“Inside here? None,” the sergeant answered. “In Philadelphia? I think the count is five right now.”
“Jesus!” Dowling said. The man who was patting him down nodded sadly.
He felt like saying Jesus! again when he got a look at the situation map for the Texas-New Mexico border. The so-called Eleventh Army had a division and a half-an understrength corps-to cover hundreds of miles of frontier. The bombers that had plastered Dallas and Fort Worth had long since been withdrawn to more active fronts.
Only one thing relieved his gloom: the Confederates he was facing were just as bad off as he was. Where he had a division and a half under his command, his counterpart in butternut commanded a scratch division, and somebody had been scratching at it pretty hard. Dowling thought he could drive the enemy a long way.
After studying the map, he wondered why he ought to bother. If he advanced fifty miles into Texas, even a hundred miles into Texas-well, so what? What had he won except fifty or a hundred empty, dusty miles? All those wide-open spaces were the best shield the Confederacy had. Advance fifty or a hundred miles into Virginia and the CSA staggered. Advance fifty or a hundred miles into Kentucky and you cut the enemy off from the Ohio River and took both farming and factory country. Texas wasn’t like that. There was a lot of it, and nobody had done much with a lot of what there was.
“Are you sending me out there to do things myself, or just to keep the Confederates from doing things?” he asked a General Staff officer.
That worthy also studied the map. “For now, the first thing is to make sure the Confederates don’t do anything,” he replied. “If they take Las Cruces, people will talk. If they go crazy and take Santa Fe and Albuquerque, I’d say your head would roll.”
“They’d need a devil of a lot of reinforcements to do that,” Dowling said, and the colonel with the gold-and-black arm-of-service colors didn’t deny it. Dowling went on, “They’d have to be nuts, too, because even taking Albuquerque won’t do a damn thing about winning them the war.”
“Looks that way to me, too,” the colonel said.
“All right, then-we’re on the same page, anyhow,” Dowling said. “Now, the next obvious question is, who do I have to kill to get reinforcements of my own?”
“Well, sir, till we settle the mess in Pennsylvania, you could murder everybody here and everybody in Congress and you still wouldn’t get any,” the General Staff officer said gravely. That struck Dowling as a reasonable assessment, too. The colonel added, “I hope you’ll be able to hold on to the force you’ve got. I don’t promise, but I hope so.”
“All right. You seem honest, anyhow. I’ll do what I can,” Dowling said.
When he headed to the Broad Street Station for the roundabout journey west, he discovered fall had ousted summer while he wasn’t looking. The temperature had dropped ten or twelve degrees while he was visiting the War Department. The breeze was fresh, and came from the northwest. Gray clouds scudded along on it. No red and gold leaves on trees, no brown leaves blowing, not yet, but that breeze said they were on their way.
Home. Cincinnatus Driver had never imagined a more wonderful word. While he lived in it, the apartment in Des Moines had seemed ordinary-just another place, one where he could hang his hat. After almost two years away, after being stuck in a country that hated his-and hated him, too-that apartment seemed the most wonderful place in the world.
The apartment and the neighborhood seemed even more amazing to his father. “Do Jesus!” Seneca Driver said. “It’s like I ain’t a nigger no more. Don’t hardly know how to act when the ofay down at the corner store treat me like I’s a man.”
Cincinnatus smiled. “It’s like that here. I tried to tell you, but you didn’t want to believe me.” Of course one reason it was like that was that Des Moines didn’t have very many Negroes: not enough for whites to flabble about. The United States as a whole didn’t have very many. Cincinnatus’ smile slipped. The USA didn’t want many Negroes, either. That left most of them stuck in the CSA, and at the tender mercy of Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party.
No such gloom troubled his father. “Bought me a pack of cigarettes, an’ I give the clerk half a dollar. An’ he give me my change, an’ he say to me, ‘Here you is, sir.’ Sir! Ain’t nobody never call me ‘sir’ in all my born days, but he do it. Sir!” He might have been walking on air. Then something else occurred to him. “That clerk, he call a Chinaman ‘sir,’ too?”
“Reckon so,” Cincinnatus answered. “What color you are don’t matter-so much-here. Achilles and Amanda, they both graduated from high school. You reckon that happen in Kentucky? And you got yourself two grandbabies that are half Chinese, and another one on the way. You reckon that happen in Kentucky?”
“Not likely!” His father snorted at the idea. “I seen Chinamen in the moving pictures before, but I don’t reckon I ever seen one in the flesh in Covington. Now I ain’t just seen ’em-I got ’em in the family!” He thought himself a man of the world because of that.
“They’ve got you in the family, too,” Cincinnatus said. Achilles’ wife, the former Grace Chang, really seemed to like Cincinnatus’ father, and to be glad Cincinnatus himself was home. Her parents had much less trouble curbing their enthusiasm. They weren’t thrilled about being tied to Achilles or Cincinnatus or Seneca. The funny thing was, they would have been just about as dismayed if the Drivers were white. What bothered them was that their daughter had married somebody who wasn’t Chinese.
“They is welcome in my family, long as they make that good beer,” Seneca Driver said. Cincinnatus nodded. Homebrew mattered in Iowa, a thoroughly dry state. He first got to know Joey Chang because of the beer his upstairs neighbor brewed. Achilles and Grace got to know each other in school. The rest? Well, the rest just happened.
Cincinnatus wondered how the Freedom Party would look at that marriage. Who was miscegenating with whom? He didn’t have to worry about that here. He didn’t have to worry about all kinds of things here, things that would have been matters of life and death in the Confederate States. He could look at a white woman without fearing he might get lynched. He didn’t much want to-he’d always been happy with Elizabeth-but he could. He could testify in court on equal terms with whites-and with Chinese, for that matter. And…
“You’re a U.S. citizen, Pa,” he said suddenly. “Once you’ve lived in Iowa long enough to be a resident, you can vote.”
His father was less delighted than he’d expected. “Done did that once in Kentucky,” Seneca Driver replied. “There was that plebiscite thing, remember? I done voted, but they went ahead an’ gave her back to the CSA anyways.” He plainly thought that, since he’d voted, things should have gone the way he wanted them. Cincinnatus wished the world worked like that.
Elizabeth came out of the kitchen and into the front room. “You two hungry?” she asked. “Got some fried chicken in the icebox I can bring you.” She thought Cincinnatus and his father were nothing but skin and bones. Since they’d eaten too much of their own cooking down in Covington, she might have been right.
“I would like that. Thank you kindly,” Seneca said. Cincinnatus nodded, but he was less happy than his father sounded. To Seneca Driver, his son’s family seemed rich. Compared to anything the older man had had in Kentucky, they were. But Cincinnatus knew money didn’t grow on trees, and neither did chickens. Elizabeth had done cooking and cleaning to make ends meet while he was stuck in Covington. Achilles had helped out, too. All the same…
Cincinnatus knew his hauling business was dead. His wife had sold the Ford truck he’d been so proud of. He didn’t blame her for that; if she couldn’t pay the rent, the landlord would have thrown her out onto the street. But he didn’t have enough money to buy another one. He wasn’t going to be his own boss anymore. He would have to work for somebody else, and he hadn’t done that since the end of the Great War. He hated the idea, but he didn’t know what he could do about it.