“Four days,” he answered. “Then back on the train and the boat to Cuba, and then back to sea. No rest for the weary.” He stepped past her into the cottage and closed the door. “You have any whiskey in this place? Plenty in mine if you don’t.”
“I don’t know,” Anne said. “I haven’t had a chance to look.”
Kimball nodded. “Saw you on the way over here, with the coon hauling your bags. I usually like a little water in my whiskey, but not here. Jekyll Island water tastes like swamp. They say it’s safe to drink, but it’s nasty.”
“Thanks for letting me know,” Anne answered as they made their way back toward the little cottage’s kitchen-if you came to the Laughing January with a cook and a housekeeper, you could do some very handsome entertaining. “I haven’t tried that yet, either.”
Kimball stopped, so suddenly that she almost ran into him. Voice lazy and amused, he asked, “What else haven’t you tried here?”
Afterwards, she couldn’t sort out which of them grabbed the other first. What followed was as much a brawl as lovemaking. He tore a couple of hooks and eyes from her gauzy summer frock as he got her out of it; she sent one of the gold buttons from his uniform jacket spinning across the room when she yanked it open instead of bothering to undo all the fastenings.
They didn’t even look for the bedroom. For the rough coupling they both wanted, the floor seemed better. Kimball’s weight pinned Anne half against rug, half against polished hardwood. He slammed himself into her as if he wanted to hurt her and please her at the same time.
And he did, both. Her nails clawed stripes down his back as she bucked under him. “Come on, damn you, come on,” she said, her own excitement mounting. She bit his shoulder and tasted blood.
He grunted, drove even deeper into her-she would not have thought it possible-and spent himself. Only a couple of quick heartbeats later, she cried out, too, a noise any cat prowling along a fence would have recognized.
Suddenly, he was heavy upon her. Before she could push him away, he rolled off and to one side. She felt a small pang of regret as he pulled out of her. “
Anne rubbed her backside in a fashion no properly refined lady would have used-but then, no properly refined lady would have got rugburn on the area in question by screwing her brains out on the floor. “I thought you were trying to ram me down into the basement,” she replied, not without admiration.
“These places don’t have basements,” Roger Kimball said.
“I knew that,” Anne told him. “The way you were going there, I didn’t think you cared.” Her stretch was an odd blend of satisfied lassitude and abraded posterior.
One appetite for the moment slaked, Kimball remembered another. “We were coming in here for some whiskey, weren’t we?” He got to his feet and searched the cabinets. Curtains covered the windows, but they weren’t thick. A dedicated snoop would have had no trouble spotting his nudity. He didn’t care. Anne admired him again, this time for brazenness-not that she didn’t already know about that. She also admired the red lines on his back…and the back itself.
He grunted again, on a different note from when he’d shot his seed into her, and held up a bottle three- quarters full of amber liquid. “If this cottage is like mine, the bedroom should be…over here,” he said, and sure enough, it was.
He bothered with glasses no more than he’d bothered with clothes. Anne followed his lead, something she was unused to doing. He yanked the cork from the bottle with his teeth when it would not yield to his fingers. “What shall we drink to?” Anne asked.
She wondered if he would say
“Leave some for me,” Anne said. She had to pull it out of his hand. It wasn’t the best whiskey she’d ever had, nor anywhere close, but, if she drank enough of it, it would get her drunk. After she’d swallowed and her eyes stopped watering, she said, “We’re going to lose, aren’t we?”
“Don’t see how we can do anything else,” Kimball said. “Scuttlebutt is, we’ve already started sniffing around for terms.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Anne said. “I’d have thought President Semmes owed me enough to let me know such things, but maybe not.” Maybe, with her plantation in ruins and her investments in hardly better shape, she wasn’t rich enough to be worth cultivating any more.
“Well, he hasn’t told me about it, either. I don’t know if the stories are true or not,” Kimball said. “Ones I’ve heard say that damned Roosevelt turned us down flat, so it doesn’t matter any which way.” He drank again, then stared at the bottle. “What are we supposed to do after we lose the war? How are we supposed to get over that?”
“The damnyankees did. They did it twice,” Anne said. “Anything those people can do, we can do, too. We have to figure out where we went wrong in this fight and make sure we don’t go wrong that way again.”
“Because there
She discovered Roger Kimball’s hand high up on her bare thigh. As she stared at it, it moved higher still. She set the bottle on the floor by the side of the bed and clasped Kimball to her. Love, or even fornication, was better than thinking about what might have been, too.
An aeroplane buzzed high over the line east of Lubbock. Jefferson Pinkard stared up at it. He thought about firing a few rounds-by the way it had come, it was plainly a U.S. machine-but decided not to waste the ammunition. It was so high up there, he had no chance of hitting it.
“Why we don’t got no aeroplanes to shoot down that
Jeff thought of Emily. He couldn’t help imagining her naked. That was all right, when he didn’t imagine Bedford Cunningham naked beside her or on top of her. He answered, “Guess they don’t reckon this here front’s important enough to send us much in the way of flying machines. Yankees always have had more’n us.”
Something fell from the U.S. aeroplane. Pinkard’s first reaction was to hit the dirt, but he checked himself- that wasn’t a bomb. No: those weren’t bombs. They drifted and fluttered in the air like the snowflakes he occasionally saw in Birmingham. Rodriguez stared at them in blank wonderment. Jeff guessed he never saw snow down in Sonora, even if he’d made its acquaintance here this past winter.
“Papers!” Sergeant Albert Cross said. “The bastards are dropping leaflets on us.”
“Rather have ’em drop leaflets than bombs any old day, and twice on Sunday,” Pinkard said.
“Probably be scratchy as hell,” Cross said after a judicious pause for thought. “But hey, Hip, you’re right-damn sight better’n nothin’. It’s a fucking wonder all the flies in Texas don’t live in this here trench.”
“You mean they don’t?” Jeff said, kidding on the square. “Could have fooled me.” As if to make him pay for his words, something bit him on the back of the neck. He swatted, but didn’t think he got it.
By then, the fluttering papers had nearly reached the ground. A few drifted back toward the Yankees’ trenches. Others fell in no-man’s-land. Still others came down in and behind the Confederates’ forward line.
Had Pinkard stabbed up with his bayoneted Tredegar, he could have spitted one of the descending leaflets. He didn’t bother. He just grabbed one out of the air. Cross and Rodriguez crowded close to see what the devil the United States thought it worthwhile to tell their foes.
At the top of the leaflet was a U.S. flag that looked to have too many stars in the canton crossed with another one Pinkard hadn’t seen before, a dark banner with the light silhouette of a tough-looking man’s profile on it. The headline below explained: THE UNITED STATES WELCOME THE STATE OF HOUSTON INTO THE UNION.
“Wait a minute,” Cross said, “Houston’s
