"This is wonderful," Jorge said. "I ate boring food so long, I forgot how good things could be."
His older brother laughed. "I said the very same thing when I got here-didn't I, mamacita?"
"Yes, exactly the same thing," Magdalena Rodriguez answered.
"Let's hope we can hear Miguel say it, too," Susana said.
"And soon, please, God," their mother said. Someone knocked on the door. "It's the postman." She got up to see what he had.
There were a couple of advertising circulars and a large envelope that looked official. And it was: it came from something called the U.S. occupying authority in the former state of Sonora. Magdalena Rodriguez fought through the pronunciation of that. When she opened the envelope and unfolded the piece of paper inside, she made a face.
"All in English," she said.
"Let me see." Jorge could read English well enough. And, in fact, the paper was aimed at Pedro and him. He frowned at the eagle in front of crossed swords on the letterhead; people using that emblem had done their level best to kill him. Now they were telling him what he had to do as a returned prisoner of war.
And they weren't kidding around, either. Returned POWs had to report to the alcalde's office once a week. They had to renounce the Freedom Party. They had to report all meetings of more than five people they attended.
Pedro laughed when Jorge said that. "More than five people here now," he observed. "Do we report this?"
"I wouldn't be surprised," Jorge said. He kept reading. Returned POWs could not write or subscribe to forbidden literature. They couldn't keep weapons of caliber larger than.22-either pistols or longarms.
"I'm surprised they let you have any," his sister said when he read that.
"Somebody who was writing the rules had to know every farm down here has a varmint gun," Jorge said. His father had taught him to shoot, and to be careful with firearms, when he was a little boy. "If they said we couldn't keep guns at all, we wouldn't pay any attention to them. They think this keeps them out of trouble."
"You can kill somebody with a.22," Pedro said.
"Sure," Jorge agreed. "But you have to hit him just right."
"Are you sure they really let us out of the camps?" his brother asked.
He shrugged. "We're here. This isn't so good, but they'll get tired of it after a while. They have to. How many soldiers can they put in Baroyeca?"
"As many as they want," Pedro said.
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.