She got cheers for that, too, but not so many, even if she didn’t call a spade a spade. The painful truth was that not even her mostly Jewish audience could get excited about the fate of Negroes in the CSA. Flora had been banging her head against that truth ever since she started speaking out about Jake Featherston’s persecutions.
“Don’t you see?” she said. “Pogroms are wrong. How many of your ancestors-how many of you, ladies and gentlemen-came to the United States because of the Tsar’s pogroms? Come on-I know it’s more than that.”
All over the hall, hands went up. People raised them reluctantly and lowered them as soon as they could. If they’d had their druthers, they wouldn’t have raised them at all. They didn’t want to think about why they’d come to America. They especially didn’t want to compare their past to the Confederate Negroes’ present.
Flora wanted to make sure they remembered. She wanted that even if it cost her votes. Against a candidate like Sheldon Vogelman, losing a few didn’t much matter. If the Democrats had run someone stronger, she hoped she would have done the same thing.
“If you turn your back on other people when they’re in trouble, who’ll look out for you when you are?” she asked. “Don’t you see? If we don’t look out for the Negroes in the CSA, in an important way we don’t look out for ourselves, either.”
“We don’t want those people here!” somebody shouted. Several people clapped their hands. They weren’t all hecklers. She knew where the hecklers were sitting. Listening to them hurt more because they weren’t.
“The Democrats are the party for people who only care about themselves,” Flora said. “If your fellow man matters to you, you’ll vote Socialist next week. I hope he does. I hope you do. Thank you!”
She got a good hand as she stepped away from the lectern. She could have been caught pulling hundred-dollar bills out of a contractor’s pocket with her teeth, and she still would have won here this time around.
For lunch the next day, she faced a more critical audience. David Hamburger had come out of the Great War with one leg and with politics not far from Vogelman’s. He and Flora still got on well when they stayed away from political matters. When they didn’t-and they couldn’t all the time-sparks flew.
They met at Kaplan’s, a delicatessen that had been around at least as long as Flora had. David was waiting for her when she came in. That was probably just as well; she didn’t have to watch the rolling gait required by an artificial leg that started above the knee.
“Hello, there,” he said as she joined him. “So how does it feel to be slumming in your old stomping grounds?”
“Kaplan’s isn’t slumming,” Flora said. “Don’t be silly. Not a place in Philadelphia comes close to it.” The waiter was bald and had a gray mustache. Flora ordered corned beef on rye. Her brother chose pastrami. They both ordered beer. The waiter nodded and hurried away. “How have you been?” Flora asked.
“Not too bad-middle-class, or somewhere close.” David shrugged. “My son’s too little to conscript in this war, so that’s good.”
“Yes,” Flora said tonelessly. Her own son was heading toward eighteen, and Joshua wouldn’t hear of her doing anything to keep him out of the conscription pool. Having a nephew in harm’s way was bad enough. Having a son on the front lines would be ten thousand times worse.
The food and the beers came quickly. Flora took a long pull at hers. David drank more slowly. He pulled a dill pickle from the jar on the table and nibbled it with his sandwich and his beer. After a bit, he said, “Looks like you’ll be away for another couple of years.”
“Well, I hope so,” Flora said.
“You’ve done a good job, and Vogelman’s meshuggeh,” David said. “Between the two, that ought to do the job. If it doesn’t, this district is even more verkakte than I give it credit for-and I didn’t think it could be.”
Hearing the Yiddish made Flora smile. Like her brothers and sisters, she’d grown up speaking it more often than English at home. Now, though, she never heard it, never spoke it, unless she came back to the district. No one she knew in Philadelphia used it. Her husband, a gentile from Dakota, had learned a few phrases from her, but that was all. Joshua knew a few phrases, too. He couldn’t begin to speak it. Flora wasn’t so sure she could speak it herself anymore.
She thought, and then did bring out a Yiddish sentence: “What’s going to happen to this language in a couple of generations?”
“I don’t know,” David answered, also in Yiddish. He dropped back into English to go on, “And I won’t lose much sleep over it, either. We brought Yiddish from the old country. Now we’re Americans. They speak English here. So, fine-I’ll speak English.”
“I suppose so,” Flora said. “Joshua doesn’t seem much interested in learning it, anyhow. But I can’t help wondering whether my grandchildren or great-grandchildren won’t think they missed out on something special because they didn’t get the chance to learn it.”
“Well, if they do, there’s always night school,” David said, and Flora nodded. How many immigrants had learned all sorts of different things in night school? Hundreds of thousands, surely. Some were accountants, some were lawyers, because of the courses they’d taken in hours snatched from sleep and rest. Still…
“It won’t be the same,” she said. “What you learn in school isn’t like what you pick up around the house.”
“I can’t do anything about it.” David pulled another pickle spear out of the jar and aimed it at her like a bayonet. “I can’t-but you can. You can pass the Preservation of Yiddish Act and make it a crime for all the alter kackers”-he tacked the English plural onto the Yiddish word-“who can still yatter away in the old language to use English instead. And you can make it another crime for anybody Jewish not to listen to them and talk back in Yiddish.”
Flora laughed so hard, she almost choked on her sandwich. “You,” she said severely, “are ridiculous.”
“Thank you,” her brother answered, which only made her laugh harder. “And while you’re at it, you can have them make the Lower East Side a national park. Buffalo have Yellowstone. Why shouldn’t people who speak Yiddish have their own game preserve, too? And if we get too crowded, you could issue hunting licenses to anti-Semites, and they’d come in here and thin us out. Only difference between us and the buffalo is, we might shoot back.”
“You-” Flora stopped. She had to reach into her purse for a handkerchief to wipe her streaming eyes. She tried again: “You ought to sell that routine to the Engels Brothers. If they wouldn’t pay you for it, I’m a Chinaman.”
“You could do the same thing for Chinamen, here and in San Francisco,” David said, warming to his theme. “And think of the chances Jake Featherston’s missing. If he charged fees to get into the hunting preserves for shvartzers, he could probably cut taxes in half.”
That killed Flora’s laughter. “It isn’t hunting down there,” she said. “It’s slaughter, nothing else but.”
“They might as well be Mormons, eh?” David insisted on being difficult.
“It’s worse,” Flora insisted. “We’re fighting the Mormons, but we aren’t murdering the ones in the land we’ve taken. The Confederates are emptying out one town after another, taking the Negroes off to camps and killing them once they get there. It’s… about as bad as it can be down there.”
“And it’s just pretty bad up here,” David said. “Well, nice to know we’ve still got room for improvement.”
That wasn’t funny, either-or, if it was, only in the blackest way. When Flora laughed this time, it was only to keep from sobbing.
XVI
Some lovely rubble lay between Sergeant Michael Pound’s barrel and the advancing Confederate armor. Once upon a time, the rubble had been homes and shops and people’s hopes. All things considered, Pound liked it better as rubble. If you knocked a wall down in a neighborhood that hadn’t been trampled, the enemy would notice right away. If you rearranged what was already wreckage, though, so what?
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Not many Pittsburgh neighborhoods had gone untrampled. The United States were making a stand here, defying the Confederates to drive them out. Jake Featherston seemed willing, even eager, to try. He keep feeding men and barrels and artillery and airplanes into the fight. No matter who held Pittsburgh by the time the battle here was done, one thing was clear: it wouldn’t be worth holding.
Pound tapped Lieutenant Don Griffiths on the leg. “Sir, do you think we could crawl inside that ruined-garage, I guess it used to be-over there? We’ve got a nice field of fire where the window was, and the shadows inside’ll keep the bastards in butternut from spotting us.”
The barrel commander stuck his head out of the cupola for a good look. He had nerve; nobody could say he didn’t. And he seemed to own more in the way of sense than the late Lieutenant Poffenberger, anyway. When he ducked back down again, he said, “Good idea, Sergeant,” and spoke to the driver by intercom. Jouncing over shattered brickwork, the barrel took its new position.
Another reason Pound liked the ruined garage was that he’d seen U.S. infantrymen huddled in the ruins not far away. Your own foot soldiers were the best insurance policy you had in a barrel. They kept the other side’s foot soldiers away. No sneaky bastard could plant a magnetic mine on your side, chuck a grenade through an open hatch, or throw a Featherston Fizz at your engine compartment so the flaming gasoline dripped down through the louvers and set you on fire, not if you had pals around.
He spotted motion up ahead through the gunsight. Not the dinosaurian shape of a Confederate barrel rumbling into position, but… “Sir, they’re moving infantry up.”
“Yes, I saw them, too,” Griffiths answered. “Hold fire for now. Let our own infantry deal with them if they can. We’ve got this good position. I don’t want to give it away for something as small as a few soldiers on foot.”
“Yes, sir.” Pound surprised himself by smiling at the lieutenant. What Griffiths said made perfectly good sense. Pound wouldn’t have thought the junior officer had it in him.
Confederate Asskickers screamed down out of the sky to bomb and machine-gun U.S. positions. What seemed like every antiaircraft gun in the world opened up on them. So many guns blazed away, Pound wondered if some of them hadn’t kept quiet before to lure the Confederate dive bombers into a trap. Three or four Mules didn’t pull up from their dives, but went straight into the ground. The explosions made the ground shake under his barrel. He saw one funeral pyre through the hole that had held the garage window.
“Good riddance,” he muttered.
“Amen,” Cecil Bergman said. The loader added, “See anything out there that needs killing, Sarge?”
“Quiet right now,” Pound answered.
“Good,” Bergman said-not a bloodthirsty attitude, but a sensible one. Nobody in his right mind was eager for combat. You had a job to do, you did it, and you tried not to think about it. When you had to think about it, you thought about targets and barrels. You didn’t think about men. Because those sons of bitches on the other side had a job to do, too, and theirs was turning you into a target. If that also meant turning you into raw hamburger or burnt hamburger, they would try not to think about it.
“Somebody coming over to us,” Griffiths said, and then, “He’s in our uniform.”
“Right,” Pound said, and pulled the.45 on his belt out of its holster. Confederates in U.S. uniform, Confederates who talked like U.S. soldiers, had caused a lot of grief in Pennsylvania. “Make sure he’s got the right countersign before you let him get close.”
“I intend to, Sergeant.” Griffiths sounded like a small boy reproving his mother. The barrel commander popped out of the cupola. “Foxx!” he said.
“Greenberg,” the soldier answered. Michael Pound relaxed-mostly. That was the right countersign. The Confederates had their own football heroes. They were unlikely to know the names of a couple of U.S. running backs. Of course, they might have captured a prisoner and torn the countersign out of him. Pound didn’t relax all the way.
He was glad to see Lieutenant Griffiths didn’t, either. “That’s close enough, soldier. I don’t know you,” Griffiths said. Pound grinned, down there where nobody but Cecil Bergman could see him. Maybe the lieutenant wasn’t such a little boy after all.
“Yes, sir,” the man in green-gray said. “Just wanted to let you know Featherston’s fuckers have armor coming forward. One of our artillery-spotting airplanes saw the barrels.”
“All right-thanks,” Griffiths said. The soldier sketched a salute and left. Griffiths ducked down into the turret. “What do you think, Sergeant?”
Pound had enormous respect for artillery spotters. They flew low and slow, and often got shot down. But that had only so much to do with the lieutenant’s question. “Well, sir, if he’s legit we’ll find out pretty soon,” Pound said.
“Yes,” Griffiths said. “But that kind of message can’t hurt us, so he must be the real thing, right?”
“Well, no, sir, not quite,” Pound answered patiently. “He could have had a harmless message just waiting in case we were on our toes. If he did, he’s out there looking for somebody else to screw.”
“Oh,” Griffiths said in a hangdog voice. “I didn’t think of that.” A moment later, softly and to himself, he added, “Dammit!”
“Don’t worry about it, sir,” Pound said. “You did what you were supposed to do. Nobody could ask for anything more.”
“I’m supposed to see more than you do, though.” The barrel commander sounded fretful. “If I don’t, then you ought to be the officer.”
“I don’t want to be an officer, sir,” Pound said for what had to be the hundredth time in his career. Senior enlisted men were supposed to curb junior officers’ enthusiasms. That was at least as important a part of their job as anything else. Most junior officers didn’t know it. Pound didn’t know how to say it without offending the lieutenant. If he didn’t say anything, Griffiths couldn’t get his ass in a sling. He kept quiet.
A few minutes later, the Confederates laid on an artillery barrage. Griffiths kept the hatch up on the cupola as long as he could. When gas rounds started gurgling in, though, he clanged it shut. “Button up!” he yelled over the intercom to the driver and bow gunner. Then he put on his gas mask. Resignedly, Pound did the same. With autumn here, wearing it wasn’t so awful as it had been during the summer. Even so, it cut down his vision, and it was awkward to use with a gunsight. Lieutenant Griffiths had an even harder time seeing out the cupola periscopes through his mask’s portholes.
Shrapnel clanged off the barrel’s chassis. A barrage like this wasn’t dangerous to armor except in case of an unlucky direct hit. Pound traversed the turret so the big gun-the pretty big gun, anyway-bore on the approach route he would use if he were a Confederate barrel commander. Griffiths set a hand on his shoulder to say he understood and approved.
Not much later, the barrel commander sang out: “Front!”
“Identified,” Pound answered-he saw the ugly beast, too. “Range 350.”
“You lined up on him so nicely, Sergeant,” Griffiths said. “Go ahead and do the honors.”
“Yes, sir,” Pound said, and then, to Bergman, “Armor-piercing.”
“Armor-piercing,” the loader echoed, and slammed a round in the breech.
Pound adjusted the main armament’s elevation just a little. The C.S. barrel came on, sure nothing nasty was in the neighborhood. Pound wouldn’t have been that confident. The enemy machine was one of the new models. Maybe that made the commander feel invulnerable. Infantrymen in butternut loped alongside, automatic rifles at the ready.
The U.S. barrel’s gun spoke. Pound’s mask kept out the cordite fumes. The shell casing clanged on the fighting compartment floor. “Hit!” Lieutenant Griffiths yelled. “That’s a hit!”
Smoke and fire spurted from the stricken C.S. barrel. The U.S. bow gunner opened up on the Confederate foot soldiers. One of them spun, his rifle flying out of his hands. He crumpled, right out there in the open.
Other Confederate soldiers went down, too. They were more likely diving for cover than hit. Nobody came out of the barrel. Flames and a cloud of smoke burst from the cupola hatch. Five men dead, Pound thought, and then, Well, they wanted to kill me. I like it better this way.
He tapped Lieutenant Griffiths. “Sir, shouldn’t we move out of here and find another firing position? Next enemy barrel that comes this way is going to know where we’re at. Most ambushes only work once.”
“Good point,” the barrel commander said, and then, over the intercom to the driver, “Back us out, Mancatelli. Shift us over behind that pile of bricks to the left.”
He hadn’t been ready to move quite soon enough, but he’d had a backup firing position in mind when he did. It was a pretty good one, too; Michael Pound would have suggested it if Griffiths hadn’t seen it himself. But he had. No, he wasn’t such a helpless puppy after all.
After the barrel backed out of the garage, Mancatelli stayed in reverse long enough to move forward toward the secondary position. That kept the front glacis plate and the front of the turret facing the direction from which the barrel was likeliest to take fire. It avoided exposing the machine’s thinner side armor. Those who served in barrels knew their weaknesses best-except, maybe, for those who tried to destroy them.
Peering out through the gunsight, Pound saw soldiers in butternut pointing to where the barrel had been. That probably meant they were warning it was still there. Nobody pointed toward the wreckage behind which it now hunkered down. If a machine weighing upwards of twenty tons could be sneaky, this one had just done the trick.
And here came a pair of Confederate barrels. “Front!” Griffiths sang out. “The one on the right, Sergeant.”
“Identified,” Pound acknowledged. “Bergman, we’re going to have to do this fast as hell, because that other bastard will start shooting at us as soon as we nail his pal.” He assumed he would nail the first barrel; he had all the arrogance a good gunner should. As he traversed the turret, he added, “So give me two rounds of armor-piercing, fast as you can, when I say, ‘Now.’… Now!”
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