“I wish I could, sir.” Toricelli sounded mournful, too. He went on, “I don’t think the world is ever going to be the same. From now on, if you’re in a big city or if you’re in politics or the military, you won’t be able to go down to the corner diner for a cup of coffee or a ham on rye without wondering whether the quiet fellow in the next booth is going to blow himself to hell and gone—and you along with him.”
“You’re in a cheerful mood today, aren’t you?” But Dowling feared the younger officer was right—dead right. “One thing consoles me, anyhow.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Bound to be more people who want to blow up Jake Featherston than ones who want to see me dead bad enough to kill themselves to get me.”
“Sir, I believe they call that a dubious distinction.”
“And I believe you’re right.” Dowling laughed, but on a note not far from despair. “What is the world coming to, Captain? Just before the war started, I listened to a fellow named Litvinoff going on and on about nerve agents—he wouldn’t call them gases. He was happy as a clam in chowder, you know what I mean?”
“Oh, yes, sir.” Toricelli nodded. “I’ve met people like that. It’s their toy, and they don’t care what it does, as long as it does what it’s supposed to.”
“That’s right. That’s exactly right.” Dowling nodded, too. “And now this. Is there anything we won’t do to each other?”
Toricelli considered that. “I don’t know, sir. I’m not sure I’m the right person to ask,” he said. “Don’t you think you ought to talk to one of the Negroes in a Freedom Party camp instead? But ask fast, while there are still some left.”
“Ouch!” Abner Dowling winced. “Well, you got me there. Maybe I ought to put it a different way: aren’t there some things we shouldn’t do to each other?”
“We’ve got the Geneva Convention,” Toricelli said.
“It doesn’t talk about people bombs,” Dowling said. “It doesn’t talk about those camps, either. It doesn’t talk about gas, come to that. Nobody wanted to talk about gas when they were hammering it out, because everybody figured he might need it again one of these days.”
Now Toricelli eyed Dowling with a certain bemusement. “You’re just about as cheerful as I am, aren’t you, sir?”
“I’m as cheerful as I ought to be,” Dowling answered. He looked out the window. An auto painted U.S. green-gray was coming up to his headquarters. The guards stopped it before it got too close. Anybody could paint a motorcar. Who was inside mattered far more than what color it was.
But the driver seemed to satisfy the guards. He got out of the Chevrolet and hurried toward the building. “I’ll see what he wants, sir,” Captain Toricelli said.
“Thanks,” Dowling told him.
His adjutant returned a few minutes later with the man from the auto—a sergeant. “He’s from the War Department, sir,” Toricelli said. “Says he’s got orders for you from Philadelphia.”
“Well, then, he’d better give them to me, eh?” Dowling did his best not to show worry. Orders from Philadelphia could blow up in his face almost as nastily as a people bomb. He could be cashiered. He could be summoned before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War again—and wasn’t even once cruel and unusual punishment? He could be ordered back to the War Department to do something useless again. The possibilities were endless. The good possibilities seemed much more sharply limited.
“Here you are, sir,” the sergeant said.
Dowling opened the orders and put on his reading glasses. If this noncom had orders to report on how he took bad news, he was damned if he’d give the man any satisfaction. Wounded soldiers bit back screams for the same reason.
He skimmed through the orders, blinked, and read them again more slowly. “Well, well,” he said when he’d finished.
“May I ask, sir?” Captain Toricelli was sensitive to everything that might go wrong. What hurt Dowling’s career could hurt his, too.
“I’ve been relieved of this command. I’ve been transferred,” Dowling said.
Toricelli nodded. Like Dowling, he didn’t want to show a stranger his wounds hurt. “Transferred where, sir?” he asked, trying to find out how badly he was hit.
“To Clovis, New Mexico, which is, I gather, near the Texas border,” Dowling answered. He couldn’t keep the amazement out of his voice as he went on, “They’ve appointed me commander of the Eleventh Army there. They want somebody to remind the Confederates there’s a war on in those parts. And—”
“Yes, sir?” Toricelli broke in, eyes glowing. He might have been a soldier who’d discovered a bullet had punched a hole in his tunic without punching a hole in him.
“And they’ve given me a second star, Major Toricelli,” Major General Abner Dowling said. He and Toricelli shook hands.
“Congratulations, sir,” the sergeant from the War Department said to Dowling. The man turned to Toricelli. “Congratulations to you, too, sir.”
“Thank you,” Dowling said, at the same time as Toricelli was saying, “Thank you very much.” Dowling went back to his desk and pulled out the half pint. He eyed how much was left in the bottle. “About enough for three good slugs,” he said as he undid the cap. He raised the little bottle. “Here’s to Clovis, by God, New Mexico.” He drank and passed it to Angelo Toricelli.
“To Clovis!” Toricelli also drank, and passed it to the sergeant. “Here you go, pal. Kill it.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” the noncom said. “To Clovis!” He tilted his head back. His Adam’s apple worked. “Ah! That hits the spot, all right. Much obliged to you both.” He would still have a story to tell when he got back to the War Department, but it wouldn’t be one of frustration and rage and despair. Sergeants didn’t drink with generals—or even majors—every day.
One swig of whiskey didn’t turn him into a drunk. He drove off toward Philadelphia. That left Dowling and his adjutant in a pleasant sort of limbo. “What the deuce is going on in New Mexico?” Toricelli asked.
“All I know is what I read in the newspapers, and you don’t read much about New Mexico there.” Dowling figured he was heading to Clovis to fix that, or try. “Only thing I can really recall is that bombing raid on Fort Worth and Dallas a few months ago.”
“Probably a good idea to find out before we get there,” Toricelli said.
“Probably,” Dowling agreed. He was sure that never would have occurred to George Custer. Custer would have charged right in and started slugging with the enemy, regardless of what was going on beforehand. Nine times out of ten, he and everyone around him would soon have regretted it. The tenth time . . . The tenth time, he would have ended up a national hero. Dowling didn’t make nearly so many blunders as his former boss. He feared he would never become a national hero, though. His sense of caution was too well developed.
“I’m sure we’ll stop in Philadelphia on our way to Clovis,” his adjutant said. “The War Department can brief us there.” Captain—no, Major—Toricelli had a well-developed sense of caution, too.
Not even the stars on his shoulder straps kept Dowling from being searched before he got into the War Department. “Sorry, sir,” said the noncom who did the job. “Complain to the Chief of Staff if you want to. Rule is, no exceptions.”
Dowling didn’t intend to complain. As far as he could see, the rule made good sense. “How many people bombs have you had?” he asked.
“Inside here? None,” the sergeant answered. “In Philadelphia? I think the count is five right now.”
“Jesus!” Dowling said. The man who was patting him down nodded sadly.
He felt like saying Jesus! again when he got a look at the situation map for the Texas–New Mexico border. The so-called Eleventh Army had a division and a half—an understrength corps—to cover hundreds of miles of frontier. The bombers that had plastered Dallas and Fort Worth had long since been withdrawn to more active fronts.
Only one thing relieved his gloom: the Confederates he was facing wer
e just as bad off as he was. Where he had a division and a half under his command, his counterpart in butternut commanded a scratch division, and somebody had been scratching at it pretty hard. Dowling thought he could drive the enemy a long way.
After studying the map, he wondered why he ought to bother. If he advanced fifty miles into Texas, even a hundred miles into Texas—well, so what? What had he won except fifty or a hundred empty, dusty miles? All those wide-open spaces were the best shield the Confederacy had. Advance fifty or a hundred miles into Virginia and the CSA staggered. Advance fifty or a hundred miles into Kentucky and you cut the enemy off from the Ohio River and took both farming and factory country. Texas wasn’t like that. There was a lot of it, and nobody had done much with a lot of what there was.
“Are you sending me out there to do things myself, or just to keep the Confederates from doing things?” he asked a General Staff officer.
That worthy also studied the map. “For now, the first thing is to make sure the Confederates don’t do anything,” he replied. “If they take Las Cruces, people will talk. If they go crazy and take Santa Fe and Albuquerque, I’d say your head would roll.”
“They’d need a devil of a lot of reinforcements to do that,” Dowling said, and the colonel with the gold-and-black arm-of-service colors didn’t deny it. Dowling went on, “They’d have to be nuts, too, because even taking Albuquerque won’t do a damn thing about winning them the war.”
“Looks that way to me, too,” the colonel said.
“All right, then—we’re on the same page, anyhow,” Dowling said. “Now, the next obvious question is, who do I have to kill to get reinforcements of my own?”
“Well, sir, till we settle the mess in Pennsylvania, you could murder everybody here and everybody in Congress and you still wouldn’t get any,” the General Staff officer said gravely. That struck Dowling as a reasonable assessment, too. The colonel added, “I hope you’ll be able to hold on to the force you’ve got. I don’t promise, but I hope so.”
“All right. You seem honest, anyhow. I’ll do what I can,” Dowling said.
When he headed to the Broad Street Station for the roundabout journey west, he discovered fall had ousted summer while he wasn’t looking. The temperature had dropped ten or twelve degrees while he was visiting the War Department. The breeze was fresh, and came from the northwest. Gray clouds scudded along on it. No red and gold leaves on trees, no brown leaves blowing, not yet, but that breeze said they were on their way.
****
Home. Cincinnatus Driver had never imagined a more wonderful word. While he lived in it, the apartment in Des Moines had seemed ordinary—just another place, one where he could hang his hat. After almost two years away, after being stuck in a country that hated his—and hated him, too—that apartment seemed the most wonderful place in the world.
The apartment and the neighborhood seemed even more amazing to his father. “Do Jesus!” Seneca Driver said. “It’s like I ain’t a nigger no more. Don’t hardly know how to act when the ofay down at the corner store treat me like I’s a man.”
Cincinnatus smiled. “It’s like that here. I tried to tell you, but you didn’t want to believe me.” Of course one reason it was like that was that Des Moines didn’t have very many Negroes: not enough for whites to flabble about. The United States as a whole didn’t have very many. Cincinnatus’ smile slipped. The USA didn’t want many Negroes, either. That left most of them stuck in the CSA, and at the tender mercy of Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party.
No such gloom troubled his father. “Bought me a pack of cigarettes, an’ I give the clerk half a dollar. An’ he give me my change, an’ he say to me, ‘Here you is, sir.’ Sir! Ain’t nobody never call me ‘sir’ in all my born days, but he do it. Sir!” He might have been walking on air. Then something else occurred to him. “That clerk, he call a Chinaman ‘sir,’ too?”
“Reckon so,” Cincinnatus answered. “What color you are don’t matter—so much—here. Achilles and Amanda, they both graduated from high school. You reckon that happen in Kentucky? And you got yourself two grandbabies that are half Chinese, and another one on the way. You reckon that happen in Kentucky?”
“Not likely!” His father snorted at the idea. “I seen Chinamen in the moving pictures before, but I don’t reckon I ever seen one in the flesh in Covington. Now I ain’t just seen ’em—I got ’em in the family!” He thought himself a man of the world because of that.
“They’ve got you in the family, too,” Cincinnatus said. Achilles’ wife, the former Grace Chang, really seemed to like Cincinnatus’ father, and to be glad Cincinnatus himself was home. Her parents had much less trouble curbing their enthusiasm. They weren’t thrilled about being tied to Achilles or Cincinnatus or Seneca. The funny thing was, they would have been just about as dismayed if the Drivers were white. What bothered them was that their daughter had married somebody who wasn’t Chinese.
“They is welcome in my family, long as they make that good beer,” Seneca Driver said. Cincinnatus nodded. Homebrew mattered in Iowa, a thoroughly dry state. He first got to know Joey Chang because of the beer his upstairs neighbor brewed. Achilles and Grace got to know each other in school. The rest? Well, the rest just happened.
Cincinnatus wondered how the Freedom Party would look at that marriage. Who was miscegenating with whom? He didn’t have to worry about that here. He didn’t have to worry about all kinds of things here, things that would have been matters of life and death in the Confederate States. He could look at a white woman without fearing he might get lynched. He didn’t much want to—he’d always been happy with Elizabeth—but he could. He could testify in court on equal terms with whites—and with Chinese, for that matter. And . . .
“You’re a U.S. citizen, Pa,” he said suddenly. “Once you’ve lived in Iowa long enough to be a resident, you can vote.”
His father was less delighted than he’d expected. “Done did that once in Kentucky,” Seneca Driver replied. “There was that plebiscite thing, remember? I done voted, but they went ahead an’ gave her back to the CSA anyways.” He plainly thought that, since he’d voted, things should have gone the way he wanted them. Cincinnatus wished the world worked like that.
Elizabeth came out of the kitchen and into the front room. “You two hungry?” she asked. “Got some fried chicken in the icebox I can bring you.” She thought Cincinnatus and his father were nothing but skin and bones. Since they’d eaten too much of their own cooking down in Covington, she might have been right.
“I would like that. Thank you kindly,” Seneca said. Cincinnatus nodded, but he was less happy than his father sounded. To Seneca Driver, his son’s family seemed rich. Compared to anything the older man had had in Kentucky, they were. But Cincinnatus knew money didn’t grow on trees, and neither did chickens. Elizabeth had done cooking and cleaning to make ends meet while he was stuck in Covington. Achilles had helped out, too. All the same . . .
Cincinnatus knew his hauling business was dead. His wife had sold the Ford truck he’d been so proud of. He didn’t blame her for that; if she couldn’t pay the rent, the landlord would have thrown her out onto the street. But he didn’t have enough money to buy another one. He wasn’t going to be his own boss anymore. He would have to work for somebody else, and he hadn’t done that since the end of the Great War. He hated the idea, but he didn’t know what he could do about it.
Were there jobs for a middle-aged black man with a bad leg and a none too good shoulder? There, for once, Cincinnatus wasn’t so worried. With the war sucking able-bodied men out of the workforce, there were jobs for all the people who wanted them. He’d seen how many factories and shops had NOW HIRING signs out where folks could see them. Women were doing jobs that had been a man’s preserve before the war. He figured he could find something.
Elizabeth came back with a drumstick for his father, a thigh for him, and two more glasses of beer. “You holler if you want anything else,” she said. She swung her hips as she walked of
f. In some ways, Cincinnatus was glad to discover, he wasn’t crippled at all. His homecoming had been everything he hoped it would be along those lines.
“Sure is good,” his father said, taking a big bite out of the chicken leg and washing it down with a sip of Mr. Chang’s homebrew. “They always said folks in the USA had it good. I see they was right.”
All he had to do was enjoy it. He didn’t have to worry about where it came from. For the past couple of years, Elizabeth had done that. Cincinnatus was sure she’d done a lot of worrying, too. But she’d managed. Now that Cincinnatus was finally home, the worrying fell on his shoulders again.
He’d hoped the government would help him out. No such luck. To those people, he’d been in Kentucky on his own affairs, and never mind that the plebiscite and its aftermath were what had stuck him there.
Amanda came into the apartment. She’d found work at a fabric plant, and her paycheck was helping with the bills now, too. She smiled at Cincinnatus and Seneca. “Hello, Dad! Hello, Grandpa!” she said, and kissed them both on the cheek. She’d always got on better with Cincinnatus than Achilles had. There was none of that young goat bumping up against old goat rivalry that sometimes soured things between Cincinnatus and his son.
“How are you, sweetheart?” he asked her.
She made a face. “Tired. Long shift.”
Seneca laughed. “Welcome to the world, dear heart. You better git used to it, on account o’ it gonna be like dat till God call you to heaven.”
“I suppose.” Amanda sighed. “I wish I could have gone on to college. I’d be able to get a really good job with a college degree.”
“Lawd!” The mere idea startled Cincinnatus’ father. “A child o’ my child in college? That woulda been somethin’, all right.”
“Even if you had started college, hon, reckon you would’ve gone to work anyways with things like they were,” Cincinnatus said. “Sometimes you just can’t help doin’ what you got to do.”
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