He didn't find any restaurant jobs in the Terry, either. He would have been surprised if he had. Half of these joints didn't have any waiters at alclass="underline" the fellow at the stove did everything else, too. At a lot of the other places, the waiter looked to be the cook's son or brother or cousin. Still, you never could tell. If you didn't bet, how were you going to win?
The Terry had even more places to get a drink than it did places to get food. Scipio was tempted to stick his head into one of them, too, not to look for work but to find somewhere he could kill an afternoon over a mug of beer or two. In the end, he stayed out. Unless a man had silver to spend, beer cost three or four dollars a mug even in the dingiest dive. Without a job at the moment, Scipio didn't care to throw his banknotes around like that.
He ended up back at his roominghouse. The landlady gave him a fishy stare. A working man who unexpectedly showed up long before quitting time couldn't figure on anything else. The landlady didn't say anything. She didn't need to. If Scipio was late with his rent, he'd end up on the sidewalk, and everything he owned-not that that amounted to much-out there with him. He was paid up till the end of the week, and he had plenty for the next week's rent.
He hoped he wouldn't have to worry past then. He'd never before had trouble finding a job. That cheered him, till he remembered he hadn't looked for one since the war ended. Everybody was scrambling for work now.
He went upstairs. The furniture in his room was no better than could be expected in a Terry roominghouse, but he kept the place spotlessly clean. The books on the battered bookshelf were his. He pulled out a beat-up abridgement of Gibbon's Decline and Fall and read with a smile on his face of the Moorish conquest of the blond Visigoths of Spain.
General George Armstrong Custer was not a happy man. "God damn it to hell and gone, Lieutenant Colonel," he shouted, "I don't want to go back to Philadelphia. I'm perfectly content to stay here in Nashville."
"I'm sorry, sir," Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling said. Custer's adjutant was in fact a good deal less than devastated, but knew better than to show it. "The telegram just now came in. I'm afraid it leaves you little room for discretion."
"I don't want to go back to Philadelphia," Custer repeated. He had scant discretion. Once set on a course, he kept on it, and derailing him commonly took the rhetorical equivalent of dynamite. He'd been stubborn and hard-charging for more than seventy-eight years; no wire from the War Department would make him change his ways. Abner Dowling was convinced nothing would make him change his ways.
"Sir," Dowling said, "I suspect they want to honor you. You are, after all, the senior soldier in the United States Army."
"Don't pour the soft soap on me, even if you're shaped like a barrel of it," Custer growled. His description of Dowling's physique was, unfortunately, accurate, although he was hardly the dashing young cavalryman himself these days. He tapped at the four stars on the shoulder of his fancy-as fancy as regulations permitted, and then some-uniform. "Took me long enough to make full general, by God. When I think of the fools and whipper-snappers promoted ahead of me… I could weep, Lieutenant Colonel, I could just weep."
Custer's slow promotion had also meant Dowling's slow promotion. Custer never thought of such things, nor that calling a fat man fat to his face might wound his feelings. Custer thought of Custer, first, last, and always.
Dowling scratched at his mustache, in lieu of reaching out and punching the distinguished general commanding the U.S. First Army right in the nose. He took a deep breath and said, "Sir, they may have taken a while to recognize your heroism, but they've gone and done it."
In an odd sort of way, he was even telling the truth. As with the rest of his life, Custer knew only one style of fighting: straight-ahead slugging. First Army had paid a gruesome toll for that aggressiveness as it slogged its way south through western Kentucky and northern Tennessee.
When Custer saw his first barrel, he'd wanted to mass the traveling forts and beat his Confederate opponents over the head with them, too. War Department doctrine dictated otherwise. Custer had ignored War Department doctrine (lying about it along the way, and making Dowling lie, too), assembled his barrels exactly as he wanted to, hurled them at the Rebs-and broken through. Other U.S. armies using the same tactics had broken through, too. If that didn't make him a hero, what did?
If he'd failed… if he'd failed, he would have been retired. And Dowling? Dowling would probably be a first lieutenant in charge of all the battleship refueling depots in Montana and Wyoming. He knew what a narrow escape they'd had. Custer didn't even suspect it. He could be very naive.
He could also be very canny. "I know why they're calling me to Philadelphia," he said, leaning toward his adjutant so he could speak in a conspiratorial whisper. "They're going to put me out to pasture, that's what they're going to do."
"Oh, I hope not, sir," Dowling lied loyally. He'd fought the good fight for a lot of years, keeping Custer as close to military reality as he could. If he didn't have to do that any more, the War Department would give him something else to do. Anything this side of latrine duty looked more pleasant.
"I won't let them," Custer said. "I'll go to the newspapers, that's what I'll do." Dowling was sure he would, too. Publicity was meat and drink to him. He might even win his fight. He'd won many of them in his time.
All that was for the moment beside the point, though. "Sir, you are ordered to report in Philadelphia no later than Sunday, twenty-first April. That's day after tomorrow, sir. They've laid on a special Pullman car for you and Mrs. Custer, with a berth in the next car for me. You don't have to take that particular train, but it would be a comfortable way to get there." Dowling was, and needed to be, skilled at the art of cajolery.
Custer sputtered and fumed through his peroxided mustache. He did know how to take orders-most of the time. "Libbie would like going that way," he said, as if to give himself an excuse for yielding. Dowling nodded, partly from policy, partly from agreement. Custer's wife would like going that way, and would also approve of his acquiescence. But then, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, in Dowling's view, had more brains in her fingernail than her illustrious husband did in his head.
The train proved splendid. Dowling wondered if the Pullmans and dining car had been borrowed from a wealthy capitalist to transport Custer in splendor-and he himself got only a reflection of the splendor Custer had to be enjoying to the fullest. As he ate another bite of beefsteak in port-wine sauce, he reflected that life could have been worse.
A brass band waited on the platform as the locomotive pulled into the Broad Street station-and not just any brass band, but one led by John Philip Sousa. Next to the band stood Theodore Roosevelt. Dowling watched Custer's face when he saw the president. The two men had been rivals since they'd combined to drive the British out of Montana Territory at the end of the Second Mexican War. Each thought the other had got more credit than he deserved-they'd quarreled about it in Nashville, as the Great War was ending.
Now, though, Roosevelt bared his large and seemingly very numerous teeth in a grin of greeting. "Welcome to Philadelphia, General!" he boomed, and advanced to take Custer's hand as the band blared out "The Stars and Stripes Forever" and photographic flashes went off like artillery rounds. "I trust you will do me the honor of riding with me at the head of the Remembrance Day parade tomorrow."
Dowling could not remember the last time he had seen George Custer speechless, but Custer was speechless now, speechless for half a minute. Then, at last, he took Roosevelt's hand in his and huskily whispered, "Thank you, Mr. President." Beside him, Libbie (who thought even less of Roosevelt than he did) dropped the president a curtsy.