Breakthroughs

IX

“Well, Edna,” Nellie Semphroch said with a groan, “I wish you’d married that Rebel officer and moved away from here, the way you were talking about.”

“So do I, Ma,” her daughter moaned. “Oh, Jesus Christ, so do I.” They were not angry at each other, not for the moment. What sounded like a thunderstorm raged outside.

It was not a thunderstorm. It was worse, much worse. “If you’d gone somewhere far away, you’d be safe now,” Nellie said. “You ain’t safe here. Nobody’s safe in Washington, not any more.”

Two candles lit the cellar under the coffeehouse from which Nellie had made so much during the war. Every few seconds, another U.S. shell would crash down, and the candlesticks would shake and the flames jerk. Every so often-far more often than Nellie’s frazzled nerves could readily bear-a shell would land close by or a round from a big gun would hit a little farther off. Then the candlesticks would jump, and the flames leap and swoop wildly. A couple of times, Nellie had to move like lightning to keep the candlesticks from falling over and the candles from starting a fire.

If a big shell came down on the coffeehouse…If a big shell came down on the coffeehouse, it would pierce the roof and then the ceiling of the first story and then the floor, every one of them as if it weren’t there at all. Those shells, she’d heard, had special hard noses to smash their way even into concrete installations. If one of them exploded in the cellar-well, she and Edna would never know what hit them, and that, she had seen, was in its own way a mercy.

A heavy shell thudded home. The ground shook, as if in an earthquake (or so Nellie imagined; she’d never felt a real earthquake). Edna started to cry. “God, God, Ma,” she wailed. “This here is the capital of the United States. What the hell is the U.S. Army doing, blowing the capital of their own goddamn country to pieces?”

“If the Rebs would have left, if they would have said Washington was an open city and pulled back over the Potomac into Virginia, this never would have happened,” her mother answered. “But they keep going on about how Washington is theirs, and they built all those forts on the high ground north of town-built ’em or took over the ones we made-and so this is what happens on account of it.”

Edna was not inclined to argue politics. She’d wanted to marry Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid for his personal charms, not out of sympathy for the Confederate States of America. Falling in love with him (that was what Edna called it, though to Nellie it had never looked like anything but an itch in the privates) had made her more sympathetic to the CSA, but not all that much more.

One of the candles burned out, making the cellar even gloomier and filling it with the greasy stink of hot tallow. Edna lighted a fresh candle from the one still burning and stuck it in its candlestick. The flickering flames filled her face with shadows, making her look far older than her years. “Ma…?” she began, and then hesitated.

“What is it?” Nellie asked warily. These days, that kind of stuttering led only to trouble.

Sure enough, when Edna resumed, it was to ask, “Ma, why do you suppose that Bill Reach yelled for everybody to get out of the church just when the Yanks-uh, the Army-were gettin’ ready to start shooting at Washington?”

“I don’t know.” Nellie’s voice was tight. “I don’t care. I wish I’d never set eyes on Bill Reach, not a long time ago and not now, either.”

She waited for her daughter to bait her about the strumpet’s life she’d led. But Edna’s mind, for once, turned in a different direction. “How do you suppose he knew, Ma? How could he have known the Army was going to open up on us right then?”

“I couldn’t begin to tell you,” Nellie answered. That didn’t mean she didn’t know, as she hoped Edna would think it would. It meant only what it said: that she couldn’t tell.

But Edna, despite being wild for life, was not a fool in matters unrelated to large, handsome, empty-headed men. “He couldn’t have known, Ma,” she insisted, “not if he’s just a drunken bum. Only thing a drunken bum cares about is his next bottle. Only way he could have known…” She drew in a sharp, excited breath. “Ma, the only way he could have known is if he’s a spy.”

Edna had hit the nail on the head. She didn’t realize that hitting the nail on the head endangered not only Bill Reach-who, in Nellie’s view, deserved all the danger he could find and then some-but also Hal Jacobs and Nellie herself. With a sniff, Nellie said, “Anyone who’d hire that louse to spy for him would have to be pretty hard up, if you want to know what I think.”

That was true. Hal Jacobs, now, was sober and sensible-sensible enough to stay sober, too. Nellie could see him as a spy. Why Reach never started babbling about what he knew to everyone around him when he got drunk was beyond her.

Edna said, “But he couldn’t be anything else, Ma. He knew. Somebody must have told him.”

“I wouldn’t want to tell Bill Reach anything, except where to head in,” Nellie said grimly. “And anybody else who would want to is a fool, like I said before. I don’t know what he might have heard while he was laying in the gutter, and I don’t want to know, either.”

For a wonder, Edna subsided. The bombardment didn’t. The U.S. Army seemed intent on killing every Confederate in Washington, D.C. If that meant killing all the U.S. citizens left in the tortured city, too, well, fair enough. For variety’s sake, perhaps, bombing aeroplanes roared overhead and dropped long strings of explosives that made the candlesticks quiver as if they were in torment along with everything else in town.

At last, hours later, a lull came. “Let’s go up and cook something to eat,” Nellie said. “Then, if they haven’t started up again by the time we’re through, I think I’ll scurry across the street and see how Mr. Jacobs is getting along.”

“All right, Ma, you go ahead and do that,” Edna said, but without the viciousness that would have informed the words before the disaster of her wedding. Losing her fiance on what would have been their wedding day had taken a lot of the starch out of her.

It was dark in the coffeehouse, too: night outside, with a few strips and circles of moonlight sliding through holes shell fragments had punched in the boards that covered the window opening. The gas had gone out as soon as U.S. shelling started, which was sensible of the Confederate authorities but made life no easier. Edna scooped coal into the firebox of the stove and got a fire going.

“I hope this beefsteak is still good,” Nellie muttered, sniffing at it as she took it out of the icebox. She sighed. “You may as well cook it up, because it won’t be any better tomorrow. God only knows when we’ll have the chance to get ice again.”

Edna fried it in an iron spider. It tasted a little gamy, but not too bad. But when Edna turned the tap to get water to make coffee, nothing came out. “The Rebs wouldn’t have shut off the water,” she said. “They couldn’t put out any fires if they did.”

“A shell must have broken a pipe somewhere not far away,” Nellie said. “If the water doesn’t come back on soon, we’ll have to carry it back from the river in a bucket and boil it. That will be dangerous, if the shelling keeps up like this.”

“Oh, well.” Edna tried to make the best of things: “If there ain’t no water, I can’t very well do dishes, now can I?”

“I’m going across the street,” Nellie said, and her daughter nodded. When Nellie opened the door and inhaled, she coughed. The air was thick with smoke. A lot of the things that could burn in Washington were burning. Here and there in the near and middle distance, orange flames flickered and leaped.

Nellie was not supposed to be on the street after dusk. A Confederate patrol that spied her was as likely as not to shoot first and ask questions later. But she didn’t think she would be spotted, and she wasn’t.

When she opened the door to Hal Jacobs’ cobbler’s shop, the bell over it jangled, as if cheerily announcing a customer. Jacobs looked up, candlelight exaggerating the surprise on his face. The two men huddled with him also looked startled. One was Lou Pfeiffer, a pigeon fancier who used his birds to carry messages out of Washington. The other, to Nellie’s horrified dismay, was Bill Reach.

“I came to check and make sure you were all right, Mr. Jacobs,” Nellie said in a voice that might have been carved from ice. “I see you are. Good evening.” She turned and started back across the street.

“Widow Semphroch-Nellie-please wait,” Jacobs said. “Mr. Reach has something he would like to say to you-don’t you, Bill?” He bore down heavily on the last three words.

Reach, for once, wasn’t obviously drunk. That did not make his tone any less raspy and rough when he said, “I’m sorry as he-as anything for all the trouble I caused you, Lit-uh, Nellie, and I sure as-as can be won’t do anything like that ever again, honest to God I won’t.” He took off his battered black derby, revealing a mat of unkempt gray hair beneath.

It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough. But it sufficed to bring Nellie back into the shop. Lou Pfeiffer’s round head went up and down on his fat neck. “That’s good,” he wheezed. “That’s very good.”

And then the thunder from the north that had died away started up again, not only started up again but was, impossibly, louder and fiercer than ever. Shells began crashing down, some very close by. Fragments whined off brick and stone and bit into and through rough wood. “To the cellar!” Jacobs shouted.

Nellie hesitated. Crossing the street to get back to her own cellar in the middle of the bombardment was nothing but madness. Going down into the cellar here, with a man who, she thought, loved her; a man who had used her; and a man about whom she knew next to nothing…

She hesitated, and was lost. “Come on! To the cellar!” Jacobs bawled again. He grabbed her by the arm and half dragged her down the stairs.

Meant for one, his cellar was obscenely crowded for four. Nellie sat in one corner of the tiny, stifling chamber, her skirts pulled in tight around her, willing no one to come near. And no one did. But they all kept looking at her in the flickering light of the candle flame. And they were all men, so she knew-she was sure she knew-what went through their filthy minds.

And then, to her horror, Bill Reach pulled from his pocket a flask and began to drink. She sprang to her feet and was up the stairs and shoving the cellar door open before Hal Jacobs could do anything more than let out a startled bleat. She slammed the door down on top of the three U.S. spies and fled.

When she got back to the cellar under the coffeehouse, she discovered flying fragments had sliced her skirt to shreds. Not one of them had touched her flesh. “You all right, Ma?” Edna asked. “I heard you at the cellar door right in the middle of all the guns-before that, I was afraid you were a goner, and then I thought you were nuts, coming out in that.”

“With where I was, I’d go out among the shells again in a minute.” Nellie spoke with great conviction. “In a second, believe me.” Edna shot her a quizzical glance. She shuddered but did not explain.

Far in the distance, off somewhere on the west Texas plains, a coyote howled, a wail full of hunger and loneliness and unrequited lust. Hipolito Rodriguez let out a soft chuckle. “He is not very happy, I don’t think. The way he sound, he might as well be a soldier, si?”

Before Jefferson Pinkard could answer, Sergeant Albert Cross said, “Need some men for a raidin’ party on the Yankee trenches tonight.”

Pinkard stuck up his hand. “I’ll go, Sarge.”

Cross looked at him without saying anything for a while. Then he remarked, “You don’t got to kill all the damnyankees in Texas by your lonesome, Jeff. Leave some for the rest of us.”

“I want to go, Sarge,” Pinkard answered. He had never been a particularly eloquent man. Instead of saying more with words, he folded his big hands into fists. “What they done-” He shook his head in frustration. The words clogged in his throat.

In the end, Sergeant Cross shrugged. “Well, hell, you want ’em that bad, reckon you can have ’em. Who else?”

“I go,” Hip Rodriguez said quietly.

One by one, Cross got the rest of the volunteers. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s mighty fine. We go out half past midnight. Y’all grab yourselves some shuteye before then. Don’t want any sleepy bastard yawnin’ out in the middle of no-man’s-land an’ lettin’ the damnyankees know we’re comin’. See y’all tomorrow mornin’-early tomorrow mornin’.”

After the sergeant went on his way, Rodriguez said, “Ever since you get back from leave, amigo, you want to go on all the raids, on all the attacks. You never used to do nothing like that before.”

“What about it?” Pinkard said. “Yankees ain’t gonna get out of Texas unless we grab ’em by the scruff of the neck and heave ’em on out. Somebody’s got to do it. Might as well be me.”

Rodriguez studied him. The little Sonoran farmer’s eyes might have been black glass in his swarthy face. “You don’t have such a good time like you think when you get back home?” he asked. He didn’t push. He didn’t raise his voice. He let Pinkard answer without making him feel he had to tell any deep, dark secrets.

But no matter how discreet he was, no matter how little pressure he applied, Jefferson Pinkard kept on saying what he’d been saying ever since he returned to the front from Birmingham: “Had a hell of a time back home.”

In a certain sense, that was even true. He hadn’t screwed so much on his honeymoon down in Mobile. Emily had done everything he wanted. Emily had done more than he’d imagined. He’d wakened one night to her sucking him hard and then pulling him over onto her. She’d been wet and waiting. He’d worn himself out by then, and hadn’t thought he could come, but he’d been wrong.

Bedford Cunningham had made himself scarce, too. After that first dreadful moment, Jeff hadn’t seen him at all. That suited Jeff fine. If he never saw Bedford again, that would suit him even better.

But now he was back here, somewhere east of Lubbock. Bedford Cunningham remained in Birmingham, remained next door to Emily. What were they doing now that Jeff was gone? Was she rubbing her breasts in his face? Was she teasing his foreskin with her tongue? Was she groaning and gurgling and urging him on, her legs folded around his back tight as a bear trap’s jaws?

Every filthy picture in Pinkard’s mind made him wish he were dead, and Cunningham, and Emily. And, at the same time, every filthy picture in his mind made him wish he were back in Birmingham, so Emily could do those things to him.

“Yeah, a hell of a time,” he repeated. Rodriguez plainly didn’t believe him. Well, too damn bad, Hip, Jeff thought.

He wrapped himself in his blanket, more to keep the mosquitoes away than for warmth, and did his best to sleep. Images of Emily naked and lewd made him sweat harder than the hot, muggy weather could have done by itself. At last, despite them, he dozed-and dreamt of his wife, naked and lewd. Whether awake or asleep, he could not escape her…except when he fought.

Sergeant Cross shook him awake at midnight. For a moment, he thought the hand on his shoulder was Emily’s. When he realized it wasn’t, he also realized he was liable to be killed inside the next hour. He scrambled eagerly to his feet. “Let’s get moving, Sarge,” he said.

“Keep your britches on, Jeff,” Cross answered. “Some of our buddies are still sawing wood. We got to wait on the artillery, too. They’re gonna lay down a box barrage for us, keep the Yanks from bringing reinforcements into the stretch of trench we hit.”

“That sounds pretty good,” Pinkard said. “They want us to bring back prisoners, or are we supposed to come back by ourselves?”

“Nobody told me one way or the other,” Cross said. “Reckon we’ll have to play that one by ear when we get over there.” Seeing Pinkard yawn, he went on, “Grab yourself some coffee. Pot on a little fire just down the way.”

The coffee was thick and tasted like dirt and was strong enough to strip paint, but it made Pinkard’s heart beat faster and his eyes open wide. He gulped it down, swearing as it burned his mouth. Several of his comrades took cups, too. Pretty soon, the pot was empty.

Sergeant Cross passed out burlap sacks of grenades. Jeff took one. The little round bombs-British style, not the potato-mashers the Yanks and the Huns used-were fine for trench fighting. Bayonet and entrenching tool were even better, as far as Pinkard was concerned.

One by one, the men in butternut climbed out of the trench and crawled through the few pathetic lengths of wire that passed for a belt. Cross said, “This here wire reminds me of a bald fellow combin’ about the last three strands he’s got across his shiny old dome and pretendin’ he’s got hisself a whole head o’ hair. He may be fooled, but ain’t nobody else who is.”

Several soldiers chuckled in low voices. Pinkard didn’t, but he nodded at the aptness of the comparison. Because they had any barbed wire at all, the Confederate commanders in Texas often seemed to think they had great thickets of the stuff, as was true in Virginia and Tennessee-not that, from the news coming west, it had done the CSA a whole lot of good there, either.

A little to the north, a flare rose from the Yankee lines. It burned in the sky, a fierce white point of light. Under its glare, the advancing Confederate soldiers froze. Pinkard pressed his face into the dirt. It smelled of dust and of dead bodies. That stink of rotting flesh never left his nostrils; even more than cordite and coffee and tobacco, it was the definitive odor of the front, as hot iron was the definitive odor of the Sloss Foundry.

After what felt like forever, the flare finally faded. Jeff crawled on. He skirted shell holes when he could, but was always ready to dive into one if the U.S. soldiers opened up on the raiding party.

Cross muttered discontentedly: “Sure as hell, goddamn artillery’s gonna open up too goddamn soon. They ain’t gonna figure out we had to wait for the flare. Goddamn artillery can’t figure out to grab their asses with both hands, anybody wants to know.”

He was right. The Confederate soldiers hadn’t reached the Yankee wire-thicker than their own, but not much-when the three-inch guns behind the C.S. line started barking. Shells rained down on the U.S. position, making the sides and back of a box that isolated a stretch of the forward trenches.

Like the rest of the men in the raiding party, Pinkard wore a wire-cutter on his belt. He could crawl under most of the wire the damnyankees had laid, and snipped his way through the few places where he had trouble crawling. Somebody in the U.S. trench fired. Jeff didn’t think it was an aimed shot. He wanted to thank the Yankee for it; it told him exactly where the trench line was.

He yanked a grenade out of the sack, pulled off the ring, and chucked the bomb into the trench, as close to the Yankee rifleman as he could put it. The report was loud and hard and short. He threw more grenades. So did the rest of the raiders. Then, with a yell, he scrambled forward and leaped down into the U.S. trench.

“Hey there, you-” The words were spoken in a sharp Yankee accent. Jeff didn’t reach over his shoulder for his rifle. Faster to yank the entrenching tool off his belt and swing it in a short, flat arc. The shovel blade struck flesh and bit deep. The U.S. soldier went down with a groan. Then Pinkard unslung the Tredegar and ran along the firebay.

A potato-masher grenade hurled from a traverse exploded eight or ten feet in front of him. A fragment bit the back of his hand. Another tore through his tunic without grazing him. He dashed past the place where the grenade had gone off and into the traverse. A Yankee yelled and fired. He missed. Pinkard lunged with the bayonet. He grunted as it penetrated the U.S. soldier’s flesh, almost as he sometimes grunted when he penetrated Emily’s flesh.

The damnyankee shrieked and crumpled. Jeff fired and stabbed, stabbed and fired, till three or four more Yankees were down and none left on his feet in the traverse. He grunted again, an oddly sated sound.

Somebody touched him on the shoulder. He whirled, and would have spitted Hip Rodriguez if the Sonoran hadn’t beaten the bayonet aside with his own rifle. “We got to go back, Jeff,” Rodriguez said. “The sergeant, he blow the whistle. You no hear?”

Consumed in his orgy of killing, Pinkard hadn’t heard anything. He shook his head like a man coming out of a dream. “All right, Hip,” he said meekly. “I’ll come back with you.”

Rodriguez looked down the length of the traverse. Muttering, “Ten million demons from hell,” he crossed himself. To Jeff, he said, “You fight like a crazy man, amigo.”

“Yeah,” Pinkard said. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

U.S. artillery pumped shells into no-man’s-land as the Confederate raiders crawled and scrambled back to their own line. One man took a splinter in the leg. One man hadn’t come out of the trench. Even so, Sergeant Cross reported to Captain Connolly with considerable pride: “Sir, we whaled the stuffing out of the sons of bitches. Pinkard here, he was worth a regiment all by hisself.”

“Good news, Sergeant,” the company commander said. “Well done, Pinkard.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jeff answered. His voice was dull, far away. The red mist of slaughter had retreated from his mind. He felt spent and empty. Emily cavorted once more behind his eyes.

Four fat freighters slowly steamed south. Watching them from the deck of the USS Ericsson, George Enos sighed and said, “I don’t know why they bother painting themselves in camouflage colors. A big bull’s-eye with SINK ME alongside it in big letters would be more like the straight story.”

Carl Sturtevant chuckled. “You aren’t looking at the world with the proper spirit, George,” he said, for all the world like a chaplain.

Enos snorted. “And you aren’t looking at the world like any petty officer I ever heard of,” he retorted. “You’re supposed to go ‘Goddamn right’ when I say something like that.”

The chief of the depth-charge projector crew laughed. “I never do what I’m supposed to if I can help it.”

“All right.” Enos chuckled, too. The ships wallowed along, painted in stripes and patches and gaudy colors that were supposed to make it hard for the skipper of a submersible to gauge either their range or their course. Whether the camouflage job did that or not, George couldn’t have said. It made the freighters ugly as sin, though. There he was certain.

Stripes zigzagged jaggedly over the Ericsson, too, in an effort to break up her outline and make her seem to be moving in the direction of her own stern. She and a sister ship scurried around the freighter like sheep dogs around sheep, doing their best to keep the flock safe from the wolves that lurked under the surface of the sea.

“What I want to do,” Enos said, “is get the bastard who almost torpedoed us a few weeks ago. Lord knows he’s still hanging around; he would have chewed up that other bunch of freighters if we hadn’t run him off.”

Sturtevant raised an ironic eyebrow. “I swear, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Lieutenant Crowder reported that submersible as probably destroyed, and if you don’t think Lieutenant Crowder knows everything in the world, well, shit, just ask him.”

“Yeah, and rain makes applesauce,” Enos said. They both laughed then; laughing at the pretensions of officers was a sailors’ tradition old as time.

“He’s not too bad a fellow,” Sturtevant allowed in an astonishing display of magnanimity, “as long as you don’t take him too serious. Give him a chance, though, and he’d have half of us up in aeroplanes and the other half down under the water in deep-sea diver suits, tryin’ to catch torpedoes like they were footballs the Rebs were throwing at us.”

“He does like gadgets,” Enos agreed. “At least the depth-charge projector is a pretty good gadget.”

A veteran seaman, Sturtevant had almost as little use for new-fangled devices as he did for young officers enamored of them. When he said, “Yeah, it’s not too bad,” he surely meant it as high praise, and that was how George Enos took it.

Enos stared out across the blue, blue water of the tropical Atlantic, looking for anything that might alert him to the presence of the Confederate submarine that also seemed to make its home in this stretch of ocean. He’d spied the stinking thing once-why not twice?

Ocean, squawking birds, sun standing higher in the sky every day-and far higher now than Enos had ever seen, anyway. Despite that fierce and brilliant light, he didn’t spot anything out of the ordinary.

He kept looking ahead of the freighters, ahead and off to one side. If the submersible did prowl in these waters, that was the direction from which it would attack. It couldn’t move very fast while submerged; it had to take the lead on the surface, then go under and slowly sneak toward its intended prey.

George did his best to think like the skipper of a submersible. One thing he knew: the skipper of the boat that had almost sunk the Ericsson had nerve and brains both. He’d pretended to be sunk well enough to fool Lieutenant Crowder, and then he’d gone after U.S. freighters the first chance he got. That was his job, and he was going to do it come hell or high water-in fact, he’d probably prefer high water.

“There ought to be a better way to find a submersible that’s hunting than bare-naked eyeballs,” George said. “What we need”-he glanced over at Carl Sturtevant-“is a new kind of gadget.”

“Here’s what you need.” Sturtevant displayed the middle finger of his right hand. “And for God’s sake don’t say that anyplace where Crowder can hear you. He’ll either order you to invent the damn thing yourself-and by day before yesterday, too, or you’ll be in Dutch-or else he’ll try and do it himself, and that won’t work, either.”

“Yeah, but-” Enos got no further than that. The lead freighter blew up. It was a spectacular explosion; the ship must have been carrying munitions. The report slapped George in the face across a couple of miles of water. “Jesus!” he exclaimed.

Klaxons started hooting men to their battle stations. The Ericsson’s deck shuddered under Enos’ feet as he ran. The stacks belched smoke. The destroyer picked up speed.

At the one-pounder by the stern, George peered about. He suspected-he feared-he was likelier to spot a torpedo wake heading straight for the Ericsson than a telltale periscope. If he didn’t try to spot a periscope, though, nothing could be more certain than his failure.

A runner came up to Lieutenant Crowder at the depth-charge projector by Enos’ gun and said, “Sir, this is where the bastard-uh, the submersible-is hiding. Captain wants you to shake him up to the surface if you can.”

“We’ll do that,” Crowder said. He turned back to Carl Sturtevant, who did the dirty work of running the projector. “We’ll shake those Rebel bastards or their limey pals right out of their shoes. Give me four charges, Sturtevant; set the fuses for two hundred feet.”

“Aye aye, sir. Four charges. Two hundred feet,” the veteran petty officer repeated tonelessly. That tonelessness was itself a dead giveaway that he did not agree with his superior’s order. Indeed, as the crew loaded the first two charges onto the projector, he went so far as to ask, “Did I hear that right, sir?” If Crowder said no, he could change the order without losing face by having a man of lower rank correct him.

But Crowder, crisply, said, “Yes. I want them deep. After he sank that freighter, the skipper down there will surely have seen us coming to the attack. He will try to place as much ocean between himself and us as he can. Two hundred feet I said; two hundred feet it shall be.”

“Yes, sir,” Sturtevant answered, even more woodenly than before. Two by two, the depth charges flew off the Ericsson’s stern and splashed into the sea.

That yes, sir in place of aye aye, sir was a telling proof of how strongly Sturtevant disagreed with Lieutenant Crowder. Standing there behind the one-pounder, George Enos found himself on the petty officer’s side. Whatever flag the boat somewhere under them flew, its skipper had proved himself a tough, aggressive bastard in earlier attacks. George didn’t think a skipper like that would lurk in the depths, either. His guess was that the enemy captain would come up to periscope depth as soon as he could, and try to put a fish right in the Ericsson’s engine room. In which case, sending depth charges down two hundred feet would be a waste of good explosives.

George’s eyes went back and forth, back and forth, looking for the feathery plume of wake that trailed and could give away a periscope. He imagined he saw something a couple of times, but longer looks proved him wrong.

Astern of the Ericsson, water boiled and bubbled, the surface mark of the depth charges’ explosions. Moments later, oil floated up from far underwater, flattening the waves over which it rode. “Well, dip me in shit and fry me for bacon,” Carl Sturtevant said in conversational tones. “Either we’ve hurt the son of a bitch or else he’s trying to make us think we did. Whether it’s the one or the other, we didn’t miss him by much.” He solemnly took off his hat to Lieutenant Crowder. “Beg your pardon, sir. You were right and I was wrong, and I’m man enough to admit it.”

“Never mind that.” Crowder pointed back to the oil slick. “Let’s get over it and pound that boat to death. I’ll want half the ash cans we throw down there fused for a hundred and fifty feet, the other half for two-fifty.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Sturtevant said, and repeated back the order. No back talk now; his thoughts and Crowder’s were running down the same track.

Like any destroyer, the Ericsson was an agile vessel. She quickly returned to the floating oil. Into the water splashed the new salvo of depth charges.

Explosions underwater once more roiled the surface of the sea. Enos stood at his gun, ready to pound away at the submarine if she had to surface in a hurry. He was also ready for disappointment; the submersible had tricked the destroyer before. More oil came to the surface, and air bubbles, and bits of wreckage swept up by the bubbles.

The men at the depth-charge projector cheered and beat their fists against its metal sides. “If he’s shamming this time, he’s a better actor than any Booth ever born,” Lieutenant Crowder shouted. “Set some for two-fifty again, Sturtevant, and some for an even hundred. If we’ve hurt that boat bad enough, it’ll have to surface. Hop to it, you men.”

Hop to it they did. Depth charges rained into the Atlantic. With a kill so close, Crowder fired them off with reckless abandon. If the Ericsson didn’t sink the submarine, she’d be all but defenseless against it. George caressed the curved metal of the one-pounder’s trigger as if it were his wife’s curved flesh. “Come on,” he muttered. “Come on, you son of a whore.”

And, like a broaching whale, up the submarine came. She rose bow-first, and was plainly in desperate straits. No sooner had the boat reached the surface than she heeled over onto her side and began to sink once more. Though it was more nearly horizontal than vertical, an officer came out of the conning-tower hatch and threw something into the water: the boat’s papers in a weighted sack, George supposed.

He fired a ten-round clip of one-pounder shells at the enemy officer. One struck home; the officer’s head exploded into red fog. The fellow-he was a Rebel, for he wore dark gray trousers, not Royal Navy blue-tumbled into the sea. A moment later, the submersible sank, this time for good.

Carl Sturtevant pounded George on the back. “Good shooting, snapping turtle,” he bawled in Enos’ ear. “You see the name on the boat there?”

“Bon-something,” George said. “She rolled over too damn fast to get more than just a glimpse.”

“Bonefish, had to be,” Sturtevant said. “There’s swarms of ’em in C.S. waters; no wonder they’d name a boat after ’em.”

“We sent it to the boneyard, by God,” Enos answered. Solemnly, the two men shook hands.

Cincinnatus wished he were driving his truck. Inside the cab of the rumbling, snorting White machine, nobody was watching him. Here in Covington, he wished he had eyes in the back of his head, and one on each side, too. Did that fellow with the gray mustache waiting for the trolley belong to Luther Bliss’ Kentucky State Police? Was that redhead in overalls a member of the Confederate underground that kept on doing its best to disrupt Kentucky’s return to the USA? When he got back into the colored part of town, he wondered whether the woman hawking apples reported to Apicius or some other Red cell leader. All those groups were intently interested in keeping an eye on him.

And things weren’t simple, either. The colored woman selling apples might have reported to Luther Bliss, or even to the Confederate diehards. Cincinnatus had worked with them; other Negroes could, too. For that matter, white Reds could work with black Reds. Maybe none of those people, nor any others he passed on the street, was interested in him at all. He hoped none of those people was interested in him at all. He had trouble believing it, though.

Time was when he’d let out a sigh of relief coming up the walk to his house. When he was home with Elizabeth and little Achilles, nothing could bother him. That was what he’d thought then.

Now…As he went up the wooden steps onto his front porch, his eyes automatically dropped to look at the boards right in front of the door. There was nothing to see. He and Elizabeth had both worked hard to get rid of every trace of Tom Kennedy’s blood. No, there was nothing to see. But he knew the blood was there.

What he didn’t know was who had blown off a big chunk of Kennedy’s head. He had next to no chance of finding out, either, because everyone thought he was in someone else’s pocket and so didn’t want to give him the time of day. But if he didn’t find out who’d murdered the Confederate diehard and why, whoever it was might decide he needed killing, too. Since he didn’t know whom in particular to worry about, he had to worry about everybody, which got wearing.

Elizabeth had got home ahead of him. She must have seen him coming, for she opened the door as he was reaching for the knob. Out toddled Achilles, a big smile on his face. “Dada!” he said, grabbing Cincinnatus around the leg. “Dada!”

“Sounds more like a real word now,” Cincinnatus said, leaning forward over his son to kiss his wife. “Not jus’ babble, babble, babble, way it used to be.”

Then Achilles tugged on his trouser leg and spoke imperiously: “Up!”

Laughing, Cincinnatus lifted him. He was a lot lighter than crated rifles and munitions, and there was only the one of him, not unending loads in the back of the truck. When Cincinnatus remarked on that, Elizabeth snorted. “May only be the one,” she said, “but it sure enough seems like there’s about a hundred an’ ten of him sometimes.”

Cincinnatus carried the toddler into the house. He paused in the front hall and sniffed appreciatively. “What smells so good?”

“That beef tongue I bought at the butcher’s the other day,” his wife answered. “Your mother threw it in the pot with taters an’ onions while she was watching Achilles. And I’ve got some string beans and salt pork cookin’ up in there, too.”

“I knew I married you for some reason,” Cincinnatus said. Elizabeth stuck out her tongue at him. When she turned to go into the kitchen, he swatted her lightly on the backside. They both laughed.

Supper proved to be as good as it smelled, which wasn’t easy. Afterwards, happily replete, Cincinnatus played with Achilles while Elizabeth cleaned up in the kitchen. Achilles liked chasing a little rubber football. Whenever he tried to kick it, he fell on his bottom. He thought that was part of the fun.

After a while, he tried something different. Cincinnatus had been tossing the ball for him to chase. He went and got it and did his best to throw it back. It went up in the air and bounced off his head. As far as he was concerned, that was pretty damn funny, too.

While he got the ball and tried again to throw it to Cincinnatus, his father laughed and said, “I wonder if that’s how the Yankees got the notion of throwin’ the ball forwards when they play football.” In the Confederate States, passes toward the other side’s goal line were against the rules. Football in the United States, though, permitted forward passes that were hurled from at least five yards behind the line of scrimmage.

When Elizabeth finished the dishes, Cincinnatus lighted a cigar (a lousy cigar-tobacco had gone downhill since Kentucky’s forcible separation from the CSA) and read the evening newspaper Elizabeth had-with the white lady’s permission-brought home from one of the houses she cleaned. As usual, the paper claimed extravagant U.S., German, and even Austrian victories. Had a quarter of what the papers claimed been true, the forces of the Quadruple Alliance would have conquered the world ten times over.

Someone knocked on the door. Cincinnatus and Elizabeth both looked up in alarm. Not so long before, Tom Kennedy had knocked on the door like that-and died on the doorstep a moment later. Was it a neighbor wanting to borrow some molasses, or was it a ruse to get Cincinnatus to open the door and expose himself to someone crouched in the dark with a rifle?

Only one way to find out. “Who is it?” Cincinnatus asked warily. Before the war, he would have opened the door without asking. Before the war, the door might well have been open anyhow on a warm spring night, or Elizabeth and he might have been sitting out on the front porch.

A deep voice answered: “It sure as hell ain’t the Easter bunny, and it ain’t Father Christmas, neither.”

Cincinnatus opened the door. There stood Apicius, who was almost certainly the best barbecue cook in the USA. He might have been the best barbecue cook in the CSA, too, but the competition was stiffer there. As fit his trade, the big black man was big in all dimensions. Solid muscle lay under his fat. “You better come in,” Cincinnatus said. “I don’t reckon this is no social call.”

“And it ain’t,” Apicius said, squeezing past him. “I ain’t here on my business. I’m here on the business of the workers and peasants of the state of Kentucky.” His chuckle was wheezy. “And why ain’t you surprised?”

“Can’t imagine,” Cincinnatus answered, letting the cook precede him down the hall and into the front room. Apicius and Elizabeth greeted each other. Then she took Achilles back to the bedroom. As far as Cincinnatus was concerned, the less she involved herself in affairs of politics and the various undergrounds with which he was entangled, the better.

“You got the fine start to a family here,” Apicius said, and nodded at his own words. “Need yourself some more young uns, but that’ll come, that’ll come.”

“You didn’t come over here to jaw about my family,” Cincinnatus said. “Nothin’s gonna pry you away from the barbecue pit if it ain’t important.”

“That’s a fact,” Apicius said. “You never was a fool, Cincinnatus.”

“Yeah, go on and baste me with that big old long-handled brush o’ yours,” Cincinnatus said. “Then you put me over the fire an’ turn me on the spit.”

Apicius laughed, but he quickly sobered. “All right. I won’t waste your time. I won’t waste my time. What I got to know is this: whose man is you? I can talk with you if you is my man. I can talk with you if you is Tom Kennedy’s man. I-”

“You know what happened to him,” Cincinnatus broke in, his voice harsh.

“I know what. I dunno who done it, and I wish I did. But he still have folks left on his side.” Apicius waved a big, thick-fingered hand, as if to make Cincinnatus’ interruption disappear. “I can even talk with you if you is Luther Bliss’ man.”

Cincinnatus interrupted again: “I ain’t, but you’d be a fool to talk with me if I was. You don’ know how dangerous that Bliss is.”

“Hell I don’t,” Apicius said. “Ain’t no law says the forces of reaction can’t have people on their side who know what they’s doin’. But I can talk with you if you is Bliss’ man. Have to watch what I say, but I can talk. But if I don’t know whose man you is, Cincinnatus, how can I talk with you? I say somethin’, how do I know who hears it?”

Apicius’ point made perfectly good sense. Of all the factions still struggling in Kentucky, Cincinnatus had more sympathy for the Reds than for any other-the Reds were, after all, his own people. But a man who’d been struggling to reach what passed for the upper stratum of black society before the war didn’t completely sympathize with the Reds’ leveling aspirations, either.

The other side of the coin was that, if Apicius didn’t like the answer Cincinnatus gave him, no insurance company in the world would put a nickel on his life. With a sigh, Cincinnatus said, “I never wanted to be nothin’ but my own man. If that ain’t good enough for you, don’t talk with me at all-’cept to say thanks when I buy me some ribs.”

Apicius sighed, too. “You know too goddamn much to be your own man and nobody else’s. You is mixed up in this. Can’t get yourself unmixed, any more’n you can take the sugar out of the coffee once it’s in.”

That was probably true, too. Cincinnatus was about to say so when another knock came from the front of the house. Apicius’ had been ordinary. This one was brisk, authoritative. Whoever was out there expected to be let in right away, with no backtalk from anybody.

“Who?” Apicius whispered.

“Don’t know,” Cincinnatus whispered back. Apicius’ hand went to a trouser pocket: a pistol in there, no doubt. Cincinnatus wished he had one, too. For the second time that evening, he went to the door and called, “Who is it?”

“Queen of the May,” the man outside answered.

Everyone was giving smart answers tonight. Cincinnatus opened the door for Luther Bliss, wondering if he’d get caught in the cross fire between the chief of the Kentucky State Police and Apicius. A glance over his shoulder told him the Red leader had that pistol out and ready. But then, to his amazement, Apicius lowered it. “Evenin’, Luther,” he said.

“Evenin’, Apicius, you damn Red,” Bliss answered amiably. Cincinnatus stared from one of them to the other. They both laughed at him. Pointing to Apicius, Luther Bliss said, “I know who this son of a bitch is. I know what he stands for. Because I know that, he doesn’t worry me too much. I can handle him-reckon he thinks the same about me. You, though, Cincinnatus-who the hell are you? Who are you really working for?”

Apicius laughed again, louder this time. He pointed to Cincinnatus. “I come over here to find out the same damn thing, Luther-and I don’t care if you’s here or not. He still could be one o’yours.”

“Only man I work for is Lieutenant Straubing, who bosses my truck unit,” Cincinnatus said. “I ain’t nobody’s man but my own.” He looked from Apicius to Luther Bliss and back again. One thing was obvious: neither of them believed him.

In the mid-Atlantic, Sylvia Enos read in the Boston Globe as she rode the trolley to work, the USS Ericsson engaged and sank the CSS Bonefish, a submersible that had for some time tormented shipping in the region. The Bonefish had previously torpedoed the SS Teton, a civilian steamship in U.S. service. Our bold Navy has valiantly swept away yet another vicious scourge of the sea.

That was George’s ship. If they’d fought a Confederate submarine, he’d surely been in danger. She folded the paper and leaned back in the uncomfortable seat. He was all right now. And with this Bonefish sunk, he’d keep on being all right a while longer. Now that she hadn’t seen him for a few months, her anger was cooling. He might have wanted to be unfaithful, but he hadn’t actually gone and done it.

And he was all right. Thank you, God, Sylvia thought. Next to that simple fact, the war news on the front page, the mutinies in the French Army and all the rest of it, faded to insignificance. The Ericsson had fought again, and nothing had happened to George. The world looked good.

When the trolley came to her stop, Sylvia left the Globe on the seat for whoever might want it. She hoped the next person who picked it up would find as much good news as she had, and not a name he recognized in the black-bordered casualty lists.

She had a spring in her step as she went into the canning plant. It was usually missing in the morning-especially these days, when she had to get George, Jr., off to kindergarten and Mary Jane to Mrs. Dooley’s before she could come to work.

She was humming a song about coal conservation when she punched in. The words were as stupid as those of most wartime patriotic songs, but she couldn’t get the tune out of her mind. Save your coal for me-Always!/ Says the sailor on the sea-Always! She shook her head in annoyance-not just a stupid song but irritating, too, because it would not leave her alone.

Mr. Winter, the foreman, followed the war news closely, as befit a veteran wounded in the service of his country. “That’s your husband’s destroyer that sank that Rebel submersible, isn’t it, Mrs. Enos?” he called as she walked to the machine that put labels on cans of mackerel.

“Yes, Mr. Winter, George is on the Ericsson, that’s right,” she answered.

“Thought so,” the foreman said, puffing on his cigar. “Well, good for him, by God. I’m glad he came through that safe. Those submersibles are things we didn’t have to worry about in my day. I’ll tell you something else, too: I’m not sorry to have missed them.” He patted his gimpy leg. “I just wish the Rebs had missed me.”

“I’m sure of that, Mr. Winter,” Sylvia said. When she got to her machine, she checked the paste reservoir, which was full, and the label hopper, which turned out to be almost empty. She quickly filled it. That would have been just what she needed: to get caught by surprise fifteen minutes into her shift, and have to hold up the line while she fed the hopper. Mr. Winter would have made some not so polite conversation with her about that.

Isabella Antonelli came hurrying up to the machine next door. “I saw in the paper-your husband’s ship, it sank a submarine,” she said. “This is good news. Better news would be for the dannata war to end, but this is good news for you.”

Before Sylvia could do anything more than nod, the line, which had shut down for shift changeover, started again with the usual assortment of groans and creaks from the belts and gearing. Into the machine went the first brightly tinned can. Sylvia pulled a lever. Three lines of paste flowed onto the can. She took a step and pulled a second lever. On went the label, with the colorful picture of the improbably tunalike mackerel on it. Another step, a third level, and the can went on its way. She went back and did it again…and again…and again.

The day went smoothly. She didn’t have to think about what she was doing. The labels didn’t jam in the hopper once during the whole shift. That was the machine’s Achilles’ heel, the most common problem that could shut down the line and bring down the wrath of Mr. Winter.

Not today. Sylvia still felt almost alarmingly fresh as she clocked out and hurried to the trolley stop to catch the next car to George, Jr.’s, school. The streetcar was right on time. A man with a white Kaiser Bill mustache stood up so she could sit down.

Everything was going so well, she wondered what would happen to break the lucky streak. She found out when she got to the school. He wasn’t in the kindergarten classroom. “You’ll have to get him at the front office,” his teacher, Miss Hammaker, told Sylvia.

“What did he do?” she gasped. “Is he all right?”

“You’ll have to get him at the office,” the dyspeptic-looking spinster repeated. Sylvia snarled at her and hurried away.

When she saw George, Jr., she knew right away what the trouble was. A clerk clacking away at a typewriter spelled it out in two well-chosen words: “Chicken pox.” Then she went on, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to keep him home until the scabs come off the pox.”

“But that will be two weeks from now,” Sylvia exclaimed in horror.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Enos, but we can’t very well let him go spreading a contagious disease, now can we?” the clerk said primly.

“But my job!” Sylvia said. “What am I supposed to do about my job?”

“I really don’t know what to tell you about that, ma’am,” the clerk answered. “We do have the other children to look out for, too, you know.”

Sylvia put a hand on her son’s shoulder. “Come on, George,” she said wearily. “Let’s go get your sister and take the two of you home and then try to figure out what to do next.” She had no idea what to do next. Once she got home, she could start worrying about it. The clerk started typing again. Now that George, Jr., was leaving, she didn’t have to worry about him any more. Sylvia did.

When she got to Mrs. Dooley’s, the woman looked at her with the same disapproval Miss Hammaker had shown. “Mrs. Enos,” she said pointedly, “your daughter will not be welcome here-”

“Until she gets over the chicken pox,” Sylvia finished for her. Mrs. Dooley’s eyebrows rose. Sylvia said, “Just a wild guess, of course.” She kept her arm around George, Jr. The longer he had to stay on his feet, the more pale and sick he looked-and the redder his spots got by comparison.

“I can’t have her here till she’s better,” Mrs. Dooley said. “The other women whose children I mind would have a fit if I let her stay, and I wouldn’t blame them one bit.” She turned. “Go on, Mary Jane. Go home with your mother. When you’re well, you can come back again.”

“All right,” Mary Jane said meekly. That she offered no mischief or snippy talk was a telling indication she didn’t feel right. She too was starting to break out in the red spots that would soon turn into blisters.

Cautiously, Mrs. Dooley asked, “She is vaccinated, isn’t she?”

“What?” Sylvia needed a moment to understand what the question meant. “Oh. Yes. She and her brother both. It’s only chicken pox-it can’t be smallpox.”

“All right.” The older woman nodded. “Most children are vaccinated these days, but you never know. Well, that’s a relief. You take them home now, Mrs. Enos, and bring your daughter back when she’s well.”

Nodding, Sylvia turned away and led the children back to the trolley stop. They didn’t frisk ahead of her, the way they usually did. She urged them to hurry, but they lacked the energy to do it. She counted herself lucky they didn’t make her miss a streetcar.

They had no appetite at supper, which also didn’t surprise her. After they were done picking at their food, she gave them aspirins and put them to bed early. “This itches, Mama,” George, Jr., said. “It itches a lot.”

“Try not to scratch,” Sylvia answered. “If you do, it’ll leave scars.”

“It itches!” he said.

Remembering her own bout of chicken pox-she’d been nine or ten-she knew how fiercely they itched. “Do your best,” she said. She had a pockmark on the side of her jaw, one between her breasts, several on her arms and legs, and one or two in other places she hadn’t known about till her husband found them. That had amused George no end, though she’d been embarrassed.

By the time she finished the supper dishes, the children were asleep. She went down the hall and knocked on Brigid Coneval’s door. When the Irishwoman opened it, she was in mourning black. “Mrs. Enos,” she said, and stepped aside. “Do come in. What might I do for you today?”

Her apartment looked more battered than Sylvia’s, and smelled of cooking grease and cabbage. Her children, three boys ranging from George, Jr.’s, size on down, ran around raising hell. Through their racket, Sylvia said, “I was wondering if I could pay you enough to watch my children, just long enough to let them get over the chicken pox.”

Brigid Coneval shook her head. “That I cannot, and that I will not,” she answered. “For one thing, I’m taking in other people’s wee ones no more, as you know. And for another, Patrick has not had the chicken pox himself, nor has Michael, nor Billy, neither. I’ll be just as well pleased without them having ’em, too, sure and I will.”

“But what am I going to do?” Sylvia exclaimed. She’d been saying the same thing to anyone who would listen ever since she’d first seen George, Jr., covered with spots. “How am I going to go to work?”

“Well, if you do, you do-and if you don’t, you don’t,” Mrs. Coneval said airily. “Tell ’em you’ll not be in while the babes are after being sick, that’s all. What else can you do?”

“They’ll fire me.” Sylvia stated the obvious.

“Will you starve while you miss a couple weeks’ pay?” Brigid Coneval asked. Reluctantly, Sylvia shook her head. The new widow went on, “Then be damned to the job. You’ll get another soon enough-plenty to be had, with so many men off getting killed. You’ll have no trouble at all, at all.”

“I’ve worked there a long time.” Sylvia sighed. “But you’re right. In the end, you’re right. If they fire me for staying home, then they do, that’s all. I don’t want to leave that job, but I can if I have to. Thank you, Mrs. Coneval. You’ve made me see things clear.”

“Any time at all, dearie,” Brigid Coneval said.

Behind Private First Class Reginald Bartlett, artillery thundered: not a lot of artillery, not by the standards of the Roanoke front, but more than he’d heard on the Confederate side of the line here in Sequoyah. “Let the damnyankees keep their heads down for a change,” he said.

Pete Hairston nodded. “Only trouble is, once the guns stop, we get to go forward and push ’em out,” the veteran sergeant said. He paused and shrugged. “Us and the niggers do. Goddamned if I like that.”

Joe Mopope said, “You people are crazy, giving niggers guns. Wouldn’t never catch us Kiowas giving niggers guns.”

“If those colored regiments hadn’t come over the river, we never would have got enough men to attack the Yanks,” Reggie said.

Hairston nodded again. “That’s a fact. We’d be holding on tooth and toenail, same as we have been. Now we got a chance to take back some of this here state. We better see that we don’t waste it, on account of I don’t reckon we’ll ever see another one.”

Whistles blew, up and down the reinforced Confederate line. Lieutenant Nicoll shouted, “Come on, boys, now it’s our turn!” Out of the trenches came his company. Howling the Rebel yell, they trotted forward. “Go!” Nicoll roared to them. “Go on! They aren’t doing so well back East-we’ve got to show them how to play the game.”

“We’ll get ’em!” Napoleon Dibble said. “They can’t mess with the Belgians, and they can’t mess with us.”

Reggie said nothing. He didn’t waste his breath yelling. Every time he came up above ground, he felt like a turtle coming out of its shell. He was vulnerable up here. His time in the close-quarters fighting of the Roanoke front had taught him how hideously vulnerable a man was when he came up out of his trench.

He wasn’t afraid, though, not in the ordinary sense of the word. Whatever was going to happen would happen. It was largely out of his hands. If he let it worry him, he’d be letting his pals down, and he couldn’t stand that, not after they’d been through and suffered so much together.

On they came. Some dropped into cover to shoot while others advanced, then leapfrogged past when the other group hit the dirt. The bombardment hadn’t taken out all the Yankees; bombardments never did. Rifles and machine guns stuttered to life. Men in butternut began falling not of their own volition.

Some of those men were black, the new units going forward along with the white troops who had been in the field for years. The Negro soldiers charged straight at the U.S. trenches; they weren’t skilled in the fire-and-move tactics the veterans had learned by painful experience. And they went down in gruesome numbers. When they screamed, Bartlett couldn’t tell their voices from those of white men.

He lay in a shell hole, fired a couple of rounds toward the Yankee line ahead, and then got to his feet and ran by the men he’d been supporting. He dove behind a stump and started shooting again. Once his buddies had dashed past him and found cover, he scrambled up and ran on.

He was about thirty yards from the Yankee trench when a traversing machine gun turned its balefully winking eye upon him.

His first feeling was nothing but surprise. One moment, he’d been sprinting forward, his eyes fixed on the Yankees in their ugly cooking-pot helmets who were shooting at him and his countrymen. The next, he slammed to the ground on his face.

Somebody punched me, he thought. Somebody punched me twice. God damn that Joe Mopope anyhow-this is no time for practical jokes.

Then he tried to move. What had been impact turned to pain, stunning pain, in his left shoulder and right leg. Someone very close by was screaming at the top of his lungs. Only when Reggie needed to inhale did he realize those cries belonged to him.

Machine-gun and rifle fire kept right on stitching past him. In what was more a roll and a wriggle than a crawl, he made it into a hole in the torn-up ground, pulled out his wound dressing, and wondered what the hell he should bandage first.

Blood was turning the outside of his right trouser leg blackish red. His left arm didn’t want to do what he told it to do. Awkwardly, one-handedly, he got a sort of a bandage around his thigh and stuffed a pad of gauze into the hole in his shoulder. The world kept going gray as he worked, but he persevered.

“Stretcher-bearer!” he shouted. “Stretcher-bearer!” His voice was hoarse and raw-edged. No one came. The Yanks didn’t usually shoot stretcher-bearers on purpose, any more than the CSA did, but bullets weren’t fussy, either.

Reggie got out his canteen and drank it dry. The day was hot and muggy. Before very long, the anguish of thirst joined the agony from his wounds. The sun beat down on him out of a brassy sky. His bandages went from white to red and soggy.

Every so often, when the pain backed off a little, he wondered how the attack was going. He occasionally saw men in butternut going forward. Nobody flopped down in his shell hole. He didn’t think that was fair.

More screams rose. This time, they didn’t come from Reggie. After a while, those screams stopped. They never started up again. Bartlett got the idea that the fellow who’d been making them wasn’t breathing any more.

Up ahead, the firing hesitated, then broke out anew, louder and fiercer than ever. Shells from the damnyankees’ field artillery whistled overhead. Some, no doubt aimed to impede the Confederates’ advance, dropped down near Reggie. He halfway-more than halfway-hoped one would land square on him. He’d never know what hit him then. He knew exactly what had hit him now. He moaned through dry lips.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the scorching sun slid across the sky. As it sank toward the western horizon, men in butternut started coming back past the shell hole where Reggie Bartlett lay. He called out to them, but his voice was a dry husk of what it had been. No one heard him. No one saw him reach out imploringly with his good hand. His comrades retreated.

In their wake, the soldiers of the U.S. Army advanced. They fired and moved, as their Confederate counterparts had done during the morning. The sun was going more orange than gold when one of them jumped down into Reggie’s hole.

The Yankee had fired twice before he realized the body in there with him was not dead. He had it in his power to change that on the instant. Reggie got a good, long, close look at him: he was in his late twenties or early thirties, dark, in need of a shave, and wearing what the Yanks called a Kaiser Bill mustache. It had a couple of white hairs in it. Reggie thought it looked stupid. Two stripes on the fellow’s sleeve: a corporal.

He said, “I ought to blow your fuckin’ head off, Reb.” Reggie shrugged a one-shouldered shrug. The U.S. corporal suddenly looked thoughtful. “If I bring you in, though,” he went on, thinking out loud, “your pals miss a chance to blow my fuckin’ head off, and that don’t make me even a little bit sorry, I got news for you.”

Reggie forced a word out through parched throat: “Water?”

“Yeah,” the corporal said, and held a canteen to his lips. The water was warm and stale and tasted ambrosial. Then the Yankee heaved him up onto his back with a bull’s strength, ignoring his cries of pain. The U.S. soldier started toward his own line, shouting, “Stretcher-bearers! Got a wounded Reb prisoner here!”

A couple of U.S. soldiers with red crosses on their helmets and on armbands took charge of Bartlett. “How you feelin’, Reb?” one of them asked, not unkindly.

“Shitty,” he answered.

“Stick him, Louie,” the other stretcher-bearer said. “We don’t want him yellin’ at us all the way to the field hospital.”

“Sure as hell don’t,” Louie agreed, and stuck a needle in Reggie’s arm. Reggie sighed as relief washed over him. The pain remained, but now he floated over it instead of being immersed. The relief must have shown on his face, for Louie chuckled. “That morphine’s great stuff, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Reggie breathed.

The stretcher-bearers hauled him through zigzagging communications trenches similar to the ones behind his own front line. Then they put his stretcher in the back of an ambulance. “Daniel brought in this here Reb,” the one who wasn’t Louie told the driver. “Thought he’d be worth patching. Might even be right-he ain’t pegged out on us while we were lugging him back here.”

“Hate to waste the sawbones’ time on a Rebel,” the ambulance driver said, “but what the hell?” The ambulance’s motor was already turning over. He put the machine in gear and headed back toward the field hospital, whose tents were out of range of artillery from the front.

When Bartlett got there, another pair of stretcher-bearers took him out of the ambulance and laid him on the ground outside a green-gray tent with an enormous red cross on it. Most of the men there were U.S. soldiers, but a few others wore butternut. Attendants gave him water and another shot.

Presently, a doctor in a blood-spattered white coat came by and looked him over. “That leg’s not too bad,” he said after cutting away bandages and trouser leg. He examined the shoulder. “We’re going to have to take you into the shop to repair this one, though. What’s your name, Reb?” He poised a pencil over a clipboard.

“Reggie Bartlett. I broke out of one Yankee prisoner-of-war camp. Reckon I can do it again.” With two shots of morphine in him, Reggie didn’t care what he said.

He didn’t impress the Yankee doctor, either. After recording his name, the fellow said, “Son, you’re going to be a good long while healing up. I don’t care whether you escaped before. By the time you think about flying the coop again, this war’ll be over. And we’ll have won it.”

Bartlett laughed in his face-the morphine again.