American Front

XV

Major Irving Morrell was waiting for the stew pot full of odds and ends to come to a boil when a runner hurried up to him. "Sir," the fellow said, saluting, "I'm supposed to bring you back to division headquarters right away."

"Are you?" Morrell raised an eyebrow. "Well, you're going to have to wait a minute, anyhow." He raised his voice: "Schaefer!"

"Sir?" the senior captain in the battalion called.

"I'm ordered back to Division, Dutch," Morrell told him. "Try not to let the Rebs overrun us till I get back."

"I'll do my best," Captain Schaefer said, chuckling. "As long as you're going back there, see if they'll send another couple of machine guns forward. We can use the firepower."

"I'll do that," Morrell promised. He turned to the runner. "All right, lead the way."

He was sweating by the time he got out of the front-line trenches; the runner had taken him literally, and was setting a hard pace. His wounded leg had unhappy things to say about that. Sternly, he told it to be quiet. It didn't want to listen. He ignored the complaints and pushed on through the hot, muggy summer night.

Division staff was too exalted to try to survive under canvas. They'd taken over several houses in the little town of Smilax, Kentucky. The one to which the runner brought Morrell had sentries all around and a U.S. flag in front of it. He gave the fellow a startled look. "You didn't say General Foulke wanted to see me."

"Yes, sir, that's who," the runner said. He spoke to one of the sentries: "This here's Major Morrell." The soldier nodded and went inside. He emerged a moment later, and held the door open for Morrell to go in and see the divisional commander. As Morrell climbed the stairs, the runner trotted off down the street, perhaps on another mission, perhaps to escape one.

Major General William Dudley Foulke was sitting in the front room scribbling a note when Morrell came in. The general was a plump man in his mid-sixties, with a bald crown, a white fringe around it, and a bushy white mustache. He looked more like a French general than an American one; all he needed was a kepi and a little swagger stick to complete the impression.

"At ease, Major," Foulke said after they exchanged salutes. "Effective immediately, I am removing you from command of your battalion."

"Sir?" Morrell hadn't expected to be summoned before the divisional commander at all, and certainly not for that reason. "On what grounds, sir?"

"What grounds?" Foulke wheezed laughter, then held up a plump, pink hand. "On the grounds that Philadelphia asked me for a younger officer who could fill a staff position there, and that your name topped the list. Are those satisfactory grounds, Major?"

"Uh, yes, sir," Morrell said. "I can't imagine any better ones, and a whole slew that are worse." When General Foulke had told him he was being removed, he'd imagined that slew of worse grounds, though he didn't think he'd given reason for invoking any of them. Stubborn honesty, though, compelled him to add, "After I spent so long in the hospital, sir, I do regret being pulled away from active service again, if you don't mind my saying so."

"I don't mind at all," General Foulke said. "I'd be disappointed if you said anything else, as a matter of fact. A staff officer who likes being a staff officer because he has a soft billet far away from the line isn't a man of the sort the country needs. Men who want to go out and fight, they're the sort who do well for the general staff. You will be fighting, I promise you; the only difference will be, you'll do it with map and telegram, not with a rifle."

"Yes, sir." Morrell knew he should have been overjoyed; a tour on the General Staff would look very good on his record. But he revelled in the rugged outdoor life, whether in the Sonoran desert or the Kentucky mountains. Getting stuck behind a desk struck him as altogether too much like being stuck in a hospital bed.

William Dudley Foulke was thinking along with him, at least up to a point. Steepling his fingers, the general said, "Staff work can be the making of a promising young officer. If you see opportunity, by all means seize it. Here." He handed Morrell a book. "Something for you to read on the train: my translation of the Roman military writer Vegetius. Either it will engage your interest or help you sleep the miles away."

"Thank you very much, sir," Morrell said, wondering whether an ancient writer's precepts would have any bearing on the modern art of war.

"My pleasure." Foulke sighed. "When I was a boy, I thought I would be a lawyer or a scholar. But I was fourteen years old when the Rebs beat us the first time, and I knew then I wanted to spend the rest of my life in the military service of my country. That little volume there is a relic of what might have been, I'm afraid, nothing more." He grew brisk again. "Well, you don't want to hear an old man maundering on about himself. I certainly didn't when I was a young officer, at any rate."

Morrell flushed. That embarrassed him, which only made him flush more. "I'll treasure the book, sir," he said.

"Or perhaps you won't," Foulke said. "It's all right either way, Major. I've sent Philadelphia a wire, letting them know you're on your way. Now the trick will be getting you there. This part of Kentucky isn't what you'd call overburdened with railroads. We'll send you up the Hyden-Hazard road, and east from there to Hazard, where you can catch a train. You're ready to go now, I assume."

"Uh, two things, sir," Morrell said. "First, I promised I'd ask for a couple of more machine guns for my battalion."

"They'll have them," Foulke promised. "What else?"

Morrell looked down at himself. "If I'm going to Philadelphia, shouldn't I cleanup a bit first?"

Foulke snuffled air out through his mustache. "Seeing what a real front line soldier looks like would do Philadelphia good, but you may be right." He called for his adjutant-"Captain Rothbart!" — and said, "Get Major Morrell a hot bath, get him a fresh uniform, and get him on the road to Hazard so he can catch the train for Philadelphia."

"Yes, sir!" Rothbart said, and efficiently took care of Morrell. If he handled everything as smoothly for the divisional commander, General Foulke was well served.

Inside an hour's time, Morrell, clean and newly decked out, was jouncing along in a motorcar over dirt roads never intended for automobile traffic. The motorcar had three punctures before he got to Hazard, which, in the light of that experience, seemed well-named. Morrell stood guard with a rifle while the driver fixed the first two punctures; bushwhackers and Rebel guerrillas still roamed behind U.S. lines, looking like innocent civilians when they weren't out raiding. For the third puncture, Morrell pitched in and helped with the repair job. He thought about the state of his uniform only after his knees were already dirty.

No Rebs shot at the motorcar, but the train he boarded in Hazard took gunfire three different times before it got out of Kentucky, and once had to turn around on a siding when the Confederates blew up a bridge on the route north. Occupied, eastern Kentucky might have been; subdued it was not.

Under the white glare of the train's acetylene lights, Morrell pondered Vegetius. Some parts of the book, the ones that dealt with Roman military equipment, were as dry and dusty as he'd feared, and Vegetius' own proposed inventions didn't strike him as any great improvements. He started wondering why General Foulke had wasted his time translating such a useless work.

But when Vegetius started talking about principles of the military art, the book came to life. It was as if more than fifteen centuries had fallen away, leaving Morrell face-to-face with someone who worried about all the same things he did: ambushes, ways to deceive the enemy, the importance of intelligence, and other such concerns as vital in the twentieth century as they had been in the fourth.

And one sentence seized his attention and would not let it go: "Let him who desires peace prepare for war." Being ready to fight, he thought, instituting conscription and all the rest of it, had kept the United States from having to do more fighting after the defeat in the Second Mexican War.

When he finished the volume, he set it down not only with respect, but also with real regret. Not only was it interesting in and of itself, but General Foulke wrote gracefully, an attribute more common among officers of the War of Secession than their busy modern successors.

He changed trains in Wheeling, West Virginia. The new one pulled into the Pennsylvania Railroad station at Thirtieth and Market in the middle of the night. Waiting for him at the station was a spruce young captain who might have been Rothbart's cousin. His hat cords were intertwined black and gold; he wore black lace on his cuffs and a badge with the coat of arms of the United States superimposed on a five-pointed star-the marks of a General Staff officer.

His salute might have been machined. "Major Morrell?" he said, his voice as crisp as the creases on his trousers. At Morrell's nod, he went on, "I'm John Abell. As soon as we pick up your bags, I'll take you over to the War Department and we'll find quarters for your stay in the city."

"I haven't got any bags," Morrell told him. "When General Foulke let me know I'd been detached from my battalion, he gave me time to take a bath and put on a clean uniform, and then he stuck me in an automobile. My gear will catch up with me eventually, I expect."

"No doubt," Captain Abell said, looking at the mud on Morrell's knees. Well, if a General Staff officer didn't know motorcars got punctures on bad roads, that was his lookout. The captain shrugged, plainly deciding not to make an issue of it. "Let's go, then."

A couple of antiaircraft cannon stuck their snouts in the air outside the train station. " Philadelphia 's been in the war," Morrell observed.

"That it has." Captain Abell waved. A driver in an open-topped Ford came up. He opened the door to the rear seat for the two officers, then used the hand throttle to give the automobile more power as he chugged east through the streets of Philadelphia toward the War Department headquarters. Abell went on, "When the Rebs came storming up out of Virginia, we were afraid we'd either have to fight for the town or declare it an open city and pull out. That would have been very bad."

"I'll say it would," Morrell agreed. Since the War of Secession, and especially since the Second Mexican War, Philadelphia had been the de facto capital of the United States: Washington was simply too vulnerable to Confederate guns in the hills on the south side of the Potomac. Could the United States have gone on with the war after losing both their de jure and de facto capitals? Maybe. Morrell was glad they hadn't had to find out.

Despite the hour, motor traffic kept rumbling through the city, probably interrupting bureaucrats' sleep. Philadelphia wasn't just an administrative center; it was also a key assembly point for southbound men and materiel. Here and there, Morrell saw houses and shops and buildings that had taken damage. "The Rebs never got into artillery range of you, did they?" he asked.

"No, sir," Abell answered. "They send bombing aeroplanes over us when they can, though. A lot of bombs have fallen around the War Department, but only a couple on it." His lip curled. "They can't aim for beans."

It wasn't as if the War Department were a small target, either. It covered a lot of space between the United States Mint and Franklin Square. Thinking of it as one building was a mistake, too; it was a whole great complex, some structures of marble, some of limestone, some of prosaic brick. The driver had to jam on the brake several times to keep from running down uniformed men hustling from one building to another.

When he finally stopped, it was in front of a building that looked more like a tycoon's house than anything the government maintained. "One way to keep from being noticed is to look poor and worthless," Captain Abell said, noting Morrell's expression. "Another way is to look rich and useless."

If the Confederates didn't know exactly where the U.S. Army General Staff made its headquarters, Morrell would have been astonished. He didn't say anything, though, but hopped out of the Ford and followed Captain Abell into the building. By the captain's reasoning, the sentries outside should have been decked out in servants' livery and carried trays for visitors' cards rather than rifles. Morrell was relieved to see they weren't and didn't.

Inside, the place was ablaze with electric lamps. Morrell blinked several times. The security officer to whom Captain Abell took him was brisk, thorough, efficient. After satisfying himself that Morrell really was Morrell, he gave him a temporary pass and said, "Good to have you with us, Major."

"Thanks," Morrell answered, still a long way from sure he was glad to be here. No matter what William Dudley Foulke had said, could you really fight a war in a fancy place like this?

Then Abell took him into the map room. Morrell had always had a fondness for maps; the more you studied them, the more you geared strategy and tactics to the terrain, the better off you were liable to be.

And here was the whole war, spread out before him in blue and red lines and arrows. Both Ontario fronts kept on being clogged, the enemy had the initiative in Manitoba, Kentucky still hadn't been knocked out of the fight. Guaymas remained in Rebel hands. (Morrell's leg twinged.) Utah was still in flames, too. But the Confederates were being driven from Pennsylvania, the USA had bitten off big chunks of Sequoyah, and the Rebs had been chased from New Mexico and well back into Texas. Other maps showed the confused fighting at sea.

His head swung back and forth, as if on a swivel. Seeing all the maps together, he felt like a general, not just a major worrying about his tiny part of the big picture. "I think I'm going to like this place," he said.

The motorcar carrying Jacob Colleton kicked up a plume of red-brown dust as it came up the path toward Marshlands. "Is everything ready?" Anne Colleton demanded of Scipio, her voice harsh.

"Yes, ma'am," he answered; she would have been astonished to hear him say anything else. "The room is waiting for him. Dr. Benveniste should be here momentarily, and we are prepared to do all we can."

"All we can," Anne echoed. There in the back seat of the motorcar sat her brother, stiff and pale as a mannequin. He'd be sitting or standing for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life. If he lay down, the telegram had warned her, the fluids in his gas-ravaged lungs were liable to choke him to death.

She opened the door as the motorcar jounced to a stop. Scipio rolled out the wheeled chair that had belonged to her great-grandfather after he started having strokes. But he'd been an old man. Jacob should have had a long, healthy life stretching ahead. It might still be long. The question was, did Jacob wish it would be short?

The Negro chauffeur (Anne wondered if he was the man who'd driven Tom down from Columbia, but who paid enough attention to Negroes to be sure?) opened the door so Jacob could get out of the motorcar. The effort of sliding over, getting out, and walking two steps to the chair set him coughing, and that set him groaning. He sighed when he sat in the chair, and that made him groan anew.

Anne gave the chauffeur two dollars. "Thank you, ma'am!" he exclaimed, tipping his cap. The grin was broad and white across his black face; she'd greatly overpaid him. She didn't care. Her brother was worth it. The Negro climbed back into the automobile, put it in reverse so he could turn away from the mansion and the people who had come out of it, and drove off.

Jacob Colleton looked up at his sister. "Not quite the homecoming I had in mind when I went off to war," he said. His voice was a rasping whisper, as if he were a hundred years old and had smoked a hundred cigars a day for every one of those years.

"You hush, Jacob. We'll make you as comfortable as we can," Anne replied. Her brother's voice, so far from the vibrant baritone she remembered, made her grind her teeth at the inadequacy of what she'd just said. So did the purple circles under his eyes, almost the only color in his corpse-pale face. "You're coming home a hero, the same way they did after the War of Secession."

"A hero?" His laugh was a coughing wheeze. "I'd had two cups of coffee and I was on my way to the latrine when the damnyankees gassed us. Only fool luck my men took me with 'em when they fell back. Otherwise I'd be in a prison camp or a Yankee hospital. Not a damn thing heroic about it."

Speaking so much gave him color, but not of a healthy sort: his whole face turned a leaden violet, as if he were being strangled. And so he was, from the inside out. He sounded much the way Tom had, too, utterly forgetful of the patriotism that had sent him rushing to join the fight against the USA.

"When we get you to your room, what can we bring you?" Anne asked.

"Whiskey," Jacob answered. "Morphia, if you can lay hold of it."

"Dr. Benveniste is on his way," she said. "He'll prescribe it." If he doesn't, he'll be sorry. She nodded to Scipio. "Take him upstairs. We'll discuss permanent service arrangements for him shortly."

"Yes, ma'am," the butler said, and then, to Jacob, "I'll be as careful as I can, sir."

Jacob let out a sound full of pain only once, when Scipio had trouble getting the chair smoothly over the threshold. Then, in the front hall, he had to stop, because Marcel Duchamp was standing there and would not move. The artist stared avidly at Jacob Colleton. "Modern man as defective part in the assembly line of war," he murmured. "Or is it man as perfect part? — the end product of what war is designed to produce."

He probably did not mean to be offensive; he must have seen Jacob not as Anne's injured brother but as an inspiration for art. At that moment, she did not care what he meant. "Get out," she said in a cold, deadly voice. "Pack your paintings and be gone from this house by tomorrow."

"But where shall I go?" Duchamp exclaimed in horror, sweat beading on his forehead.

"You can go to Columbia. You can go to Charleston. Or, for that matter, you can go to hell," Anne told him crisply. "I don't care. You are no longer welcome here." He tried to outstare her, to will her into changing her mind. Men had tried that with her before, and all of them had gone away defeated. So did Marcel Duchamp.

Then he tried for the last word: "You are not modern. You are only a rich atavism, playing with the new but belonging to the old."

That held enough truth to hurt. Looking down at poor Jacob, Anne saw how important things like the ties of family truly were to her. If those things had a smaller place in the world Duchamp inhabited, she would turn her back on that world, or on the parts of it she did not care for. She let the Frenchman see none of that. "I'll take my chances," she said. "And what I told you stands. Now get out of the way, or I'll throw you out this instant."

"Should have thrown him out before he got here," Jacob croaked; like Tom, he'd had no use for the exhibition of modern art. "But you don't need to throw him out now on account of me. Far as I can see, he was right. That's what war does: makes lots and lots of things just like me."

"Take him upstairs, Scipio." Anne didn't directly answer her brother, but she was never one to change her mind once she'd made it up. Duchamp would go, or she would throw him out.

Dr. Saul Benveniste arrived a few minutes later: a short, dark, clever man who looked, she thought, as Confederate founding father Judah P. Benjamin might have looked were he as thin as Alexander Stephens. The doctor went upstairs and came down a few minutes later. "I've given him morphia," he said. "I'll leave a supply here so you can give him more whenever the pain is very bad. Past that-" He spread his hands and shrugged.

"Is there any treatment you can give?" Anne asked. "Something that will make his lungs better, I mean, not just something to relieve the pain."

"I don't know of any," the doctor answered, his brown eyes mournful. "But then, nobody knows much about the business of poisonous gases, though I expect we'll all learn. You have to understand-the tissue in there is burned. I can't repair that from the outside. Breathing warm, moist air may help, and Marshlands has a good supply of that. He may heal some on his own, too. I can't really offer a long-term prognosis. I'm too ignorant."

"Thank you for being honest with me," she said.

"I'll do everything I can for him," Benveniste said. "I don't want you to get any exaggerated notions of how much that's likely to be, though."

"Thank you," Anne repeated. Then she said, "He wants whiskey. Will having it make him worse?"

"His lungs, you mean? I don't see why," Dr. Benveniste told her. "Most of the time, I don't have much good to say about drinking whiskey. Now, though-" He shrugged again. "If he hurts less drunk, is that so bad?"

"Not in the least," she said. "All right, Doctor. I'll call you as I need you."

Benveniste nodded and left. His Ford started up with a bang and a belch, then rattled away.

Anne went upstairs. Her brother was sitting up in bed, propped up by pillows. He had a bit more color than when he'd arrived at Marshlands. Nodding to Anne, he said, "Here I am, a relic of war," in his ruined voice.

"Dr. Benveniste said they might come up with new ways to make you better before too long," Anne told him. Dr. Benveniste hadn't quite said that, but he had said he didn't know much about treating poison-gas cases, so surely he and other medical men would be learning new things about them. And giving her brother hope counted a good deal, too.

"Best thing he could have done for me was shoot me through the head," Jacob said. "Morphia's the next best thing, though. I'm still on fire inside, but it's not as big a fire." He yawned; the drug was making him sleepy. Though his bedroom was rather dim, the pupils of his gray eyes were as small as if he'd been in bright sunshine.

He yawned again, then started to say something. The words turned into a soft snore. Without his seeming to realize it, his eyelids slid shut. The snore got deeper, raspier; Anne could hear the breath bubbling in and out of his tormented lungs, as if he had pneumonia.

She walked out into the hall and called one of the servants: "Julia!" When the Negro woman had come into Jacob's bedroom, she said, "I want you to sit here and make sure my brother does not lie down, no matter what. If he starts to slump away from the pillows that are supporting him, you are to straighten him up. Someone will have to be here all the time when he's asleep. I'll make arrangements with Scipio for that. Do you understand what I've told you?"

"Yes, ma'am," Julia said. "Don' let Mistuh Jacob lay hisself down, no matter what."

"That's right. You stay here till he wakes up or till someone takes your place." When Julia nodded again, Anne went out of the room, half closing the door behind her. Quite cold-bloodedly, she decided to arrange for Jacob's tenders to be chosen from among the younger, better-looking wenches of the household. She didn't know whether, injured as he was, he would be able to do anything with them or have them do anything for him. If he could, she would give him the chance.

In her office, a few doors down from Jacob's room, the telephone rang. She hurried down the hallway, the silk of her dress rustling around her ankles. Picking up the earpiece, she spoke into the mouthpiece: "Anne Colleton."

"How do, Miss Anne?" The voice on the other end of the line had a back- country rasp to it: not a Carolina accent at all, and certainly not the almost English phrasing of her broker, who was the likeliest person to call at this hour and who came from an old Charleston family. She couldn't immediately place who this caller was, though he did sound vaguely familiar. When she didn't say anything for a few seconds, he went on, "This here's Roger Kimball, Miss Anne. How are you?"

She needed a moment to place the name, even though he'd written to her more than once after their encounter on the train to New Orleans: the randy submersible skipper. "Hello, Lieutenant Kimball," she said. "I'm well, thank you. I didn't expect to hear from you. Where are you calling from?"

"Lieutenant Commander Kimball now," he told her proudly, "though I reckon you know me well enough to call me Roger." That was true in a biblical sense, but probably in no other. "Where am I at? I'm in Charleston, that's where. Fishing over on the other coast is so bad, they moved a good many of us back here."

"I wish you luck with your fishing," Anne said. That was true. After what the damnyankees had done to her brother, she wanted every ship flying their flag to go straight to the bottom of the sea. True or not, though, she wished she'd phrased it differently. Kimball would think…

Kimball did think. "Since I'm so close now, I was figurin' on gettin' me some liberty time, and then comin' up there and…" He let his voice fade, but she knew what he had in mind. Since she'd already given herself to him, he thought he could have her any time he wanted.

That she'd made a related calculation about Jacob and her serving women never once entered her mind. What did enter it was anger. "Lieutenant Commander Kimball, my brother just now came from the Western Kentucky front, suffering from chlorine in the lungs. I am not really in the best of positions to entertain visitors"-let him take that however he would-"at the present time."

"I'm very sorry to hear that, Miss Anne," the submariner said after a short silence. Sorry to hear which? Anne wondered. That Jacob's been gassed, or that I won't let you lay me right now? No sooner had the thought crossed her mind than Kimball continued, "That chlorine, that's filthy stuff, by everything I've heard tell about it. I hope your brother didn't get it too bad."

"It isn't good," Anne said, a larger admission than she would have made to someone with whom she was socially more intimate. The physical intimacy she'd known with Kimball was of different substance, somehow; despite it, the two of them remained near-strangers.

"I really do hope he gets better," Kimball said, and then, half to himself, "Nice to know there's somethin' in this war you don't have to worry about aboard a submersible." That brief bit of self-reflection done, he went on, "All right, I won't come up there right away-you'll be busy and all. Maybe in a few weeks, after I make a patrol or two."

His arrogance was breathtaking, so much so that Anne, instead of going from mere anger to fury, admired the quality of his nerve. He had been enjoyable, on the train and in New Orleans, a town made for enjoyment if ever there was one. Thinking about Jacob, she also thought she was liable to need relief from thinking about Jacob. She tapped a fingernail on the telephone case; indecision was unlike her. "All right, Roger, maybe in a few weeks," she said at last, but then warned, "Do telephone first."

"I promise, Miss Anne," he said. She didn't know what his promises were worth, but thought him likely to keep that one. He started whistling before he hung up the telephone. Anne wished she had any reason to be so happy.

George Enos set his gutting knife down on the deck of the steam trawler Spray, opened the ice-filled hold, and threw in the haddock and halibut he'd just finished cleaning. Then he went back to the latest load of fish the trawl had just scooped up from the bottom of Brown's Bank.

The seaman who was helping him clean the fish, a fellow named Harvey Kemmel who spoke with a harsh Midwestern accent utterly unlike Enos' New England dialect, wiped his face on his sleeve and said, "This here fishing for a living, it's damned hard work, you know?"

"I had noticed that, as a matter of fact," George answered dryly as he yanked another squirming halibut up off the deck, slit its belly open, and pulled out the guts. He tossed the fish into the hold and grabbed another one.

Patrick O'Donnell came aft, a mug of the Cookie's good coffee clamped in his right hand. With his left, he slapped the side of the hold. "Nice the boat's so much like the Ripple," he said. "Means I don't hardly have to think to know where things are at."

"Same with me, Skipper," George Enos agreed, "and I heard Charlie say the same thing about the galley. I like it that we're all still together-except poor Lucas, I mean."

"Me, too," O'Donnell agreed. He glanced down at the load of fish Enos and Kemmel were gutting. "We bring those into Boston, we'll make ourselves some pretty fair money off 'em." His gaze swung northward. Brown's Bank lay north and east of Georges Bank, where the Ripple had usually operated. In time of peace, that would have mattered only because it cost them more fuel to reach. Now, with the southern coast of Nova Scotia, some of it still unconquered, not so far away, other concerns also mattered. Under his breath, O'Donnell added, "If we get back to Boston."

Work went on. Work always went on, and there were never enough men to do it. Like Harvey Kemmel, several of the other sailors were working aboard a steam trawler for the first time. That meant O'Donnell and Enos and even Charlie White spent an inordinate amount of time explaining what needed doing, which in turn meant they didn't have as much time as they would have liked to do their own work.

One of the new men, a tall, skinny fellow named Schoonhoven who'd started life on a Dakota farm, was the first to spot the approaching boat. "Skipper," he called, his voice cracking with what might have been alarm or excitement or a blend of the two, "tell me that's not a submarine."

O'Donnell raised a telescope-just like the one he'd had aboard the Ripple — to his eye. "All right, Willem, I'll tell you that's not a submarine," he said, and then, after a perfectly timed pause, he added, "if you want me to lie to you."

Cleaning flatfish forgotten, Enos hurried to the rail and peered out across the Atlantic. It was indeed a submarine, traveling on the surface now because the Spray couldn't possibly hurt it. In case the fishermen hadn't noticed it was there, it fired its deck gun. A shell sent up a plume of seawater a couple of hundred yards in front of the trawler.

Patrick O'Donnell ducked into the cabin, then came out again in a hurry. "Run up the white flag!" he shouted. "Maybe they'll let us take to the boats before they sink the trawler." As the signal of surrender fluttered up below the U.S. flag the Spray was flying, O'Donnell peered once more through the telescope at the submersible. "That's a Confederate boat," he ground out. "The bastards cruise up to Canada and back, same as the Canucks do to their ports."

The submersible closed rapidly. Soon Enos could see the Stars and Bars flying above it, too. A sailor ran out onto the deck of the Confederate vessel and began working the signal lamp. "Abandon-ship." Along with the rest of the Spray's crew, Enos read the Morse as it flashed across the water, letter by letter, word by word. "We-aim-to-sink-her."

"There's a surprise," Charlie White said with a grunt of laughter. "I figured they were going to buy our fish off us."

"Nova- Scotia — coast-100-miles-north," the signal lamp said. "Some-Yank-held-Good-luck-getting-there."

"Thanks a hell of a lot," Enos said. He helped Schoonhoven and Kemmel put the boat over the side. It looked very small, and a hundred miles of ocean enormously large. He glared toward the Rebel submersible, muttering, "And the horse you rode in on, too."

One after another, the crewmen from the Spray scrambled down into the boat. As captain, Patrick O'Donnell came last. "Let's get clear," he said. They worked the oars and moved away from the trawler. If no storm rose, you could row a hundred miles. The boat had food and water and a compass. All the same, Enos hoped they wouldn't have to try it.

Off to the other side of the Spray, he spotted what looked like a length of pipe sticking up out of the water and moving toward the Confederate submarine. He deliberately looked away from it. The Rebs on board the submersible paid it no heed. They were intent on coming right up to the Spray so they could sink her at point-blank range. If you didn't miss, you didn't waste shells. Pay attention to the trawler, he thought at the Confederates. Pay attention to the trawler a little longer.

He'd just started to think that again when three men in the boat who hadn't made themselves not look at that moving length of pipe whooped at the top of their lungs. O'Donnell's whoop had words in it: "The fish is away!"

Everybody stopped rowing. Along with everybody else, George watched the torpedo's wake speed toward the Confederate submersible. He'd never seen anything move so fast in the water. "Run true," he breathed. "Come on-run true."

The torpedo did run true. It couldn't have had more than five hundred yards to travel: it was a point-blank shot, too. Three Rebs were standing with their heads and shoulders out of the conning tower. An instant before the torpedo slammed home, one of them spotted it. Enos saw him point. He might have yelled something, but that was lost in the dull boom! of the torpedo's slamming into the submarine a little before amidships.

Water and spray spurted up from the explosion, hiding the submersible for a moment. When it became visible again, it had broken in half. Bow and stern portions both sank amazingly fast. Diesel oil from the submarine spread over the water, flattening out the light chop. In the oil floated bits and pieces of debris and three splashing men-probably the ones in the conning tower, George thought. Most of the crew wouldn't have known they were in danger till the torpedo hit.

"Let's go pick 'em up," O'Donnell said, and they rowed toward the Confederates struggling in the Atlantic. As they did so, the U.S. submersible that had torpedoed the Rebel boat surfaced like a broaching whale. Men tumbled out of the conning tower and ran to the deck gun to cover the Confederate sailors.

Enos reached out a hand to one and helped drag him into the boat filled with the crew of the Spray. The Reb was filthy with fuel oil and, beneath that dark brown coating, looked stunned. "My name is Briggs, Ralph Briggs," he gasped in the accent George had learned to hate down in North Carolina. "Senior lieutenant, Confederate States Navy." He rattled off his pay number.

"Welcome aboard, Senior Lieutenant Briggs," O'Donnell said as sailors hauled the other two Rebel survivors into the boat. "You're a prisoner of the United States Navy."

Briggs looked over to the U.S. submarine, then glared at O'Donnell. "You're the luckiest damned fisherman in the history of the world, pal, having that damn boat show up just when we were about to blow you to hell and gone."

O'Donnell erupted in laughter. So did George Enos. So did all the other sailors from the Spray. "That wasn't luck, Reb," O'Donnell said, a huge grin on his face. "We were out hunting boats like you. We had the Bluefin there on tow behind us all the time. When you came up, I telephoned 'em, they slipped the line, and they put a fish in your boat while you were busy with us."

"We don't need to give you to the Bluefin to make you U.S. Navy prisoners, either," Enos added gleefully. "We're U.S. Navy, too, but I don't have to tell you my name, rank, and number."

More laughter roared out of the sailors and ex-fishermen who crewed the Spray. Charlie White said, "How many more Rebel submarines do you think we can sink before your boys catch on?"

Briggs and the other Confederates looked appalled to discover the trap into which they'd walked. The senior lieutenant had spunk, wet and stunned though he might be. Savagely, he ground out, "I hope you sons of bitches tow that damned boat right into a mine."

"You go to hell," Enos said, horrified at the notion. Several other sailors echoed him.

An officer from the Bluefin used a megaphone to shout across the water: "Shall we take your friends off your hands? We have more men aboard to keep an eye on them."

"Sounds good to me," Patrick O'Donnell yelled back. They rowed over to the submersible. Sailors there-sailors in Navy whites, not fishermen's dungarees-helped the Confederate survivors up onto the Bluefins deck and then marched them into the conning tower and down below. When they had disappeared, O'Donnell said, "All right, we can go home now."

They returned to the Spray, which bobbed in the chop. Once up on deck, Charlie White shook himself, as if awakening from a happy dream. "Lord, that was sweet," he said.

For the black man, jeering at the Rebels had to be doubly delightful. It was plenty sweet enough for George, too. "Didn't figure I'd just keep on doing a fisherman's job after I joined the Navy," he said. "It's worked out pretty well, though-couldn't have worked out better." He turned to Patrick O'Donnell. "This whole hunting scheme was your idea. Do you think they'll make you an officer now that it's worked?"

"I'm too old and too stubborn to make an officer out of me now," O'Donnell said. "CPO suits me fine." He waved to the Cookie. "Charlie, why don't you break out the medicinal rum? This may be the first submersible a fishing boat ever sank, but it isn't going to be the last."

"Yes, sir!" White said enthusiastically. You weren't supposed to call a chief petty officer sir, but O'Donnell didn't correct him.

Sam Carsten was walking along the wharf toward the Dakota when all the antiaircraft guns at Pearl Harbor started going off at once. Guided by the puffs of black smoke suddenly blossoming in the sky, he spotted an aeroplane flying so high, it seemed nothing more than a speck up in the sky, too high for him to catch the sound of its engine.

For a moment, he stood watching the spectacle, wondering if the guns could bring down the aeroplane. Then he realized that, if they were shooting at it, it had to be hostile. And a hostile aeroplane could not have come from anywhere on the Sandwich Islands, which were firmly under the control of the United States. It had to have been launched from an enemy ship, and an enemy ship not too far away.

"And an enemy ship means an enemy fleet," he said out loud. "And an enemy fleet means one hell of a big fight."

He started running back toward the Dakota. As he did so, klaxons and hooters began squalling out the alert the guns had first signaled. When he got to the battleship's deck, he looked around for the aeroplane again. There it was, streaking away to the southeast.

He pointed to it. "We follow that bearing and we'll find the limeys or the Japs."

One of the sailors near him said, "Yeah." Another one, though, said, "Thanks a lot, Admiral." Carsten shook his head. You said anything on a ship, somebody would give you a hard time about it.

" Battle stations!" shouted people who really were officers. "All hands to battle stations. Prepare to get under way."

Carsten sighed as he sprinted toward his own post. Inside the sponson, you couldn't see anything. All you ever got were orders and rumors, neither of which was apt to tell you what you most wanted to know.

As usual, Sam got to the five-inch gun after Hiram Kidde, but only moments after him, because no one else but the gunner's mate was there when he arrived. "Do you know what's up for sure, 'Cap'n'?" he asked.

Kidde shook his head. "Limeys or Japs, don't know which." That Carsten had figured out for himself. The gunner's mate went on, "Don't much care, either. They're out there, we'll smash 'em."

The rest of the crew was not far behind. Luke Hoskins said, "I heard it was the Japs." One of the other shell-jerkers, Pete Jonas, had heard it was the English. They argued about it, which struck Carsten as stupid. What point to getting yourself in an uproar about something you couldn't prove?

The deck vibrated under Carsten's feet as the engines built up power. Lieutenant Commander Grady, who was in charge of all the guns of the starboard secondary armament, stuck his head into the cramped sponson to make sure everything and everyone was ready, even though they were still in harbour. He didn't know to whom the aeroplane had belonged.

After Grady had hurried away, Carsten said, "There-you see? If the lieutenant commander doesn't know what's going on, anybody who says he does is just puffing smoke out his stack."

"We're moving," Kidde said a few minutes later, and then, after that, "I wonder how they-whoever they are; Sam's right about that-managed to sneak a fleet past our patrols and aeroplanes. However they did it, they're gonna regret it."

There wasn't much to see. There wasn't much to do, either, not until they'd caught up to whatever enemy ships had dared approach the Sandwich Islands. The gun crew took turns peering through their narrow view slits. Hoskins and Jonas quit arguing about who the enemy was and started arguing about how much of the fleet had sortied with the Dakota. Given how little they could see, that argument was about as useless as the other.

After he couldn't see Oahu any more, Carsten stopped looking out. He'd seen a lot of ocean since he joined the Navy, and one trackless stretch of it looked a hell of a lot like another. He didn't get bored easily, which was one of the reasons he made a good sailor.

Lieutenant Commander Grady came back, his thin face red with excitement for once. "It's the Japs," he said. "One of our aeroplanes has spotted them. Looks like a force of cruisers and destroyers-they must have figured they could sneak in for a raid, throw some shells at us, and then run home for the Philippines again. We get to show 'em they're wrong. Doesn't look like they know they've been seen, either." He rubbed his hands in anticipation.

"Told you it was the Japs," Hoskins said triumphantly.

"Ahh, go to hell," Jonas said: not much of a comeback, but the best he could do when his idea had struck a mine.

"Stupid slant-eyed bastards," Hiram Kidde said. "If they're raiding us, they don't want their damned aeroplane spotted. That pilot's going to join his honourable ancestors when they find out he dropped the ball like that."

"Cruisers and destroyers," Sam said dreamily. He patted the breech of the five-inch gun. "They'll be sorry they ever ran into us. The big guns up top'll pound 'em to bits at a lot longer range than they can hit back from."

"That's why we built 'em," Kidde said. He didn't sound dreamy. He sounded predatory.

By the sound, by the feel, of the engines, they were making better than twenty knots. An hour passed after they steamed out of Pearl Harbor, then another one. A colored steward came by with sandwiches and coffee from the galley. Pete Jonas got out a deck of cards. Kidde waved for him to put it back in his pocket. He made a sour face, but obeyed.

All of a sudden, the Dakota swung hard aport. The engine's roar picked up the flank speed. "What the deuce-" Luke Hoskins said, an instant before the torpedo slammed into the port side of the ship.

The deck jerked under Carsten's feet. If you got hit the right-or rather, the wrong-way, the shock wave from an explosion like that could break your ankles. That didn't happen, but Sam sat down, hard, on the steel plates of the deck. The electric lights in the sponson flickered. Then, for a dreadful second or two, they went out. "Oh, sweet Jesus," Jonas moaned, which was pretty much what Carsten was thinking, too.

He scrambled to his feet. He'd just regained them when the lights came back on. He glanced toward the door that led out of the sponson, out to the stairway to the top deck, out to the deck itself, out to the lifeboats. He didn't move toward the door, not a step. Nobody else did, either, in spite of bawling klaxons and shouts outside in the corridor. They were still at battle stations. Nobody had given any orders about abandoning ship.

Danger-hell, fear-made his mind work very quickly, very clearly. "We got sucker-punched," he exclaimed. "Nothing else but. The Japs put that little fleet out there where we had to spot it-Christ, they sent out that aeroplane to lead us right to it. And they posted submersibles right out here between it and Pearl, and just sat there waiting for us to come running out. And we did-and look what it got us."

"How come you're so goddamn much smarter than the admiral?" Kidde sounded half sardonic, half respectful.

"Not likely," Sam answered. "Now that we've been torpedoed, I bet he's figured out what's going on, too."

"If the engines quit, we're in trouble," Luke Hoskins said. "That'll mean the boilers are flooded." He stood quite still, a thoughtful look on his face. "We're listing to port, I think."

Carsten could feel it, too: the deck wasn't level, not any more. He glanced to the doorway again. If he left without orders, it was a court-martial. If he stayed and the battleship sank, a court-martial was the least of his worries. But the engines kept running, and the list wasn't getting worse in a hurry.

Lieutenant Commander Grady came in. "Looks like we're going to make it," he said. "Compartmenting's holding up, engines are safe, and the aft magazine didn't go up." He scratched his chin. "If it had, I think we would have known it."

"So what have we got, sir?" Kidde asked. "A couple thousand tons of water in us?"

"Something like that," Grady agreed. "We limp back to Pearl Harbor if we can, we go into dry-dock for six months or however long it takes to patch us up again, and then we go back to war." His features, lean, scholarly-more a professor's face than a naval officer's-went grim. "We got off lucky. They sank the Denver, and it doesn't look like many of her crew had time to get off before she went down. Not a better cruiser in the Pacific Fleet than the Denver."

"They were laying for us," Carsten said. "They showed the fleet and the aeroplane to bring us out, and then-"

"I'd say you're right," Grady replied. "The ships kept the submarines in fuel and supplies, too: not likely they'd have the range to go from Manila to here and back without stocking up along the way. I hope the rest of the fleet manages to punish them. We're out of the fight for now."

Out of the fight. The words seemed to echo in the sponson as Grady left to pass the news to the rest of the gun crews under his command. The Dakota swung through a long, slow turn, as awkward as a horse with a lame hind leg, and began limping back toward Pearl Harbor. They hadn't done anything wrong except pursue too eagerly, but they were, sure as hell, out of the fight.

"Fuck it. We're alive," Luke Hoskins said.

Sam looked back at the doorway one last time. He wouldn't have to run out through it, hoping he could make it up on deck before water or fire engulfed him. When you got down to it, that wasn't such a bad bargain. "We're alive," he repeated, and the words sounded very fine.

Mary McGregor bounced up and down on the seat of the wagon beside her father. "What are we going to get?" she said. She'd been saying that ever since they'd left the farm for the trip into Rosenfeld, Manitoba.

As he'd done every time she asked, Arthur McGregor answered, "I don't know. You're the one who's turning seven today. I've got fifty cents in my pocket, and you can spend it any way you please."

"I'll get a store doll, one with real glass eyes," Mary declared. Then she shook her head, making her auburn curls fly around her face. "No, I won't. I'll get candy. How much candy can I get for fifty cents, Pa?"

"Enough to make you sick for a week," McGregor answered, laughing. His youngest child was full of extravagant notions. He figured a few more years of living on the farm would cure her of most of them.

Off to the north, artillery rumbled. Mary took no notice of it, prattling on cheerfully about everything on which she might spend her half-dollar. If she got everything she wanted, it could easily have cost McGregor fifty times that. Moreover, her choice was liable to be severely limited: if Henry Gibbon didn't have it in his general store, she couldn't get it. Her father let her go on all the same. Dreams were free, even if presents weren't.

The artillery rumbled again. Arthur McGregor sighed. Though dreams were free, they didn't always come true. When the Anglo-Canadian offensive opened and pushed the Americans south from Winnipeg, he'd dreamt they would throw the Yankees out of Canada altogether. But Rosenfeld had never seen a single khaki uniform, not unless the Yanks had shipped prisoners through. The town and his farm hadn't even come within artillery range of the front. It was high summer now, and

everything around these parts remained under the muscular thumb of the USA.

Coming into Rosenfeld, he saw just how muscular that thumb had be come. Soldiers in green-gray crowded the streets, some no doubt going up toward the front, some coming back for relief. Their boots, and the tires of motorcars and great grunting White trucks, made dust swirl like fog all through the town.

They had soldiers serving as traffic policemen, now halting a stream of trucks so an officer in an automobile could cut across, now halting a column of men who looked fresh off the train so more trucks could get through, and now holding up McGregor to let another column of soldiers, these men veterans, go by. From the veterans, whose uniforms were sun-bleached and imperfectly clean, rose a smell that put him in mind of the farmhouse the morning before the bathtub got filled. He'd smelled it in barracks, too, and especially out on manoeuvres-men on the front line had little incentive and less ability to keep clean.

"Get off the main road, Canuck," one of the soldiers called, pointing the wagon onto a little side street. There wasn't any particular animosity in the or der. McGregor could even see the need for it. But "What's a Canuck, Pa?" Mary asked as he stopped disrupting traffic.

"You are," he answered, getting out of the wagon to tie the horse to a hitching post. "I am." He picked her up and put her down on the plank sidewalk. "It's what Americans call Canadians when they don't like us much."

"Oh." She thought about that, then nodded. "You mean the way we call them goddamn stinking Yanks?"

"Yes, just like that," he said, and coughed. "But we don't call them that where they can hear us. And, for that matter, who called them that where you could hear him?"

"It wasn't a him-it was Ma," Mary answered, which made McGregor cough all over again. He'd have to have a talk with Maude when he got home. Mary went on, "How come they get to call us names whenever they please and we don't get to call them names whenever we please? That's not fair."

"Because they have more guns than we do, and they drove our soldiers out of this part of the country," he told her. "If you have more guns in a war, you get to say what's fair."

She chewed on that. To his relief, she didn't argue with him about it. He took her hand and walked toward the general store. Several U.S. soldiers smiled at her along the way. A lot of them weren't far from McGregor's age: reservists called up for the war, probably with daughters as old as Mary or maybe even older. She took no notice of the Americans. She made a point of taking no notice of the Americans.

"Mornin', Arthur," Henry Gibbon said when they went into the general store. Gibbon beamed down at Mary. "And a good mornin' to you, little lady."

"Good morning, Mr. Gibbon," she answered, very politely: the storekeeper, being a Canadian, deserved not only notice but respect.

"Reason we're here," McGregor said, "is that somebody here just turned seven years old, and she's got half a dollar to spend however she pleases. She'll be wanting to look at your toys and dolls and candy, unless I miss my guess."

"We can probably do somethin' along those lines," Gibbon said. He beck oned Mary over to the jars of sweets on his counter. "Why don't you have a look at these here, little lady, and I'll see what I've got in the way of toys." He glanced up at Mary's father. "We're apt to be a bit picked over, things bein' like they is."

"I understand that," he answered. "But if anybody in Rosenfeld has anything good, you're the man."

"That I am," the storekeeper agreed solemnly. He had just turned around to see what a pasteboard box held when something exploded across the street. The plate-glass window at the front of the general store shattered, fragments flying inward. One glittering shard flicked McGregor's sleeve; another stuck out of the floor boards bare inches from his foot.

Mary screamed. He ran to her and scooped her up, afraid some of the shrapnel-like slivers of glass had cut or stabbed her. But she wasn't bleeding anywhere, though glass dust sparkled in her hair like diamonds. She trembled in his arms.

"Holy Jesus!" Henry Gibbon said. He looked at what had been his window and said "Holy Jesus!" again, louder. Then he looked out through what had been his window and said "Holy Jesus!" a third time, louder still. This time, he amplified it somewhat: "That's the Register office, blown to hell and gone."

McGregor had been too worried about his daughter even to think about what might have blown up out there. Now he looked, too. Sure enough, the wood-and-brick building that had housed Rosenfeld's weekly newspaper was nothing but a ruin now, and beginning to burn. If the fire engines didn't get here in a tearing hurry, that whole block was liable to go up in smoke, and maybe this one, too, if the wind blew sparks across the street.

In the street lay U.S. soldiers, some down and writhing, some down and still. A couple of horses were down, too, screaming like women in torment. An officer went up to them and quickly put them out of their torment with his pistol. McGregor thought well of him for that; he would have done the same.

In that spirit, he set Mary down and went out of the general store to see if he could do anything for the wounded U.S. soldiers. They were the enemy, yes, but watching anybody suffer wasn't easy. One of them had a leg bent at an un natural angle. McGregor knew how to set broken bones.

He never got the chance. The officer who'd shot the two horses swung up his pistol and aimed it at McGregor's head. "Don't move, Canuck," he snapped. "You'll be hostage number one. We'll take twenty of you bastards, and if the bomber doesn't give himself up, we'll line you up against a wall and teach you a lesson you'll remember the rest of your life." He laughed.

McGregor froze. He'd known the Yankees did things like that, but he'd never imagined it could happen to him.

Mary came flying out of the general store. "Don't you point a gun at my pa!" she screamed at the officer. McGregor grabbed her before she could hurl herself against the American. He had to move to do that, but the man didn't fire.

Henry Gibbon came out of the store, too. "Have a heart, Crane," he said to the U.S. officer. "Arthur McGregor's no bomber, and he doesn't live in town, so he doesn't make much of a hostage, neither. Only reason he came in is that today's his little girl's seventh birthday." He pointed to Mary.

The U.S. officer-Crane-scowled-but after a moment he lowered the pistol. "All right," he said to McGregor. "Get the hell out of here."

McGregor's legs felt loose and light with fear and relief, so he seemed to be floating above the ground, not walking on it. He steered Mary toward the side street on which he'd left the wagon.

"But I didn't get my birthday presents!" she said, and started to cry.

"Oh, yes, you did," he told her.

"No, I didn't!" she said. "Not anything, not even one peppermint drop."

"Oh, yes, you did," he repeated, so emphatically that she looked up in puzzled curiosity. He pointed to himself. "Do you know what you got? You got to keep me."

She kept on crying. He wasn't a doll or a ball or a top or a peppermint drop. He didn't care. He was alive, and he was going to stay that way a while longer.

Jefferson Pinkard got to the foundry floor at the Sloss works a few minutes early, as he usually did. Vespasian and Agrippa, the two Negroes who'd taken over the night shift, nodded and said, "Mornin', Mistuh Pinkard," together.

"Mornin'," Pinkard said. Both blacks had proved themselves solid workers, worthy of being talked with almost as if they were white men. He looked around. "Where's Pericles at? He's usually in here before I am."

After a pause, Vespasian said, "He ain't corain' in today, Mistuh Pinkard."

"Oh?" Jeff said. "He sick?" Pericles and Vespasian were kin or in-laws or something of the sort; he couldn't quite remember what. Just because you talked with black men didn't mean you had to keep track of every little thing about them.

Vespasian shook his head. "No, suh, he ain't sick," he answered. He sounded tired unto death, not just because of the night's work but also from a lifetime's worth of weariness. A moment later, the words dragging out of him one by one, he went on, "No, suh, like I say, he ain't sick. He in de jailhouse."

"In the jailhouse? Pericles?" That caught Pinkard by surprise. "What the devil did he do? Get drunk and go after somebody with a busted bottle?" That didn't sound like Pericles, a sober-sided young buck if ever there was one.

And Vespasian shook his head again. "No, suh. He do somethin' like that, we can fix it. He in de jailhouse for — sedition." He whispered the word, pronouncing it with exaggerated care.

"Sedition?" Now Jefferson Pinkard frankly stared. Vespasian was right, he thought. You could fix a charge of brawling against a black man easily enough — provided he hadn't hit a white, of course. If he was a good worker, a couple of words from his boss to the police or the judge would get him off with a small fine, maybe just a lecture about keeping his nose clean. But sedition-that was another ball of wax.

Neither Vespasian nor Agrippa said much more about it. They waited till it was time for them to go off shift, then left in a hurry. Pinkard didn't suppose he could blame them. When one of your own got into trouble, you didn't spend a lot of time talking about that trouble with an outsider.

He had to start his shift by his lonesome, which left him too busy to think about anything else. About half an hour into the shift, a colored fellow who introduced himself as Leonidas joined him. Jeff hoped to high heaven Leonidas wouldn't take Pericles' place for good. He was strong enough, but he wasn't very smart, and he didn't remember from one minute to the next what Pinkard had told him. Jeff kept him from getting hurt or from messing up the job at least half a dozen times that morning. It was more nerve-racking than doing everything by himself would have been, because he never knew ahead of time when or how Leonidas would go wrong, and had to stay on his toes every second.

When the lunch whistle blew, Pinkard sighed with relief-half an hour when he wouldn't have to worry. "See you at one, suh," Leonidas said, taking his dinner bucket and heading off to eat with other Negroes.

"Yeah," Pinkard said. He wondered if Leonidas could find some way to kill himself when he wasn't anywhere near the foundry floor. He wouldn't have been a bit surprised: the Negro was an accident waiting to happen, and probably could happen any old place.

Pinkard opened his own dinner pail. He had a chunk of cornbread and a couple of pieces of roasted chicken in there: leftovers from the night before. He'd just started to eat when a couple of middle-aged fellows in gray police uniforms came up to him. "You Jefferson Davis Pinkard?" asked the one who wore a matching gray mustache.

"That's me," Jeff said with his mouth full. He chewed, swallowed, and then asked more clearly, "Who're you?"

"I'm Bob Mulcahy," the policeman with the mustache answered. He pointed to his clean-shaven partner. "This here's Bill Fitzcolville. We're looking into the matter of a nigger named Pericles. Hear tell he's been working alongside you a while."

"That's a fact," Pinkard agreed, and took another bite of chicken. They weren't going to hold things up on the floor because he was talking with po lice. If he didn't feed his face, he'd have to go hungry till suppertime.

"This Pericles, he been a troublemaker, uppity, anything like that?" Mul cahy asked.

"Not hardly." Pinkard shook his head. "Didn't cotton to the notion of workin' with a nigger, not even a little bit, I tell you. But it ain't worked out too bad. He does his job — did his job, I guess I oughta say. This nigger Leonidas, buck they gave me instead of him, he ain't fit to carry guts to a bear, doesn't look like. But Pericles, he pulled his weight."

Fitzcolville scribbled down his words in a notebook. Mulcahy shifted a good-sized chaw of tobacco from right cheek to left, then asked. "This nigger Pericles, he a smart fellow or a dumb one?"

"Nothin' dumb about him," Jeff answered. "You show him somethin' once, you tell him somethin' once, you don't need to do it twice, on account of he remembers it and does it right his own self."

"Uh-huh," Fitzcolville grunted, as if Pinkard had said something alto gether damning.

Mulcahy kept on with his questions, steadily, imperturbably: "He ever talk about anything political while the two of you was working together?"

"Political?" Pinkard paused for a bite of cornbread. "What the hell kind of politics is a nigger supposed to have? It ain't like he can vote or nothin'."

"Oh, niggers have politics, all right," Mulcahy said. "Red politics, too damn many of 'em. This Pericles, he ever talk about how the war was going or how the war was changing things here back at home?"

Red politics. Emily had said something like that, and he hadn't taken it seriously. The Birmingham police did. Jeff said, "We was talkin' one time about how, after Herb Wallace got hisself killed in the war, the Sloss folks threw his widow out of factory housing here. Pericles didn't reckon that was fair."

"Uh-huh," Fitzcolville said again, and scrawled more notes.

"You gonna call him a Red for that?" Pinkard demanded. "You better call me a Red right at the same time, 'cause I think it stinks like shit, too, what they done to Daisy. Here her husband's gone and got killed for the sake of the fat cats up in Richmond, and they throw her out of her place like a dog. You call that the way things oughta be?"

He'd gone too far. He could see it by the way the two policemen stared at him-stared through him, really. "Maybe you are a Red," Mulcahy said, "but I doubt it. Most of the ones who are have too much sense to run off at the mouth like you do. 'Sides, white men can pretty much say what they please- it's a free country. Niggers, now, we gotta watch niggers."

"I been watchin' this crazy damnfool nigger Leonidas every goddamn minute of the mornin' shift," Pinkard said. "You give me a choice between him and Pericles, I'll take Pericles every goddamn time. When he's here, he does his job. I don't know what he does when he ain't here, and I don't care."

"That's not your job," Mulcahy said. "It is our job, and we've found this nigger tied up in all sorts of stuff niggers got no business sticking their noses into."

"Whatever else he is, he's a steel man," Jeff answered. "Steel he's helped make, I reckon it's done more to hurt the damnyankees than anything else he's done has hurt us."

The two policemen looked at each other. Maybe they hadn't thought of it like that. Maybe, too, they just didn't care for the idea of a white man speak ing up for a black. That second maybe soon proved the true one, for Mulcahy said, "You like that nigger pretty well, don't you?"

Pinkard surged to his feet. "Get out of here," he said, his voice thick with anger and cornbread both. Both policemen gave back a step, too. The foundry floor was no place for anyone unused to it to feel comfortable, either. Jeff had an advantage, and he used it. "You got a lot o' damn nerve, you know that? Callin' me a nigger-lover like I ain't a proper white man. Go on, get the hell out."

"Didn't mean it like that, Pinkard," Bob Mulcahy said. "Just trying to get to the bottom of who all this damn nigger's been messing with."

"He ain't messed much with me, and he know what he's doin', too, not like this lamebrained halfwit they saddled me with now that you took him away," Pinkard said. "Pretty soon, way things look, they're gonna drag my ass off to war — hell of a lot o' white men gone already. You want to keep makin' steel, it's gonna be niggers doin' the work, mostly. Maybe you ought to think about stuff like that a little more often, 'fore you start haulin' hard-workin' bucks off to the jailhouse for no reason at all."

"We've been thinking about it," Bill Fitzcolville said, proving he did have more words in him than ub-bub. "Don't like the answers we get, neither."

"But this here Pericles, we got him dead to rights," Mulcahy said. "Found all kinds of subversive literature at his house: Marx and Engels and Lincoln and Haywood and I don't know who all else. Niggers ain't allowed to have that kind of stuff. He'll spend a while cooling off in jail, that's for damn sure. We're trying to track down how much damage he's done, is what we're doing here."

"Like I said, he ain't done me any damage I know of," Pinkard said. The policemen shrugged and left. But he didn't think that meant he was going to get Pericles back any time soon. He'd just have to go and see if he couldn't turn Leonidas into something a little bit like a steelworker. The odds were against him; he could see that much already. He sighed. Life could be a real pisser sometimes, no two ways about it.