years in the CSA; he knew what was what here. But he also knew he was being watched. The damnyankees didn't waste subtlety showing him that-which didn't mean there weren't also subtle spies, ones he didn't notice right away. He assumed his telephone was tapped and his mail read.
And so he sat tight and worked on his memoirs. A generation earlier, he'd done what he could to free the CSA from the onerous terms of the armistice after the Great War. But the Confederacy wasn't crushed then. It wasn't occupied, either. The USA had learned a bar fighter's lesson since: once you knocked a guy down, you needed to kick him in the head so he couldn't jump up and come after you with a broken bottle.
One day in early March, when spring was just starting to be in the air, he went over to Capitol Square to look around. Woodrow Wilson had declared war on the USA there in 1914. Potter himself and Nathan Bedford Forrest III had halfheartedly plotted against Jake Featherston there, too.
Forrest was dead now, because you needed to be a better plotter than he ever was to go up against the wily President of the CSA. Featherston never found out Potter was involved in that scheme. If he had, Potter knew he would have died himself.
Capitol Square had been battered when the two generals sat on a park bench and talked about where the Confederacy was going. Down the drain, though neither of them knew it at the time.
The square looked even worse now than it had then, which wasn't easy. The grass was still mangy and leprous from winter's freezes. No one had mowed it for a long time. It softened the outlines of bomb and shell craters without hiding them. Signs with big red letters shouted blunt warnings: WATCH WHERE YOU STEP! and MINES amp; LIVE AMMO!
Thus cautioned, Potter didn't walk across the square to the remains of the Capitol. A neoclassical building, it had been bombed into looking like an ancient ruin. From the pictures he'd seen, the Colosseum and the Parthenon were both in a hell of a lot better shape than this place.
Workmen were hauling away the wreckage of Albert Sidney Johnston's heroic statue. Like the Confederacy, it was good for nothing but scrap metal these days. George Washington's statue, now out from under its protective pyramid of sandbags, had come through better. Even the Yankees still respected Washington…some, anyhow.
Two blue jays screeched in a tree. A robin hopped on the ground, eye cocked for bugs. A skinny red tabby eyed the robin from behind a low mound of earth. 'Go get it,' Potter murmured. The cat had to eat, too. But the robin flew off. The cat eyed Potter as if it were his fault. It was a cat-it wouldn't blame itself. Potter sketched a salute. 'You're a loser, too,' he said fondly. The cat yawned, showing off needle teeth. It ambled away.
He'd been looking for the bench where Forrest first broached getting rid of Featherston and getting out of the war. Once he sold his memoirs, that bench would become a historical monument of sorts. Or rather, it would have, because he saw no sign of it. One more casualty of war.
He found another bench, deeper into Capitol Square. Despite the signs, he didn't blow up getting to it. He sat down. Getting out of the apartment felt good. So did the sun on his face, though he'd grown used to being pasty during the war. A man in a filthy Confederate uniform was sleeping or passed out drunk in the tall grass not far away. Some newspapers did duty for a blanket.
Potter didn't think the derelict was watching him, though you never could tell. Somebody was, somewhere. He was sure of that. He looked around to see if he could spot the spy. Not this time. That proved exactly nothing, of course.
After the end of the last war, Jake Featherston had spent some time in Capitol Square as a drifter, one more piece of flotsam washed up by the armistice. Then he ran into the Freedom Party-and it ran into him. Before he joined, it was a tiny, hopeless outfit that could keep its membership rolls and accounts in a cigar box. Afterwards…
Now it was more than twenty-five years afterwards. Potter could see that everybody would have ended up better off if Jake Featherston went down some other street and never met the hopeless chucklehead who founded the Freedom Party. Once upon a time, he'd known that chucklehead's name. He couldn't remember it now to save his life. Well, it sure didn't matter any more.
He closed his eyes. He wished he could close his nose. The stench of death still lingered in Richmond. It would only get worse as the weather warmed up, too. How many years would it need to go away for good?
'Hey, friend, you got any change you can spare?'
Clarence Potter opened his eyes. The sleeping soldier-he still had a sergeant's chevrons on his sleeve-had come to life. He was filthy, and badly needed a shave. God only knew when he'd bathed last. But Potter didn't smell whiskey along with the-what did that Yankee soap ad call it?-B.O.
'Here.' He dug in his pocket and found a half-dollar. 'Buy yourself something to eat.' He tossed it to the man.
'Much obliged, sir.' The vet caught it out of the air. He eyed Potter. 'You went through it, I reckon.'
'Twice,' Potter agreed. 'Not always at the front, but yeah-twice.'
'You've got the look, all right.' The demobilized soldier stuck the fat silver coin in a trouser pocket. 'You reckon we'll ever get back on our feet again?'
'Sooner or later? I'm sure of it. When?' Potter shrugged. 'It may be later. I don't know if I'll live to see it. I hope you do.'
The younger man eyed him. 'You talk kinda like a Yankee.' He probably came from Alabama or Mississippi.
With another shrug, Potter answered, 'I went to college up there.'
'Yeah? You like the Yankees, then? If you do, I'll give you your money back, on account of I don't want it.'
'Keep it, son. It's no secret that I don't care for the United States. We can't fight them now-we're licked. I don't know if we'll ever be able to fight them again. But I won't like them if I live to be a hundred, and my bones tell me I won't.'
'Huh,' the vet said gravely, and then, 'We oughta fight 'em. We oughta kick the snot out of 'em for what they done to us.'
Was he another Jake Featherston, still unburst from his chrysalis of obscurity? It was possible. Hell, anything was possible. But long odds, long odds. How many tens of thousands had there been after the last war? Potter had no idea. He did know only one rose to the top.
He also knew this grimy fellow might be a provocateur, not an embryo Featherston. The Yankees wouldn't be sorry to have an excuse to stand him against a wall with a blindfold and a last cigarette. No, not even a little bit.
'I have fought the USA as much as I intend to,' he said. 'Keeping it up when it's hopeless only makes things worse for us.'
'Who says it's hopeless?' the young vet demanded.
'I just did. Weren't you listening? Even if we rise, even if we take Richmond, what will the damnyankees do? Pull their people out of the city and drop a superbomb on it? How do you aim to fight that?'
'They wouldn't.' But the man's voice suddenly held no conviction.
'Sure they would. And if we'd won, we'd've done the same thing to Chicago if it rebelled and we couldn't squash it with soldiers. What else are the damn bombs for?'
The man in the shabby, filthy butternut uniform looked up into the sky, as if he heard the drone of a U.S. heavy bomber. One would be all it took. The cities of the conquered CSA lay naked before airplanes. No antiaircraft guns any more. No Hound Dogs waiting to scramble, either. The only reason the damnyankees hadn't done it yet was that nobody'd provoked them enough.
'Teddy Roosevelt used to talk about the big stick,' Potter said quietly. 'They've got the biggest stick in the world right now, and they'll clobber us with it if we get out of line. We lost. I wish like hell we didn't. I did everything I knew how to do to keep it from happening. We can't get too far out of line now, though. It costs too goddamn much.'
'What am I supposed to do with myself, then?' the veteran asked. Tears filled his voice and glistened in his eyes. 'I been living on hate ever since we gave up. Don't hardly got nothin' else to live on.'
'Clean up. Find a job. Go to work. Find a girl. Plenty of 'em out there, and not so many men. Help build a place where your kids would want to live.' Potter shrugged. 'Where we are now, what else is there?'
'A place where kids'd want to live? Under the Stars and Stripes? Likely tell!' the young man said scornfully.
