And when the Virginia soldiers turned in, they found black rebels banging away at them from behind a barricade of rubble. Several Virginians fell then. Eddie went down, clutching at his arm. Justin dragged him into a doorway before he really thought about what he was doing. "How bad is it?" he asked.
"I'll live." Eddie's face was gray. "Right now, I'm not so sure I want to. Give me a pain shot, will you?"
"Sure." But Justin didn't know where to find the syringe, not till Eddie groped for it with his good hand. Then, awkwardly, he stuck the soldier. Even more awkwardly, he dusted antibiotic powder onto the wound and bandaged it. Eddie would need more work than that—Justin could see as much. He was no doc himself, though. All he could do was all he could do.
"Thanks, man. You did good." Eddie sounded much better than he had a few minutes earlier. The pain shot—morphine? something like it, anyway—kicked in fast. The wounded man went on, "You were on the ball, getting me out of the line of fire."
"You would have done the same for me." And Justin didn't just say it—he believed it. You didn't show you were scared so you wouldn't look bad in front of your buddies. And you didn't let them down so they wouldn't let you down, either. He hadn't needed long to figure out some of what made soldiers tick.
"Get moving!" somebody yelled from the street. "We'll do pickup on the wounded pretty soon."
Justin didn't want to get moving, any more than he'd wanted to get up from behind the trash can. But Eddie was watching him, and so was the soldier—officer?—with the loud voice, and Smitty would be. This wasn't good, but what could he do? He ran out and got moving.
The first thing he ran past was a body. His ill-fitting boots splashed in the blood. Soldiers were scrambling over the barricade. Someone got hit climbing over it and fell back. That didn't make Justin enthusiastic about trying it himself. He couldn't stay here, though—again, too many people were watching him. Up he went, and thudded down on the other side. Bullets cracked past him. The blacks might have been driven from the barricade, but they hadn't given up.
He found out how true that was a few seconds later. A skinny African American kid who didn't look more than fourteen leaned out of a second-story window and aimed an assault rifle at him. Justin fired first, more because his finger was on the trigger and the gun pointed in the right direction than for any other reason. The kid dropped the rifle and fell out of the window, splat! on the sidewalk. Half his head was blown away.
Justin stopped and stared and threw up. How he missed his own shoes he never knew, but he did. He would have killed me, he thought as he spat and retched and spat some more. He would have killed me if I didn't shoot him. It was true. He knew it was true. And it did not a dollar's worth of good.
Somebody thumped him on the back—Smitty. "First one you know you scragged yourself?" he asked.
"Yeah," Justin choked out.
Smitty thumped him again. "That's never easy. You reckon he would have cared a rat's patootie if he nailed you?"
"No," Justin managed. The Negro kid was doing everything he could to kill him. He'd never had any doubts about that.
"Well, come on, then, before somebody else is luckier than that guy was," Smitty said. "It gets easier, believe me. After a while, you don't hardly feel a thing."
"Terrific," Justin said. Smitty smacked him on the back one more time, as if he really meant it. Maybe the genuine Virginia soldier thought he did. After a while, you don't hardly feel a thing. The scary part was, it was likely to be true. And he was liable to get shot if he just stood here.
Mr. Brooks hadn't talked about this. You probably couldn't talk about this, not unless you were talking to somebody else who already knew what you were talking about. Now Justin did, even if he wished he didn't. Wishing did him as much good as it usually does—none at all. He ran on, past the corpse of the kid he'd killed. He felt as if it were the corpse of his own childhood lying there in a spreading pool of blood.
Without Justin around, Elizabeth felt even more like Nowhere to Beckie than it had before. She had nothing to do except read and watch TV. Virginia TV mostly wasn't worth watching. She got into a screaming fight with Gran over nothing in particular. The two of them sulked around each other for the next several days.
She didn't realize till much, much later that her grandmother was worried about her. Seeing that Gran showed worry by snapping at people, Beckie's not noticing wasn't the hottest headline in the world.
She was sorry afterwards, but not sorry enough to apologize. Gran wouldn't have said she was sorry if torturers started pulling her toenails out with rusty pliers. The next time Gran admitted a mistake would be the first.
Beckie almost hoped. . . She shook her head, appalled at herself. How could she wish—almost wish—the disease on somebody she was supposed to love? Never mind that her grandmother was maybe the least lovable human being she'd ever known. She hoped it just meant she was stir-crazy, not that she was some kind of monster.
She wished she could talk it over with Justin. He would have understood. But he was down in Charleston, doing. . . what? Whatever a soldier had to do. Whatever they told a soldier to do. What would that be? Beckie didn't know, not exactly, and she was glad she didn't. Whatever it was, she suspected it wouldn't be so easy to get out from under as Justin had thought.
/ should have told him. She sighed and scowled and shook her head. Would he have listened? She laughed, not that it was funny. Justin was the sort of person who listened only to himself. He sure hadn't paid any attention to his uncle, and Mr. Brooks had more sense in his big toe than Justin did all over.
Of course, who didn't think he had sense? Or she, for that matter? Gran was convinced she knew what was what and Beckie was the one who needed to rent a clue if she couldn't buy one. And if that wasn't crazy, Beckie had never run into anything that was.
What about me? Beckie wondered. Am I sure Vm right when I really don't have any idea what's going on? It didn't look that way to her, anyhow. Here they were in Elizabeth, and here they were, stuck. You didn't need to be Sir Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin to figure that out.
What did Franklin say about the United States? We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately—that was it. Actually, he was talking about the people who signed the Declaration of Independence, but these days people remembered the quote as a kind of early epitaph for the country that couldn't stay united. Now all the states were separate, and all of them positive they were better off because of it.
"Penny for 'em, Rebecca," Mr. Snodgrass said from behind her.
She jumped. She hadn't known he was there. When somebody asked her something like that, she felt obliged to tell the truth. "You'll laugh at me," she said, and spelled it out.
He didn't laugh, but he did smile. "You ought to start a movement," he said. "Bring back the United States!"
"Oh, I know it wouldn't work," Beckie said. "None of the consuls and presidents and governors and what have you would want their power cut. No state would want people from any other state telling it what to do, or soldiers from another state on its land. But if things didn't break down in the first place, maybe we'd all be Americans now, not Virginians or Californians or what all else. Maybe we wouldn't fight these stupid little wars all the time. One's always bubbling somewhere."
She studied the expression on his wrinkled, lived-in face. It was the strangest blend of amusement and sorrow she'd ever seen. He knew much better than she did how dead the United States were. But if by some miracle they weren't. . . then what? His wife would still be alive. There wouldn't be shell holes down the street. He wouldn't have healing blisters on his hands from digging trenches. Beckie wouldn't, either.