Breakthroughs

like what happens after that.”

He took his time finishing the beer, then turned and walked toward the door. He hadn’t gone three paces before the bartender shouted, “Don’t even breathe, soldier boy!”

Featherston looked back over his shoulder and found himself staring down the barrels of a sawed-off shotgun. After gas and machine guns and Yankee traveling forts, that was not so much of a much. If the bastard did pull the triggers, it would be over in a hurry, anyway. “Fuck you,” Jake said, and kept walking.

No blast of shot tore into his back. He stood on the street for a few seconds. Five dollars for a flophouse bed? He shook his head and made for Capitol Square. Sleeping in the park was free. Maybe a congressman or a senator would come by and see what the aftermath of war looked like.

He was not the only soldier in Capitol Square-far from it. As evening fell, several campfires started flickering. That was probably against the rules, but no policemen came in to do anything about it. Jake saw them on the sidewalk and clustered around the bomb-scarred Capitol. “Cowardly bastards,” he muttered.

“Wish they would try and break us up,” another ragged veteran said. “Look at ’em there, fat and happy. Nobody who ain’t been through what we been through can know what it’s like, but we’d give ’em a taste, goddamn if we wouldn’t.”

“That’s right, by Jesus,” Featherston said. “Wonder who their pappies were, so they didn’t have to put on a real uniform.”

“Amen,” the other soldier said. “You can sing that in my church any old day.” He stuck out a hand. “Name’s Ted Weston. I’m in the 22nd North Carolina Infantry-or I was, anyways.”

“I’m Jake Featherston, First Richmond Howitzers.”

“I’ve heard of that outfit,” Weston said. “Pretty la-de-da, ain’t they? You might could have had a pappy of your own, get into a unit like that.”

“Hell I did,” Jake growled. “I was good at what I did, is all. Good enough to lead a battery for a year and a half, but not good enough to take the stripes off my sleeve and put a bar or two on my collar. La-de-da, my ass- hadn’t been for a la-de-da officer with a fancy pa gettin’ hisself killed…ahh, the hell with it.” He spat in disgust.

Weston eyed him in the dim, flickering light; they weren’t close to a fire. “Sounds like you got a powerful load of angry rilin’ your belly, Jake.”

“Oh, a touch,” Featherston allowed. “Just a touch. Don’t get me started, or I’ll sick it all up.” He waited to see if Weston would ask him more. He would have brought it all out; he might even have purged himself of some of it. But the infantryman from North Carolina shrugged and moved away.

Nobody gives a damn, Featherston thought. Nobody. He went away himself, to the base of the great statue of Albert Sidney Johnston, the Confederacy’s chief martyr during the War of Secession. The war now ended had martyrs in plenty, but he didn’t think he would see statues to them any time soon. He wrapped himself in his blanket and went to sleep.

When morning came, he found a cheap cafe, the saloons not yet being open. Ham and eggs and biscuits and coffee cost him two dollars he could not afford. He fumed at the price, as he fumed at everything these days. And then he spotted a couple of neatly turned-out sentries in front of a building at the southwestern corner of Capitol Square. Those sentries drew him as a lodestone draws nails. Sure enough, that was the War Department building, the source, as he saw it, of all his miseries and all his country’s miseries as well.

One of the sentries wrinkled his nose as Featherston approached. He turned his head and spoke to his comrade: “Dogs find more rubbish to drag out these days.”

Jake didn’t think he was meant to hear that, but hear it he did, artilleryman’s battered ears or not. “You can kiss my ass, too, pal,” he said, and started past the spit-and-polish boys into the War Department.

The one who’d spoken swung his rifle down horizontally to block his way. “Where do you think you’re going, buddy?” he demanded. “State your business.”

“Kiss my ass,” Jake repeated. “I’m a citizen of this country, and I’m a real soldier, too, goddammit. I’d rather smell the way I do than be a perfumed pansy in a uniform that never once saw dirt. Now get the hell out of my way. I aim to have me a word or two to say to the bonehead generals who cost us this war.”

“I don’t think so, sonny boy,” the sentry said. “They’ve got better things to do with their time than listen to- and smell-the likes of you.”

“Like hell they do,” Featherston said. “I want to tell you-” Without a single telltale motion or glance, he kicked the sentry in the crotch, then whirled and coldcocked his chum while the other man was just beginning to raise his rifle. The only difference between them was that the first went down with a groan, the second silently.

Whistling, Jake started to walk by them and into the War Department. Then, reluctantly, he checked himself. He’d get caught in there. He was liable to get caught out here; a couple of men were coming across the street toward him.

He did what they must have expected least-he charged straight at them. Neither of them cared to try tackling him. They were middle-aged and prosperous and no doubt thought anyone who did anything out of line would politely wait around for the police afterwards. He taught them otherwise in a hurry. Then he was back in Capitol Square, one discharged soldier among hundreds. How were they supposed to find him after that?

They couldn’t. They didn’t. They didn’t even try, and the sentries, who’d got a better look at him, were in no condition to help. He stopped running and started sauntering, looking like any of the rest of the men in the square who had more time on their hands than they knew what to do with.

At least one of those soldiers had seen what he’d done. As he strolled past, the fellow said, “Damn shame you couldn’t give that bastard Semmes a good shot in the nuts, too.”

“You’d best believe it’s a damn shame,” Jake said. “One of these days, though, if this poor, miserable country ever gets back on its feet again, we’ll pay back everybody who ever did us wrong-and I mean everybody.”

“Hope that day comes soon,” the other veteran said. “Can’t come soon enough, if anybody wants to know what I think.”

“I don’t know when,” Featherston said. “We’ll have to go some to put our own house in order, I reckon. But we’ll walk tall again one of these days, and then-and then everybody better look out, that’s all.” The other soldier clapped his hands.

Not even a funeral. Sylvia Enos thought that was worst of all. When scarlet fever took her mother, when her brother died in a trainwreck, there had been an end to things, dirt thudding down on the lid of a coffin, and then a wake afterwards. Once that was done, people had been able to pick up the threads of their lives and go on.

But fish and crabs and whatever lived at the bottom of the sea in the middle of the Atlantic were giving George the only burial he would ever get. Fishermen shuddered when they talked of things like that. Along with all his friends, George had hated the idea of going down at sea. Sylvia knew men who wouldn’t eat crab or lobster because of what the shellfish might have been eating.

She stirred the dress she’d thrown in the kettle full of black dye. It would be ready pretty soon. She’d used a good deal of coal heating water to dye clothes for mourning; that was cheaper than buying new black dresses and shirtwaists. She hoped the Coal Board wouldn’t cut the ration yet again, though.

Mary Jane came into the kitchen and said, “I want to go out and play.”

“Go on, then,” Sylvia said with a sigh. Mary Jane wasn’t really mourning; how could she mourn a man she scarcely remembered? She knew Sylvia was upset, but had trouble understanding why. George, Jr., had known his father well enough to miss him, but he was also far less wounded than he would have been had George come home every night. School seemed far more real and far more urgent to him than a father long at sea.

Sylvia wished she felt the same way. Now that George was gone, she found herself far more forgiving of his flaws than she had been while he was alive. She even-almost-wished he’d gone to bed with that colored strumpet, to give him one more happy memory to hold on to when the torpedo slammed into the Ericsson.

“Not fair,” she muttered, stirring again. The Confederacy had already dropped out of the war, and England had been on the point of giving up. Why, how, had a British submersible chosen her husband’s ship in those waning moments of the war? Where was the sense in that?

George hadn’t even mentioned British submersibles to her. All he’d ever written about were Confederate boats. Why had the Royal Navy decided to move one of theirs into that part of the ocean?

She didn’t suppose questions like that had any answers. A minister would have called it God’s will. As far as she was concerned, that wasn’t any answer, either. Why had God decided to take everybody on board the Ericsson? Because her husband had wanted to screw a whore? If God started taking