But Jorge shook his head. 'I don't believe it. They'd have to stick soldiers in every little town from Virginia to here. Even the Yankees don't have that many soldiers…I hope.'
Pedro thought about it. 'Mm, maybe you're right. The war is over. The Yankees will want to go home, too.'
'Sure they will. Who wouldn't?' Jorge said. 'Being a soldier is no fun. You march around, that's not so bad. But when you fight, most of the time you're bored and uncomfortable, and the rest you're scared to death.'
'And you can get hurt, too,' their mother said softly, and crossed herself again.
Jorge and Pedro had both been lucky, coming through the war with nothing worse than a few scratches. Their brother hadn't. The roll of the dice, the turn of the card…Some guys had a shell burst ten feet away from them and didn't get badly hurt. Some turned into hamburger. Who could say why? God, maybe. From everything Jorge had seen, He had a rugged sense of humor.
One of these days, he wanted to talk that over with Pedro-and with Miguel, too. Not here, though. Not now. Not with their mother listening. She believed, and she hadn't seen so many reasons not to believe.
Well, all that could wait. It would have to, in fact. 'How is the farm?' he asked his mother. He would be here for a long time. This was what counted now.
'Not so bad,' she answered, 'but not so good, either. We all did everything we could. With so many men in the Army, though'-she spread her hands-'we couldn't do everything we wanted to. The livestock is all right. The crops…Well, we didn't go hungry, but we barely made enough to pay for the things we need and we can't get from the land.'
'It's about what you'd expect,' Pedro said. 'If we work hard, we can bring it back to the way it was before the war-maybe better. If the Yankees let us, I mean.'
'I think maybe they will. They don't care so much about us-we're too far away,' Jorge said. 'Virginia, Tennessee-they really hate the people there. And Georgia, too. I think they'll come down on them harder and leave us alone unless somebody here does something stupid like try to rise up.'
Pedro didn't say anything. Jorge realized that wasn't necessarily good news. No, his brother hadn't seen so much fighting as he had. Maybe Pedro was still ready for more. Jorge knew damn well he wasn't. Bombers dropping loads on Baroyeca, without even any antiaircraft to shoot back? Believe it or not, the mere idea made him want to cross himself.
XV
People in the United States said Washington, D.C., had Confederate weather. Armstrong Grimes' father, who was from Ohio, said so all the goddamn time. Armstrong had always believed it. Why not? His old man wouldn't waste time and effort lying about anything so small.
But now Armstrong was stuck in southern Alabama in the middle of summer, and he was discovering that people in the USA didn't know what the hell they were talking about. He'd already found that out about his father- what guy growing up doesn't? — but discovering the same thing about the rest of the country came as a bit of a jolt.
Every day down here was like a bad day back home. It got hot. It got sticky. And it never let up. U.S. soldiers gulped salt tablets. When the sweaty patches under their arms dried out-which didn't happen very often-they left salt stains on their uniforms. He itched constantly. Prickly heat, athlete's foot, jock itch…You name it, Armstrong came down with it. He smeared all kinds of smelly goop on himself. Sometimes it helped. More often, it didn't.
And there were bugs. They had mosquitoes down here that could have doubled as fighter-bombers. They had several flavors of ferocious flies. They had vicious little biting things the locals called no-see-'ems. They had chiggers. They had ticks. They had something called chinch bugs. The Army sprayed DDT on everything and everybody. It helped…some. You would have had to spray every square inch of the state to put down all the nasty biting things.
Local whites hated the men in green-gray who'd whipped their armies and made them stop killing Negroes. Bushwhackers shot at U.S. soldiers. You looked sideways at every junked motorcar by the side of the road. It could go boom and take half a squad with it.
The U.S. Army didn't waste time fighting fair, not after the surrender. Every time a U.S. soldier got shot, ten- then twenty-Confederates faced the firing squad. The number for an auto bomb started at a hundred and also quickly doubled.
Armstrong hadn't been on any firing squads while the war was going on. Now, with three stripes on his sleeve, he frequently commanded one. The first couple of times he did it, it made his stomach turn over. After that, it turned into routine, and he got used to it.
So did the soldiers who did the shooting. They went about their business at the same time as they argued about whether it did any good. 'Just makes these motherfuckers hate us worse,' Squidface opined.
'They already hate us,' Armstrong said. 'I don't give a shit about that. I just don't want 'em shooting at us.'
'If we don't get the assholes who're really doin' it, what do we accomplish?' Squidface asked. 'Shootin' little old ladies gets old, you know?'
'We shoot enough little old ladies, the ones who're left alive'll make the trigger-happy guys knock it off,' Armstrong said.
'Good fuckin' luck.' Squidface was not a believer.
Armstrong trotted out what he thought was the clincher: ''Sides, we kill all the whites down here, nobody'll be left to go bushwhacking, right?'
'Shit, now you're talkin' like a Confederate nigger,' Squidface said. 'We do that, won't be anybody left alive down here.'
'Wouldn't break my heart.' Armstrong wiped his face with his sleeve. The sleeve came away wet-big surprise. 'Best thing they could do with this country is give it back to the possums and the gators.'
Squidface laughed, but he wouldn't give up on the argument-what better way to kill time? He suggested a reason to leave some Confederates alive: 'Nobody gets laid any more if we kill all the women. Some of the ones we grease are cute. That's a waste of good pussy.'
'How come you haven't come down venereal yet?' Armstrong asked.
'Same reason you haven't, I bet,' Squidface answered. 'I'm lucky. And when I figure maybe I won't be lucky, I'm careful. The broads down here, they're nothin' but a bunch of whores.'
'They lost,' Armstrong said, which went a long way towards explaining things. He added, 'A lot of 'em, their husbands or boyfriends aren't coming back, either.'
He supposed he had been lucky. He'd got an education down here that was a hell of a lot more enjoyable than anything they'd tried to cram down his throat in high school. He hadn't cared about English lit or medieval history or practical math. This-this was stuff he wanted to learn.
The one thing he was glad about was that none of the women who'd enlightened him had come before his firing squad. That would have been worse than embarrassing, and it might have landed him in trouble. Orders against what the brass called fraternization had gone out. Getting anyone to listen to them was another story.
'Far as I'm concerned, it's the same now as it was when we were shooting at each other,' he said. 'I just want to serve out my hitch, take off the goddamn uniform, go back home, and figure out what the hell to do with the rest of my life.'
'Want to hear somethin' funny?' Squidface said.
'I'm all ears,' Armstrong answered.
'Me, I'm thinkin' about turning into a lifer.'
'Jesus Christ! C'mon with me, buddy. I'm taking you to the aid station. You're down with something worse than the clap. You've got softening of the brain, damned if you don't.'
'Nah. I been thinkin' about it,' Squidface said. 'Thinkin' hard, too. Say I go back to Civvy Street. What's the best thing that can happen to me?'
'You get out of the Army,' Armstrong answered at once.
'Yeah, and then what? Best thing I can see is, I spend the next forty years working in a factory, I find some
