men.
' 'Scuse me, ma'am, but could you spare me a quarter?' a gaunt colored man asked, touching the brim of his straw hat. 'I's powerful hungry.'
Anne walked past him as if he didn't exist. She heard him sigh behind her. How many times had whites pretended not to see him? She didn't care if he thought she was heartless. He'd been old enough to carry a rifle in the uprisings during the war. As far as she was concerned, that meant she couldn't trust him. She was glad a good number of policemen and Freedom Party stalwarts tramped along the streets.
She walked past three or four more black beggars before getting back to Ford's Hotel. One of them cursed softly when she went by without taking notice of him. He couldn't have been in Richmond long, or he would have got used to being ignored. At the hotel, the colored doorman in his magnificent uniform smiled and bowed as he held the door open for her. Before the war, she would have taken that subservience as no less than her due. Now she wondered what lay behind it-wondered and had no trouble coming up with a nasty answer.
When she strode into the bar, she let out a sigh of relief. The cold air gushing from the vents seemed a blessing from on high. She ordered a gin and tonic and took the drink back to a small table. Five minutes later, she was fighting not to shiver. She'd never imagined that air conditioning could be too effective, but it was here. She felt as if she'd gone from subtropical Richmond to somewhere just north of the Arctic Circle.
A bespectacled officer-a colonel, she saw by the three stars on his collar tabs-sitting at the bar picked up his drink and carried it over to her table. 'May I join you?' he asked, his accent sounding more like a Yankee's than that of a man from the CSA.
'Clarence!' she said, and sprang to her feet to give him a hug. 'Wonderful to see you again-it's been years. I remember when you got your name in the papers at the Olympics, but I'd forgotten they put you back in uniform.'
'Had to find something to do with me,' Clarence Potter answered lightly, but with a hint of bitterness underneath. 'How have you been, Anne? You still look damn good.'
She couldn't remember the last time a man told her something like that and sounded as if he meant it. When she and Clarence had briefly been lovers down in South Carolina, nothing personal drove them apart, but she'd backed the Freedom Party while he despised Jake Featherston. Despite the saying, politics had unmade them as bedfellows.
'I'm-well enough,' she said. She and Potter both sat down. She couldn't help asking, 'What do you think of the plebiscites?'
'I'm amazed,' he said simply. 'If you'd told me five years ago that we could annoy the United States into calling elections they're bound to lose, if you'd told me we could get Kentucky back without going to war, I would have said you were out of your ever-loving mind. That's what I would have said, but I would have been wrong.'
Not many men, as Anne knew too well, ever admitted they were wrong for any reason. All the same, she couldn't help asking, 'And what do you think of the president now? He's sharper than you figured.'
'I never figured he wasn't sharp. I figured he was crazy.' Potter didn't hold his voice down. He'd never been shy about saying what he thought, and he'd never worried much about what might come after that. After a sip at his own drink-another gin and tonic, Anne saw-he went on, 'If he is crazy, though, he's crazy like a fox, so maybe I'm the one who was crazy all along. You can't argue with what he's accomplished.'
She noticed he still separated the accomplishments from the man. In the CSA these days, people were encouraged-to put it mildly-to think of Jake Featherston and his accomplishments as going together. No, Clarence had never been one to join the common herd. Anne didn't mind that; neither had she. 'What are you doing in the Army these days?' she asked.
'Intelligence, same as before,' he answered, and then not another word. Given the four he had used, that wasn't surprising. After a moment, he asked a question of his own: 'Why did you come up to Richmond?'
'Parce que je peut parler franзais bien,' she said.
It didn't faze him. He nodded as if she'd given him a puzzle piece he needed. He hesitated again, then asked, 'How long are you going to be here?'
'Another few days.' She looked him in the eye. 'Shall we make the most of it?' She'd never been coy, and the older she got, the less point to it she saw.
That didn't faze him, either. He nodded again. 'Why not?' he said.
Colonel Irving Morrell didn't think he'd ever seen people dance in the streets before, not outside of a bad musical comedy on the cinema screen. Here in Lubbock, people were dancing in the streets, dancing and singing, 'Plebiscite!' and, 'Yanks out!' and whatever other lovely lyrics they could make up.
The people of the state of Houston had been his fellow citizens ever since it joined the USA after the Great War. If he'd been carrying a machine gun instead of the.45 on his belt, he would have gunned down every single one of them he saw, and he would have smiled while he did it, too.
Sergeant Michael Pound, who strode down the sidewalk with him, was every bit as appalled as he was. 'What are they going to do with us, sir, once we have to get out of this state?' the gunner asked.
'I don't know,' Morrell said tightly. He'd tried not to think about that. He couldn't help thinking about it, but he'd done his best not to.
Sergeant Pound, on the other hand, seemed to take a perverse pleasure in analyzing what had just happened. He probably enjoys picking scabs off to watch things bleed, too, Morrell thought. 'This is a defeat, sir- nothing but a defeat,' Pound said. 'How many divisions would those Confederate sons of bitches have needed to run us out of here? More than they've got, by God- I'll tell you that.'
'Democracy,' Morrell answered. 'Will of the people. President Smith says so.'
Before Sergeant Pound could reply-could say something that might perhaps have been prejudicial to good discipline-one of the local revelers whirled up to the U.S. soldiers and jeered, 'Now you damnyankee bastards can get your asses out of Texas and go to hell where you belong.'
Colonel Morrell did not pause to discuss the niceties of the situation with him. He punched him in the nose instead. Sergeant Pound kicked the reveler on the way down. He didn't get up again.
'Anybody else?' Morrell asked. The.45 had left its holster and appeared in his right hand with almost magical speed.
Before President Smith and President Featherston agreed on the plebiscite, the U.S. officer would have touched off a riot by slugging a Houstonian. Now the rest of the dancers left him and Sergeant Pound alone. They'd already got most of what they wanted, and Morrell knew they would get the rest as soon as the votes from the plebiscite were counted. And most of them didn't want to give the U.S. Army big, overt provocations any more. Those could jeopardize what they'd been screaming for.
Sergeant Pound must have been thinking along with Morrell, for he said, 'Freedom Party goons will probably thump that big-mouthed son of a bitch harder than we ever did.'
'Good,' Morrell said, and said no more.
A woman-a genteel-looking, middle-aged woman-said something inflammatory about U.S. soldiers and their affections for their mothers. Morrell still held the.45 in his hand. Ever so slightly, his index finger tightened on the trigger. He willed it to relax. After a few seconds, the rebellious digit obeyed his will.
An Army truck took Morrell and Pound out of Lubbock and back to the Army base outside of town. As far as Morrell could tell, Army bases and colored districts were the only parts of Houston where anybody still gave a damn about the USA.
A young lieutenant waylaid Morrell as soon as he jumped down from the truck. 'Sir, Brigadier General MacArthur wants to see you in his office right away.'
'Thank you,' Morrell said, in lieu of something more pungent. Sergeant Pound went on his way, a free man. Morrell sighed. The guards outside Mac-Arthur's office glowered at him despite his uniform as he approached, but relaxed and passed him through when they recognized him and decided he wasn't an assassin in disguise. He saluted Daniel MacArthur. 'Reporting as ordered, sir.'
The lantern-jawed U.S. commander in Houston returned the salute, then waved Morrell to a chair. 'Easier to fiddle sitting down while Rome burns, eh, Colonel?'
'Sir, I just had the pleasure of coldcocking one of those goddamn Houstonian bastards.' Morrell explained exactly what he'd done on the streets of Lubbock, and why. The only thing he didn't do was name Michael Pound.
