The Center Cannot Hold

V

Sam Carsten smeared zinc-oxide ointment on the bridge of his nose. It wouldn't do him any good. He was dolefully certain of that. When summer came, he got a sunburn. He'd got sunburned in San Francisco, which wasn't easy. Hell, he'd got sunburned in Seattle, which was damn near impossible.

The port of Brest, France, toward which the USS O'Brien was steaming, lay on the same parallel of latitude as Seattle. Somebody'd told that to Carsten, but he'd had to look it up for himself in an atlas before he would believe it. The bright sunshine dancing off the ocean-and off the green land ahead-seemed almost tropical in comparison to what Seattle usually got.

He patted the breech of the destroyer's forward four-inch gun. "This here is one more place I figured I'd have to fight my way into," he remarked.

"Yes, sir," Nathan Hirskowitz agreed. The petty officer shrugged. "But we've got one thing going for us, even on a little courtesy call like this."

"You bet we do," Sam said. "We aren't Germans."

Hirskowitz nodded. He scratched his chin. Whiskers rasped under his nails, though he'd shaved that morning. "Yes, sir," he said. "That's what I was thinking, all right."

"They just don't like Germans here in France, same as they just don't like Englishmen in Ireland." Carsten thought for a moment, then went on, "And same as they just don't like us in the CSA-what do you want to bet a ship from the Kaiser's High Seas Fleet gets the same sort of big hello in Charleston as we do here?"

"I won't touch that one. You got to be right," Hirskowitz said.

"Damn funny business, though," Sam said. "We were at war with the froggies, too, same as Kaiser Bill was at war with the Confederates."

"But we didn't lick France, same as the Germans didn't lick the Confederate States. That makes all the difference." Hirskowitz added something in French.

"What the hell's that mean?" Sam asked in surprise.

"Something like, the better you know somebody, the more reasons you can find to despise him," the gunner's mate answered.

"Well, I've known you for a while, and this is the first I knew you spoke any French."

Nathan Hirskowitz surprised Sam again, this time by looking and sounding faintly embarrassed: "It's my old man's fault, sir. He came to the United States out of this little Romanian village in the middle of nowhere-that's what he has to say about it, anyway. But he'd taught himself French and German and English while he was still there."

"That's pretty good," Sam said. "He taught you, too, eh?"

"Yeah, me and my brothers and my sister. German was easy, of course, because we already used Yiddish around the house, and they're pretty close. But he made us learn French, too."

"So what does he do in New York City?" Sam asked. "How come you aren't too rich to think about joining the Navy?"

"How come?" Hirskowitz snorted. "I'll tell you how come, sir. Pop had a storing and hauling business. But he liked horses better than trucks, and so that went under. He's smart, but he's a stubborn bastard, my old man is. And since his business went under, he hasn't done much of anything. He sponges off the rest of my relatives, that's all. You listen to him talk, he's too smart to work."

"Oh. One of those." Carsten nodded; he'd met the type. "Too bad. Any which way, though, I expect I'll stick with you when we get shore leave. Always handy to have somebody along who knows the lingo."

"Sir, you're an officer, remember? You got to find one of your own who speaks French. You can't go drinking with a no-account gunner's mate."

Sam cursed under his breath. Hirskowitz was right, no doubt about it. The trouble was, Carsten didn't like drinking with officers. That was the bad news about being a mustang. He'd spent close to twenty years as an able seaman and petty officer himself. His rank had changed, but his taste in companions hadn't. Officers still struck him as a snooty lot. But he would hear about it, and in great detail, if he fraternized-that was the word they'd use-with men of lower rank.

Up to the wharf came the O'Brien. The skipper handled that himself, disdaining the help of the tugboats hovering in the harbor. If he made a hash of it, he'd have nobody but himself to blame. But he didn't. With all the Frenchmen watching-and, no doubt, with some Germans keeping an eye on the destroyer, too-he came alongside as smoothly as if parking a car.

A French naval officer whose uniform, save for his kepi, didn't look a whole lot different from American styles, came aboard the O'Brien. "Welcome to la belle France," he said in accented English. "We have been allies before, your country and mine. We are not enemies now. It could be, one day, we shall ally again."

He didn't say against whom he had in mind. He didn't say-and he didn't need to say. The O'Brien 's executive officer said something in French. Sam didn't want to go drinking with the exec. The Frenchman saluted. The executive officer returned the salute. He said, "We come to France on a peaceful visit, and hope that peace will last forever."

With a very Gallic shrug, the French officer replied, "What lasts forever? Nothing in this world, monsieur. I need to say one thing to you, a word of- comment dit-on? — a word of warning, yes. Your men are welcome to go ashore, but they should use a certain… a certain caution, oui?"

Since the Frenchman plainly wanted the O'Brien 's crew to hear that, the exec carried on in English: "What sort of caution, sir?"

"Political caution," the local said. "The Action Francaise has no small power here in Brest. You know the Action Francaise?"

"Mais un petit peu," the executive officer said, and then, "Only a little."

"Even a little is too much," the Frenchman told him. "They are royalist, they are Catholic-very, very Catholic, in a political way-and (forgive me) they oppose those who were the allies of the United States during the… the unpleasantness not so long past."

They hate the Germans' guts, Carsten thought. That's what he means, but he's too polite to say so. The O'Brien 's executive officer nodded and said, "Thanks for the warning. We will be careful."

"I have done my duty," the French officer answered. I wash my hands of the lot of you, he might have said. With another salute, he went back over the gangplank, up onto the pier, and into Brest.

Carsten wondered if the skipper would keep his crew aboard the ship after a greeting like that, but he didn't. He did warn the men who got liberty to stick together and not to cause trouble. Sam hoped they would listen, but sailors in port weren't always inclined to.

He went ashore himself, as much from simple curiosity as from any great desire to paint the town red. Brest wasn't the sort of place to which tourists thronged. It was, first and foremost, a navy town. That didn't faze Sam. The steep, slippery streets were another matter. Brest sat on a ridge above the Penfeld River, and seemed more suited to mountain goats than to men.

Mountain goats, though, didn't go into bars. Carsten did, the first chance he got. "Whiskey," he told the bartender, figuring that word didn't change much from one language to another.

But the fellow surprised him by speaking English: "The apple brandy is better." Seeing Sam's look of surprise, he explained, "Many times during the Great War-and since-sailors from Angleterre come here."

"All right. Thanks. I'll try the stuff." When Sam did, he found he liked it-Calvados was the name on the bottle. He drank some more. Warmth spread through him. A navy town had to have friendly women somewhere not too far from the sea. After I drink some more, I'll find out about that, he thought.

Before he could, though, three or four French officers came in. One of them noticed his unfamiliar uniform. "You are-American?" he asked in halting English. "You are from the contre-torpilleur new in the harbor?"

"Yes, from the destroyer," Sam agreed.

"And what think you of Brest?" the fellow asked.

"Nice town," Carsten said; his mother had raised him to be polite. "And this Calvados stuff-this is the cat's meow." The Frenchman looked puzzled. Sam simplified: "It's good. I like it."

"Ah. 'The cat's meow.' " The French officer-a tough-looking fellow in his forties, a few years older than Sam-filed away the phrase. "Would it please you, monsieur, to see more of Brest?"

"Thank you, friend. I wouldn't mind that at all," Sam answered, thinking, among other things, that an officer ought to know where the officers' brothels were, and which of them had the liveliest girls. But the Frenchman-his name turned out to be Henri Dimier-took him to the maritime museum housed in a chateau down by the harbor, and then to the cathedral of St. Louis closer to the center of town. Maybe he was an innocent, maybe he thought Sam was, or maybe he was subtly trying to annoy him. If so, he failed; Carsten found both buildings interesting, even if neither was exactly what he'd had in mind.

When they came out of the cathedral, a whole company of blue-uniformed policemen rushed up the street past them. "What's going on there?" Sam asked.

"I think it is the Action Francaise," Dimier answered, his face hard and grim. "They are to have a-how do you say? — a meeting in the Place de la Liberte. It is not far. Would you care to see?"

"Well… all right." It wasn't what Sam had had in mind. It wouldn't be much fun. But it might be useful, and that counted, too. I suppose that counts, too, he thought mournfully.

The Place de la Liberte wasn't far from the cathedral: only two or three blocks. Even before Carsten and Henri Dimier got there, the sound of singing filled the air. A forest of flags sprouted inside the park. Some were the familiar French tricolor, others covered with fleurs-de-lys. Pointing, Sam asked, "What are those?"

"That is the old flag, the royal flag, of France," Dimier replied. "They want to, ah, return to his throne the king."

"Oh." Carsten wasn't sure what to make of that. The mere idea struck him as pretty strange. He tried another question: "What are they singing?"

"I translate for you." The French officer cocked his head to one side, listening. "Here. Like this:

"The German who has taken all,

Who has robbed Paris of all she owns,

Now says to France:

'You belong to us alone:

Obey! Down on your knees, all of you!'

"And here is the-the refrain-is that the word?

"No, no, France is astir,

Her eyes flash fire,

No, no,

Enough of treason now.

"Would you hear more, monsieur?"

"Uh-yeah. If you don't mind." I do need to know this. We all need to know it.

Dimier picked up the song again:

"Insolent German, hold your tongue,

Behold our king approaches,

And our race

Runs ahead of him.

Back to where you belong, German,

Our king will lead us!"

And the refrain:

"One, two, France is astir,

Her eyes flash fire,

One, two,

The French are at home."

And once more:

"Tomorrow, on our graves,

The wheat will be more beautiful,

Let us close our ranks!

This summer we shall have

Wine from the grapevines

With royalty.

"Do you understand, being an American, what all this means?"

"I doubt it," Sam answered. "Do you?"

Before Henri Dimier could answer, the men of the Action Francaise charged the police who were trying to hold them in the square. For a moment, clubs flailing, the police did hold. But then the ralliers-the rioters, now-broke through. With shouts of triumph, they swarmed into the streets of Brest. Sam had a devil of a time getting back to the O'Brien. After that, though, he understood, or thought he understood, a good deal that he hadn't before.

Clarence Potter was a meticulous man. If he hadn't been, he couldn't very well have had a successful career in intelligence work during the war. That habit of precision was one reason why he had no use for the Freedom Party. To his way of thinking, Jake Featherston and his followers only wanted to smash things up, with no idea what would replace them.

He stood in Marion Square in Charleston, listening to a Freedom Party Congressional candidate. The fellow's name was Ezra Hutchinson. He was a rotund man who put Potter in mind of a hand grenade in a white summer suit. He exploded like a hand grenade, too. Unlike a hand grenade, though, he kept doing it over and over.

"Now hear me, friends!" he thundered, pumping a fist in the air atop the portable platform on which he stood. "Hear me! We've turned the other cheek to the USA for too long! It's high time we took our place in the sun again our own selves. We're a great country. We ought to start acting like it, by God!"

Some of the people in the little crowd in front of the platform clapped their hands. Ezra Hutchinson didn't stand up there alone. A dozen Freedom Party hardnoses in white shirts and butternut trousers backed him. They all applauded like machines. Whenever he paused a little longer than usual, they barked out, "Freedom!" in sharp unison.

"Freedom!" echoed several voices from the crowd.

"We're a great country!" Hutchinson repeated. "But who remembers that, here in the CSA? The Radical Liberals? Hell, no-they'd rather be Yankees. The Whigs? Oh, they say they do, but they'd rather suck up to the Yankees. I tell you the truth, friends: the only party that remembers when the Confederate States had men in them is the Freedom Party."

That gave Clarence Potter the opening he'd been waiting for. He shouted, "The only party that shoots presidents is the Freedom Party!"

People stirred and muttered. Wade Hampton V was only a couple of years dead, but a lot of folks didn't seem to want to remember how he'd died. The Freedom Party sure as hell didn't want people to remember how he'd died. It was doing its best to act respectable. As far as Potter was concerned, its best could never be good enough.

Some of the goons on the platform turned their heads his way. More goons were sprinkled through the crowd, some in the Party's near-uniform, others wearing their ordinary clothes. But Ezra Hutchinson only smiled. "Where were you during the war, pal?" he asked; Freedom Party men often believed they were the only ones who'd done any fighting.

"I was in the Army of Northern Virginia," Potter answered, loudly and distinctly. "Where were you, you fat tub of goo?"

Hutchinson's smile disappeared. He'd been a railroad scheduler during the Great War, and never come within a hundred miles of a fighting front. But then he stuck out his chins and tried to make the best of it: "I served my country! Nobody can say I didn't serve my country."

He waited for Potter to make some other gibe so he could give a sharper comeback. But Potter said nothing more. He just let the candidate's words hang in the air. When Hutchinson did try to go back to his speech, he seemed flat, uninspired.

Several Freedom Party men started working their way back through the crowd toward Potter. He was there by himself. He carried a pistol-he always carried a pistol-but he didn't want to use it unless he had to. He slipped away and around the corner before any of the goons got a good look at him. He'd done what he'd set out to do.

But, in a way, the Freedom Party men had done what they'd set out to do, too: they'd made him retreat. And they would make it hard for other candidates to speak; they weren't shy about attacking their rivals' gatherings. Jake Featherston, damn him, had turned Confederate politics into war.

Who knows where Featherston would be now if that Grady Calkins hadn't gone and shot President Hampton? Potter thought. But snipers were part of war, too: a part that had upped and bit the Freedom Party.

Potter discovered the real problem at a Whig meeting a few days later. Everything there was stable, orderly, democratic. Speaker yielded politely to speaker. No one raised his voice. No one got excited. And, Potter was convinced, no one could possibly have hoped to influence the voters or make them give a damn about keeping the Whigs in power in Richmond.

He threw his hand in the air and was, in due course, recognized. "I have a simple question for you, Mr. Chairman," he said. "Where are our hooligans, to break up Freedom Party rallies the way Featherston's bastards work so hard to break up ours?"

People started buzzing. You didn't often hear such questions at a gathering like this. The chairman's gavel came down, once, twice, three times. Robert E. Washburn was a veteran of the Second Mexican War. He wore a big, bushy white mustache, and both looked and acted as if the nineteenth century had yet to give way to the twentieth. "You are out of order, Mr. Potter," he said now. "I regret to state that I have had to point this out to you at previous gatherings as well."

Heads bobbed up and down in polite agreement with Washburn's ruling. Too many of those heads were gray or balding. The Whigs had dominated Confederate politics for a long time, as the Democrats had in the USA. The Democrats had got themselves a rude awakening. Potter feared the Freedom Party would give the CSA a worse shock than the Socialists had given the United States.

He said, "I am not out of order, Mr. Chairman, and it's a legitimate question. When the damnyankees started using gas during the war, we had to do the same, or else leave the advantage with them. If we don't fight Featherston's fire with fire, what becomes of us now?"

Down came the gavel again. "You are out of order, Mr. Potter," Washburn repeated. "Your zeal for the cause has outrun your respect for the institutions of the Confederate States of America."

He seemed to think that was plenty to quell Potter, if not to make him hang his head in shame. But Clarence Potter remained unquelled. "Featherston's got no respect for our institutions," he pointed out. "If we keep too much, we're liable not to have any institutions left to respect after a while."

Now heads went back and forth. People didn't agree with him. He'd run into that before. It drove him wild. He'd seen a plain truth, and he couldn't get anyone else to see it. Jake Featherston had come much too close to smashing his way to a victory in 1921, and he would be even more dangerous now if that Calkins maniac hadn't shown up the Freedom Party for what it was. Potter felt like knocking these placidly disagreeing heads together. That brought him up short. I'm not so different from Featherston after all, am I?

Robert E. Washburn said, "We rely upon the power of the police to protect us against any further, uh, unfortunate outbursts."

That was an answer of sorts, but only of sorts. "And how many coppers start yelling, 'Freedom!' the minute they take off their gray suits?" Potter asked. "How well do you think they'll do their job?"

He did make the buzz in the room change tone. A great many policemen favored the Freedom Party. That was too notorious a truth to need retelling. It had caused problems in 1921 and again in 1923, though the Freedom Party men had been on their best behavior then. How could anybody think it wouldn't cause problems in the upcoming Congressional election?

The local chairman was evidently of that opinion. "Thank you for expressing your views with your usual vigor, Mr. Potter," Washburn said. "If we may now proceed to further items of business…?"

And that was that. They didn't want to listen to him. And what the Whigs didn't want to do, they didn't have to do. More than sixty years of Confederate independence had taught them as much, and confirmed the lesson again and again. What would teach them otherwise? he wondered. The answer to that seemed obvious enough: losing to the Freedom Party.

As the Charleston Whigs droned on, Potter got to his feet and slipped out of their meeting. Nobody tried to call him back. Everybody seemed glad he was going. They didn't want to hear their grip on things was endangered. They deserve to lose, by God, he thought as he went out into the heat and humidity of a Charleston summer. But then, remembering Jake Featherston's burning eyes as he'd seen them again and again during the Great War, Potter shook his head. They almost deserve to lose. No one deserves what those "Freedom!" — shouting yahoos would give us if they won.

Pigeons strutted along the street, cooing gently. They were slow and stupid and ever so confident nobody would bother them. Why not? They'd proved right again and again and again. This one stranger in their midst wouldn't prove any different… would he?

Clarence Potter laughed. He threw his arms wide. Some of the pigeons scurried back from him. One or two even spread their wings and fluttered away a few feet. Most? Most kept right on strutting and pecking, and paid him no attention whatsoever. "You goddamn dumb sons of bitches," he told them, laughing though it wasn't really funny. "You might as well be Whigs." The birds went right on ignoring him, which proved his point.

He wondered whether the Radical Liberals would take him seriously. Odds were, they would. The Freedom Party, after all, was replacing them as the Whigs' principal opposition. But then he wondered if it mattered whether the Rad Libs took him seriously. It probably didn't. No one except a few dreamers had ever thought the Radical Liberals could govern the CSA. They gave the states of the West and Southwest a safety valve through which they could blow off steam when Richmond ignored them, as it usually did. Closer to the heart of the CSA, the Radical Liberals let people pretend the country really was a democratic republic-without the risks and complications a real change of power would have entailed.

Why do I bother? Potter wondered as he strode past the pigeons that, fat and happy and brainless, went on pretending he wasn't there-or, if he was, that he couldn't possibly be dangerous. Easier just to sit back and let nature take its course.

But he knew the answer to that. It was simple enough: he knew Jake Featherston. Ten years now since I walked into the First Richmond Howitzers' encampment. Ten years since he told me Jeb Stuart III's body servant might be a Red, and since Jeb Stuart III, being III of an important family, made sure nothing would happen to the nigger. Jeb Stuart III was dead, of course. He'd looked for death when he realized he'd made a bad mistake. He'd had plenty of old-fashioned Confederate courage and honor. But he'd taken however many Yankee bullets he took without having the faintest conception of just how bad a mistake he'd made.

"The whole Confederacy is still finding out just how bad a mistake you made, Captain Stuart," Clarence Potter muttered. A young woman coming the other way-a young woman in a shockingly short skirt, one that reached so high, it let him see the bottom of her kneecap-gave him a curious glance as she went by.

Potter was by now used to garnering curious glances. He wasn't nearly so used to women showing that much leg. He looked back over his shoulder at her. For a little while, at least, he forgot all about the Freedom Party.

W hen the steam whistle announcing shift change blew, Chester Martin let out a sigh of relief. It had been a good day on the steel-mill floor. Everything had gone the way it was supposed to. Nobody'd got hurt. You couldn't ask for more than that, not in this business.

Instead of heading straight home, he stopped at the Socialist Party hall not far from the mill. A good many men from his mill and others nearby sat and stood there, talking steel and talking politics and winding down from the long, hard weeks they'd just put in. "How's it going, Chester?" somebody called. Martin mimed falling over in exhaustion, which got a laugh.

Somebody else said, "They don't work us as hard as they worked our fathers."

"Only goes to show what you know, Albert," Chester retorted. "My old man's got one of those soft foreman's jobs. He hardly even has calluses on his hands any more, except from pushing a pencil. They work me a hell of a lot harder than they work him."

"Sold out to the people who own the means of production, has he?" Albert Bauer said-he was and always had been a Socialist of the old school.

Before Chester could answer that, someone else did it for him: "Oh, put a sock in it, for Christ's sake. We're starting to own the means of production. At least, I've bought some shares of stock, and I'll bet you have, too. Go on, tell me I'm a liar."

Bauer said not a word. In fact, so many people said not a word that something close to silence fell for a moment. Have that many of us bought stocks? Chester wondered. He had a few shares himself, and knew his father had more than a few: Stephen Douglas Martin had been picking up a share here, a share there, ever since he started making good money when he wasn't conscripted into the Great War.

"Funny," Martin said. "The Party talks about government owning the means of production, but it never says much about the proletariat buying 'em up one piece at a time."

"Marx never figured anything like that would happen," someone said. "Neither did Lincoln. Back when they lived, you couldn't make enough money to have any left over to invest."

"As long as Wall Street keeps going up and up, though, you'd have to be a damn fool not to throw your money that way," somebody else said. "It's like stealing, only it's legal. And buying on margin makes it even easier."

Nobody argued with him. Even now, most of the men who left their jobs at the steel mills left only because they were too old or too physically worn or too badly hurt to do them any more. Those were the people for whom the Socialists were trying to push their old-age insurance policy through Congress. But if you could quit your work at sixty-five, or even sixty, and be sure you had enough left to live on for the rest of your days thanks to what you'd done for yourself while you were working… If you could manage that, the whole country would start looking different in twenty or thirty years.

I'll turn sixty-five in 1957, Martin thought. It didn't seem so impossibly far away-but then, he had just put in that long, long day at the mill.

He rode the trolley home, ate supper with his parents and his sister, and went to bed. When the wind-up alarm clock next to his head clattered the next morning, he just turned it off. He didn't have a moment's sleepy panic, thinking it was some infernal device falling on his trench. I've been home from the Great War for a while now, he thought as he put on a clean work shirt and overalls. But he would take a couple of puckered scars on his left arm to the grave. As it had on so many, the war had left its mark on him.

When he went into the kitchen, his father was already there, smoking his first cigar of the day. His mother fried eggs and potatoes in lard. She used a wood-handled iron spatula to flip some onto a plate for him. "Here's your breakfast, dear," she said. "Do you want some coffee?"

"Please," he said, and she poured him a cup.

His father said, "Saturday today-only a half day."

Chester nodded as he doctored the coffee with cream and sugar. "That's right. You know I won't be home very long, though-I'm going out with Rita."

Stephen Douglas Martin nodded. "You already told us, yeah."

His mother gave him an approving smile. "Have a good time, son."

"I think I will." Chester dug into the hash browns and eggs so he wouldn't have to show his amusement. His folks had decided they approved of Rita Habicht, or at least of his seeing her. They must have started to wonder if he would ever see anybody seriously. But he wasn't the only Great War veteran in no hurry to get on with that particular part of his life. Plenty of men he knew who'd been through the mill (and, as a steelworker, he understood exactly what that phrase meant) were still single, even though they'd climbed into their thirties. It was as if they'd given so much in the trenches, they had little left for the rest of their lives.

He took the trolley past the half-scale statue of Remembrance-who would have looked fiercer without half a dozen pigeons perched on her sword arm-to the mill, where he put in his four hours. Then he hurried back home, washed up, shaved, and changed from overalls, work shirt, and cloth cap to trousers, white shirt, and straw hat. "I'm off," he told his mother.

"You look very nice," Louisa Martin said. He would have been happier if she hadn't said that every time he went anywhere, but still-you took what you could get.

He rode the trolley again, this time to the block of flats where Rita lived. She had one of her own. She'd got married just before the war started. Her husband had stopped a bullet or a shell in one of the endless battles on the Roanoke front. Martin had fought there, too, till he got wounded. He'd never met Joe Habicht, but that proved exactly nothing. Rita had had a baby, too, and lost it to diphtheria the day after its second birthday. Women fought their own battles, even if not with guns. Through everything, though, she'd managed to hang on to the apartment.

She didn't keep Chester waiting when he knocked on the door. His heart beat faster as she opened it. "Hi," he said, a big, silly grin on his face. "How are you?"

"Fine, thanks." She patted at her dark blond hair. It was a little damp; she must have washed after getting back from her Saturday half day, too. "It's good to see you."

"It's good to be here," he said, and leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. "You look real pretty."

Rita smiled. "You always tell me that."

"I always mean it, too." But Martin started to laugh. When she asked him what was funny, he wouldn't tell her. I'll be damned if I want to admit I sound just like my mother, he thought. Instead, he said, "Shall we go on over to the Orpheum?"

"Sure," she said. "Who's playing there today?"

"Those four crazy brothers from New York are heading the bill," he answered.

"Oh, good. They are funny," Rita said. "I was in stitches the last time they came through Toledo." That had been a couple of years before; she and Chester hadn't known each other then. He wondered with whom she'd seen the comics. That she had a past independent of him occasionally bothered him, though he'd never stopped to wonder if his independent past bothered her. But neither of them had seen anybody else for several months now. That suited Chester fine, and seemed to suit Rita pretty well, too.

They held hands at the trolley stop. An old lady clucked disapprovingly, but they paid no attention to her. Things were looser now than they had been when she was a young woman. As far as Chester Martin was concerned, that was all to the good, too. He was sorry when the trolley car came clanging up so soon.

He slid a silver dollar to the ticket-taker at the Orpheum, and got back a half dollar and two yellow tickets. He and Rita went up to the first balcony and found some seats. He took her hand there, too. She leaned her head on his shoulder. When the house lights went down, he gave her a quick kiss.

A girl singer and a magician led off the show. As far as Martin was concerned, the magician couldn't have disappeared fast enough. A trained-dog act ended abruptly when the dog, which could jump and fetch and even climb ladders to ring a bell at the top, proved not to be trained in a much more basic way. He got an enormous laugh, but not one of a sort the fellow in black tie who worked with him had in mind. The dancer who came on next got another laugh by soft-shoeing out holding his nose.

"I wouldn't have done that," Rita said, even though she'd laughed, too. "Now he'll squabble with the man with the dog all the way to the end of the tour." Chester wouldn't have thought of that for himself. Once she said it, he realized she was bound to be right.

At last, after a couple of other acts Martin knew he wouldn't remember ten minutes after he left the Orpheum, the Engels Brothers came out, along with the tall, skinny, dreadfully dignified woman who served as their comic foil. They were all young men, not far from Chester's age, but got their name from the enormous, fuzzy beards they wore. One of the beards was dyed red, one yellow, one blue, and the fourth left black. From the balcony, Martin couldn't tell if the beards were real or fakes. For the comics' sake, he hoped they were phony.

The Brother with the undyed beard talked enough for any three men. The one with the yellow beard didn't talk at all, but was so limber, he seemed to have no bones. The one with the blue beard tried to slap everybody else into line. The one with the red beard spent all his time chasing the tall, skinny woman, who seemed more bewildered than flattered by his attentions.

At one point, they all started pelting one another with oranges. It might have been trench warfare up there-by the way the Engels Brothers dodged around the prop furniture, they'd been in the trenches-except that the woman kept standing up and getting nailed. By the time they'd finished, the stage was a worse mess, much worse, than it had been after the dog act. But this was a lot funnier, too.

The Engels Brother with the black beard proved the sole survivor. He looked out at the audience and said, "Orange you glad you aren't up here?" The curtain came down.

"That was… I don't know exactly what that was, but I don't know when I've laughed so hard, either," Rita said as she got up and made her way toward the exit. Since Chester Martin was rubbing at his streaming eyes with his handkerchief, he couldn't very well argue with her.

They had supper at a diner across the street from the Orpheum, then took the trolley back to Rita's block of flats. "I had a wonderful time," she said as she fumbled in her handbag for the key.

"I always have a terrific time with you, Rita." Chester hesitated, then asked, "Can I come in for a minute, please?"

She hesitated, too. She was careful of her reputation. He'd seen that from the first time he took her out. He liked it. She said, "You're not going to be-you know-difficult, are you?"

He would have liked nothing better than to be difficult, but he solemnly shook his head. "Cross my heart," he answered, and did.

"All right." Rita opened the door and flipped on a light. "The place is a mess." It was, to Martin's eye, perfectly neat. Rita sat down on the overstuffed sofa. She patted the upholstery next to her, asking, "What have you got in mind?"

Instead of sitting there, Chester awkwardly went to one knee in front of her. Her eyes got very big. Tongue stumbling, heart pounding, he repeated, "I always have a terrific time with you. I don't think I'd ever want to be with anybody else. Will you-will you marry me, Rita?" He took a velvet jewelry box from his pocket and flipped it open to show her a ring set with a tiny chip of diamond.

She stared at him. "I wondered if you were going to ask me that tonight," she whispered, and then, "The ring is beautiful."

"You're beautiful," he said. "Will you?"

"Of course I will," she answered.

Afterwards, he wasn't quite sure who kissed whom first. When he came up for air, he gasped, "You never kissed me like that before."

"Well, you never asked me to marry you before, either," Rita answered.

He laughed. They kissed again. Heart pounding, he asked, "What else don't I know?"

"You'll find out," she said. "After the wedding."

S cipio paid five cents for a copy of the Augusta Constitutionalist. In one way, that struck him as a lot of money to shell out for a newspaper. In another, considering that he would have paid millions if not billions of dollars when the currency went crazy a couple of years before, it wasn't so bad.

"Thanks, uncle," said the white man who took his money. He didn't answer. He just opened up the paper and read it as he hurried towards Erasmus' fish market and restaurant.

Had he answered, what would he have said? Angry at himself for even wondering, he shook his head as he walked along. White men never called black men mister, not in the Confederate States of America they didn't. If he held his breath till they started to, he'd end up mighty, mighty blue. The fellow with the pile of papers at his feet would just have called him an uppity nigger, or maybe a crazy nigger, if he'd complained.

Maybe the worst of it was, the white man had been trying to be polite. I can't win, Scipio thought. Why do I bother imagining I could?

Even more to the point, he wondered why he'd wasted any money on the paper. The headline screamed about a lurid love triangle that had ended in an axe murder. It would have been made to seem a lot more lurid had the parties involved been colored. Or, on the other hand, it might not have made the paper at all in that case. A lot of whites expected Negroes to act that way, and took it for granted when they did.

Much smaller stories talked about Congressional candidates' latest promises. Scipio wondered why he bothered even glancing at those. It wasn't as if he could vote. But the remarks of Eldridge P. Dinwiddie, the Freedom Party candidate in Augusta, did make his eyes widen as if he'd just poured down a couple of cups of Erasmus' strong, chicory-laced coffee.

"Too many Red rebels are still hiding in plain sight," Dinwiddie was quoted as saying. "The Whigs have forgotten all about them. Going after them would remind people of how badly the party that's in power bungled the war effort. But if you elect me, I'll make sure they aren't forgotten and are brought to justice. I aim to see all those nigger traitors hang."

Mr. Dinwiddie, wrote the reporter who'd listened to him, received prolonged and vociferous support for his suggestion.

"Hell wid Mistuh Dinwiddie," Scipio muttered under his breath. Being one of those fugitive Reds himself, he didn't care for the notion of getting hunted down and hanged. Here and there, faded posters still offered a reward for his capture.

But that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead. Every so often, a phrase from the education Anne Colleton had made him acquire floated up out of his memory. This one fit. South Carolina might have been another country. The name on his passbook here in Georgia was Xerxes. Everyone here, even his wife, knew him by that name and no other.

Anne Colleton, though, wasn't dead. If she ever saw him, he would be, and in short order. Like most late summer days in Augusta, this one was hot and muggy. Scipio shivered even so.

Foreign news got shoved onto page three. There'd been another battle in the endless Mexican civil war. Imperial forces claimed victory. The rebels weren't calling them liars too loudly, so maybe they'd actually won. Venezuela and Colombia were talking about going to war with each other. The paper said the United States had sent the Kaiser a note warning him against arming or encouraging the Venezuelans, and that he'd denied doing any such thing-and warned the USA against encouraging or arming the Colombians. A party called French Action had caused riots in Paris at the same time as the French government claimed it was two years ahead of schedule in paying reparations in Germany. Japanese aeroplanes had bombed a town somewhere in China.

He was so engrossed in the article about allowing the forward pass in football-some people condemned it as a damnyankee innovation, while others claimed it added excitement to the game-he almost walked past Erasmus' place. "Mornin', Xerxes," his boss said when he came in.

"Mornin'," Scipio answered. "How you is?"

"Tolerable," Erasmus said. "Little better'n tolerable, mebbe. How's your ownself?"

Scipio shrugged. "Not bad. I's gettin' by."

"Can't ask much more'n that, not till Judgment Day, anyways." Erasmus raised a salt-and-pepper eyebrow. "You saved, Xerxes?"

How do I answer that? Scipio wondered. His education had weakened his faith. And, he discovered, so had his time with the Red rebels, all of whom had been as passionate in their disbelief as a lot of Christians were in their belief. He hadn't thought the Marxist ideology had rubbed off on him, but it seemed to have after all. After a moment's thought, he said, "Hope so."

"Should ought to be able to say better'n that," Erasmus said, but then, to Scipio's relief, he let it go. Pointing to the Constitutionalist, he asked, "You done with that?"

"Done wid it now, yeah," Scipio answered: the only thing he could have said. Erasmus didn't put up with reading on the job. That wasn't because he couldn't read a newspaper himself, though he couldn't. It was because, when you worked for Erasmus, you worked for Erasmus.

"Throw it on the fish-wrappin' pile, then," Erasmus said.

As Scipio did, he asked, "What you think 'bout de for'ard pass, boss?"

"Bunch o' damn foolishness, you ask me," Erasmus answered. "Anybody got the time to git all hot and bothered about it gots too goddamn much time, an' dat's the Lord's truth. Devil fill up your time just fine, you bet. Forward pass?" He rolled his eyes. "Might as well worry over that other damnfool damnyankee game-what the hell they call it? Baseball, dat's the name."

Scipio had never seen a baseball game, or even a baseball, in his life. Because he was-or rather, had been-widely read, he knew the sport was played in the northeastern part of the United States. But it had never caught on all across the USA, the way football had. And it certainly hadn't caught on in the Confederate States.

Erasmus eyed him. "You got any more ways o' wastin' time 'fore you starts earnin' what I pays you?"

"Only one," Scipio said with a grin. He grabbed a mug and poured it full of coffee from the big pot on the stove, then added cream and sugar. But he didn't sit down to drink it. He carried it with him as he started sweeping and tidying up. Erasmus had a steaming mug at his side, too. As long as Scipio worked hard, the older man didn't mind coffee or things like that.

The first breakfast customer came in a couple of minutes later. "Mornin', Aristotle," Scipio said. "How you is?" By now, he knew dozens of regulars by name and preferences. "You wants de usual?"

"Sure enough do," Aristotle answered. Scipio turned to Erasmus, who was already doing up a plate of ham and eggs and grits. Erasmus knew his customers even better than Scipio did. They were his, after all.

After the breakfast rush petered out, Scipio washed a young mountain of dishes and silverware, then dried them and stacked them neatly to get ready for lunch, which would be even more hectic. Once he'd done that, he helped Erasmus clean catfish and crappie. The proprietor would fry a lot of them during lunch, and even more during dinner. Erasmus was a wizard with a knife. Every cut he made was perfect, and he moved as fast as any slicing machine. Scipio…

"You makes me 'shamed," Scipio said, for Erasmus could clean three fish to his one, and do a neater, better job on them to boot. "Watchin' you makes me 'shamed."

"Shouldn't ought to," Erasmus answered. "You is doin' the best you kin. Good Lord don't want no more'n dat from nobody. I been cuttin' up fish for a livin' since I was ten years old. Maybe you went fishin' couple-three times a year, gutted what you cotched. It make a difference, it surely do."

"Mebbe." Scipio would have thought Erasmus was humoring him, but Erasmus had no sense of humor when it came to work, none at all.

And now his boss said, "You's better'n you was, too, an' dat's a good thing. You didn't get no better, don't reckon I'd let you mess around with knives no more."

Scipio looked at his hands. He had a couple of cuts, along with several scars he'd picked up earlier. Seeing what he was doing, Erasmus held out his own hands. He had more scars than Scipio could count, a maze, a spiderweb, of scars, new, old, short, long, and in between. "Do Jesus!" Scipio said softly.

Erasmus only shrugged. "Ain't nobody perfect, Xerxes. Ain't nobody even close to perfect. Yeah, I's pretty damn good. But I been doin' this goin' on fifty years now. Every so often, the knife is gonna slip."

"Uh-huh." Scipio couldn't take his eyes off those battered hands. He'd noticed them, but he hadn't really studied them. They repaid study. Like so many who did something supremely well, Erasmus had suffered for his art. Scipio kept looking at them till a fat woman came in and asked Erasmus for three pounds of crawdads.

What have I got that shows what I've done with my life? Scipio wondered. Only one thing occurred to him: the way he talked, or could talk if doing so wouldn't put him in mortal danger. He felt smarter when he talked like an educated white man than he did using the thick Congaree River Negro dialect that was his only other way of putting his thoughts out for the world to know. He didn't suppose he actually was smarter, but the illusion was powerful, and it lingered.

Erasmus wrapped the crawdads in the Augusta Constitutionalist Scipio had been reading that morning. The woman paid him, said, "Thank you kindly," and left.

"I been tellin' you and tellin' you," Erasmus said, "you ought to save your money and git yourself your own place. You end up doin' a lot better working for your ownself than you do when you works for me."

"Don't like tellin' folks what they gots to do," Scipio answered, not for the first time. "Reckon I kin"-if he'd run Marshlands for Anne Colleton, he could surely manage a little cafe for himself-"but I don't like it none."

"You gots to have some fire in your belly to do a proper job," Erasmus agreed. "But you gots to have some fire in your belly to git ahead any which way."

He eyed Scipio speculatively. Scipio concentrated on cleaning a catfish. He was better at doing what others told him than at telling others what to do. Back at Marshlands, he'd had Anne's potent authority behind him. If he started his own business, he'd be the authority. No, he didn't care for that. Still feeling Erasmus' eye on him, he said, "I gits by."

He sounded defensive, and he knew it. Erasmus said, "Any damn fool can get by. You could do better, an' you should ought to."

Scipio didn't answer. Before too long, the first dinner customers started coming in. He hurried back and forth from the stove to the tables out front. The sizzle and crackle of fish going into hot oil filled the place. He served and took money and made change and then did endless dishes, getting ready for the next morning. When he finally left, Erasmus stayed behind, still busy.

And when he got back to his flat, Bathsheba was waiting at the door to give him a kiss. Her eyes glowed. Scipio hoped he knew what she had in mind, and hoped that, after a long, hard day, he could perform. He turned out to be wrong-or, at least, not exactly right. She took his hand and set it just above her navel. "We gonna have us a young 'un," she said.

All of a sudden, Scipio discovered he might have fire in his belly after all.

H ipolito Rodriguez knew he should have counted himself a lucky man. For one thing, he'd come through the Great War without a scratch. If that by itself wasn't enough to make him light candles in the church in the little mining town of Baroyeca, he couldn't imagine what would be.

And, for another, Baroyeca lay in the Confederate state of Sonora, not in the Empire of Mexico farther south. It was close enough to the border to hear the echoes of the civil war that convulsed the country of which Sonora had once been a part, but not close enough to have let any of the fighting come near.

Nothing bothered Baroyeca very much. A couple of men hadn't come home from the war in the north. A few others had come home, but maimed. Mostly, though, days went on as they always had. Rodriguez's farm outside of town yielded no better crops than it ever had, but he managed to keep his wife, three sons, and two daughters fed.

And, every so often, he had enough money left in his pocket to go into town and spend some time at La Culebra Verde — the Green Snake-the cantina across the street from the church where he lit candles to thank God for his salvation. Having been preserved alive, didn't he have the right to enjoy himself every once in a while?

"Why not?" Carlos Ruiz said when he posed the question out loud one day. Carlos was his age, and had fought in Tennessee, where things had been, by all accounts, much worse than his own experience in Texas. Ruiz asked his counterquestion in English, not Spanish.

" Si, why not?" Rodriguez agreed, the last two words also in English. He dropped back into Spanish to continue, "My children speak as much of the new language as of the old. Ten million devils from hell take me if I know whether to be glad or sorry."

"If you want them to stay here and be farmers or marry farmers, Spanish is good enough," Ruiz said-in Spanish. "If you hope they try to make money, English is better."

He was a farmer himself, and wore the ribbon for a Purple Heart on his baggy cotton shirt. Had he been a rich man, or a townsman, or even someone who hadn't also fought in the north, Hipolito Rodriguez might have got angry, especially since he'd been drinking for a while. As things were, he only shrugged and said, "How much good will English do people who look like us, Carlos?" Like Ruiz, like almost everybody in Baroyeca, he was short, with red-brown skin and hair blacker than moonless midnight. "Even with English, what are we but a couple of damn greasers?" The last five words were in the official language of the Confederacy.

"We may be greasers," Ruiz said, also in English, "but we ain't no niggers. Mallates, " he added in Spanish, in case Rodriguez didn't understand him. Then back to English: "In the law, we're the same as anybody else."

That was true. The people of Sonora and Chihuahua were Confederate citizens, not merely residents of the CSA. They could vote. They could run for office. They could-if they were rich enough, which some few were-marry whites from the other states in the Confederacy. They could. And yet… Rodriguez sighed and took another pull at the beer in front of him. "The law, it means only so much."

That was also true. If it weren't for Negroes, Sonorans and Chihuahuans would have been at the bottom of the pile. Most Confederates who called themselves white looked down their noses at them. Rodriguez had seen as much during the war, the first time he'd ever had much to do with ordinary whites.

"When the election comes, who will you vote for?" Ruiz asked.

Rodriguez shrugged. "My patron is a Radical Liberal." Ever since Sonora and Chihuahua came into the CSA, small farmers like him had voted as the great landowners in the area wanted them to vote. But, like so many things, that wasn't quite as it had been before the Great War. Rodriguez didn't want to say as much out loud, though. What he didn't say couldn't get back to anyone. He lifted his cup, emptied it, and asked the same question of Carlos Ruiz.

Ruiz gave back the same shrug. "Don Joaquin is a Radical Liberal, too." Hipolito Rodriguez nodded. The Radical Liberals had been strong in the Confederate Southwest for years. Voting for them had always been a way to show Richmond the people here weren't happy with the neglect the Whigs gave them.

"I'd better go home," Rodriguez said, setting his mug on the table in front of him. "If I go now, Magdalena won't yell at me… so much." He got to his feet. The room swayed slightly, but only slightly. I'm not drunk, he thought. Of course I'm not drunk.

"Hasta luego, amigo," Ruiz said. By the way he sat, he wasn't going anywhere for quite a while.

"Luego," Rodriguez answered. He walked to the door-steadily enough, all things considered-and left La Culebra Verde. The cantina had thick adobe walls that kept out the worst of the heat. When he went out into the street, it smote full force. His broad-brimmed straw hat helped some, but only some. He sighed as he drew in a lungful of bake-oven air. He'd known it would be like this. It always was.

Baroyeca looked a lot like any other little Sonoran town. The main street was unpaved. Dust hung in the air. Horses and a few motorcars stood in front of shops. Like the cantina, most of the rest of the buildings were of adobe. Some had roofs of half-round red tiles, some of thatch, a few of corrugated tin.

A roadrunner trotted down the street as if it owned it. The bird held a still-wriggling lizard in its beak. When a stray dog came towards it, it flapped up into the branches of a cottonwood tree and gulped the lizard down. The dog sent a reproachful stare after it, as if to say, That's not fair.

"Life's not fair," Rodriguez muttered. Both dog and roadrunner ignored him.

Advertising slogans were painted on the whitewashed fronts of the shops. Here and there, signs and posters added to the urge to sell. Rodriguez remembered his father saying there hadn't been so many of those when he was young.

Posters-well printed in both Spanish and English-extolled the virtues of Horacio Castillo, who was seeking a fourth term in the Confederate Congress. Castillo, his pictures showed, was a plump man with a neat, thin mustache. FOR PROGRESS AND SECURITY, VOTE RADICAL LIBERAL, his posters said.

A few posters also touted the Whig candidate. Vicente Valenzuela wouldn't win, but he'd put up a respectable showing.

And then there were the scrawls on the walls, again in both Spanish and English.?LIBERTAD! some said, while others shouted, FREEDOM! Rodriguez eyed them thoughtfully. The Freedom Party had never been strong in Sonora up till this election. It probably wouldn't win now, either. But it was making itself known in ways it hadn't before.

Most of what Rodriguez knew about the Freedom Party was that it wanted another go at the USA and wanted to keep black men in their place. He didn't like the USA, either. And if black men weren't on the bottom in the CSA, he would be, so he wanted them kept down.

But a Freedom Party man had murdered the president of the Confederacy. Rodriguez scowled. That was no way to behave. He sighed. It was too bad. If people could only forget that…

He sighed again, and headed for his farm. A horse-drawn wagon coming into town kicked up more dust, a yellow-gray cloud of it. A couple of men with rifles rode atop the wagon. They gave Rodriguez a hard, watchful stare as it rattled past. He sighed yet again. He was no bandido. And, even if he were a bandido, it wasn't as if the silver mines in the hills outside of Baroyeca yielded enough precious metal to be worth stealing. Fewer than half as many miners as before the war went down into those dark shafts. If the mine ever failed altogether, what would become of Baroyeca? He didn't like to think about that, either.

High up in the sky, several vultures wheeled, riding the columns of hot air that rose from the baking ground. If Baroyeca dried up and blew away, even the vultures might not find enough to eat in this valley.

After not quite half an hour, Rodriguez got back to his farm. He raised corn and beans and squashes and chickens and pigs. A sturdy mule, one of the best for miles around, did the plowing and hauling. He raised almost all his own food. But if Baroyeca fails, what will I do for salt and nails and cotton cloth and coffee and all the other things I can't make for myself? He clicked his tongue between his teeth. He had no idea.

A scrawny dog ran toward him, growling and baring its teeth. " Callate, Maximiliano!" Rodriguez shouted. The dog skidded to a stop about ten feet away. It whined and wagged its tail, as if to say, Well, you might have been someone dangerous, and I was on the job. Rodriguez wasn't fooled. He'd had Maximiliano for three years now, and had never seen a stupider dog. He'd known exactly what he was doing when he named the beast for the Emperor of Mexico.

On the other side of the border, naming a dog for the Emperor might have got him stood up against a wall and shot for a rebel. All things considered, he was just as glad to be where he was.

His older daughter, Guadalupe, carried a hen by the feet toward the chopping block by the house. Spit flooded into Rodriguez's mouth at the thought of chicken stew or any of the other interesting things Magdalena, his wife, could do with the bird. He waved to Guadalupe. She was eleven now; she'd been born just before he got conscripted. It wouldn't be more than another year or two before she started having a real shape, before boys began sniffing around, and before life began wheeling through a new cycle. The thought made him feel old, though he'd just passed thirty.

In the house, Miguel and Jorge were wrestling. They were less than a year apart, seven and six, and Jorge, the younger, was big for his age, so the match was pretty even. Susana, who was five, watched them with her thumb in her mouth, probably glad they weren't picking on her. Rodriguez didn't see Pedro, the youngest; he was probably taking a nap.

"Hola," Rodriguez said to Magdalena, who sat patting tortillas into shape. His mouth watered again. As far as he was concerned, she made the best tortillas in the whole valley.

"Hola," she answered, cocking her head to one side to study him. "Como estas?"

He recognized that gesture, and straightened up in indignation. "I'm not drunk," he declared.

Magdalena didn't answer right away. After she'd finished studying him, though, she nodded. "No, you're not," she admitted. "Good. And what's new in town?"

"It's still there," he said, which, given the state of the silver mine, wasn't altogether a joke. He added, "A wagon came into town from the mine while I was walking home."

"Yes, I saw it go by," Magdalena said. "Who was at the cantina? What's the gossip?"

"I was mostly talking with Carlos," he answered. "We were going on about how you hear more and more English these days." He spoke in Spanish; Magdalena was far more comfortable in it than in the other language.

She nodded even so. "The way the older children bring it back from school, I wonder if their children will know any Spanish at all."

"It's good they go to school, in English or Spanish," Rodriguez said. "Maybe then they won't have to break their backs and break their hearts every day, the way a farmer does."

Magdalena raised an eyebrow. Rodriguez felt heat under his swarthy skin. He hadn't broken his back today. He spread his hands, as if to say, You want too much if you expect me to work hard every day. His wife didn't say anything. She didn't have to. The eyebrow had already done the job.

Rodriguez said, "And we talked politics."

"Ah." Magdalena perked up. "What will you do?" Here in Sonora, women's suffrage was a distant glow on the horizon, if that. She couldn't vote herself. But that didn't keep her from being interested.

"I don't know yet," Rodriguez answered. "I don't know, but I think I may just vote for the Freedom Party."

B rakes squeaking a little, the Birmingham pulled up in front of the Freedom Party offices in Richmond. Jake Featherston's guards fanned out and formed a perimeter on the sidewalk. They were well armed and alert; they might have been about to clear the damnyankees out of a stretch of trench. Featherston's enemies inside the CSA weren't so obvious as U.S. soldiers in green-gray, but they probably hated him even more than the Yankees had hated their Confederate foes. Soldiering, sometimes, was just a job. Jake had also discovered politics was a serious business.

One of the guards nodded and gestured. As Jake came forward from the building, another guard opened the curbside door for him. "Freedom!" the man said as he got into the motorcar.

"Freedom, Henry," Featherston echoed. He settled himself on the padded seat. This beat the hell out of life as an artillery sergeant, any way you looked at it.

"Freedom!" the driver said, putting the Birmingham in gear.

"Freedom, Virgil," Featherston answered. "Everything ready at the other end?"

"Far as I know, Sarge." Virgil Joyner made that sound as if he were addressing a general, not a noncom. Yes, this was a pretty good life, all right.

They went only a few blocks. When the driver pulled to a stop, Featherston scowled. "What the hell?" he said angrily. A squad of Freedom Party guards were arguing with some Richmond policemen in old-fashioned gray uniforms. Several reporters scribbled in notebooks. A photographer's flash immortalized the moment. Featherston got out of the motorcar in a hurry. "What's going on here?" he demanded.

"This is a polling place," one of the cops said. "No electioneering allowed within a hundred feet. Far as I'm concerned, they sure as hell count as electioneering." He pointed to the armed guards.

"We're just here to protect Mr. Featherston," one of the men in not-quite-Confederate uniform insisted. He sounded ready for business. The policemen looked nervous. Well they might-the Freedom Party guards outgunned them, and had proved to the CSA they weren't shy about mixing it up with the police, or with anyone else they didn't like.

Here, though, Jake judged it a good time to walk soft. "It's all right, boys," he said, as genially as he could. "Don't reckon anybody'll take a shot at me while I go and vote." He walked past the policemen and toward the doorway above which the Stars and Bars fluttered.

The guards didn't look happy. Like watchdogs, they wanted to stay with their master all the time. But, once he'd decided, they didn't argue. The cops didn't bother hiding their relief.

"Who you gonna vote for, Mr. Featherston?" a reporter shouted.

"Freedom-the straight ticket," Jake answered with a wave and a grin.

Despite that cocky grin, he remained alert as he went to the polling place. If anybody wanted to take a shot at him, this was a hell of a good place to do it. If a rifle muzzle came out of that building, where would he jump? Or from that one? Or that one? He hadn't fought in the trenches-the First Richmond Howitzers had been in back of them-but he'd had plenty of bullets whip past his head. He knew everything that needed knowing about diving for cover.

No shots rang out. He strode into the polling place with grin intact. A man coming out of a curtained booth recognized him, did a double take, and grinned a grin of his own, a big, delighted one. "Freedom!" the fellow blurted.

"Freedom," Featherston said.

Somber, disapproving coughs from the officials at the polling place, four or five graybeards who might have fought in the Second Mexican War or maybe even the War of Secession, but surely not in the Great War. One of them said, "No electioneering, gentlemen, if you please."

"Right," Jake said; he was doing this by the rules. He scrawled his name and address in their registry book, and went into the booth the fellow who'd recognized him had vacated. As he'd told the reporter he would, he put an X by the name of the Freedom candidates for Congress, for the Virginia Assembly and State Senate, and for the Richmond City Council. The last race was nominally nonpartisan, but everybody knew better. With the Whigs and Radical Liberals pretty evenly split in the district, he thought the Freedom Party man had a decent chance of sneaking home a winner, too.

After finishing the ballot, he went out and presented it to the election officials. One of them folded it and put it into the ballot box. "Jacob Featherston has voted," he intoned solemnly.

"Jacob Featherston is a murdering son of a bitch," said a man who'd come out of his voting booth a moment after Jake emerged from his.

More coughs from the old men. "None of that here," one of them said. Another took the ballot. "Oscar Herbert has voted," he declared.

A few years earlier, when the Freedom Party was just getting off the ground, Jake Featherston would have mixed it up with Herbert right outside the polling place, or maybe here inside it. He was no less angry now, but he was shrewder than he had been. Some day soon, pal, somebody's gonna pay you a little visit, he thought. Your name's Oscar Herbert and you live in this precinct. We'll find you. You bet we will.

Herbert went one way, Featherston the other. He walked through the cops and out to his guards. With audible sighs of relief, they closed in around him. Photographers took more flash pictures. He waved to them.

"How many seats do you expect to lose this time?" a reporter called.

"What's that?" Jake cupped a hand behind his ear as he got into the Birmingham. "Spent too long in the artillery, and my ears aren't what they ought to be." He slammed the car door before the reporter could finish the question again. He had lost some hearing during the war, but not so much as that. Still, artilleryman's ear came in handy for avoiding questions he didn't want to answer.

"Back to headquarters, Sarge?" the driver asked.

"You bet," Featherston answered. The car pulled away from the curb.

On the short ride over to Party headquarters, Jake contemplated the question he'd pretended not to hear. He liked none of the answers he came up with. His best guess was that Freedom would lose seats in the House of Representatives. He hoped the Party would hold its own, but he didn't believe it. And if he lost seats-he took everything personally, as he always had-how long would people keep finding him a force to be reckoned with?

"We were so close," he muttered. "So goddamn close."

"What's that?" Virgil Joyner said.

"Nothin'. Not a thing." Jake lied without hesitation.

When he got back to Freedom Party headquarters, he wished he hadn't gone and voted so soon. He had nothing to do but sit around and wait and stare at the banks of telegraph clickers and phones and wireless sets that would bring in the election results when there were election results to bring in. That wouldn't be for a while yet. Polls in Virginia didn't close till seven P.M., and those farther west would stay open a couple of hours longer than that. Meanwhile…

Meanwhile, he did some more scribbling in Over Open Sights. He'd fiddled with the-maybe journal was the right name for it-now and again in the days since the Great War, but he'd never quite managed to recapture the heat he'd known while writing it in the odd moments when he wasn't throwing three-inch shells at the damnyankees.

One of these days, he told himself. One of these days, I'll be ready to put it out, and people will be ready to read it. I'll know when. I'm sure I'll know when. But the time isn't ripe yet. He fiddled with the pile of Gray Eagle scratchpads in lieu of twiddling his thumbs, and accomplished about as much as he would have twiddling them. He changed a word here, took out a couple of words there, added a phrase somewhere else. It all added up to nothing, and he knew that, too.

His secretary stuck her head into the office. "Can I get you something to eat, Mr. Featherston?" she asked, as if she were his mother.

He wouldn't have taken that from anyone else-certainly not from his real mother, were she still alive. But he nodded now. "Thank you kindly, Lulu," he said. "Some fried chicken'd go down mighty nice about now."

"I'll take care of it," she promised, and hurried away. Take care of it she did, as she always did. Jake ate like a wolf. No matter how much he ate, his gaunt form never added an ounce. He ate as much from duty as from hunger. His stomach would pain him no matter what when he watched the returns coming in, but it would pain him less with food in there.

A little before seven, Freedom Party leaders and telegraph operators gathered at the headquarters. Featherston made himself greet them, made himself shake hands and smile and slap backs, the way he'd made himself eat. It needed doing, so he did it. But it was a distraction he could have done without.

"Polls are closing," said somebody-somebody with a gift for the obvious-as church bells all through Richmond chimed seven times. A minute or so later, the very first returns began coming over the wire. They meant as little as the changes Jake had made in Over Open Sights earlier in the day, but everybody exclaimed over them even so. Featherston did a little exclaiming himself when a Freedom Party candidate jumped into an early lead in a Virginia district he'd been sure was safely Whig.

"Maybe the people are wising up," he said. "I hope they are, God damn it."

In the first days of the Great War, he'd thought the Confederate Army would drive everything before it, too. He'd taken unholy glee in shelling Washington, and he'd delighted in swarming up into Pennsylvania and toward Philadelphia. If the de facto capital of the USA had fallen along with the de jure one… But Philadelphia had held, and, inch by painful inch, the C.S. Army had been driven back through Pennsylvania and Maryland and into Virginia itself.

If the niggers hadn't risen up and stabbed us in the back… But he knew they had, however much white men nowadays tried to pretend otherwise.

On one of the competing wireless sets, an announcer said, "If this trend holds up, it looks like the third district in South Carolina will be coming back to the Whigs in the next Congress after staying in Freedom Party hands these past two terms."

Curses ran through the headquarters, Featherston's loud among them. The Party had held that seat in the debacle of 1923; he'd counted on holding it again. Maybe the people weren't wising up after all. Maybe they were an even bigger pack of damned idiots than he'd thought.

A colored waiter, hired for the occasion, brought around a tray of drinks. Featherston took a whiskey. The Negro nodded respectfully as he did. Jake tossed back the drink. His mouth tightened. Where were you in the uprising, you sorry black son of a bitch? You didn't have a penguin suit on then, I bet. Probably just another goddamn Red. If we'd shot a few thousand bastards like you before you got out of line, we wouldn't have had any trouble like we did. He had some sharp things to say about that in Over Open Sights.

Another Freedom Party seat, this one from Arkansas, went down the drain. Amid more curses, somebody said, "Well, we didn't elect any Senators till 1921, so we don't have to worry about them for another couple o' years."

That was exactly the wrong attitude to take, as far as Jake was concerned. "We're playing this game to win, dammit," he snarled. "We don't play not to lose. We don't play safe. We're playing to win, and we're gonna win. Remember it, damn you all!"

Nobody argued with him, not out loud. But nobody seemed anything close to convinced, either. That meant he got to crow extra loud when, out of a clear blue sky, the Freedom candidate won a tight three-way race for governor of Texas, and then, in the wee small hours of the morning, when a new Freedom Congressman came in from, of all places, southern Sonora.

"See, boys?" Featherston said around a yawn. "We ain't dead yet. Not even close." I hope not even close, anyhow.