve must have failed him at last. He gave Jeff a forlorn nod. "How come you ain't about to piss yourself like me?"

"What's the use?" Jeff answered. "I'd beg if I thought it'd do any good, but it won't. So I'll go out the best way I know how. Why give these assholes the satisfaction of watching me blubber?"

Reporters watched from a distance. Guards made sure they stayed back. Otherwise, they would have got up to the condemned men and yelled questions in their faces. Jeff figured Yankee reporters had to be even worse than their Confederate counterparts, and the Confederates were pretty bad.

A guard had to help Vern Green up the stairs to the platform. Jeff made it under his own power. His knees were knocking, but he didn't let it show. Pride was the last thing he had left. And much good it does me, too, he thought.

Along with more guards and the hangman, a minister waited up there. "Will you pray with me?" he asked Jeff.

"No." Jeff shook his head. "I made it this far on my own. I'll go out the same way."

Vern talked with the preacher. They went through the Twenty-third Psalm together. When they finished, Vern said, "I'm still scared."

"No one can blame you for that," the minister said.

A guard held out a pack of cigarettes to Jeff. "Thanks," he said. "You'll have to take it out for me."

"I will," the guard said. The smoke was a Raleigh, so it tasted good. Vern also smoked one. The guards let them finish, then walked them onto the traps. The hangman came over and set the rope around Jeff 's neck. Then he put a burlap bag over Jeff 's head.

"Make it quick if you can," Jeff said. The bag was white, not black. He could still see light and shadow through it. His heart pounded now-every beat might be the last.

"I'm doing my best," the hangman answered. His footsteps moved away, but not far. They've got no right, damn them, Jeff thought. They've-A lever clacked.

The trap dropped.

S tuck in fucking Alabama," Armstrong Grimes grumbled. "What could be worse than this?"

Squidface was cleaning his captured automatic Tredegar. He looked up from the work. "Well, you could be in hell," he said.

"Who says I'm not?" Armstrong said. "It's a godforsaken miserable place, and I can't get out of it. If that's not hell, what do you call it?"

"Pittsburgh," Squidface answered, which jerked a laugh out of Armstrong. After guiding an oily rag through the Tredegar's barrel with a cleaning rod, Squidface went on, "If you're gonna get screwed any which way, lay back and enjoy it, you know?"

"Tell me another one," Armstrong said. "Army chow. The people fucking hate us. We're not careful, we get scragged. Even the broads are scared of us now. If they get friendly, they end up dead. And we don't take hostages for that, so there's nothing to hold the locals back."

"Army chow's not so bad," Squidface said. "There's always enough of it nowadays, anyhow. Back before I went in, I couldn't always count on three squares." He was skinny enough to make that easy to believe.

But Armstrong was in the mood to bitch, and he wasn't about to let anybody stop him. "You're just saying that 'cause you're turning into a lifer."

"Yeah? So? You oughta do the same," Squidface answered. "God knows how long you're gonna stay stuck here. You make a pretty good soldier, even if you are a big target. Why not leave the uniform on? You go back to Civvy Street, you'll end up bored outa your skull all the goddamn time."

"I'd sooner be bored than bore-sighted," Armstrong said.

Squidface ignored the joke. That pissed Armstrong off, because he thought it was better than most of the ones he made. But, as if he hadn't spoken, the PFC continued, "Besides, you can't tell me you aren't getting any down here. Up in the USA, the girls'll slap your face if you try and cop a feel. You want to fuck, you gotta get married."

"There's still whorehouses in the USA," Armstrong said.

"Yeah? So?" Squidface said again.

He left it right there. Armstrong grunted. With a whore, it was nothing but a business deal. Some of the gals down here were looking for love. They wanted to think they mattered to you, so you mattered to them. They weren't just going through the motions. That did make it better.

All the same…"You figure because you want to stay in, everybody ought to want to stay in."

"My ass," Squidface retorted. "Plenty of the cocksuckers in this company, I wish they'd get the fuck out. Raw recruits who don't know their nuts from Wednesday'd be better. But you're all right. You could do it. You might even end up an officer."

"Christ! What're you smoking?" Armstrong laughed out loud. "Whatever it is, I want some."

"I'm serious, man," Squidface said. "Me, I'm a noncom. It's what I'm made for. You've got more of the 'Yes, sir!' they like when they promote people."

"Oh, man, give me a fucking break," Armstrong said.

"You do," Squidface insisted. "Shit, you're Armstrong. You never got a gross nickname hung on you or nothin'."

"That's 'cause I've got a gross name instead," Armstrong said. "Hot damn."

"All the same." Squidface wasn't about to let up. "I can see the newspaper story now. It's fucking 1975, and Colonel Armstrong Grimes gets a Medal of Honor for leading the regiment that takes Paris away from the Germans."

"If the Germans want the place, they're welcome to it, far as I'm concerned," Armstrong said. "It's full of Frenchmen-or it was till they blew it up."

"So don't listen to me."

"Like I ever did." As long as they were zinging each other, Armstrong was happy enough. But they'd come much too close to getting serious there, and getting serious made him nervous.

He wasn't the only U.S. soldier who got nervous in Alabama. Somebody well up the chain of command had the bright idea that a football game between occupiers and locals might show people that men from the USA weren't so different from anybody else-no horns, no tails, no pitchforks.

The company CO asked Armstrong, "Didn't you play football in high school?"

"Some," he answered. "I was second string. I wasn't that great or anything."

"You want a chance to knock Confederates on their ass without getting gigged for it?"

"Where do I sign up?"

Squidface wanted nothing to do with that. "I'm glad I'm a little guy," he said. "Those assholes on the other side, they're gonna be lookin' for a chance to rack you up. This ain't gonna be no friendly game."

"Yeah, well, we'll work out on them, too," Armstrong said.

"They better have plenty of ambulances ready," Squidface said darkly.

They got uniforms. Whoever was in charge of what they were calling the Peace Bowl had clout. U.S. soldiers wore blue suits, their Confederate counterparts red. They got cleats to take the place of their boots. They got helmets. Armstrong wondered if he wouldn't do better with his regular steel pot than with this leather contraption.

The athletes on the U.S. team were in much better shape than the high-school guys had been. Armstrong felt he'd earned something when he got named a starting tackle. They had a quarterback who could really throw and a couple of ends who could catch. The ends weren't the swiftest in the world, but they'd do.

They played the Peace Bowl at a high-school stadium. U.S. soldiers filled half the stands, locals the other half. To make sure the bowl stayed peaceful, the locals got frisked before they could go inside.

Armstrong got his first look at the red team then. He didn't like what he saw. They were slimmer and rangier than the U.S. players. They looked fast. That wasn't what worried him, though. One glance told him these guys were going to play as if they were fighting to hold the U.S. Army out of Chattanooga. Squidface had it straight. Peace Bowl, nothing. This wouldn't be football. This would be war.

The red team-they seemed to call themselves the Wolves-won the toss. When the U.S. kicker booted the ball, Armstrong thundered down the field. The first collision was always welcome. He slammed into a guy in red. "Yankee cocksuckin' motherfucker," the man said, and tried to lift a knee into his family jewels.

"Kiss my ass, Charlie." Armstrong twisted and took the knee on his hip pad. "You want to play like that? We'll play like that."

"Bring it on," the other guy said.

And they did. Both sides did, the whole game long. Armstrong got punched and elbowed and gouged and kicked. Every tackle was a piling-on penalty. It was trench warfare, only without trenches. The Confederates were faster. The U.S. team was a touch stronger.

One Confederate broke his leg. As far as Armstrong could tell, that was an accident-the tackle looked clean. One U.S. player had his shoulder dislocated. On the next play, the Wolf who dislocated it got racked up. Armstrong couldn't see just what happened to him; somebody was trying to step on his face. Whatever it was, the guy in red got carried off on a stretcher.

With four minutes to go, the Confederates punted to the U.S. team. The blues were on their own thirty, down 28–24. "This is it," the quarterback said in the huddle. "We get a touchdown, we win. We fuck up, we look like chumps in front of these shitheads and in front of our own guys. We gonna let that happen?"

"No!" they chorused.

"All right. Short pass into the left flat on three. Let's go get 'em."

"You shot my brother, asshole," said the guy across the line from Armstrong.

"Don't worry, cuntlips," Armstrong said sweetly. "You're next."

And he was right, but not the way he meant it. The first mortar bomb hissed in then, and burst right on the midfield stripe. But the red team shielded the blue from most of the fragments. As soon as Armstrong heard the bang, he flattened out. So did the Alabaman who didn't like him, but the guy in red was bleeding from his back and his leg.

"Fuck," he said hoarsely.

Another Confederate player was down with a ghastly head wound. It proved again what Kaiser Bill's army had found out the hard way in the Great War-leather helmets didn't do one damn thing to stop shell fragments. A couple of U.S. soldiers clutched at themselves and groaned, too. Their uniforms showed the blood more than their opponents'.

Armstrong crawled over to the closer one. He didn't want to rise up, in case more mortar rounds landed on or near the football field. And they did-one near the far end zone, and another, gruesomely, in the side of the stands filled with people cheering for the red team. Screams and shrieks and wails rose high and shrill.

"Son of a bitch!" Armstrong said, not entirely displeased. "We may not even have to take hostages this time. They're doing it to themselves."

The wounded U.S. player expressed an opinion that would have assigned every white person in the former Confederacy to an even warmer if less humid clime. Then he said, "I wish I could bandage myself. This cloth doesn't tear for shit."

"Hang on." Armstrong extracted a small clasp knife from his right sock. "I'll fix you up."

"What are you doing with that?" the other soldier asked.

"Never can tell when it'll come in handy," Armstrong said, slicing at the fellow's shirt. "If I could've got my hands on a derringer, I would've packed one of those, too." He cut at the soldier's tight trousers so he could see the wound. "Not too bad. Looks like you're sliced up some, but I don't think there's any iron in there."

"Oh, boy," the injured player said. Armstrong knew it was easier to be optimistic if you weren't the guy who'd stopped one.

Another round burst on the far side of the field, and then another one in the Confederate side of the stands. The bastards with the mortar could have done much worse to the people they were trying to harm. Instead, they unleashed horror on the men and women who would have applauded had damnyankees been sliced to cat's meat.

"I think the game's over," somebody not far away said.

"Boy, I bet he had to go to college to be smart like that," Armstrong said.

"Heh," said the wounded football player lying beside him. "I hope they drop on that fucking mortar crew pretty damn quick."

"Good luck," Armstrong said. Mortars didn't make a great big bang when they went off. If you drew a mile-and-a-half circle around the football field, the crew was…somewhere in there. If they wanted to throw their weapon in a Birmingham, go somewhere else, and set up again, they could do that, too. And most of the soldiers who could be chasing them were here at the game instead.

The guys in green-gray were emptying from the stands as fast as they could without panic. Medics came out to get the injured off the field. They'd been there for the football injuries, but they knew how to deal with battlefield wounds, too. They'd had plenty of practice. Armstrong stayed right where he was. He wished he could have stashed an entrenching tool in his sock. Like every U.S. soldier in the CSA, he felt pinned down.

E verything faded. Cassius found that out the hard way. He could remember the fierce, incredulous joy he'd known when he shot Jake Featherston, but he couldn't feel it any more. All he had now was the memory, and it wasn't the same thing.

Fame faded, too. It wasn't that people didn't recall what he'd done, here more than half a year later. He got greeted with smiles and nods wherever he went. But he wasn't fresh news any more. Too much had happened since. The United States was about to get a new President. That was why he'd been invited down to Washington, D.C.: to see Tom Dewey inaugurated.

He wondered if his would be the only black face at the inauguration. He feared it might. Down in the CSA, he'd always been among his own kind. But Negroes in the United States were thin on the ground. He had to get used to dealing with white people.

A lot of them didn't know how to deal with him, either. The ones who treated him like an eight-year-old who wasn't very bright were easy to avoid. Even the ones who plainly meant well, though, often acted as if they couldn't expect much from him. In some ways, they bothered him more than the other kind, because they were harder to shake off.

"Such neat handwriting!" gushed the desk clerk at Willard's Hotel when Cassius checked in the evening of January 31. He looked at his signature. Cassius Madison, it said in his ordinary script, which was not too bad and not too good. Everybody in the USA needed a surname. He'd taken his from the town outside of which he shot Jake Featherston. Only later did he learn it also belonged to a U.S. President from before the War of Secession. Were Cassius white, the clerk never would have remarked on how he wrote. The man had to be surprised he could write at all.

Once he'd checked in, Cassius knew what to do at a hotel. He tipped the man who carried his bags up to his room. Watching a white man do what would have been nigger work in the CSA was a kick.

"Thanks," the fellow said, pocketing the half-dollar. "You want a girl, buddy, you talk to me. I'll get you a lulu, I will. Fifteen bucks, and you'll be a happy guy-I guarantee it."

"Not right now," Cassius answered. Right after he came to the USA, he couldn't keep women away from him, not that he tried very hard. But they didn't throw themselves at him like that any more-another sign his fame was wearing thin, and one he really regretted.

The bellhop shrugged. "You change your mind, you can find me. My name's Pete. See you around." He strode out of the room.

Cassius shrugged. He didn't like paying for it. He did like doing it, though, so maybe he'd hunt up Pete and maybe he wouldn't. In the meantime, he looked at the room-service menu. He ordered a steak and a salad and fried potatoes. Experience had taught him that those were hard for even a kitchen asleep at the switch to screw up too badly.

Another white man, this one with a foreign accent, brought the dinner into his room on a cart. Cassius tipped him, too. With a nod that was almost a bow, the waiter left. Cassius attacked the steak. They'd got medium-rare right, and the meat was pretty tender. He'd had plenty worse.

He went to bed without looking for Pete. He felt more tired than virtuous. He didn't know why sitting on a train for the trip down from Boston should have worn him out-he hadn't done anything but sit. But he'd seen several times that traveling long distances could be as wearing as a march with Gracchus' guerrillas.

After the alarm clock woke him, he showered and shaved and dressed in a sober suit set off by a bright red tie. Then he went downstairs for breakfast.

Willard's, at the corner of Fourteenth and Pennsylvania Avenue, was only a couple of blocks from the White House, on whose battered grounds the inauguration ceremony would take place. It was even closer to the security perimeter, which featured barbed wire, machine-gun nests, and search points.

Even though Cassius had one of the most recognizable faces in the USA and an official invitation, he got frisked. "I shot the President of the CSA," he complained. "You reckon I'm gonna shoot the President of the USA?"

"Not our job to take chances," answered the soldier patting him down. "But I'll tell you something-Congresswoman Blackford came through this checkpoint a few minutes ago. She was married to a guy who was President. One of our gals searched her anyway." He paused. "You're clean. Go on through."

"Thanks," Cassius said. If they were searching members of Congress, they hadn't singled him out because he was a Negro. He'd wondered.

He showed his invitation to an usher who might have been a soldier dressed up for the occasion. "Oh, yes, sir," the man said-he couldn't have been more than a year or two older than Cassius. "Come with me. We've got you a place right near the podium."

Cassius went past bleachers filling up with dignitaries and their wives. A woman waved to him. That was Congresswoman Blackford-the soldier hadn't been lying to him. He waved back.

There was a special grandstand right behind the podium where the new President would be sworn in. Newsreel cameras in front of the podium would capture the moment so people all over the country could see it. They were sure to capture Cassius. He didn't mind. Till he learned some skill to help him get through the rest of his life, all he had to trade on was the one moment when his rifle spoke for him.

Some of the people sitting around him were generals and admirals. Others had to be important Democratic dignitaries. Their party had been out of office for eight years. Now they got to run things again. They were friendly to him. They shook his hand and congratulated him. Then they went back to chatting with one another, talking about all the things they would do now that they could do them.

The seats on the podium started to fill up: there were the incoming Vice President and his wife. There was the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. There were outgoing President La Follette and his wife. And there, at last, were incoming President Dewey and his wife-and a flock of hard-eyed bodyguards around them.

Vice President Truman was sworn in first. He gave no speech and had no counterpart to shake his hand. President La Follette had been Vice President before the Confederate bomb killed his predecessor, and the office stayed empty after he left it.

When Truman sat down, Dewey stood up. So did La Follette, who took his place beside the Chief Justice. The new President took the oath: "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

As soon as Dewey finished the oath, President-no, ex-President-La Follette took a step forward and shook his hand. Then he sat down on the podium. The Chief Justice also shook hands with President Dewey. He too sat down.

Dewey stood behind the lectern and its undergrowth of microphones. All the wireless webs would be sending his words live across the country. "It is a privilege to be here," Dewey said. "You have entrusted me with the great responsibility of winning the peace. I would like to congratulate my distinguished predecessor, President La Follette, for winning the desperate war Jake Featherston started."

Cassius clapped along with everybody else. Now that Dewey had won, he could afford to be gracious to the man who'd gone before him.

The new President looked out at the crowd. He was young and smartly dressed. He looked eager to get on with things. He sounded the same way: "Now that peace has come, we will be prosperous. And we will stay strong. Some in what were the Confederate States may think they can drive us out. I stand before the people of the United States-I stand before the people of the reunited States-to tell them they are wrong."

More applause rose. Cassius clapped harder this time than he had before. He wanted the Confederates to get everything that was coming to them and then some. People around him clapped again, too. He didn't think most of them clapped as loud as they had before. He did think that was too bad.

"And I stand before the foreign powers of the world to remind them that the United States are strong, and to remind them that we shall protect ourselves come what may, and with whatever means seem necessary," Dewey went on. "The superbomb is an awful, terrifying weapon. We shall not use it unless provoked. But those who might provoke us had better know they do so at their peril."

This time, the hand he got was loud and long. Was he telling Japan to watch out? Or was he warning the Kaiser? Cassius had found out more about foreign countries since coming to the United States than he ever knew down in Georgia. The only foreign lands he'd ever thought of there were the USA-which wasn't foreign any more-and the Empire of Mexico, because Mexicans had come to work in Augusta and Mexican soldiers had tried to kill him. The world seemed a wider, more complicated place than it had in the days before he shot Jake Featherston.

"My administration will seek to prevent nations that do not now possess the superbomb from acquiring it," Dewey said. "We have seen at first hand the devastation it inflicts. The German Empire walks side by side with us in this effort. Both Germany and the United States recognize the danger to world peace if irresponsible governments gain the ability to split the atom."

Japan, then-not the Kaiser after all, Cassius thought. He also wondered how President Dewey knew the United States and Germany would be responsible. Cassius decided he probably didn't. But they already had the superbomb, and they didn't aim to let anyone else join their club.

Wasn't Dewey whistling in the dark about his chances of succeeding? The thought had hardly crossed Cassius' mind before the President said, "I know preventing others from building superbombs will be neither easy nor cheap. We do intend to try, however. The safety of the world is at stake."

Behind Cassius, a general leaned over to his wife and murmured, "When it doesn't work, he can say we gave it our best shot." Cassius was sure he wasn't supposed to hear that. He was also sure it made more sense than he wished it did.

Dewey continued, "We will cleanse the old Confederate States of the evil influence of the Freedom Party. We will ensure that the Negroes surviving there gain full rights as citizens, and that the atrocities of the past can never come again."

As Cassius applauded that, a newsreel camera swung toward him. He was here not least as Dewey's object lesson. He didn't mind, or not very much. If the new President kept his pledge or even came close, the Negroes who remained south of the Mason-Dixon Line would be better off than they ever had before.

Dewey made more promises about all the wonderful things he would do within the United States. Cassius didn't know whether they would be wonderful or not. He hoped so. What could you do but hope?

After the speech ended, Dewey turned to the crowd. People came up to congratulate him. He and Truman shook hands and smiled while photographers flashed away. Cassius went down with the rest of the people in his special grandstand.

"Good luck, suh," he said when he worked his way up to Dewey.

"Thank you." The new President gave his hand a quick, professional pump. "Thank you for everything. You've made my job much easier."

"I was mighty glad to do it, suh," Cassius replied. No, nobody would ever think of him without thinking of his one moment. He didn't mind that very much, either. It was one moment more than most of his luckless people ever got.

Atlanta again. Irving Morrell would rather have stayed home with his family, but even leave was welcome. The Atlantic Military District hadn't come to pieces while he went back to the USA. (Well, he supposed that, technically, Atlanta was part of the USA again, too. The locals didn't believe it for a minute. Morrell had trouble believing it himself.)

Things could have been worse. None of the morale officers-there were such things-in his command had had the brilliant idea of a soldiers-against-locals football game, the way that maniac in Alabama had. Why not issue any Confederates with a grudge an engraved invitation? Plenty of damnyankees to shoot at right here! The only lucky thing was that the mortar crew hurt their own people worse than the U.S. soldiers they were aiming at.

Morrell didn't know what the CO of the Gulf Coast Military District had done with his intrepid football-planning officer. He knew what he would have done himself. If it were up to him, that major or whatever he was would be running the coast defenses of Colorado right now.

He had his own problems. Railroad sabotage just wouldn't stop. There were too many miles of track, and not enough soldiers to keep an eye on all of them. The War Department didn't think that kind of offense justified executing hostages, which was the only thing that might have ended it. Morrell supposed the military bureaucrats in Philadelphia had a point. If the U.S. Army murdered Confederates for any little thing, how did it differ from Jake Featherston's regime except in choice of victims?

But not killing Confederates for any little thing sure made Morrell's life harder.

Then there were the two dozen command cars in and around Rocky Mount, North Carolina, that somehow got sugar in their gas tanks: as good a way of wrecking an engine as any ever found. The local CO had dealt with that one on his own and sent Atlanta a report later. Morrell approved of officers with initiative. This one had commandeered motorcars from the locals to make up the lack and fined the whole town.

Even fines got tricky, though. Confederate silver and gold were still legal tender; weight for weight, those coins matched their U.S. counterparts. Confederate paper wasn't, not for dealings with the occupying authorities. Brown banknotes stayed in circulation among the locals; there weren't enough green bills to go around yet.

Pretty soon, all Confederate paper would be illegal. Then squeezing the occupied states would get easier, anyhow. Right now, the situation with money was the same as it was most ways. Wherever the U.S. authorities reached, they ruled. Where they didn't, or where they turned their backs even for a moment, the old ways went on.

"Here's an ugly one, sir." A light colonel from the judge-advocate's office set a manila folder on Morrell's desk. "From Greenville, South Carolina. They strung up a Negro for coughing at a white woman."

"Coughing?" Morrell said.

"That's what they do a lot of the time down here instead of whistling like we would," the younger officer explained.

"Do we know who did it?" Morrell asked. "Sounds like those people need stringing up themselves."

"Yes, sir." But the lieutenant colonel sounded unhappy.

"Want to tell me more, or do I need to go through all this stuff?" Morrell set a hand on the folder.

"Well, I can give you the short version," the military attorney said.

"Good!" Morrell was drowning in paperwork. "Do that, then."

"Right. For one thing, we know who did it, but we can't prove anything. Everybody denies it. Everybody who was there swears he wasn't and nobody else was, either. As far as they're concerned, that colored guy hanged himself."

"No U.S. witnesses?"

"No, sir."

"All right. You said, 'For one thing.' That means there's something else, doesn't it?"

"Yes, sir. That town will go off like a bomb if we arrest these people. Greenville does not want to put up with the idea that a Negro can get fresh with a white woman, no matter what. I don't know if the dead guy really did or he didn't. But the whites may have surrendered to us. They sure haven't given up on the way things were before they did."

"No, huh?" Morrell had heard that song too many times before. It made up his mind for him. "Send orders to the officer in charge there. Tell him to get his heavy weapons ready and make sure he has air support ready to fly. Then tell him to arrest those people and get them out of there. If Greenville rises, we'll level the place."

"Are you sure, sir?" the lieutenant colonel asked.

"If I had a superbomb handy, I'd drop it on those bastards. That's how sure I am. Now let's get cooking."

"Uh, yes, sir." The military attorney saluted and left his office in a hurry.

U.S. soldiers arrested seventeen men and two women in Greenville. The town didn't rise. Morrell hadn't thought it would. Diehards here bushwhacked and raided and made godawful nuisances of themselves. They showed no signs of being ready or able to fight pitched battles against U.S. troops.

He called in a couple of writers from Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper. "I want you to draft a pamphlet for me," he told them. "Aim it at whites in the former CSA. We can call it Equality. Tell these bastards they don't have to like Negroes, but they can't go pissing on them the way they did before the war."

"Yes, sir," the men chorused. One of them added, "When do you want it, sir?"

"Say, a week," Morrell answered. "Then I'll get War Department approval for it, and then I'll issue it. I'll issue it by the millions, by God. From now on, nobody's going to be able to say, 'Well, I didn't know what the rules were.' We'll tell 'em just what the rules are. If they break 'em after that, it's their own damn fault."

He got the first draft six days later. He didn't think it was strong enough, and suggested changes. When it came back, he sent the text to Philadelphia. He wondered how long things would take there. With the new administration coming in, the bureaucracy was even bumpier than usual.

But he not only got approval four days later, he also got a message saying that the powers that be had sent his text to the U.S. commandants in the Gulf Coast Military District, the Mid-South Military District, and the Republic of Texas. They had orders to print and distribute Equality, too. What the written word could do, it would.

As soon as the pamphlet hit the streets, complaints hit his desk. He might have known they would. Hell, he had known they would. The former mayor of Atlanta was in prison for aiding and abetting the removal of Negroes from the town. The new town commissioner was a fortyish lawyer named Clark Butler. He would have been handsome if his ears hadn't stuck out.

He'd always cooperated with U.S. authorities before. He was hopping mad now. "You mean we have to put up with it if a, uh, colored fellow"-he'd learned it wasn't a good idea to say nigger around Morrell-"makes advances to a white woman?"

"As long as he's peaceable about it, yes," Morrell asked. "Do you mean to tell me white men never make advances to colored women?"

Butler turned red. "That's different."

"How?"

"It just is."

Morrell shook his head. "Sorry, no. I'm not going to budge on this one. Maybe it was different before the war, or you thought it was because you were on top and the Negroes were on the bottom. Things aren't like that any more."

Butler scratched the edge of his thin mustache. "Some of the states in the USA have miscegenation laws. Why are you tougher on us than you would be on them?"

"Because you abused things worse," Morrell answered bluntly. "And I don't think they'll keep those laws much longer. You gave them such a horrible example, they'll be too embarrassed to leave 'em on the books."

"You're going to cause a lot of trouble," Butler predicted in doleful tones.

"I'll take the chance." Morrell, by contrast, sounded cheerful. "If people here start trouble, I promise we'll finish it."

"It's not fair," Butler said. "We're only doing what we always did."

"Yes, and look where that got you," Morrell retorted. "Let's take you in particular, for instance. I know you didn't have anything to do with shipping Negroes to camps-we've checked. You wouldn't be sitting there if you did. You'd be in jail with the old mayor. But you knew they were disappearing, didn't you?"

"Well…" Butler looked as if he wished he could disappear. "Yes."

"Good! Well done!" Morrell made clapping motions that were only slightly sardonic. "See? You can own up to things if you try. I would've thrown you out of my office if you said anything different."

"But treating…colored folks like white people? Equality?" The city commissioner pronounced the name of the pamphlet with great distaste. "People-white people-won't like that, not even a little bit."

"Frankly, Butler, I don't give a damn." Morrell was getting sick of the whole sorry business. "Those are the rules you've got now. You're going to play by them, and that's flat. If you try to make some poor Negro sorry, we will make you sorrier. If you don't think we can do it-or if you don't think we will do it-go ahead and find out. You won't like what happens next. I promise you that. Wake the town and tell the people. We mean it."

"Colored folks in the same church? Colored kids in the same school?" Plainly, Butler was picking the most hideous examples he could think of.

And Morrell nodded as if his head were on springs. "That's right. Negroes working the same jobs as white people, too, and getting the same pay. Oh, I don't expect colored lawyers right away-you didn't let them get the education for that. But they'll get it from here on out."

"I don't reckon we'll put up with it," Butler said. "I truly don't. Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!"

"Are you saying that in your official capacity, Mr. Butler?" Morrell asked. "If you are, you just resigned."

Clark Butler reconsidered. He had a well-paying, responsible job at a time and in a place where jobs of any kind were hard to come by. "Well, no. I wasn't speaking officially," he said after a brief pause. "I was just expressing the feelings of a lot of people in this part of the continent-and you know that's so, General."

Morrell knew, all right, much too well. After a pause of his own, he replied, "I don't care what people feel. I can't do anything about that. But I damn well can do something about how people behave. If you want to hate Negroes in your heart, go ahead. While you're hating them, though, I will make you sorry if you treat them any different from whites. Have you got that?"

"Equality enforced at the point of a bayonet?" Butler jeered.

"Sounds pretty silly, doesn't it?" Morrell said with a smile. The city commissioner nodded. But Morrell wasn't finished: "Still, when you get right down to it, it beats the hell out of camps and ovens and mass graves."

"I wasn't involved with that," Butler said quickly.

"You wouldn't be talking with me now if you were," Morrell replied. "But you think you're serious about what you're going to do? So are we. You can find out the easy way or the hard way. Up to you."

Butler left in a hurry after that. Morrell wasn't sorry to see him go, and resolved to keep a closer watch on him from here on out. He wondered whether the United States could enforce anything like equality on the old CSA. He still wasn't sure-but he aimed to try.

T he only way Clarence Potter could have avoided seeing the pamphlet called Equality was to stay in his apartment and never come out. The Yankees plastered the damn thing all over Richmond. During the war, that common a propaganda leaflet would have meant the Quartermaster Corps didn't need to issue toilet paper for a while.

When he first read the pamphlet, he thought it was an A-number-one asswipe, nothing else but. After he looked at it again, he still thought it was an asswipe. But it was a clever asswipe, and a determined one. The damnyankees weren't out to change hearts or minds in the dead CSA. They were out to change behavior. If they rammed different behavior down people's throats from Richmond to Guaymas, they figured hearts and minds would eventually follow.

What worried Potter most was, they had a fighting chance of being right.

He'd watched the same thing happen when the Freedom Party took over the CSA. Even people who didn't like Jake Featherston and the Party started greeting one another with "Freedom!" It was safer. You couldn't get into trouble if you did it. And, after a while, you didn't even feel self-conscious about it. You took it for granted. Pretty soon, you took the truth of everything the Party said for granted. And you, and the Confederate States of America with you, followed Jake Featherston into the abyss.

Now the Yankees wanted to push what was left of the Confederacy into…Equality. They didn't ask whites to love Negroes. They just said, Treat them the way you'd treat yourselves, or we'll make you regret it.

Was there ever a more perverted application of the Golden Rule?

Potter was sure lots of people hated the idea of Negro equality even more than he did. He'd spent sixty-odd years in the CSA; he knew what was what here. But he also knew he was being watched. The damnyankees didn't waste subtlety showing him that-which didn't mean there weren't also subtle spies, ones he didn't notice right away. He assumed his telephone was tapped and his mail read.

And so he sat tight and worked on his memoirs. A generation earlier, he'd done what he could to free the CSA from the onerous terms of the armistice after the Great War. But the Confederacy wasn't crushed then. It wasn't occupied, either. The USA had learned a bar fighter's lesson since: once you knocked a guy down, you needed to kick him in the head so he couldn't jump up and come after you with a broken bottle.

One day in early March, when spring was just starting to be in the air, he went over to Capitol Square to look around. Woodrow Wilson had declared war on the USA there in 1914. Potter himself and Nathan Bedford Forrest III had halfheartedly plotted against Jake Featherston there, too.

Forrest was dead now, because you needed to be a better plotter than he ever was to go up against the wily President of the CSA. Featherston never found out Potter was involved in that scheme. If he had, Potter knew he would have died himself.

Capitol Square had been battered when the two generals sat on a park bench and talked about where the Confederacy was going. Down the drain, though neither of them knew it at the time.

The square looked even worse now than it had then, which wasn't easy. The grass was still mangy and leprous from winter's freezes. No one had mowed it for a long time. It softened the outlines of bomb and shell craters without hiding them. Signs with big red letters shouted blunt warnings: WATCH WHERE YOU STEP! and MINES amp; LIVE AMMO!

Thus cautioned, Potter didn't walk across the square to the remains of the Capitol. A neoclassical building, it had been bombed into looking like an ancient ruin. From the pictures he'd seen, the Colosseum and the Parthenon were both in a hell of a lot better shape than this place.

Workmen were hauling away the wreckage of Albert Sidney Johnston's heroic statue. Like the Confederacy, it was good for nothing but scrap metal these days. George Washington's statue, now out from under its protective pyramid of sandbags, had come through better. Even the Yankees still respected Washington…some, anyhow.

Two blue jays screeched in a tree. A robin hopped on the ground, eye cocked for bugs. A skinny red tabby eyed the robin from behind a low mound of earth. "Go get it," Potter murmured. The cat had to eat, too. But the robin flew off. The cat eyed Potter as if it were his fault. It was a cat-it wouldn't blame itself. Potter sketched a salute. "You're a loser, too," he said fondly. The cat yawned, showing off needle teeth. It ambled away.

He'd been looking for the bench where Forrest first broached getting rid of Featherston and getting out of the war. Once he sold his memoirs, that bench would become a historical monument of sorts. Or rather, it would have, because he saw no sign of it. One more casualty of war.

He found another bench, deeper into Capitol Square. Despite the signs, he didn't blow up getting to it. He sat down. Getting out of the apartment felt good. So did the sun on his face, though he'd grown used to being pasty during the war. A man in a filthy Confederate uniform was sleeping or passed out drunk in the tall grass not far away. Some newspapers did duty for a blanket.

Potter didn't think the derelict was watching him, though you never could tell. Somebody was, somewhere. He was sure of that. He looked around to see if he could spot the spy. Not this time. That proved exactly nothing, of course.

After the end of the last war, Jake Featherston had spent some time in Capitol Square as a drifter, one more piece of flotsam washed up by the armistice. Then he ran into the Freedom Party-and it ran into him. Before he joined, it was a tiny, hopeless outfit that could keep its membership rolls and accounts in a cigar box. Afterwards…

Now it was more than twenty-five years afterwards. Potter could see that everybody would have ended up better off if Jake Featherston went down some other street and never met the hopeless chucklehead who founded the Freedom Party. Once upon a time, he'd known that chucklehead's name. He couldn't remember it now to save his life. Well, it sure didn't matter any more.

He closed his eyes. He wished he could close his nose. The stench of death still lingered in Richmond. It would only get worse as the weather warmed up, too. How many years would it need to go away for good?

"Hey, friend, you got any change you can spare?"

Clarence Potter opened his eyes. The sleeping soldier-he still had a sergeant's chevrons on his sleeve-had come to life. He was filthy, and badly needed a shave. God only knew when he'd bathed last. But Potter didn't smell whiskey along with the-what did that Yankee soap ad call it?-B.O.

"Here." He dug in his pocket and found a half-dollar. "Buy yourself something to eat." He tossed it to the man.

"Much obliged, sir." The vet caught it out of the air. He eyed Potter. "You went through it, I reckon."

"Twice," Potter agreed. "Not always at the front, but yeah-twice."

"You've got the look, all right." The demobilized soldier stuck the fat silver coin in a trouser pocket. "You reckon we'll ever get back on our feet again?"

"Sooner or later? I'm sure of it. When?" Potter shrugged. "It may be later. I don't know if I'll live to see it. I hope you do."

The younger man eyed him. "You talk kinda like a Yankee." He probably came from Alabama or Mississippi.

With another shrug, Potter answered, "I went to college up there."

"Yeah? You like the Yankees, then? If you do, I'll give you your money back, on account of I don't want it."

"Keep it, son. It's no secret that I don't care for the United States. We can't fight them now-we're licked. I don't know if we'll ever be able to fight them again. But I won't like them if I live to be a hundred, and my bones tell me I won't."

"Huh," the vet said gravely, and then, "We oughta fight 'em. We oughta kick the snot out of 'em for what they done to us."

Was he another Jake Featherston, still unburst from his chrysalis of obscurity? It was possible. Hell, anything was possible. But long odds, long odds. How many tens of thousands had there been after the last war? Potter had no idea. He did know only one rose to the top.

He also knew this grimy fellow might be a provocateur, not an embryo Featherston. The Yankees wouldn't be sorry to have an excuse to stand him against a wall with a blindfold and a last cigarette. No, not even a little bit.

"I have fought the USA as much as I intend to," he said. "Keeping it up when it's hopeless only makes things worse for us."

"Who says it's hopeless?" the young vet demanded.

"I just did. Weren't you listening? Even if we rise, even if we take Richmond, what will the damnyankees do? Pull their people out of the city and drop a superbomb on it? How do you aim to fight that?"

"They wouldn't." But the man's voice suddenly held no conviction.

"Sure they would. And if we'd won, we'd've done the same thing to Chicago if it rebelled and we couldn't squash it with soldiers. What else are the damn bombs for?"

The man in the shabby, filthy butternut uniform looked up into the sky, as if he heard the drone of a U.S. heavy bomber. One would be all it took. The cities of the conquered CSA lay naked before airplanes. No antiaircraft guns any more. No Hound Dogs waiting to scramble, either. The only reason the damnyankees hadn't done it yet was that nobody'd provoked them enough.

"Teddy Roosevelt used to talk about the big stick," Potter said quietly. "They've got the biggest stick in the world right now, and they'll clobber us with it if we get out of line. We lost. I wish like hell we didn't. I did everything I knew how to do to keep it from happening. We can't get too far out of line now, though. It costs too goddamn much."

"What am I supposed to do with myself, then?" the veteran asked. Tears filled his voice and glistened in his eyes. "I been living on hate ever since we gave up. Don't hardly got nothin' else to live on."

"Clean up. Find a job. Go to work. Find a girl. Plenty of 'em out there, and not so many men. Help build a place where your kids would want to live." Potter shrugged. "Where we are now, what else is there?"

"A place where kids'd want to live? Under the Stars and Stripes? Likely tell!" the young man said scornfully.

"Right now, it's the only game in town. Maybe things will change later on. I don't know. You'll see more of that than I do." Potter's hair was nearer white than gray these days. "But if you go on feeling sorry for yourself and sleeping in the square, maybe get drunk so you don't have to think about things, who wins? You? Or the USA?"

"I need to think about that," the vet said slowly.

Potter rose from the bench. "You've got time. Don't take too long, though. It's out there. Grab with both hands." He never would have had to say that to Jake Featherston. Jake always grabbed.

And look what it got him. Look what it got all of us. Clarence Potter walked back toward the street the way he'd come, trying to step just where he had before. Again, nothing blew up under him. But how much difference did that make now? Jake Featherston had blown up his whole country.

F lora Blackford loved the smell of a kosher deli: the meaty odors of salami and corned beef harmonizing with the brine and vinegar of the pickle barrel and contrasting with the aromas of bagels and fresh-baked bread. Philadelphia had some decent delis, but you needed to go back to New York City for the real thing.

Her brother waved from a table in the back. David Hamburger had a double chin these days. His brown hair was thinning and going gray. Flora was graying, too. She thought the thirty years just past would have grayed anybody, even if they'd somehow happened in the blink of an eye.

"Don't get up," she called as she hurried over to David.

"I wasn't going to. It's too much like work," he said. The artificial leg he'd worn since 1917 stuck out in front of him, unnaturally straight. "Good to see you. You still talk to me even though we won for a change?"

"Maybe," Flora said. They both smiled. David had been a Democrat, and a conservative one, ever since he got hurt. Violence had done its worst to him, so he seemed to think it would solve anything. After this round of war, that seemed less foolish to Flora than it had before. Sometimes nothing else would do.

She sat down. A waiter came up. "Nu?" he said. She ordered corned beef on rye and a bottle of beer. David chose lox and bagels with his beer. The waiter scribbled, scratched his thick gray mustache, and went away.

"How are you?" Flora asked. "How's your family?"

"Everybody's fine. Me, I'm not too bad," her brother answered. "How's Joshua doing?"

She told him what Joshua had said about not being able to give anyone the finger with his left hand. David laughed an old soldier's laugh. Flora went on, "He's lucky, I know, but I still wish it never happened."

"Well, I understand that," her brother said. "I've had a pretty good life, taking it all in all, but I sure wish I didn't stop that one bullet." David sighed. "I'm lucky, too. Look at poor Yossel-the first Yossel, I mean. He never got to see his son at all."

"I know," Flora said. "I was thinking about that every minute after Joshua got conscripted. But he wanted to join. What can you do?"

"Nothing," David answered. "Part of watching them grow up is figuring out when to let go. When Joshua got old enough for conscription, he got too old for you to stop him."

"He told me the same thing," Flora said ruefully. "He wasn't wrong, but what did it get him? A stretch in the hospital."

"And an idea of what the country's worth," David said. The waiter brought the food and the beer. David piled his bagel high with smoked salmon and Bermuda onion and ignored the cream cheese that came with them. Flora thought that was perverse, but no accounting for taste. David Hamburger proved as much, continuing, "Now that he's bled for it, he won't want to let it get soft."

Flora had seen reactionary signs in Joshua since he got wounded, and didn't like them. Tartly, she answered, "You don't have to get wounded to love the United States or be a patriot."

Her brother was busy chewing an enormous mouthful. He washed it down with a swallow of beer. "I didn't say you did," he replied at last. "But you sure don't see things the same way after you catch one."

Now Flora was eating, and had to wait before she could say anything. "Putting on the uniform doesn't turn everybody into a Democrat. Plenty of Socialist veterans-quite a few of them in Congress, in fact."

"I know, I know," David said. "Still, if they'd sat on that Featherston mamzer before he got too big to sit on-"

"Who was President when Featherston took over?" Flora asked indignantly, and answered her own question: "Hoover was, that's who. The last time I looked, Hoover was a Democrat."

"Yeah, yeah." David did his best to brush that aside. "Who gave away Kentucky and Houston? Al Smith was no Democrat, and he handed the Confederates the platform they needed to damn near ruin us."

"That was a mistake," Flora admitted. "The trouble was, nobody here really believed Featherston wanted a war. The Great War was so awful for both sides. Why would anybody want to do that again?"

"He didn't. He wanted to win this time. And he almost did," her brother said. "He wanted to get rid of his shvartzers, too. Who would have believed that? You were ahead of everybody there, Flora. I give you credit for it."

"Sometimes you don't want to be right. It costs too much," Flora said. "Nobody in the USA wanted to let C.S. Negroes in when he started persecuting them. The Democrats were worse about it than the Socialists, though."

"All right, so we didn't have things straight all the time, either," David answered. "Dewey'll do a better job of holding down the CSA than La Follette would have."

"That's the plank he ran on. We'll see if he means it," Flora said.

David laughed. "Was there ever a politician you wouldn't say that about?"

"I can think of three," Flora replied. "Debs, Teddy Roosevelt, and Robert Taft. When they said they'd do something, they meant it. It didn't always help them. Sometimes it just left them with a bull's-eye on their back."

After a moment's thought, David nodded. "And two more," he said: "you and Hosea."

"Thank you," Flora said softly. "I try. So did Hosea-and he never got the credit for it he deserved." He never would, either, and she knew it, not when the economic collapse happened while he was President. After a pull at her beer, she went on, "I'll give you another one: Myron Zuckerman."

"He was an honest man," her brother agreed.

Flora nodded. "He was. And if he didn't trip on the stairs and break his neck, I never would have run for Congress. My whole life would have looked different. I would have stayed an organizer or worked in the clothing business like the rest of the family."

"Zuckerman's bad luck. The country's good luck."

"You say that, with your politics? You'll make me blush. It's only because I'm your sister." Flora tried not to show how pleased she was.

"Hey, I disagree with you sometimes-well, a lot of the time. So what? You are my sister, and I'm proud of you," David answered. "Besides, I know I can always borrow money from you if I need it."

He never had, not a penny. Flora had always shared with her parents and sister and younger brother, but David stubbornly made his own way. I'm doing all right, he would say. It seemed to be true, for which Flora was glad.

He grinned at her. "So what does it mean, what we've been through since the Great War started? You're the politician. Tie it up for me."

"You don't ask for much!" Flora exclaimed. Her brother laughed. He picked up his beer bottle, discovered it was empty, and waved for another one. Flora drank from hers. If she was going to try to answer a question like that, she needed fortifying. "Well, for starters, we've got the whole United States back, if we can ever stop the people in the South from hating us like rat poison."

"Since when do they like us that much?" David said: a painfully true joke. He went on, "We can hold them down if we have to, them and the Canadians."

"A Negro who got out of the CSA before the Great War said that if you hold a man down in the gutter, you have to get into the gutter yourself," Flora said. "Do we want to do that?"

"Do we want the Confederate States back in business? Do we want them building superbombs again?" David asked, adding, "The one they used almost got you."

"I know," Flora said. "Don't remind me."

"Well, then." By the way David said it, he thought he'd proved his point.

But Flora answered, "Do we want our boys down there for the next fifty years, bleeding a little every day? It would be like a sore that won't heal."

"Better that than worrying about them blowing us off the map," David said. "And they would, too. We've fought them four times in the past eighty years. You think they don't want to try to get even because we won the last two?"

"No, I don't think so, not for a minute." Flora knew some Socialists had thought such things after the Great War. It was unfortunate, but it was true. Nobody thought that way any more, though. Once bitten, twice shy. Twice bitten…"Still, if we can't turn them into people who belong in the United States, what are we going to do with them?"

"Do we want people like that in our country? People who murdered eight or ten million Negroes? Even when the Tsar turns loose a pogrom, it's not as bad as that."

"A choleriyeh on the Tsar." Flora hated the idea of Russia with a superbomb, too. Germany would have to deal with Russia, though; the USA just didn't have the reach. She got back to the business at hand: "They didn't kill all the Negroes."

"No, but they didn't try to stop the Freedom Party goons, either. They cheered them on, for crying out loud," David said. "And you know what scares me?"

"Nu?" Flora asked.

"If it happened down there, it could happen here. It could happen to Negroes here, or, God forbid, it could happen to Jews. If you get enough people hot and bothered, anything can happen. Anything at all."

"God forbid is right," Flora said. "I like to think we wouldn't do anything like that…"

"Yeah. Me, too. And how many shvartzers thought their white neighbors wouldn't do anything like that? How many of them are left to think anything now?" Her brother answered his own question: "Not many."

"Maybe seeing what the Confederates did will vaccinate us against it," Flora said. "We can hope so, anyway."

"Alevai," David said.

"Alevai omayn." Flora nodded. "But can you imagine a politician saying, 'I want to do the same thing Jake Featherston did. Look how well it worked down there'?"

"Mm, maybe not-not for a while, anyway." David smiled crookedly. "Let's hear it for bad examples. I always aimed to be one for my children, but massacring people goes a little too far."

"A little. Sure." Flora reached out and set her hand on his. He looked astonished. She realized she hadn't done that in-oh, much too long. "And some bad example you are."

"Hey, I'm a Democrat. How can I be anything but a bad example?"

"You'll have to work harder than that." Flora hoped he wouldn't get angry. He had worked hard, all his life.

He didn't. "Here. I'll give it my best shot." He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. "How am I doing?"

"I think you need to try something else." Flora fought not to laugh.

"Don't know what. I already drink. Don't want to chase women-I'm happy with the one I caught. And you're the family politician."

"Well! I like that!"

David's smile got crookeder yet. "You know what? Me, too."

Flora pointed to the pack. "Give me one of those."

"You don't smoke."

"So what? Right now I do."

He handed her a cigarette, then leaned close to light it from his. She thought it tasted terrible, but she didn't care, not just then. They blew out smoke together.