Return Engagement (18 page)

“A vulture, is it?” Mort said. “It must know how worn out I am from hauling that basket.”

“Well, you can make it lighter so you won’t have to carry so much back to town,” Mary said.

“I aim to do that very thing,” he answered. “Let me have some of the fried chicken, if you’d be so kind.”

Before long, he’d turned a lot of chicken into bones. He liked light meat, Mary liked dark, and Alec was partial to giblets. They damaged the cole slaw and the potato salad, too, and the two grownups got rid of several bottles of beer. The bones, inevitably, drew ants. That vulture, or another one, soared past again. “We’re not going to leave it much to eat,” Mary said.

“Good,” Mort said. “I’d rather gobble up all this good stuff myself than leave it for an ugly old bird with a bald pink head.”

Every so often, a motorcar would rattle past. A couple of drivers honked their horns at the picnickers. When they did, Mary would wave and Mort solemnly lift the straw hat from his head. Alec paid no attention to salutations from the passersby. He was busy picking wildflowers and hunting bugs.

They’d been there a little more than an hour, and had reached the filling-in-the-corners stage of things, when an eastbound train roared past. That made Alec sit up and take notice, even if he’d ignored the passing autos. The great wheel-churning, smoke-belching locomotive was too grand and noisy to ignore. The engineer blew a long, mournful blast on his whistle, too. And once the steam engine had gone by, there were still all the boxcars and flatcars and tank cars to admire, and at last the caboose—this one painted yellow instead of the more usual red.

“Wow!” Alec’s eyes shone. “I want to make one of those go when I get big.”

“Maybe you will,” Mort said. “It’s a good job.”

For all the sense he made to his son, he might as well have started speaking Eskimo. Alec couldn’t imagine that being an engineer was work, and often hard work to boot. He would have paid, and paid anything he happened to have, for the privilege of riding in that thundering monster.

“Want another piece of pie, anyone?” Mary asked.

“Twist my arm,” Mort said lazily. “Not too big a piece, or I’m liable to explode.”

“Kaboom!” Alec yelled. “Can I have another piece, too, Mommy?” If he hadn’t been eating cherry pie, the sticky red all around his mouth would have meant he’d got a split lip.

Mary was cutting him the new piece when a truck pulled off the road behind their Oldsmobile. It had a blue-gray body and a green-gray canvas top over the bed. Half a dozen soldiers who wore blue-gray uniforms and carried bayoneted rifles jumped out and advanced on the Pomeroys.

Their leader was a sergeant with a salt-and-pepper mustache. “What you do here?” he asked in bad English.

“We’re having a picnic.” Mort waved to the basket. “Want some fried chicken?”

The sergeant spoke to his men in French. They plundered the picnic hamper as if they’d heard food might be outlawed tomorrow. All the leftovers and all the beer—and even the iced tea—vanished inside of fifteen minutes. Mary knew she’d made more food than her family needed. She hadn’t made enough for a squad of hungry Quebecois infantry.

“You too close to train tracks,” the sergeant said, gnawing the last meat off a drumstick. “You no come here no more. It could be I have to run you in. But you not doing nothing bad, you just have food. You go home, you don’t get in no trouble. You be happy, we be happy.
C’est bon?
”

“Oui, monsieur. Merci.”
Mort had picked up a little French at the diner.

The Quebecois sergeant beamed at him. He ruffled Alec’s reddish-brown hair. “
Mon fils,
he about this big,” he said. He added something in French. His men got back in the truck. It rolled away.

“That was funny,” Alec said.

“Ha,” Mary said in a hollow voice. “Ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha.”

Mort picked up the basket. It hardly weighed anything now. “So much for leftovers,” he said, and then, “Damn Frenchy was right. We might as well go home now. There’s sure no point to staying any more.”

“If they do things like that, they only make people want to blow up trains,” Mary said. “Can’t they see?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” Mort said. “Me, I’d sooner blow up their barracks right now.” He carried the basket to the auto and put it in.

Mary rolled up the picnic blankets. Alec tried to get rolled up in one of them. When he kept trying till he annoyed her, she swatted him on the bottom. After that, he behaved—for a little while. She tossed the blankets into the Olds. Mort, of course, had been joking about blowing up the garrison’s headquarters in Rosenfeld. Mary had really contemplated it. She’d never done more than contemplate it, though. It wouldn’t have been easy to pull off, and would have been risky.

Blowing up a train, on the other hand, or the tracks, or a train
and
the tracks . . . The Canadian prairie was enormously wide. Only bad luck the Frenchies’ patrol had driven past while they were picnicking. To come out here by herself would be easy. In spite of the signs on the bulletin board inside the post office, it didn’t seem dangerous.

For the first time, she looked forward to the day when Alec would go off to school. That would give her back several hours of free time during the day. She laughed. She hadn’t even thought about free time in years.

“What’s funny?” Mort asked.

“Nothing, really.” She looked back toward where they’d been eating. “Have we got everything?”

“Everything the Frenchies didn’t eat, yeah,” her husband answered. “I’m surprised they didn’t walk off with our plates and our spoons.”

“They’re the occupiers. They can do what they want,” Mary answered.

Mort came back with something suggesting exactly what the Frenchies could do, and where. Alec’s eyes got big and round. Mary was surprised, too, though she didn’t show it. Mort had always been a Canadian patriot, but he’d always been a lukewarm Canadian patriot, one who grumbled about the occupation and disliked it, but who wasn’t likely to do anything more than grumble. Now . . .

Experimentally, Mary said, “This is what the Yanks have done to us.”

“I didn’t mind the Yanks all that much,” Mort said. “I guess maybe I’d got used to them—I don’t know. But these Frenchies . . . I can’t stand ’em. They think they’re better than white people, and we just have to stand here and take it.”

That was moderately promising, but only moderately. It wasn’t anything that gave Mary a real handle to pull. But maybe she’d get one with him, sooner or later. Meanwhile . . . Meanwhile, she opened the passenger-side door. “Let’s go home.”

Mort started the auto. Making a U-turn back onto the road was easy—no traffic in either direction. Back toward Rosenfeld they went.

L
ike a lot of people in the Confederate States, Jefferson Pinkard had been waiting for
Over Open Sights
for a long time. The prison-camp boss liked having things spelled out for him. As long as they were, he didn’t have to do a whole lot of thinking on his own. And he was an orderly man. If he had the rules, he’d follow them, the same way as the prisoners in Camp Dependable had to follow the rules he laid down.

Now, at last, he had a copy of
Over Open Sights
in his hand. So what if it had a cheap paper dust jacket over a cheap cloth binding? So what if it had cost him six dollars? Now he could get the straight dope, just the way Jake Featherston wanted him to have it.

And now he was one sadly confused stalwart. He’d skimmed through
Over Open Sights
the way a younger man might have gone through a sex book looking for the dirty parts. He’d found some of what he was after, too—stuff about revenge against blacks and against the USA that set his pulse pounding. But most of it was just . . . dull. Of all the things he’d expected from Jake Featherston, a dull book was among the last.

Jake was still settling accounts with people who’d wronged him back in the Great War. Many of them were dead now. He gloated over that. He was still refighting Freedom Party squabbles from the earliest days, still getting even with people the world had long forgotten. (For that matter, the world hadn’t heard enough about most of them to forget them.)

And he was lecturing. He didn’t just explain why he couldn’t stand blacks. He went on and told why everybody had hated blacks since the beginning of time. That was more than Jeff wanted to know. He thought it was more than anybody wanted to know. He thought the same about the endless lectures on why the United States were dangerous to the Confederate States. Pinkard knew why. They were next door, they were too goddamn big, and they didn’t like the CSA. How much more did you need to say?

Pinkard wasn’t the only fellow in Camp Dependable to have shelled out for
Over Open Sights.
Damn near everybody had, as a matter of fact. Most of the guards were Freedom Party stalwarts. It would have looked funny if they hadn’t bought the President’s book. Not getting a copy might not have landed them in trouble, but who wanted to take a chance on something like that?

But, now that people had it, they had to pretend they’d read it. They had to pretend that they’d kept track of everything, too, instead of dozing off partway through as if they were reading Shakespeare back in school.

Conversations were . . . interesting. “Hell of a book, ain’t it?” Pinkard said to Mercer Scott one hot, sticky morning. Thunderheads were piling up in the sky to the south. Maybe it would rain and cut the humidity a little. Maybe, on the other hand, it would just tease, like a woman who wore tight dresses and shook her ass but wouldn’t put out. Jeff would have been inclined to slap a woman like that around to get her to change her mind. He couldn’t very well slap the weather around, though.

The guard chief’s leathery face assumed a knowing expression. “Goddamn right it is,” he said, and paused to light a cigarette. After a couple of drags, Scott added, “Tears the goddamn niggers a new asshole.”

“Oh, you bet,” Pinkard agreed. He lit a cigarette, too. After that welcome pause, he said, “And he really lays into the damnyankees, too.”

“Fuckers deserve it,” Mercer Scott said.

“That’s right. That’s just right,” Jeff said. They beamed at each other and both blew smoke rings. They’d done their duty by
Over Open Sights.

It didn’t take long for the prisoners in Camp Dependable to find out Jake Featherston’s book had finally seen print. Most of them didn’t care once they did know; Pinkard would have bet more than half the Negroes waiting their turn for a population reduction couldn’t read or write.

But all rules had their exceptions. Willy Knight was nothing but an exception. He had his letters. He was the only white prisoner in the camp. Had things gone a little differently, he would have been President of the CSA in Jake Featherston’s place.

His Redemption League in Texas had done the same sorts of things as the Freedom Party had farther east. But the Freedom Party got bigger faster and swallowed the Redemption League instead of the other way round. Knight had been Featherston’s running mate when the Freedom Party finally won. A few years later, tired of playing second fiddle, he’d tried to get Jake killed. If he’d pulled it off . . . But he hadn’t, and here he was, getting what was coming to him.

At morning roll call, he asked, “Can I get me a copy of that there
Over Open Sights,
please?”

“You? What for?” Pinkard asked suspiciously.

Willy Knight smiled. His face was skinny and filthy. None of the Negroes in Camp Dependable had had the nerve to do anything to him, fearing punishment even though he was in disgrace. Jefferson Pinkard hadn’t had the nerve to include him in a population reduction, either. If people back in Richmond changed their minds about Knight . . . It wasn’t likely, but why take chances?

“How come?” Pinkard demanded.

“How come? On account of I’ve got the galloping shits, and where else around here am I gonna get me more asswipes all at once?”

Several Negroes snorted laughter. They probably wouldn’t have had the nerve to come out with anything like that themselves. They’d seen that Knight wasn’t expendable, and they knew damn well they were. But just because Willy Knight couldn’t be casually killed didn’t mean he could get away with whatever he wanted. He might think so, but he was wrong. “Teach that man some respect,” Pinkard told the guards with him.

They did. They pulled him out of the roll-call formation and worked him over. None of what they did would cause him permanent damage. All the same, Jeff wouldn’t have wanted any of it happening to him. After a last kick, one of the guards stared down at Knight in cold contempt. “Get up,” he growled. “You think you can lie around the whole goddamn morning?”

A trickle of blood running from the side of his mouth, Knight staggered upright. “Punishment cell. Bread and water. Ten days,” Pinkard said. “Take him away.”

Two guards half led, half dragged Knight off to the row of punishment cells. They weren’t big enough to stand up in, or to lie down at full length. All you could do in one of them was squat or sit and take whatever the weather did to you. In this season, you’d bake.

Jeff eyed the assembled Negroes. “Anybody else feel like cracking wise? Want to show off how clever y’all are?” Nobody said a word. The black men stood at stiff attention. Their faces stayed as impassive as they could make them. Pinkard nodded: not approval, but acceptance, anyhow. “Good. You’re showing a little sense. ’Course, if y’all had had any real sense, you wouldn’t be here, now would you?”

That was another dangerous question. A couple of Negroes stirred. Jeff waited. Would they be fools enough to grouse about the way the Confederacy treated its black residents? Again, no one said a word.

Again, Jefferson Pinkard nodded. He turned to the remaining guards. “All right. Let’s get ’em counted. Remember to take one off for that little trip to the punishment cell.”

“Right, boss,” they chorused, and set to work. Until the count was right, nothing else happened: no breakfast, no work details, nothing. The Negroes knew that, and tried to make things as simple as they could. Things didn’t always go smoothly even so. Some of the guards had trouble counting to eleven without taking off their shoes. Making the prisoner count come out the same way twice running sometimes seemed beyond them. This was one of those mornings.