'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.
VI
During the Great War, Nellie Jacobs had heard more aeroplane motors above Washington, D.C., than she'd ever wanted to. Aeroplane motors, back in those days, had always meant trouble. Either observers were over the city taking photographs to guide bombers and artillery, or else the bombers themselves paid calls, raining destruction and death down on the Confederate occupiers. Later, Confederate bombers had tried to slaughter U.S. soldiers in Washington. Neither side cared much about civilians. Nellie had needed years after the war to stop wanting to duck whenever motors droned overhead.
Now, though, she and her husband stood in the street on the bright, crisp New Year's Day of 1926, staring into the blue sky, pointing, and exclaiming in excitement like a couple of children. 'Look! There it is!' Hal Jacobs said, pointing again.
'I see it!' Nellie answered. 'Looks like a big old fat cigar up there in the sky, doesn't it?'
'It certainly does,' Hal said. 'That is just what it looks like, I think.'
Clara tugged at Nellie's skirt. 'Ma, I have to go potty,' she said.
'Well, go on in and go,' Nellie said impatiently. 'Your dad and me, we're going to stay right here and watch the zeppelin a while longer.' Clara made the beginnings of a whimper. 'Go on,' Nellie told her. 'Go on, or I'll warm your fanny for you. You're going to be six this year. You don't need me to hold your hand any more when you go tinkle.'
Her daughter ducked into the coffeehouse. Nellie kept staring up at the Kronprinz Friedrich Wilhelm as it neared the mooring station that had been set up at the top of the newly refinished Washington Monument. 'Can you believe it?' Hal said. 'It flew all the way across the Atlantic. All the way across the ocean, without stopping once. What an age we live in!'
'Paper says the crown prince himself is in there.' Nellie tried to point to the little passenger gondola hanging beneath the great cigar-shaped gas bag. 'On a state visit to President Sinclair.'
As Clara came back, Hal nodded. His voice was troubled. 'We fought side by side with Kaiser Bill all through the Great War. Sad we should squabble with Germany now. I hope Friedrich Wilhelm can patch things up.'
'That'd be good,' Nellie agreed. 'Don't want to worry about little Armstrong going off to war one of these days.' She doted on her grandson, not least because her daughter Edna had to take care of him most of the time. Edna's half sister Clara, on the other hand, had been a not altogether welcome surprise and was an ungodly amount of work for a woman well into middle age. She would, thank God, be going back to kindergarten in a few more days.
Suddenly, the zeppelin's engines stopped buzzing. 'They've got it,' Hal said, as if he personally had been the one to moor the Kronprinz Friedrich Wilhelm to the white stone tower. He sounded delighted to repeat himself: 'What an age we live in! When my father was born, there was no telegraph and hardly any railroads. And now we
