"Mm, you've got something there." Armstrong lit a cigarette, too. "Besides, I bet she's ugly." He and Squidface both laughed. Their side had won. They could afford to.
C assius had wondered about a lot of things in his life. Whether he would be famous never made the list. A Negro in the CSA had no chance at all of reaching that goal, so what point to wondering about it?
All he had to do, it turned out, was be a halfway decent shot. Knock one man over, and his own world turned upside down and inside out. No, he hadn't expected that. He hadn't even imagined it. None of which kept it from happening.
First, U.S. officers inside Madison grilled him. He told his story. There wasn't much of a story to telclass="underline" "Soon as I seen it was Jake Featherston, I shot the son of a bitch. Shot him some more once he was down so's he wouldn't get up no mo'."
"What'll we do with him?" one officer asked another over Cassius' head. They might as well have been talking about somebody in the next county.
"Hell, I don't know," the second Yankee answered. "If it was up to me, though, I'd put him up for a Congressional Medal of Honor."
"Can't," the first officer said.
"Why the hell not?"
"He isn't a U.S. citizen."
"Oh." The second officer laughed sheepishly. "Yeah. You're right. But he just did more for us than a fuck of a lot of guys who are."
One thing that happened because he'd shot Jake Featherston was that he didn't have to go out on patrol any more. He didn't have any more duties at all, in fact. He could eat as much as he wanted and sleep as late as he wanted. If they'd issued him a girl, he would have had the whole world by the short hairs. And if he'd asked, they probably would have. But he didn't think of it, and no one suggested it, so he did without.
A few days later, a newsreel crew filmed him. He told them the same story he'd given the Army officers. One of them asked, "Did you feel you were taking revenge for all the Negroes Jake Featherston hurt?"
"He didn't hurt 'em, suh-he done killed 'em," Cassius answered. "My ma an' my pa an' my sister an' Lord knows how many more. Can't hardly get even for all that jus' by killin' one man. He needed killin'-don't get me wrong. But it ain't enough-not even close."
"Why didn't you get taken with the rest of your family?" asked the white man from the USA.
"On account of I didn't go to church on Sunday. That's where they got grabbed."
"Do you think God was saving you for something else?"
"Beats me," Cassius answered. "Plenty of other times I could've got killed, too."
"What are you going to do now?"
Cassius spread his hands. "Suh, I got no idea."
Plenty of other people had ideas for him. Next thing he knew, he was on a train heading for the USA. He'd never ridden on the railroad before, and he would have gone hungry if one of the whites escorting him hadn't taken him to the dining car. The food was good-better than U.S. Army chow. It didn't measure up to what the Huntsman's Lodge or his mother had made, but he didn't figure anything ever would, not this side of heaven.
He took some satisfaction in seeing what the USA had done to the CSA-and the Carolinas had been a Confederate redoubt till late in the war. As he passed through Virginia, he saw what the United States had done where they weren't fooling around. He saw white people living in the midst of the rubble. They were filthy and grubby and scrawny. He'd gone through that himself. He might have been sorry for them…if he'd seen more than a tiny handful of blacks living alongside them. Since he didn't, he stifled whatever sympathy he would have felt.
Then he crossed into the USA. Another country! Not only that, a country where they just treated Negroes…not too well. His father had always been cynical about the United States. Compared to what Cassius had survived, though, being treated…not too well looked pretty goddamn good.
The United States didn't look so good. The part he saw, the stretch between the Maryland-Virginia border and Philadelphia, looked almost as bomb-pocked and trampled as the land farther south had. He wondered how any part of this poor battered continent would ever climb back to its feet again.
He saw the edges of what the superbomb had done to Philadelphia. The edges were bad enough. What were things like at the center, where the bomb went off? Maybe not knowing was better.
They put him up in a hotel not far from Congressional Hall. "Anything you want-anything at all-you just telephone and ask for it," a bright young lieutenant said. "They'll bring it to you."
"Thank you kindly," Cassius said, and then, "Show me how to work the telephone, suh, please."
"You never used one before?" The officer, who couldn't have been more than a year or two older than Cassius, blinked.
"No, suh," Cassius answered. "Weren't more than a couple in the Terry-where I come from-even before things got bad. After that, we didn't have nothin'."
"All right." The white man-he was blond and blue-eyed and handsome; in the CSA, he might have become a Freedom Party Guard-showed him what to do. "You know about hot and cold water taps, right?"
"Well, we always had to heat our own, but I can cipher out what's hot and what's cold. An' we had the bathroom down the hall. Mighty nice, puttin' it right here."
"I bet. My folks grew up in a place like that. I'm lucky I didn't have to. They'll be delivering a dress uniform for you tonight, too. You go up to Congress tomorrow, so they can thank you for getting rid of Featherston."
"Oh, my," Cassius said.
He tried the telephone, and ordered a steak and fried potatoes. Fifteen minutes later, somebody knocked on the door. A white man in a fancy getup a lot like what Cassius' father had worn brought in a tray. "Here you are, sir," he said in a funny foreign accent. Cassius understood tips. They'd given him pocket money, so he handed the waiter fifty cents. With a nod and a smile, the man left. I did that right, Cassius thought.
Again, the food reminded him Army cooks didn't know everything there was to know. Was it as good as what the Huntsman's Lodge made? Pretty close, if it wasn't.
He'd just finished eating when the uniform arrived. It fit perfectly. How did they do that? Did they measure him while he wasn't looking? The fabric was buttery soft. The only differences from a real U.S. Army uniform were plain brass buttons and no U.S. on his collar. He had an auxiliary's armband instead. Well, he was one.
His visit to Congress passed in a blur. Dozens of people shook his hand. One of them, he realized just after it happened, was the President of the USA. Charlie La Follette didn't look nearly so fierce as Jake Featherston. But he'd won. And I helped, Cassius thought dizzily.
He got dizzier a moment later. Along with a resolution expressing the Thanks of Congress, they gave him a reward-$100,000, tax-free. The Congresswoman who made a speech about that was Flora somebody. Afterwards, she told him, "If you like, I'll find someone you can trust to help you look after the money. You don't want to waste it." Then she smiled. "Or maybe you do-I don't know. But it would be a shame."
"Thank you, ma'am. Reckon I take you up on that." Cassius had never imagined so much money. But he remembered how his folks always squeezed every penny to get by. He didn't think he wanted to waste this, not when it could set him up for life. Maybe waste a little, he thought.
He gave wireless interviews. He talked to Bill Shirer and Eric Sevareid and Walter Winchell. He could hardly understand Winchell's rapid-fire, slang-filled New York accent. If he hadn't heard a few soldiers talking that way, he probably wouldn't have been able to follow at all.
Each broadcaster asked the question a different way, but they all wanted to know the same thing: what did killing Jake Featherston feel like? The more he told the story, the further from the reality of it he felt.
A few days later, as if remembering it had overlooked something, Congress voted Cassius a fresh honor: it declared him a citizen of the United States. He felt more excited than someone from, say, the Empire of Mexico might have. Up till now, he'd never been a citizen of any country. Negroes in the CSA were residents, but they didn't have the rights citizens did.