The Center Cannot Hold

XI

Hipolito Rodriguez had never thought about what a stock-market crash could do to the town of Baroyeca, and to the silver mine in the hills on which the town depended for its existence. Just because he hadn't thought about such things, though, didn't mean they weren't real. The mine shut down in September. A few days later, the railroad stopped coming into Baroyeca.

"A good thing we got the stove when we did," his wife said when he brought that news home. "It would take a lot longer to come here now."

" Si, Magdalena," he said. "Everything will take a lot longer to come here now. The town is liable to dry up and blow away, and then what will become of the farms all around it?"

"We go on and do as we always did," Magdalena answered. "We stay on our land and mind our own business."

"But we can't make everything here," Rodriguez said. "If the general store closes, life will get very hard."

"How can the general store close?" Magdalena said. "Everyone around here goes to it. Senor Diaz is a rich man."

"How rich will he be if he has to ship everything into Baroyeca by wagon or by truck?" Rodriguez asked. "I don't know how much that costs, but I know it costs a lot more than the railroad."

"Now you worry me," Magdalena said. "I think you did that on purpose."

"As a matter of fact, yes," he replied. "I'm worried myself. I didn't want to be the only one."

"Oh." She'd been making tortillas. After rubbing cornmeal off her hands and onto her apron, she gave Hipolito Rodriguez a hug. "Who would have thought it could be this bad?"

"Who, indeed?" he answered. "Up till now, we complained that things that happened in Richmond didn't matter one way or the other here in Sonora, and that nobody back there cared about us." His laugh rang bitter. "Now things that happened in Richmond and in New York City matter very much here, and Madre de Dios! but I wish they didn't."

Magdalena nodded. "How do these things work out like this? You go to the meetings of the Partido de la Libertad — what do they say there? Do they know? Can they make it better?"

"What can they do now?" he asked in return. "The president is a Whig. Most of the Senators and Congressmen are Whigs. The Freedom Party can only protest what the Whigs do, and the Whigs don't do much. They don't seem to know what to do. They are fools." He'd always thought the Whigs were fools. Even before Sonora started electing men from the Freedom Party to Congress, the state had sent Radical Liberals off to Richmond.

"If the Freedom Party had power, what would it do?" Magdalena asked.

"Put people to work," Rodriguez answered at once. "Make sure they stayed at work. Make the country strong again. Tell the United States to leave us alone, and be strong enough to make sure the United States did it. Take back the states the USA stole from us in the war."

The only time he'd ever seen men from the United States was during his service in the Confederate Army during the Great War. The soldiers from the USA had done their best to kill him, and had come alarmingly close more than once. A lot of the west-Texas prairie where he'd fought was now included in the U.S. state of Houston. It was as if the USA were mocking all his effort, all his courage-yes, and all his fear, too. Anything he could do to pay back the United States of America, he would do, and do gladly.

Nodding-she knew how he felt-Magdalena said, "These things sound wonderful. How will the Freedom Party make them happen?"

"Why…" He hesitated, then shrugged. "I don't know, not exactly," he admitted. "I don't think anyone knows. But I do know they will work hard and try everything. And I know they have no hope of helping the country if they aren't in power. The Whigs have made too many mistakes. It's time for them to go."

Robert Quinn, the Freedom Party organizer in Baroyeca, had said that very thing in his accented Spanish. Hipolito Rodriguez didn't mind that he spoke the language like a man whose first language was English. That Quinn spoke Spanish at all mattered to the farmer. It told him the Freedom Party was serious about winning followers in Baroyeca, in all of Sonora. The Whigs never had been. Even the Radical Liberals had worried about the big men, the rich men, first, and had expected them to bring the campesinos into line. It had worked for many years, too. But no more.

"When you vote Freedom, you know the Party cares," Rodriguez said. "Nobody else does, not like that."

"But the election is still more than a month away," Magdalena said. "What can the Party do in the meantime? What can anyone do if-the Blessed Virgin forbid it! — the general store closes its doors?" She crossed herself.

"I don't know," Rodriguez answered. "I don't think anyone knows."

"As long as we have enough water to keep the corn and beans growing and the livestock healthy, we can go on," his wife said. "Life may be hard, but life has been hard before. We will get through till it is better again."

"I hope so," Rodriguez said. He'd got used to being a fairly prosperous farmer-prosperous by the standards of southern Sonora, at any rate. He'd seen just enough of the rest of the Confederate States to have a suspicion bordering on certainty that prosperity here was something less than it might have been elsewhere in the country.

As a measure of that prosperity, Magdalena had a treadle-powered sewing machine. She'd bought it secondhand, from a woman in Baroyeca who'd got a better machine, but even secondhand it was a status symbol for a farmer's wife. It also let her get more work done faster than she could have managed without it. With six children to be clothed, that was no small matter.

A few days after Rodriguez came back from Baroyeca, the needle in the sewing machine broke. Like any farmer, he was a good handyman. Fixing anything that small and precisely made, though, was beyond him. "You have to go back into town," Magdalena told him. "I have half a dozen pairs of pants to make. You don't want the boys to run around naked, do you?"

"I'll go," he said. "Give me the broken needle, so I can be sure I'm getting the matching part. There are as many different kinds as there are different sewing machines, and you would have something to say to me if I brought back the wrong one, now wouldn't you?"

"Maybe not," his wife answered. "Maybe I'd just think you'd spent too much time in La Culebra Verde before you tried to buy the right one."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Rodriguez said with dignity. Magdalena laughed so raucously, she distracted Miguel and Jorge enough to make them stop wrestling for a little while.

With that laughter still ringing in his ears, Hipolito Rodriguez set out for Baroyeca the next morning. When he got there, he made sure he bought the sewing-machine needle first. Magdalena would never have let him live it down if, after all his care, he came back with the wrong one.

The general store remained open. Rodriguez was astonished to discover that a packet of three needles cost only eight cents. The machine, when Magdalena bought it, had come with the one that had just broken, and no others. "I expected they would be much more," he told Jaime Diaz as the proprietor took his money.

"Then I will gladly charge you twice as much," Diaz said. "One way or another, I have to make some money. With the mine closed, I don't know how I'm going to do it. And the railroad, too! How will I get supplies?"

"I don't know," Rodriguez answered in a low voice. "My wife and I were talking about this. If you don't, how will Baroyeca go on?"

"I have no answers," the storekeeper said. "Every day, I keep hoping things will get better, and every day they get worse. Be thankful you live on a farm. It's not so bad for you. For anyone who has to get things from other places every day…" He shook his head.

"What can you do?" Rodriguez asked. "What can anyone do?"

"No one can do anything," Diaz replied. "No one can do anything to make things better, I mean. That's what makes this whole business so dreadful, my friend. The whole world is broken, and no one has the faintest idea how to fix it."

Hipolito Rodriguez hadn't thought of the collapse in those terms. He'd thought about what it meant to Baroyeca, to Sonora, and, to some degree, to the Confederate States. The world? That was too much for him to grasp. He said, " Senor Diaz, I know the man who can set things right."

"Who is that, then?" Diaz said. "In the name of God and the Blessed Virgin, tell me. If anyone can make the mine open and the train come back to Baroyeca, I will bless him with all my heart." In spite of his talk of the world, most of his thoughts stayed close to home, too. Such is life for most men.

"Jake Featherston of the Freedom Party, that's who," Rodriguez said. "They can make the country strong again, and if we are strong, how can we help being rich again, too?"

"Rich? I don't care about rich. All I care about is having the money to go on from day to day," the storekeeper said. He was polite enough to understate what he had and what he wanted. Rodriguez nodded, polite enough to accept the understatement for what it was. Diaz went on, "I don't know about the Freedom Party, either." He drummed his fingers on the countertop behind which he stood. "But the Whigs have no notion what to do. A blind man could see that. And the Radical Liberals"-he smiled a wry smile-"what have they ever been good for but making faces at the Whigs? So maybe, just maybe, you could be right."

"I think so," Rodriguez said. "When did you ever see the Whigs or even the Radical Liberals with a headquarters here in town? The Freedom Party has one. And Robert Quinn even learned Spanish to get us to join the Party. When have the others cared so much about us?"

"A point," Diaz admitted. "Quinn buys from me." Everyone who actually lived in town bought from him; what other choice did people have? Again, he was polite. He continued, "He always pays his bills on time, I will say, and he never treats me like a damn greaser." The rest of the conversation had been in Spanish. He used English for those two words.

Rodriguez nodded, a sour smile on his face. He'd also heard those English words, more often than he ever wanted to. He said, "You see? They speak English, but they don't look down their noses at Sonorans. If they can manage that, I think they can manage the whole country."

"I hadn't thought of it in that way," Diaz said. "Maybe you're right. It could be so."

"I really think it is," Rodriguez said. "Look at the mess the other parties have got us into. Doesn't the Freedom Party deserve the chance to get us out?" The storekeeper didn't say no. Rodriguez added the clincher: "And the election is coming up soon-only a little more than a month to go."

A nne Colleton drove a five-year-old Birmingham down toward Charleston. She'd finally sold the ancient Ford she'd acquired during the war after Confederate soldiers confiscated her Vauxhall. She knew she'd kept it longer than she should have, as a reminder of those grim times. But when she weighed sentiment against ever more cranky machinery, sentiment came off second best.

The Robert E. Lee Highway was better going than it had been in those days. It was paved all the way, where long stretches of it had been only rutted dirt. A lot more motorcars traveled up and down it, too. And nowadays, the bodies of hanged Negro Reds didn't dangle from trees by the side of the road. She'd seen plenty of them, coming back from Charleston to St. Matthews in 1915. She'd been going to see a lover then; she was going to see a lover now.

Back then, regardless of whether Roger Kimball had had a flat in Charleston rather than being on leave from the Navy, not even Anne, radical as she'd reckoned herself, would have dared park her motorcar in front of the building where he lived. That would have meant scandal. They'd always met in hotels: in Charleston, in Richmond, down in Georgia.

Times had changed. Much of what had been radical was now taken for granted. Anne didn't think twice about leaving the Birmingham in front of Clarence Potter's block of flats, or of knocking on his door. Inside, the clattering of a typewriter abruptly stopped. A man's voice kept on coming out of a wireless set.

Potter opened the door. He gave Anne a quick kiss and said, "Come in. Fix yourself a drink. I'm almost done with this damn report. Pretty soon, we'll find out how good the news is." By his tone, he didn't expect her to take good literally.

"A heavy turnout is expected in today's Congressional election," the reporter on the wireless said as Anne went into the kitchen to deal with whiskey and water and ice. "The Whigs remain confident of holding their strong position in the House despite the unfortunate state of the economy, and-"

The typewriter started clacking again just then, drowning out the rest. Clarence Potter was far and away the most unusual man Anne had ever met. He not only believed she could take care of herself, he encouraged her to do it. He'd never shown any interest what ever in running her life. A thoroughly competent man, he respected competence wherever he found it, and seemed happy he'd found it in her. Her whole life long, she'd fought against men who either tried to control her or simply assumed they would. Potter hadn't tried. Anne sometimes had trouble figuring out what to make of that.

Drink in hand, she came back into the front room. "Do you want me to fix one for you, too?" she asked. He didn't expect her to fix drinks. That, no doubt, was why she was willing to do it.

And he shook his head now. Lamplight glinted from the metal frames of his spectacles. "No, thanks. Not yet. Let me finish up here. I think I've figured out who's been lifting crates from Lucas Williamson's warehouse, and how he can keep it from happening again." Concentration on his face, he went back to typing.

"You did remember to vote, didn't you?" Anne asked.

He nodded. "Oh, yes. I'm not going to give the Freedom Party any help at all. The Whigs have done too much of that lately." He went back to typing, and might almost have forgotten Anne was in the room with him.

She listened to the wireless. The commentator kept on sounding optimistic about the Whigs' prospects. She hoped he was right. Like Clarence Potter, she hoped and believed two different things.

Ten minutes later, Potter took the sheet of paper out of the machine. "There," he said in his half-Yankee accent, laying it on a neat stack. "Another week's bills paid. Now I get to remember I'm a human being." He went back into the kitchen and fixed a whiskey for himself. Raising it in salute, he added, "It's damn good to see you, you know that? Always nice to have company on the deck as the ship goes down."

"It won't be as bad as that," Anne said.

"No, indeed. It'll probably be worse." Potter looked out the window. Twilight was setting in. "Polls'll close before long. Then we'll start getting returns, and then we'll know how big a mess we'll have for the next two years. To tell you the truth, I'd almost sooner not find out."

"Would you rather stay here and stay in bed, then?" Anne asked. "The election will be what it is, regardless of whether we go to Whig headquarters after supper."

Potter smiled but shook his head. "Plenty of time for that afterwards. I have this restless itch to know, and it needs satisfying as much as any other urge."

"All right." And, to Anne's internal surprise, it was all right. She knew Clarence Potter was interested; she'd had plenty of very pleasant proofs of that. If he put business before pleasure… well, didn't she, too? I'm keeping company with a grownup, she thought. It was, in her experience, a novelty, but one she didn't mind.

When they went out for supper, she ordered a big plate of boiled shrimp. "They don't come fresh to St. Matthews," she said.

"No, I suppose not," Potter agreed. "When I first moved here, I remember thinking how wonderful all the seafood was." He'd chosen crab cakes for himself. "Now, unless people remind me about it the way you just did, I take it for granted. I shouldn't do that, should I?"

"No," Anne said. "The whole country's taken too many things for granted."

"We're liable to pay the price for it, too," he said. "That goes back a long way now, you know-starting when we took it for granted we'd win the Great War and be home to celebrate by the time the leaves turned red and gold."

The colored waiter brought their suppers. As Anne began to eat, she said, "I took that for granted, and I can't say otherwise. You didn't, did you?"

"No-but remember, I went to Yale. I was there for four Remembrance Days. I had a pretty fair notion of how desperately in earnest those people were. We figured we could whip them. They went out and made damn sure they could whip us." He took a bite of crab cake, nodded, and went on in meditative tones: "We've always figured we could whip the Freedom Party, too. But the damnyankees aren't the only people who are desperately in earnest. That's what worries me."

"We'll find out." Anne feared he might be right, but didn't want to think about it, not just then.

After they finished supper, they walked over to the Whig headquarters. It lay only three or four blocks away. Even in November, bugs still buzzed around street lamps. Something-a bird? a bat? — swooped down, grabbed one of them out of the air, and vanished into darkness again.

When Anne and Clarence Potter came into the headquarters, they got their share, and more than their share, of suspicious looks. Anne had former Freedom Party ties that made people distrust her. Her companion didn't, but he did have the unfortunate habit of saying exactly what he thought, and that regardless of what the received wisdom was.

But then someone called out to them: "Have you heard the news?"

Potter shook his head. Anne said, "No, that's what we came here for. What's the latest?"

"Horatio Standifer out in North Carolina," the man replied. "In Congress since before the war, but a Freedom Party man just did him in."

"Oh, good God," Potter said. "If Standifer lost his seat, nobody's safe tonight. And if nobody's safe tonight, then God help the country tomorrow."

"What's the news here in South Carolina?" Anne asked.

"Not as bad as that," the Whig said. "We're going to lose the seat we picked up two years ago, and maybe one more besides."

Potter pointed at the blackboard on which new results were going up. "Maybe two more besides, looks like to me."

After a second look at the numbers, the other Whig scowled and nodded. "Maybe two more besides," he admitted, and went off as if Potter had some sort of contagious disease.

He does, Anne thought. He tells the truth as he sees it, and he pulls no punches. Such men are dangerous.

Returns from Georgia started coming, and then Tennessee and Alabama. The more of them there were, the longer the faces at Whig headquarters got. People started slipping over to the saloon across the street. Some of them came back. Others didn't-they stayed away and began the serious business of drowning their sorrows.

Clarence Potter didn't go. Each new seat lost to the Freedom Party-and those came in one after another, with no possible room for doubt in most of them-brought not howls of dismay from him, but rather a bitter smile. He might have been telling the world, I knew this was going to happen. Now here it is, and what are you going to do about it? No one in the Whig headquarters seemed to have the slightest idea what to do about it… except for the men who headed across the street to get drunk.

As Anne watched the man she was with, so he watched her, too. After a while, he said, "It's probably not too late for you, you know."

"What do you mean?" she asked, though she had a pretty good idea.

And, sure enough, he said, "Your politics aren't that far from Jake Featherston's. If you want to, you can probably make your peace with him."

She wanted to haul off and slap him. She wanted to, but she couldn't, for the same thought had crossed her mind. He told her the truth as he saw it, too. Still, she said, "I don't know. I turned him down once when he asked for money, years ago. He doesn't forget things like that."

Potter laughed scornfully. "I'll tell you what he won't turn down. He won't turn down money if you give it to him now, that's what."

Anne wondered about that. She decided Potter was probably half right. Jake Featherston might take her money if she offered it to him again. But would he ever trust her, ever let her have any real influence? She had her doubts. Featherston struck her as a man whose memory for slights an elephant would envy.

Casually, Clarence Potter added, "If you do go back to him, we're through. I don't know how much that means to you. I hope it means something. Losing you would mean a lot to me. But I've known Featherston longer than any of the 'Freedom!'-shouting yahoos who go marching for him these days. We aren't on the same side, and we're never going to be."

"What if he gets elected president?" Anne asked.

A muscle jumped in his right cheek, perhaps an inch below his eye. "No one ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the Confederate people, but I still find that hard to imagine-even harder than it was in 1921, when he came so close. And 1933's still a long way away. Things are bound to look better by then." He paused and sighed. "And the way you asked that question makes me wonder if we aren't through anyhow."

"Up till now, you never put any conditions on me," Anne said. "I liked it that you never put any conditions on me."

"Up till now, I never imagined I needed to," he answered. "But I can't put up with the Freedom Party. I'm sorry, but I can't."

"Don't you want revenge on the USA?" she asked.

"I don't want anything that badly," Potter said.

Anne sighed. "Some things are worth any price." He shook his head. Now she sighed. "It's been fun, Clarence," she said. "But I'll do what I think I have to do, and not what anyone else tells me to. Not ever." No wonder I never got married, she thought. She walked out of the Whig headquarters and back toward her motorcar.

K amloops, British Columbia, was a long way from Philadelphia, and a long way from the Confederate States, too. That didn't keep news from getting there about as fast as it got anywhere else, though, not in this age of telegraph clickers and wireless sets. Colonel Irving Morrell studied the Confederate election returns with a sort of horrified fascination.

"Sweet Jesus Christ!" he said, looking at the newspaper that had set them out in detail.

"Er-yes, sir," his aide-de-camp said, and chuckled.

"No offense, Lieutenant," Morrell said hastily. "Just a manner of speaking."

"Oh, yes, sir. I know that," Lieutenant Ike Horwitz answered. "You're not like that damn German sergeant who was tagging along with your buddy from the General Staff over there."

"I should hope not." Morrell set the paper on Horwitz's desk. "But look at this. For heaven's sake, look at this. The Freedom Party went from-what? — nine Congressmen to twenty-nine. They won three governorships down there. They took control of four state legislatures, too, and that means they'll start electing Senators, because their state legislatures still choose 'em. They didn't switch to popular vote, the way we did."

"That's a big pickup, no doubt about it." Horwitz leaned forward to study the numbers. He looked up at Morrell. "I'm awful damn glad I'm a Jew in the USA, and not a shvartzer in the CSA."

"A what?" Morrell said, and then he nodded, making the connection from Yiddish to German. "Oh. Yeah. I bet you are."

"There's people here who don't like Jews-plenty who feel just like that stupid sergeant," Horwitz said. "But it isn't all that bad. Hell, even the president's wife's Jewish, not that I've got any use for her politics or his. If you're colored in the Confederate States, you've got to be shaking in your shoes-if they let you have any shoes."

He was right. Morrell hadn't even wondered what the Negroes in the CSA felt about the election returns he'd been dissecting. He rarely thought about Negroes. What white man in the USA did? Maybe Horwitz, being a Jew, was more likely to look at other people who had a hard time in their homeland.

"I'll tell you what," Morrell said. "Write me an appreciation of the Confederate Negroes' likely response to this. Do a good job on it and I'll forward it to Philadelphia, see if I can get you noticed."

"Thank you, sir. That's damn white of you," his aide-de-camp answered.

Morrell's own thoughts were on the more immediate. "Any time the Freedom vote goes up, that's trouble for us, because those bastards want another shot at the USA. And Featherston's boys haven't seen numbers like these since 1921. I hope to heaven the president sits up and takes notice."

"What do you think the odds are?" Lieutenant Horwitz asked.

"Do I look like a Socialist politician to you? I'd better not, that's all I've got to say," Morrell replied. "They cut off Confederate reparations early, they haven't been checking about rearmament near as hard as they should have, they've cut our budget…" He sighed. "They think everybody should just be friends. I wish that would work, I really do."

"People vote for it," Horwitz said. "Nobody wants to go through another war like the last one."

"No, of course not. But both sides have to want peace. You only need one to have a war. And the only thing worse than fighting a war like that is fighting it and losing. Ask the Confederates if you don't believe me."

"I don't need to ask anybody," Horwitz said. "I can see that for myself. Anyone with a brain in his head ought to be able to see that for himself. But what are we going to do?"

"That's the question, all right." Morrell drummed his fingers on the desktop. "I don't know. I just don't know. Half of those people who voted for Featherston's gang of goons probably don't hope for anything but jobs and three square meals a day if he calls the shots. They sure aren't getting 'em with the folks they've got running things now."

His aide-de-camp smiled unhappily. "And isn't that the sad and sorry truth, sir? When I joined the Army, I never thought I'd be glad to be in for the food and for the roof over my head. But that's how it looks nowadays. If I were a civilian, I'd probably be scuffling like everybody else."

"Good point." Morrell nodded. "We're insulated from that, anyhow, thank God."

"I suppose the Socialists are doing everything they can there," Ike Horwitz said grudgingly. "Feeding people who are out of work and giving some of 'em makework jobs-it's not great, God knows, but it's better than nothing, you know what I mean?"

"I guess so." Morrell sighed. "If you give a man something for nothing, though, will he want to stand up on his own two feet again when times get better, or will he keep wanting a handout for the rest of his life?"

"You ask me, sir, most people want to work if you give 'em the chance," Horwitz answered. "Other thing is, if they do starve, talking about the rest of their lives starts looking pretty silly, doesn't it? And if they're afraid they're going to starve, then what happens? Then they start voting for somebody like Jake Featherston in the USA, right?"

"I suppose so," Morrell said again. Up till now, his politics had always been firmly Democratic; he'd never had to think about it. He still didn't, not really. But he'd never been a man to worry about subtleties, either, and now he wondered whether he'd made a mistake. "You're saying the Socialists are giving us a safety valve, aren't you?"

"I wouldn't have put it quite that way, but yes, sir, I guess I am," Lieutenant Horwitz answered. "If things blow up, what have we got? Trouble, nothing else but." Like any soldier-and like anyone else with an ounce of sense-he was convinced staying out of trouble was a good idea.

A couple of days later, Morrell went into the town of Kamloops to do some shopping-Christmas was coming, and he wanted to buy some things for Agnes and Mildred that he couldn't hope to find at the post exchange. The weather was crisp and chilly, the sun shining bright out of a blue, blue sky but not giving much in the way of warmth even so.

The reception he got in Kamloops gave little in the way of warmth, either. Here a dozen years after the end of the war, the Canucks cared for the green-gray uniforms their occupiers wore no more than they had after the USA finally battered them into submission. People on the streets turned their backs when Morrell walked by.

Most of them did, anyhow. He'd got used to that. What he hadn't got used to were the ragged-looking men who held out their hands and whined, "Spare change, pal?" And he especially hadn't got used to the respectable-looking men who held out their hands and said the same thing. One of them added, "Been a long time since my twin boys saw any meat on the table."

"Why don't you get a job, then?" Morrell asked.

"Why?" The man glared at him. "I'll tell you why, even though you're a damned fool to need telling. Because there damned well aren't any jobs to get, that's why. Lumber companies aren't hiring-that's what I got fired from. Farms aren't taking on hired men, not when they can't sell half the sheep and cows and wheat they raise. Even here in town, only way you can keep your job is if you're somebody's brother-if you're just a brother-in-law, you're in trouble. That's why, you stinking Yank."

Well, I asked him, and he went and told me, Morrell thought. He dug in his pocket and gave the Canadian some coins. "Here, buddy. Good luck to you."

"I ought to spit in your eye," the hungry man told him. "Hell of it is, I can't. I've got to tip my hat"-he did-"and say, 'Thank you, sir,' on account of I need the money so goddamn bad."

Never in all his days had Morrell heard Thank you, sir sound so much like Go to hell, you son of a bitch.

And he discovered the problem that sprang from giving one beggar some money. As soon as he did, all the others became four times as obnoxious, swarming around him and cursing him as foully as they knew how when he pushed past without doing for them what he'd done for one of their fellows. Maybe they hoped they'd make him feel guilty. All they really did was make him mad.

He'd just shaken free of the crowd when a woman sidled up to him. Skirts were longer than they had been a couple of years before, and the day wasn't warm, but what she wore displayed a lot of her. "Want a good time, soldier?" she said. "Three dollars."

She was skinny. Like any town with soldiers in it, Kamloops had its share of easy women, but she didn't look as if she'd been part of their sorry sisterhood for very long. "What did you used to do?" Morrell asked quietly.

"What difference does it make?" she answered. "Whatever it was, I can't do it any more. Do you want to go someplace?"

"No, thanks," he answered. She cursed him, too, with a sort of dreary hopelessness that hit him harder than the anger the male beggars had shown.

Even the storekeepers' attitudes seemed different from the way they had before things went sour. He'd never seen men so glad to take money from him. When he remarked on that, the fellow who'd just sold him a doll for Mildred said, "You bet I'm glad. You're only the second customer I've had today. Anybody with any money at all looks good to me right now. How am I going to pay my bills if nobody buys anything from me? And if I can't pay my bills, what happens then? Do I end up out on the street? I sure hope not."

Later, another shopkeeper said, "Hate to tell you this, but Kamloops'd wither up and die if it wasn't for you Yank soldiers. They still pay you regular, so you still have money in your pockets. Damn few folks do, and you'd better believe that."

A third man was even blunter: "If things don't turn around pretty quick, what the hell's going to happen to us?"

Morrell had to run the gauntlet of beggars once more on the way back to the U.S. Army base. The men cursed him all over again, this time for spending money on himself and not on them. "How would you like it if you were hungry?" one of them called after him-a parting shot, as it were.

It was a good question. He had no good answer. Nobody wanted to be hungry. He remembered that skinny woman. Nobody wanted to have to choose between whoring and starving. But nobody seemed to have much of an idea how to make things better, either. Morrell hurried home, a troubled man.

J onathan Moss was making a discovery as old as mankind: that not even getting exactly what you thought you'd always wanted guaranteed happiness. When he thought about it-which was as seldom as he could-he suspected Laura Moss, once Laura Secord, was making the same unpleasant discovery.

"I don't like the city," she said one morning over a cup of tea (Jonathan preferred coffee, which he brewed himself).

"I'm sorry," he answered, not altogether sincerely. "I don't know how I could practice law from a farm…" He almost added in the middle of nowhere, but let that go at the last possible instant.

He might as well have said it. By her sour expression, Laura heard it even if it remained technically unspoken. "But everybody here loves the Yanks and knuckles under to them," she complained.

The first part of that wasn't even close to true, as she had to know. As for the second… "Whether you like it or not, dear, the United States won the war," Moss pointed out.

Laura's expression got unhappier yet. Out on her farm, and even in Arthur-which was far enough off the beaten path for the American occupiers to pay little attention to it-she'd had an easier time pretending that blunt truth wasn't real. Here in Berlin, she couldn't ignore it. U.S. military courts here tried cases under occupation law. Soldiers in green-gray uniforms were always on the streets. "Even the newspapers!" she burst out. "They spell color c-o-l-o-r and labor l-a-b-o-r, not c-o-l-o-u-r and l-a-b-o-u-r."

"That's how we spell them in the States," Moss said.

"But this isn't the States! It's the province of Ontario! Can't you leave even the King's English alone?"

He finished his coffee at a gulp. "The King doesn't run things around these parts any more. The United States do. Sweetheart, I know you don't like it, but that doesn't mean it isn't so." Carrying his cup over to the sink, he went on, "I'm going to the office. I'll see you tonight."

"All right." She sounded almost as relieved to have him out of the apartment as he was to go. With a sigh, she added, "I don't know what I'm going to do around here, though."

Back on her farm, finding ways to pass the time had never been a worry. Moss knew just enough of farm life to be sure of that. If you weren't busy every waking moment on a farm, you had to be neglecting something. It wasn't like that here in the city. To Moss, that was one of the advantages of getting off the farm. He wasn't sure Laura saw things the same way.

Before leaving, he put on his overcoat and a fur hat with ear flaps that tied under his chin. Berlin, Ontario, might be under U.S. occupation, but its winters remained thoroughly Canadian. Moss had grown up in Chicago. He'd thought he knew everything there was to know about nasty winter weather. The war and coming back here afterwards to practice law had taught him otherwise.

Only after he was out the door and going down the stairs to his elderly Bucephalus did he realize he hadn't kissed Laura good-bye. He kept going. His sigh was more glum than bemused. For years, he hadn't been able to get the idea of her out of his mind. Then, when they finally did come together, their lovemaking had been the most spectacular he'd ever known.

And now they were married-and he forgot to kiss her good-bye. So much for romance, he thought unhappily. He got into the motorcar and turned the key, hoping the battery held enough charge to start the car. Someone down the street was cranking an old Ford. Most of the time, a self-starter was ever so much more convenient. In weather like this, though…

The Bucephalus' engine sputtered, coughed, and then came to noisy life. Moss let out a sigh of relief. The motorcar would get him to the office, which meant the odds were good it would get him home again, too. And then, once he got home, he would find out what new things Laura had found to complain about.

He put the Bucephalus in gear and pulled onto the street even though the engine hadn't had enough time to warm up. Only after the auto had started to roll did he wonder if he was running away from trouble. Well, what if you are? he asked himself. It's not as if you won't go back to it tonight.

Not many motorcars shared the streets with the Bucephalus. Considering the snow and the state of the machine's brakes, that might have been just as well. Moss saw one traffic accident, with steam pouring from a shattered radiator, and with two men in heavy coats standing there shouting at each other.

Moss thought fewer automobiles were on the streets than had been the winter before. He knew why, too: fewer people in Berlin had jobs to go to than had been so the winter before. That was true all over Canada, all over North America, all over the world. Everyone hated it, but no one seemed to have the faintest idea what to do about it.

Two words painted on the side of a building-YANKS OUT! Before long, somebody would come along and paint over them. The Canucks hadn't given up wanting their own country back. The United States remained determined they wouldn't get it. Since the USA had the muscle, the Canadians faced an uphill fight.

As Moss got out of the Bucephalus, a man in a ragged overcoat who needed a shave came up to him with a gloved hand out and said, "Can you give me just a little money, friend? I've been hungry a long time now."

"Here you are." Moss handed him a quarter. "Buy yourself something to eat."

The man took the coin. He went down the street muttering something about a damned cheapskate Yank. Jonathan Moss sighed. Try as you would, you couldn't win.

He had an electric hot plate in his office. As soon as he got in, he started perking more coffee. Not only would it help keep him awake, it would help keep him warm. Even before the coffee was ready, he got to work on the papers waiting for him on his desk.

He'd won his name among the Canadians of Berlin for keeping the U.S. occupiers off their backs as much as he could. That brought him a fair number of cases to be tried in military courts. It also brought him a lot of much more ordinary legal business. Most of his current case load involved bankruptcies.

So many of those were on his desk right now, in fact, that he thought of adding a slug of whiskey to the coffee he poured for himself. Maybe that would help him face the ruin of other men's hopes with something more like equanimity. Or maybe it'll turn me into a drunk, he thought, and left the whiskey bottle-it was only a pint-in his desk drawer.

How many of those bankruptcies would have happened if the Russians had managed to pay their loan to that Austro-Hungarian bank? Moss didn't know, not exactly. The only sure answer that occurred to him was, a lot fewer. Of course, he was lucky he was still in business himself. He'd sold out when the stock market started dropping like a rock, and had escaped before Swan-Dive Wednesday. The longer he'd stayed in, the worse he'd have got hurt.

By ten o'clock, he was starting to come up for air in his paperwork. That was when the door to his office opened and his first appointment of the day came in. "Good morning, Mr. Harrison," Moss said, getting up and leaning forward across the desk to shake hands. "What can I do for you today?"

"You can call me Edgar, for starters," Edgar Harrison answered. He was a short, thin, intense-looking man of about Moss' age. The top half of his left ear was missing: a war wound. Had the bullet that clipped him traveled a couple of inches to the right of its real course, he would have died before he hit the ground. As he sat down in the chair to which Moss waved him, he added, "It's not like we haven't worked together before."

"No, it's not," Moss agreed. Harrison sailed as close to the wind as he could when it came to urging more freedom for the conquered Canadian provinces. He'd spent time in jail not long after the Great War ended. Moss thought he'd been lucky not to get shot, though he'd never said that out loud. "Care for some coffee?" he asked, pointing to the pot on the hot plate.

Edgar Harrison shook his head. "Nasty stuff. Never could stand it. Don't know how you Yanks pour it down the way you do."

"We manage," Moss said dryly, and refilled his cup. "You've got something on your mind-I can tell by your lean and hungry look."

"Such men are dangerous," Harrison said with a laugh. "How would you like to mount a court challenge to the whole rationale for the U.S. occupation of Canada?"

"How would I like it?" Moss echoed. "Personally, I'd like it fine. I'll tell you straight out, though, you'll lose. Occupation law says the U.S. Army can do whatever it has to in occupied territory, and the Constitution doesn't apply here."

"I know that." The Canadian's face clouded. "I don't see how I could help knowing it. But that's what I want to challenge: the notion that your fancy, precious Constitution shouldn't apply in Canada. Don't we deserve the rule of law, same as you Yanks?"

"What you deserve and what you're going to get are two different things," Moss replied. "I'm sorry, Mr. Harrison-Edgar-but I can't help you make that case. I don't see any point to even trying to get a judge to hear it. The law here isn't any different from the law in Utah, and that's part of the USA."

"Yes, and you Yanks were right on the point of letting it go back to being a regular part of the USA, too," Harrison said.

"We were," Moss said. "Then that Mormon murdered General Pershing, and now it'll be another ten years before anybody so much as mentions making Utah a normal state again."

"Nobody's murdered a military governor here," Harrison said.

"That bomber tried, whatever his name was," Moss answered. "He tried twice, as a matter of fact. And there was the uprising a few years ago." He felt like fortifying this cup of coffee, too, but he wouldn't, not with Harrison watching. "I'm sorry. Whether you're right or wrong, you haven't got a Chinaman's chance of making an American court take you seriously."

Edgar Harrison's eyes were gray as ice-and, at the moment, every bit as cold. "What will your wife say, Mr. Moss"-he wouldn't use Jonathan's first name now-"when she finds out you don't want to help us toward our freedom?"

"I hope she'll say I'm the lawyer in the family, and I know what I'm doing," Moss answered. "That's what I hope. If she says anything else, well, that's between her and me, wouldn't you agree?"

"That depends," Harrison said. "Yes, indeed-that depends."

Moss looked at him. "Mr. Harrison, I think we're done here. Don't you?"

"Yes, I'm afraid we are," the Canadian replied. "I'm sorry you turned out to be just another goddamn Yank after all." He got to his feet. "Well, we have ways of dealing with that, too."

Stung by the injustice of Harrison's words, Moss exclaimed, "If it weren't for me, half the Canucks in this town would be in jail or dead." The other man paid no attention, but turned on his heel and walked out the door. Only after he was gone did Moss wonder if his words had been more than unjust. He wondered if they'd held a threat.

C incinnatus Driver didn't like having to start over as he approached middle age. He'd spent the years since moving up to Des Moines getting his hauling business up to the point where it made a pretty good living for him and his family. He'd sold the beat-up old Duryea truck he'd driven to Des Moines from Covington, and bought himself a less beat-up, middle-aged White: a bigger, more powerful machine.

And then Luther Bliss had lured him back to Kentucky and thrown him into jail. Elizabeth had to sell the White to keep food on the table for his family and a roof over their heads. Cincinnatus had a little celebrity value when he got back. Thanks to that, he'd been able to get a new truck-well, actually, an old truck, a Ford that had seen a lot of better years-on credit. For a Negro, that was something not far from a miracle.

He'd kept up the payments, too. He'd never been afraid of work. If he had to get up before the sun rose and keep driving till long after it set, he would do it without a word of complaint. He had done it without a word of complaint.

And then the bottom fell out of the stock market. All of a sudden, fewer goods came into the railway yard. Fewer riverboats and barges tied up at the docks by the Des Moines River. But just as many hauling companies and independent drivers like Cincinnatus were fighting for less business.

One way to get it, of course, was to charge less for hauling. If, after that, you worked more hours still, you might make ends meet. You might-provided you didn't charge less than fuel and upkeep on your truck cost. Cincinnatus-and everybody else who drove a truck in Des Moines, and elsewhere in the country-collided head-on with that painful limitation.

"What am I supposed to do?" he asked Elizabeth one evening over supper. "What can I do? Can't charge less now. Don't make no money at all if I charge less."

"Don't make any money," Achilles said. After so long in Iowa, he'd lost a good part of the Kentucky Negro accent Cincinnatus still kept. And, having entered his teens, he was inclined to look on everything his father did with a critical eye. He went on, "I know you're not ignorant, Pa, but you sure do sound that way sometimes."

In another year or so, he probably would have come right out and called Cincinnatus ignorant. Cincinnatus knew it, too; he remembered the hell-raiser he'd been at Achilles' age. This was what boys did when they started turning into men. "I can't help it, son," Cincinnatus said now, as mildly as he could. "I talk the way I've always talked. Don't know no other-"

"Any other," Achilles broke in.

"— way to do it," Cincinnatus finished, as if his son hadn't spoken. "And I'm talkin' about important stuff with your ma, stuff we got to talk about. Maybe your English teacher don't like the way we do it"-this time, he quelled Achilles with a glance-"but we got to hash it out just the same."

"Your pa's right," Elizabeth said. "Things ain't easy." Her accent was thicker than her husband's, but Achilles held his peace. She went on, "I ain't been gettin' so much in the way of housekeeper's work lately, neither. Dunno what we gwine do. Like your pa say, dunno what we kin do."

"Government talks about them makework jobs for folks who can't get nothin' else," Cincinnatus said. Achilles stirred not once but a couple of times, but had the sense to keep his mouth shut. Maybe he does want to live to grow up, Cincinnatus thought. Aloud, he went on, "Trouble is, I don't want one o' them. All I want is to go on doin' what I been doin', go on doin' that and make a living at it."

Elizabeth nodded. "I know," she said. She didn't say she wanted to go on cleaning other people's houses, and Cincinnatus knew she didn't. What she did say made a painful amount of sense: "We got to get the money from somewheres, though."

"I know," Cincinnatus said glumly.

"I could look for something," Achilles said. "Plenty of people hire kids nowadays, because they can pay 'em less than grownups."

He was, of course, dead right. Cincinnatus shook his head even so. "Ain't gonna let you do that unless things get a lot worse'n they are now. First thing is, you wouldn't bring in much money, like you say. And second thing is, I want you to get all the education you can. Down the line, that'll do you more good than anything else I can think of. We ain't in the Confederate States no more. No law against you goin' out and gettin' any kind o' work you're smart enough to do. There's even colored lawyers and doctors in the USA."

So there were-a handful of each. Their clients were also colored, almost exclusively. Cincinnatus didn't dwell on that. He wanted his son ambitious, as he was. He'd done as well as he could himself to have the hauling business. Maybe, one of these days, Achilles would take over for him. But maybe, once the boy became a man, he would want something more-want it and be able to get it. So Cincinnatus hoped, anyway.

Amanda said, "Wish you was-wish you were — home more, Pa." She corrected herself before her older brother could do it for her.

"I wish I was, too, sweetheart," Cincinnatus answered. After getting out of jail, he'd had to get to know his little girl all over again. By the time he came home, she'd nearly forgotten him. And he'd found there was a great deal to like in her. She had an even sweeter nature than Elizabeth's, which was saying a lot. But wishes and the real world had only so much to do with each other. "I don't work, we don't eat. Simple as that. Wish it wasn't, but it is."

It had always been as simple as that. Now, though, a new and dreadful simplicity threatened the old: even if he worked as hard as he could, as hard as was humanly possible, they still might not eat. That terrified him.

Snow was falling when he got up the next morning. He fired up the truck and headed for the railroad yard even so. He intended to get there early. Some truckers would let snow make them late. They were the ones who'd get what was left after the more enterprising men won the good assignments-or maybe the latecomers would end up with nothing at all.

When Cincinnatus saw how few trains had come into the yard, he thanked heaven he'd come as fast as he could. He got a choice load, too: he filled the back of the old Ford with canned fish from Boston-the mackerel on the cans looked absurdly cheerful-and set out to deliver it to the several grocery stores run by a fellow named Claude Simmons.

Some of the grocery boys who helped him unload the fish were no older than Achilles. One or two of them looked younger than his son. Down in the CSA, even white kids would have pitched a fit about working alongside a colored man. Nobody here complained. The boys seemed as grateful to have work as Cincinnatus was himself.

At one of the stores, Simmons himself signed off on the paperwork. He nodded to Cincinnatus. "I've seen you delivering things here more than once, haven't I?" he asked.

"That's right, suh," Cincinnatus answered.

"You drive for yourself?"

"Yes, suh."

The grocery man studied him. "You do that just 'cause it's the way things worked out, or are you one of those people who can't stand taking orders from anybody? People like that, they start going crazy if they have to let somebody else tell 'em what to do, so they end up with a job where they work for themselves-either that or they really do go nuts. I've seen that happen a time or two."

With a shrug, Cincinnatus answered, "I don't reckon I'm like that. You ask somebody else, he might tell you different. But I think I just want to make a living, do the best I can for my family."

"You want a job with me?" Simmons asked. "Delivery driver, twenty-two fifty a week. You won't get rich, but it's steady." He pointed to the clipboard in Cincinnatus' hand. "What you're doing there, you're liable to starve on."

That held the unpleasant ring of truth. Even so, Cincinnatus didn't need to think very long before he shook his head. "Thank you kindly, suh, but I got to tell you no."

"Do you?" Simmons scowled. Cincinnatus got the idea not many people-and especially not somebody like a colored truck driver-told him no. He went on, "You won't tell me you clear twenty-two fifty a whole lot of weeks these days."

"No, suh." Cincinnatus admitted what he could hardly deny. "But what happens if I take the job with you, and things get worse like they look like they're doin' and then you let me go? I'd've been drivin' one o' your trucks, right? — not my own. Probably sell that. Then I'd really have to start at the bottom. I done that before. Don't want to have to try and do it again."

"Have it your way," the grocery man said with a shrug. "Don't expect me to ask you twice, that's all."

"I don't, suh. Didn't expect you to ask me once. Right decent of you to do it."

Suddenly, Simmons seemed less a boss and more a worried human being: "Do you really think it'll get that much worse? How could it?"

"How? Dunno how, Mr. Simmons," Cincinnatus answered. "But you ever know times that weren't so bad, they couldn't get worse?"

That seemed to strike home. "Go on, get out of here," Claude Simmons said, his tone suddenly harsh. "Here's hoping you're wrong, but"-he lowered his voice-"I'm afraid you're liable to be right."

Over supper that night, Cincinnatus asked Elizabeth, "Did I do the right thing? Twenty-two fifty steady money, that ain't bad. Ain't great, but it ain't bad."

"You done just right." His wife spoke with great authority. "Couple-three months, he forget why he took you on and he let you go. What kind of mess we in then? Way things is, leastways you know what you got to do to git by."

"I thought the same thing-the very same thing," Cincinnatus said. "We're in trouble now, but we'd be ruined if I took that job and I lost it. We'll go on the best way we know how, that's all."

"Can't get worse'n what it was when you was in jail," Elizabeth said.

"Hope to God it can't," Cincinnatus answered. He didn't know exactly how bad it had been for his family. But when he laughed, he didn't feel mirthful. "When I was in jail, I didn't have to worry none about where my next meal was comin' from. I knew I was gonna get fed. Wouldn't be much, an' it wouldn't be good, but I was gonna get fed."

He would have got beaten, too, but he didn't talk about that. It wasn't anything his family needed to know, and it wasn't relevant to the discussion. Elizabeth said, "One way or another, the Lord provide for us."

"That's right," Cincinnatus said. Clarence Darrow might not have believed in God, but he did. The confidence that God was keeping an eye on him even while he went through the worst of times in jail was hard to come by, but it had proved true. So he remained convinced, at any rate.

And, one day about six weeks later, when he went to the railroad yard to see what he could haul, he remarked to the conductor, "I ain't had nothin' for the Simmons stores in a while now."

The white man sent him an odd look. "You wouldn't want that assignment if I gave it to you, Cincinnatus," he answered. "Old man Simmons went bankrupt week before last. Didn't you know?"

"No," Cincinnatus said softly. "I missed that." He looked up toward the heavens. A drop of drizzle hit him in the eye, but he didn't care. "Thank you, Jesus," he whispered. He might not have much, but what he had, he would keep a while longer.

Sylvia Enos had always enjoyed books. Like anyone who'd grown up in the days before wireless sets brought words and music straight into the home, she'd used books to while away a lot of empty hours in her life. That didn't mean she'd ever thought she would end up writing one herself.

Well, yes, she had a coauthor. He was a real writer. He told her to call him Ernie, so she did. He'd been shot up during the war; he'd served in Quebec, and had written a couple of novels about that. She'd even read one. But times were just as hard for writers these days as they were for everybody else. He'd got himself a thousand-dollar contract for I Sank Roger Kimball, by Sylvia Enos, as told to… and five hundred dollars of that went into his pocket and the other five hundred into Sylvia's, and five hundred dollars bought a hell of a lot of groceries, so Sylvia was writing a book.

"Tell me how it happened," Ernie would say, sitting in the chair in her front room, smoke curling up from his pipe as he took notes. "Tell me exactly how it happened. Make it very plain. Make it so plain anyone can follow."

"I'll try," Sylvia would say. "I'll do my best." She found herself echoing the direct way in which he spoke. "When I got on the train bound for Charleston, I thought-"

"Wait. Stop." Ernie held up a hand. He was a big man, burly like a prizefighter, and the scars above his eyebrows and on his cheeks argued he'd been in his share of scraps, whether in the ring or just in one saloon or another. "Don't tell me what you thought. Tell me what you did."

"Why don't you want to know what I thought?" Sylvia asked. "That's why I did what I did."

"Tell me what you did," Ernie insisted. "I'll write that. People will read it. Then they'll know what you did. And they'll know why, too."

Sylvia frowned. "Why will they know that?"

Ernie was a handsome man, but normally one with a slightly sullen expression. When he smiled, it was like the sun coming out. "Why? Because I'm good," he said.

That smile by itself was almost enough to lay Sylvia's doubts to rest. She'd had room in her life for precious few romantic thoughts since the Ericsson sank, but Ernie's smile coaxed some out from wherever they'd been hiding all these years. She knew that was foolishness and nothing else but. How could she help knowing it, when he was five or ten years younger than she was?

He listened. She didn't think she'd ever had anyone listen so closely to what she said. She knew George hadn't when he was still alive. She'd loved him, and she was sure he'd loved her, too. But he hadn't listened like that-nor, as she had to admit to herself, had she listened to him so. Paying such close attention hadn't occurred to either one of them.

Ernie not only listened, he took detailed notes. Sometimes he lugged a portable typewriter to her flat. The battered leather of its case said he'd lugged it to a lot of different places, most of them worse than Boston not far from the harbor. He typed in quick, short, savage bursts, pausing between them to stare at the ceiling and gnaw on the stem of his pipe.

In one of those pauses between bursts, Sylvia said, "The way the keys clatter, it sounds like a machine gun going off."

The pipe stopped twitching in his mouth. It swung toward her, as if it were a weapon itself. "No," he said, his voice suddenly harsh and flat. "You don't know what you're talking about. Thank God you don't know what you're talking about."

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"I drove an ambulance," he said, at least as much to himself as to her. "Sometimes I was up near the front. Sometimes I had to fight myself. I know what machine guns sound like. Oh, yes. I know. But I was on the safe side of the St. Lawrence"-he laughed-"when I got shot. An aeroplane shot up a train full of soldiers. Poor, stupid bastards. They never even found out what it was about before they got shot." He shrugged. "Maybe that was what it was about, that and nothing more. I went to help them, to take them away. A hospital was close by. Another aeroplane came over. It shot up all of us. I got hit."

Ernie went back to typing then. The next time Sylvia thought of making some unasked-for comment, she kept it to herself instead.

He delivered the finished manuscript on a day when winter finally seemed ready to give way to spring. Thrusting it at her, he said, "Here. Read this. It is supposed to be yours. You should know what is in it."

He flung himself down on the sofa, plainly intending to wait till she read it. It wasn't very thick. Sylvia sat down in the chair by the sofa and went through it. Even before she got halfway, she looked up at him and said, "I understand why I did what I did better now than I did when I did it."

She wondered if that made any sense at all. It must have, for he gave her a brusque nod. "I told you," he said. "I'm good."

"Yes." She nodded back. "You are." She went back to reading. When she looked up, another forty-five minutes had gone by and she was finished. "You make me sound better and smarter than I am."

That made him frown. "You should sound the way you are. How do I fix it?"

He was serious. Sylvia laughed and shook her head. "Don't. I like it." Ernie still looked discontented. She laughed again. "I like you, too." She'd never said that before.

"Thanks," he said, and put the manuscript back into a tidy pile and imprisoned it with rubber bands. "I enjoyed working with you. I think the book will be all right." By the way he sounded, the second was more important than the first.

Even so, when he headed for the door Sylvia planted herself in front of him, put her arms around him, and gave him a kiss. It was the first time she'd kissed a man, the first time she'd wanted to kiss a man, since she'd kissed George good-bye for the last time during the war.

Ernie kissed her back, too, hard enough to leave her lips feeling bruised. He squeezed her against him, then all at once shoved her away. "It's no good," he said. "It's no damn good at all."

"Why not?" Sylvia said. "It's been so long…" Knowing desire had been a delicious surprise. Knowing it, having it stirred, and now having it thwarted seemed more than she could bear.

"Why not, sweetheart? I'll tell you why not," the writer answered. "I got shot in Quebec. You know that. You don't know where. I got shot right there. Not enough left to do a woman any good. Not enough left to do me any good, either."

"Oh," Sylvia said. That didn't seem nearly strong enough. "Oh, hell."

He looked at her and nodded. "Why this is hell, nor am I out of it." The words weren't quite in his usual style. Maybe he was quoting from something, but Sylvia didn't recognize it. He bared his teeth in what seemed more snarl than smile. "I'm sorry, sweetheart."

" You're sorry?" Sylvia exclaimed. "You poor man!"

That was the wrong thing to say. She realized it as soon as the words were out of her mouth, which was, of course, too late. Ernie set his jaw and glared. No, he wasn't one to take pity-he'd despise it for weakness, maybe Sylvia's, more likely his own. "Shouldn't have messed with you," he said. "My own stupid fault. I forget every once in a while. Then it tries to wag. Like a goddamn boxer dog wagging his little docked tail. But a boxer can hump your leg. I can't even do that." He kissed her again, even harder and rougher than before. Then he walked straight out the door. Over his shoulder, he threw back a last handful of words: "Take care of yourself, kiddo."

The door slammed. Sylvia burst into tears. "Oh, hell, " she said again. "Oh, hell. Oh, hell. Oh, hell." She was sure she would never see him again.

She was sure, but she was wrong. One day a couple of weeks later, he waved to her as she came out of her block of flats. She'd never known she could feel joy and fear in the same heartbeat. "Ernie!" she called. "What is it?"

"You have your money in a bank," he said. That wasn't at all what she'd expected. "Which bank is it?"

"Plymouth and Boston Bank and Trust," she answered automatically. "Why?"

"I thought I remembered that," Ernie said. "I saw the passbook on your coffee table. Take the money out. Take it all out. Take it out right away. The bank is going to fail. It will fail very soon."

Fear of a different sort shot through her. "God bless you," she whispered. "You're sure?"

"No, of course not," he snapped. "I came here because I was guessing. Why else would I come here?"

Sylvia flushed. "I was going somewhere else, but I'll head over there right now. Thank you, Ernie."

His face softened, just for a moment. "You're welcome. Writers find things out. I know someone who works for the bank. Who worked for the bank, I mean. He saw the writing on the wall. He quit. He said anywhere else in the world was better than to be there right now." He paused and nodded to Sylvia. "Nice to think I can do something for you, anyhow." Touching a finger to the brim of his sharp new fedora, Ernie hurried away. The crowd on the street swallowed him up.

Plymouth and Boston Bank and Trust was only a few blocks away: the main reason Sylvia banked there. She ran almost the whole way. The lines didn't stretch out the door, as she'd seen at other banks in trouble. But she felt panic in the air when she went inside. Everyone was speaking in the low near-whispers people used when they tried to show they weren't afraid. She filled out a withdrawal slip and worked her way to the front of the line.

How many lines have I stood in? How many hours of my life have I wasted in them? Too many-I know that.

At last she stood before a teller's cage, with its frosted glass and iron grillwork. The young man looked very unhappy when he saw the slip. "You want to close out your entire account?" he said in that soft, no-I'm-not-afraid voice.

"That's right," Sylvia answered firmly. "You do have the money to cover it?"

The teller flinched. "Yes, we do. We certainly do. Of course we do."

"Well, then, kindly give it to me," Sylvia said.

"Yes, ma'am. Please wait here. I'll be back with it." The teller disappeared into the bowels of the bank.

Before he returned, an older man stepped into the cage and said, "Ma'am, I want to personally assure you, the Plymouth and Boston Bank and Trust is sound."

"That's nice," Sylvia told him. "If it turns out you're right, maybe I'll put my money back in. If it turns out you're wrong, I'll have the money-if that teller ever gets back. How long is he going to take?"

He chose that moment to return. While the frowning older man looked on, he counted out bills and change for Sylvia. "Here you are, ma'am," he said. "Every penny that's owed you." He sounded as if he were doing her a favor by giving her back the money, and as if she hadn't done the bank a favor by depositing it there in the first place.

By the time she left, the lines did stretch out the door. "Did you get it?" someone called to her. She didn't answer; she didn't want to get mugged when people found out she was carrying cash. She just headed home, as fast as she could.

Plymouth and Boston Bank and Trust closed its doors for good the next day.