"Here." He dug in his pocket and found a half-dollar. "Buy yourself something to eat." He tossed it to the man.
"Much obliged, sir." The vet caught it out of the air. He eyed Potter. "You went through it, I reckon."
"Twice," Potter agreed. "Not always at the front, but yeah-twice."
"You've got the look, all right." The demobilized soldier stuck the fat silver coin in a trouser pocket. "You reckon we'll ever get back on our feet again?"
"Sooner or later? I'm sure of it. When?" Potter shrugged. "It may be later. I don't know if I'll live to see it. I hope you do."
The younger man eyed him. "You talk kinda like a Yankee." He probably came from Alabama or Mississippi.
With another shrug, Potter answered, "I went to college up there."
"Yeah? You like the Yankees, then? If you do, I'll give you your money back, on account of I don't want it."
"Keep it, son. It's no secret that I don't care for the United States. We can't fight them now-we're licked. I don't know if we'll ever be able to fight them again. But I won't like them if I live to be a hundred, and my bones tell me I won't."
"Huh," the vet said gravely, and then, "We oughta fight 'em. We oughta kick the snot out of 'em for what they done to us."
Was he another Jake Featherston, still unburst from his chrysalis of obscurity? It was possible. Hell, anything was possible. But long odds, long odds. How many tens of thousands had there been after the last war? Potter had no idea. He did know only one rose to the top.
He also knew this grimy fellow might be a provocateur, not an embryo Featherston. The Yankees wouldn't be sorry to have an excuse to stand him against a wall with a blindfold and a last cigarette. No, not even a little bit.
"I have fought the USA as much as I intend to," he said. "Keeping it up when it's hopeless only makes things worse for us."
"Who says it's hopeless?" the young vet demanded.
"I just did. Weren't you listening? Even if we rise, even if we take Richmond, what will the damnyankees do? Pull their people out of the city and drop a superbomb on it? How do you aim to fight that?"
"They wouldn't." But the man's voice suddenly held no conviction.
"Sure they would. And if we'd won, we'd've done the same thing to Chicago if it rebelled and we couldn't squash it with soldiers. What else are the damn bombs for?"
The man in the shabby, filthy butternut uniform looked up into the sky, as if he heard the drone of a U.S. heavy bomber. One would be all it took. The cities of the conquered CSA lay naked before airplanes. No antiaircraft guns any more. No Hound Dogs waiting to scramble, either. The only reason the damnyankees hadn't done it yet was that nobody'd provoked them enough.
"Teddy Roosevelt used to talk about the big stick," Potter said quietly. "They've got the biggest stick in the world right now, and they'll clobber us with it if we get out of line. We lost. I wish like hell we didn't. I did everything I knew how to do to keep it from happening. We can't get too far out of line now, though. It costs too goddamn much."
"What am I supposed to do with myself, then?" the veteran asked. Tears filled his voice and glistened in his eyes. "I been living on hate ever since we gave up. Don't hardly got nothin' else to live on."
"Clean up. Find a job. Go to work. Find a girl. Plenty of 'em out there, and not so many men. Help build a place where your kids would want to live." Potter shrugged. "Where we are now, what else is there?"
"A place where kids'd want to live? Under the Stars and Stripes? Likely tell!" the young man said scornfully.
"Right now, it's the only game in town. Maybe things will change later on. I don't know. You'll see more of that than I do." Potter's hair was nearer white than gray these days. "But if you go on feeling sorry for yourself and sleeping in the square, maybe get drunk so you don't have to think about things, who wins? You? Or the USA?"
"I need to think about that," the vet said slowly.
Potter rose from the bench. "You've got time. Don't take too long, though. It's out there. Grab with both hands." He never would have had to say that to Jake Featherston. Jake always grabbed.
And look what it got him. Look what it got all of us. Clarence Potter walked back toward the street the way he'd come, trying to step just where he had before. Again, nothing blew up under him. But how much difference did that make now? Jake Featherston had blown up his whole country.
F lora Blackford loved the smell of a kosher deli: the meaty odors of salami and corned beef harmonizing with the brine and vinegar of the pickle barrel and contrasting with the aromas of bagels and fresh-baked bread. Philadelphia had some decent delis, but you needed to go back to New York City for the real thing.
Her brother waved from a table in the back. David Hamburger had a double chin these days. His brown hair was thinning and going gray. Flora was graying, too. She thought the thirty years just past would have grayed anybody, even if they'd somehow happened in the blink of an eye.
"Don't get up," she called as she hurried over to David.
"I wasn't going to. It's too much like work," he said. The artificial leg he'd worn since 1917 stuck out in front of him, unnaturally straight. "Good to see you. You still talk to me even though we won for a change?"
"Maybe," Flora said. They both smiled. David had been a Democrat, and a conservative one, ever since he got hurt. Violence had done its worst to him, so he seemed to think it would solve anything. After this round of war, that seemed less foolish to Flora than it had before. Sometimes nothing else would do.
She sat down. A waiter came up. "Nu?" he said. She ordered corned beef on rye and a bottle of beer. David chose lox and bagels with his beer. The waiter scribbled, scratched his thick gray mustache, and went away.
"How are you?" Flora asked. "How's your family?"
"Everybody's fine. Me, I'm not too bad," her brother answered. "How's Joshua doing?"
She told him what Joshua had said about not being able to give anyone the finger with his left hand. David laughed an old soldier's laugh. Flora went on, "He's lucky, I know, but I still wish it never happened."
"Well, I understand that," her brother said. "I've had a pretty good life, taking it all in all, but I sure wish I didn't stop that one bullet." David sighed. "I'm lucky, too. Look at poor Yossel-the first Yossel, I mean. He never got to see his son at all."
"I know," Flora said. "I was thinking about that every minute after Joshua got conscripted. But he wanted to join. What can you do?"
"Nothing," David answered. "Part of watching them grow up is figuring out when to let go. When Joshua got old enough for conscription, he got too old for you to stop him."
"He told me the same thing," Flora said ruefully. "He wasn't wrong, but what did it get him? A stretch in the hospital."
"And an idea of what the country's worth," David said. The waiter brought the food and the beer. David piled his bagel high with smoked salmon and Bermuda onion and ignored the cream cheese that came with them. Flora thought that was perverse, but no accounting for taste. David Hamburger proved as much, continuing, "Now that he's bled for it, he won't want to let it get soft."
Flora had seen reactionary signs in Joshua since he got wounded, and didn't like them. Tartly, she answered, "You don't have to get wounded to love the United States or be a patriot."
Her brother was busy chewing an enormous mouthful. He washed it down with a swallow of beer. "I didn't say you did," he replied at last. "But you sure don't see things the same way after you catch one."
Now Flora was eating, and had to wait before she could say anything. "Putting on the uniform doesn't turn everybody into a Democrat. Plenty of Socialist veterans-quite a few of them in Congress, in fact."
"I know, I know," David said. "Still, if they'd sat on that Featherston mamzer before he got too big to sit on-"
"Who was President when Featherston took over?" Flora asked indignantly, and answered her own question: "Hoover was, that's who. The last time I looked, Hoover was a Democrat."
"Yeah,
yeah." David did his best to brush that aside. "Who gave away Kentucky and Houston? Al Smith was no Democrat, and he handed the Confederates the platform they needed to damn near ruin us."
"That was a mistake," Flora admitted. "The trouble was, nobody here really believed Featherston wanted a war. The Great War was so awful for both sides. Why would anybody want to do that again?"
"He didn't. He wanted to win this time. And he almost did," her brother said. "He wanted to get rid of his shvartzers, too. Who would have believed that? You were ahead of everybody there, Flora. I give you credit for it."
"Sometimes you don't want to be right. It costs too much," Flora said. "Nobody in the USA wanted to let C.S. Negroes in when he started persecuting them. The Democrats were worse about it than the Socialists, though."
"All right, so we didn't have things straight all the time, either," David answered. "Dewey'll do a better job of holding down the CSA than La Follette would have."
"That's the plank he ran on. We'll see if he means it," Flora said.
David laughed. "Was there ever a politician you wouldn't say that about?"
"I can think of three," Flora replied. "Debs, Teddy Roosevelt, and Robert Taft. When they said they'd do something, they meant it. It didn't always help them. Sometimes it just left them with a bull's-eye on their back."
After a moment's thought, David nodded. "And two more," he said: "you and Hosea."
"Thank you," Flora said softly. "I try. So did Hosea-and he never got the credit for it he deserved." He never would, either, and she knew it, not when the economic collapse happened while he was President. After a pull at her beer, she went on, "I'll give you another one: Myron Zuckerman."
"He was an honest man," her brother agreed.
Flora nodded. "He was. And if he didn't trip on the stairs and break his neck, I never would have run for Congress. My whole life would have looked different. I would have stayed an organizer or worked in the clothing business like the rest of the family."
"Zuckerman's bad luck. The country's good luck."
"You say that, with your politics? You'll make me blush. It's only because I'm your sister." Flora tried not to show how pleased she was.
"Hey, I disagree with you sometimes-well, a lot of the time. So what? You are my sister, and I'm proud of you," David answered. "Besides, I know I can always borrow money from you if I need it."
He never had, not a penny. Flora had always shared with her parents and sister and younger brother, but David stubbornly made his own way. I'm doing all right, he would say. It seemed to be true, for which Flora was glad.
He grinned at her. "So what does it mean, what we've been through since the Great War started? You're the politician. Tie it up for me."
"You don't ask for much!" Flora exclaimed. Her brother laughed. He picked up his beer bottle, discovered it was empty, and waved for another one. Flora drank from hers. If she was going to try to answer a question like that, she needed fortifying. "Well, for starters, we've got the whole United States back, if we can ever stop the people in the South from hating us like rat poison."
"Since when do they like us that much?" David said: a painfully true joke. He went on, "We can hold them down if we have to, them and the Canadians."
"A Negro who got out of the CSA before the Great War said that if you hold a man down in the gutter, you have to get into the gutter yourself," Flora said. "Do we want to do that?"
"Do we want the Confederate States back in business? Do we want them building superbombs again?" David asked, adding, "The one they used almost got you."
"I know," Flora said. "Don't remind me."
"Well, then." By the way David said it, he thought he'd proved his point.
But Flora answered, "Do we want our boys down there for the next fifty years, bleeding a little every day? It would be like a sore that won't heal."
"Better that than worrying about them blowing us off the map," David said. "And they would, too. We've fought them four times in the past eighty years. You think they don't want to try to get even because we won the last two?"
"No, I don't think so, not for a minute." Flora knew some Socialists had thought such things after the Great War. It was unfortunate, but it was true. Nobody thought that way any more, though. Once bitten, twice shy. Twice bitten…"Still, if we can't turn them into people who belong in the United States, what are we going to do with them?"
"Do we want people like that in our country? People who murdered eight or ten million Negroes? Even when the Tsar turns loose a pogrom, it's not as bad as that."
"A choleriyeh on the Tsar." Flora hated the idea of Russia with a superbomb, too. Germany would have to deal with Russia, though; the USA just didn't have the reach. She got back to the business at hand: "They didn't kill all the Negroes."
"No, but they didn't try to stop the Freedom Party goons, either. They cheered them on, for crying out loud," David said. "And you know what scares me?"
"Nu?" Flora asked.
"If it happened down there, it could happen here. It could happen to Negroes here, or, God forbid, it could happen to Jews. If you get enough people hot and bothered, anything can happen. Anything at all."
"God forbid is right," Flora said. "I like to think we wouldn't do anything like that…"
"Yeah. Me, too. And how many shvartzers thought their white neighbors wouldn't do anything like that? How many of them are left to think anything now?" Her brother answered his own question: "Not many."
"Maybe seeing what the Confederates did will vaccinate us against it," Flora said. "We can hope so, anyway."
"Alevai," David said.
"Alevai omayn." Flora nodded. "But can you imagine a politician saying, 'I want to do the same thing Jake Featherston did. Look how well it worked down there'?"
"Mm, maybe not-not for a while, anyway." David smiled crookedly. "Let's hear it for bad examples. I always aimed to be one for my children, but massacring people goes a little too far."
"A little. Sure." Flora reached out and set her hand on his. He looked astonished. She realized she hadn't done that in-oh, much too long. "And some bad example you are."
"Hey, I'm a Democrat. How can I be anything but a bad example?"
"You'll have to work harder than that." Flora hoped he wouldn't get angry. He had worked hard, all his life.
He didn't. "Here. I'll give it my best shot." He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. "How am I doing?"
"I think you need to try something else." Flora fought not to laugh.
"Don't know what. I already drink. Don't want to chase women-I'm happy with the one I caught. And you're the family politician."
"Well! I like that!"
David's smile got crookeder yet. "You know what? Me, too."
Flora pointed to the pack. "Give me one of those."
"You don't smoke."
"So what? Right now I do."
He handed her a cigarette, then leaned close to light it from his. She thought it tasted terrible, but she didn't care, not just then. They blew out smoke together.
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