Part 11 (1/2)

Moss shook his head. ”I thought of myself like that at the start of the war: a knight of the air, I mean. It didn't last, of course. War's a filthy business no matter how you fight it. But I'll do that for you. So help me G.o.d, I will. You're-special to me. I don't know how else to put it.” He was more afraid of saying love love than he had been of facing machine-gun bullets from a Sopwith Pup. than he had been of facing machine-gun bullets from a Sopwith Pup.

”You'd better go now,” Laura Secord said. She wasn't reviling him, as she had the last time he'd come to her, but there was no give in her voice, either. ”You mean to be kind; I'm sure you mean to be kind. But I don't see how I can take you up on...any part of that generous offer. When I see you, I see your country, too, and your country has destroyed mine. Find yourself an American girl, one who can forgive you for that.” She laughed. ”Melodramatic, isn't it? But life is sometimes.”

He got to his feet. He'd known from the beginning the odds were against him-to put it mildly. ”Here.” He pulled a sc.r.a.p of paper and pencil from his pocket and scrawled down three lines. ”This is my address. What I said still goes. If you ever need me, let me know.” He turned and left as fast as he could, so he wouldn't have to watch her crumple up the paper and throw it away. Soon he was driving back toward Arthur, and then back past Arthur, toward the life he'd done his best to toss out the window. He kept telling himself he was lucky. He had a devil of a time making himself believe it.

”This feels good,” Reggie Bartlett said to Bill Foster as the two of them strolled through Richmond. ”We haven't done it as much lately as we used to.”

”Time has a way of getting on,” Foster said, and Reggie nodded. His friend went on, ”And we'd stop in a saloon for a beer afterwards, too. When a beer costs twenty-five dollars instead of five cents, stopping in a saloon doesn't seem like such a bully idea any more. My pay's gone up, sure, but it hasn't gone up as fast as prices have.”

”It never does,” Bartlett said with mournful certainty. This time, Bill Foster nodded. Reggie added, ”And you've got to watch your money nowadays. After all, you're going to be a married man this time next month, and Sally's the sort of girl who deserves the best.”

”I only hope I'll be able to give it to her.” Foster's voice held worry. ”How am I supposed to watch my money? All I can do is watch it go away. A dollar I put in the bank at the start of the year isn't worth a quarter now, even with interest.”

”Watching money these days means spending it as soon as you get it,” Reggie replied. ”If you do anything else, you watch it shrink, like you said.”

Foster sighed. ”Didn't used to be this way. How are we supposed to get on with our lives if we can't even save money? The Freedom Party's right, if you ask me-we've got to put a stop to things before the whole country goes down the water closet.”

”Yeah, we've got to put a stop to things,” Reggie said. ”That doesn't mean the Freedom Party is right. We heard those fellows going on and on when they were new as wet paint, remember? I thought they were crazy then, and I still think they're crazy.”

They'd come a long way into the northwestern part of town, to the public square at the corner of Moore and Confederate Street (it had been Federal before the War of Secession). In spite of the chilly weather, somebody was holding a rally in the square: Confederate flags whipped in the breeze, and a gesticulating speaker stood on a platform of fresh yellow pine.

”Is that the Freedom Party again?” Bartlett asked. Then he spotted the signs behind the platform. ”No, I see-it's the Radical Liberals. Want to listen, Bill?”

”Sure. Why not?” Foster said. ”They have some interesting ideas. If they don't go off the deep end, the way they did when they nominated Arango in '15, I may vote for 'em for president in '21.”

”Me, too.” Reggie nodded. ”That fellow up there, whoever he is, he doesn't look like he's ever gone off the deep end of anything in his whole life.”

As he got closer, he noticed a placard identifying the speaker as Congressman Baird from Chihuahua. Waistcoated and homburged, Baird looked more like a banker than a Congressman. ”We have to face the facts,” he was saying as Reggie and Foster got close enough to hear. ”We are not the top dogs any more. Our friends are not the top dogs any more. We can stick our heads in the sand and pretend things still are the way they were in 1914, but that won't do us any good. The war has been over for almost a year and a half, and most of the people in this country don't really understand that things have changed.”

Bill Foster looked disgusted. ”I take back what I said a minute ago. He wants us to go sucking up to the United States, and I'll see him and everybody else in h.e.l.l before I lick Teddy Roosevelt's boots.”

”We've got to do something,” Reggie answered. ”If we don't, it's $500 beer next month, or maybe $5,000 beer. They licked us. You going to tell me they didn't?” As if to remind him, his shoulder twinged.

While they were talking, so was Congressman Baird. Reggie started listening to him again in midsentence: ”-whole continent, north and south and west alike, might be better off if we dropped our tariff barriers and the USA did the same. I don't say we ought to do that all at once, but I do say it is something toward which we can work, and something liable to lead to greater prosperity throughout America. We share a heritage with the United States; in their own way, the Yankees are Americans, too. We fought a revolution against England, but England became the Confederacy's friend. Even though we have fought wars against the United States, they too may yet become our friends.”

”You want to hear any more of this, Reggie?” Foster asked. ”If the sign didn't say this fellow was from Chihuahua, I'd reckon he snuck in from California or Connecticut or one of those d.a.m.nyankee places.”

”d.a.m.nyankees aren't as bad as all that. They don't have horns and tails,” Reggie said. His friend gave him what was plainly meant for a withering look. He didn't wither, continuing, ”They doctored me as well as anybody could, when it would have been easier for them to give up and let me die. All you did was fight 'em. They had me in their hands.”

Foster was plainly unconvinced. But Congressman Baird got a bigger round of applause than Reggie Bartlett had really expected. Foster looked surprised at that, too. Grudgingly, he said, ”Some people here think the way you do. I still don't see it, but I'll listen a while longer.”

Buoyed by the cheers, Baird went on, ”I don't say for a moment that we should not try to regain as much of our strength as we can. We must be able to defend ourselves. But we must also bear in mind the colossus to our north and west, and that, as I said, our friends have fallen by the wayside. We are on our own, in a world that loves us not. We would be wise to remember as much.”

That made good sense to Reggie. The Whigs, who had dominated Confederate politics even more thoroughly than the Democrats had dominated those of the USA, still seemed stuck in the past without any notion of how to face the future. The Freedom Party and others of its ilk wanted to throw out the baby with the bathwater, although they quarreled over which was which. Baird, at least, had some idea of the direction in which he wanted the CSA to go.

His supporters in the crowd raised a chant: ”Radical Liberals! Radical Liberals!” Whigs would never have done anything so undignified. But the Whigs didn't have to do anything undignified. They often seemed to think they didn't have to do anything at all. That, Reggie thought, was what holding power for half a century did to a party.

And then, from behind, another chant rose, or rather a furious howl: ”Traitors! Filthy, stinking, G.o.dd.a.m.n traitors!” Reggie spun around. Charging across the yellowed gra.s.s were a couple dozen men armed with clubs and bottles and a variety of other improvised weapons. They all wore white s.h.i.+rts and b.u.t.ternut trousers. ”Traitors!” they howled again, as they smashed into the rear of Congressman Baird's crowd. They howled something else, too, a word that made Bartlett's hair try to stand on end: ”Freedom!”

The Congressman's voice rose in well-modulated indignation: ”What is the meaning of this uncouth interruption?”

No one answered him, not in so many words. But the meaning was obvious even so-the newcomers were breaking up his rally, and breaking the heads of the people who'd been listening to him.

”Fight!” Reggie shouted. ”Fight these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!”

A club whizzed past his ear, swung by a thick-necked, thick-shouldered chap screaming ”Freedom!” at the top of his lungs. Reggie kicked him in the side of the knee as he ran past. Then, as the man started to crumple, he kicked him in the belly. He'd learned to fight fair once upon a time, and had to unlearn it in a hurry when he got to the trenches.

He grabbed the muscular goon's club after the fellow lost interest in holding it, then started swinging it at everybody in a white s.h.i.+rt he could reach. Some of the others at the rally were fighting back, too. Most Confederate white men had done a tour in the Army. They'd seen worse fights than this. But the attack force from the Freedom Party had size, ferocity, youth, and surprise on their side. They also had a joyful zest for the brawl unlike anything Reggie had encountered in the trenches.

He knocked two or three of them flat even so. But then somebody hit him from behind. He staggered and fell. A couple of people-one of them was Bill Foster, who was trying, with no luck at all, to play peacemaker-stepped on him, someone else kicked him in the ribs, and he decided to stay down, lest something worse happen to him.

The ruffians had just about completed routing the rally when police at last appeared. Half a dozen men in old-fas.h.i.+oned gray took billy clubs off their belts. Their leader blew a whistle and shouted, ”That will be quite enough of that!”

”Freedom!” the goons bawled. All of them still on their feet rushed straight at the cops. They had one other thing Reggie Bartlett noticed only while p.r.o.ne: more than a little discipline. They fought like soldiers after a common goal, not like individual h.e.l.lraisers. The startled policemen went down like wheat under the blades of a reaper. Had one of them drawn a pistol...Had one of the Radical Liberals drawn a pistol...But no one had. The ruffians, or most of them, got away.

Slowly and painfully, Reggie dragged himself to his feet. He looked around for Bill Foster, and spotted him holding a handkerchief to a b.l.o.o.d.y nose. A couple of the fallen Freedom Party fighters were also rising. Reggie stooped to grab the club, though quick movement hurt. But showing he was ready to fight meant he didn't have to. The goons lifted a comrade who couldn't get up on his own and, with his arms draped over their shoulders, left the public square.

From up on the platform, Congressman Baird kept saying ”This is an outrage! An outrage, I tell you!” over and over again. n.o.body paid much attention to him. He wasn't wrong. That didn't make what he had to say useful.

”They break your nose, Bill?” Reggie asked.

”Don't think so.” Foster felt of it. ”No, they didn't. I just got hit, not clubbed or stomped.”

”b.a.s.t.a.r.ds,” Reggie said. That didn't seem nearly strong enough. He tried again: ”G.o.dd.a.m.n f.u.c.king sons of b.i.t.c.hes.” That didn't seem strong enough, either, but it came closer. He looked around for his hat, and discovered it had got squashed during the brawl. Picking it up, he asked, ”Still like what the Freedom Party stands for?”

Foster suggested the Freedom Party do something illegal, immoral, and anatomically unlikely. His hat, when he found it, was in worse shape than Reggie's. Sadly, he dropped it back onto the gra.s.s. Then he said, ”The thing is, though, plenty of people will will like it. d.a.m.n hard to stomach anybody saying anything good about the United States. A couple of times, I wouldn't have minded walloping Baird myself.” like it. d.a.m.n hard to stomach anybody saying anything good about the United States. A couple of times, I wouldn't have minded walloping Baird myself.”

”Thinking about it's one thing,” Bartlett said. ”Doing it, though...” He shook his head. ”People won't be able to stomach that. No way in h.e.l.l will people be able to stomach that.” Bill Foster thought it over, then nodded. ”People just aren't so stupid,” Reggie said, and his friend nodded again.

Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling sat at his desk-because of his protruding belly, sat some distance behind his desk-clacking away at a typewriter. He would have starved to death in short order had he had to try to make his living as a secretary, but he was a good typist for an Army officer.

He wished he were out in the field instead of banging out a report no one would ever read here in a War Department office in Philadelphia. He'd wished he were in the field instead of back of the lines at First Army headquarters all through the Great War. He could have commanded a battalion, maybe a regiment-maybe even a brigade, considering how fast front-line officers went down. Of course, he might have gone down himself, but that was the chance you took.

”Dowling!” At the howl from behind him, he made a typographical error. Save that it held the sounds of his name, the howl might have burst from the throat of a trapped wolf.

”Coming, sir.” He pushed the chair back far enough to let himself rise, then hurried into the larger, more s.p.a.cious office behind his own. Sleet beat on the window that gave a blurry view of downtown Philadelphia. Even though it was freezing out there, a steam radiator kept the office warm as toast. Saluting, Dowling asked, ”What can I do for you this morning, General Custer?”

Custer stared at him, through him. Dowling had seen that stare before. It meant Custer had been into the bottle he didn't know Dowling knew he had in a desk drawer. No: after a moment, Dowling realized the stare held more than that. Custer's pale, red-tracked eyes roamed the office. Again, he might have been a wild beast in a cage.

”What can I do for you, sir?” his adjutant repeated.

”Do for me?” Custer said slowly; he might have forgotten he'd summoned Dowling in the first place. ”You can't do anything for me. No one can do anything for me, no one at all.”

Dowling had heard Custer in a great many moods before, but never despairing. ”What's wrong, sir?” he asked. ”Is there anything I can do to help?”

”No, you can't help me, Major-uh, Lieutenant Colonel.” Custer's wits weren't particularly swift, but he hadn't started turning forgetful. As the general continued, Dowling realized that was part of the problem: ”I entered West Point in July 1857. July 1857, Lieutenant Colonel: sixty-two years ago come this summer. I have served in the United States Army longer than most men have been alive.”