Anne rubbed her backside in a fashion no properly refined lady would have used-but then, no properly refined lady would have got rugburn on the area in question by screwing her brains out on the floor. “I thought you were trying to ram me down into the basement,” she replied, not without admiration.
“These places don’t have basements,” Roger Kimball said.
“I knew that,” Anne told him. “The way you were going there, I didn’t think you cared.” Her stretch was an odd blend of satisfied lassitude and abraded posterior.
One appetite for the moment slaked, Kimball remembered another. “We were coming in here for some whiskey, weren’t we?” He got to his feet and searched the cabinets. Curtains covered the windows, but they weren’t thick. A dedicated snoop would have had no trouble spotting his nudity. He didn’t care. Anne admired him again, this time for brazenness-not that she didn’t already know about that. She also admired the red lines on his back…and the back itself.
He grunted again, on a different note from when he’d shot his seed into her, and held up a bottle three-quarters full of amber liquid. “If this cottage is like mine, the bedroom should be…over here,” he said, and sure enough, it was.
He bothered with glasses no more than he’d bothered with clothes. Anne followed his lead, something she was unused to doing. He yanked the cork from the bottle with his teeth when it would not yield to his fingers. “What shall we drink to?” Anne asked.
She wondered if he would say victory. She thought he started to, but the word did not pass his lips. Instead, he answered, “To doing our jobs the best way we know how while the world goes to hell around us,” and took a long pull at the bottle.
“Leave some for me,” Anne said. She had to pull it out of his hand. It wasn’t the best whiskey she’d ever had, nor anywhere close, but, if she drank enough of it, it would get her drunk. After she’d swallowed and her eyes stopped watering, she said, “We’re going to lose, aren’t we?”
“Don’t see how we can do anything else,” Kimball said. “Scuttlebutt is, we’ve already started sniffing around for terms.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Anne said. “I’d have thought President Semmes owed me enough to let me know such things, but maybe not.” Maybe, with her plantation in ruins and her investments in hardly better shape, she wasn’t rich enough to be worth cultivating any more.
“Well, he hasn’t told me about it, either. I don’t know if the stories are true or not,” Kimball said. “Ones I’ve heard say that damned Roosevelt turned us down flat, so it doesn’t matter any which way.” He drank again, then stared at the bottle. “What are we supposed to do after we lose the war? How are we supposed to get over that?”
“The damnyankees did. They did it twice,” Anne said. “Anything those people can do, we can do, too. We have to figure out where we went wrong in this fight and make sure we don’t go wrong that way again.”
“Because there will be another round,” Kimball said, and Anne nodded. She reached for the whiskey bottle. He handed it to her. She drank till her eyes crossed. Anything, even oblivion, was better than thinking about spending so many lives and so much treasure-and losing anyhow.
She discovered Roger Kimball’s hand high up on her bare thigh. As she stared at it, it moved higher still. She set the bottle on the floor by the side of the bed and clasped Kimball to her. Love, or even fornication, was better than thinking about what might have been, too.
An aeroplane buzzed high over the line east of Lubbock. Jefferson Pinkard stared up at it. He thought about firing a few rounds-by the way it had come, it was plainly a U.S. machine-but decided not to waste the ammunition. It was so high up there, he had no chance of hitting it.
“Why we don’t got no aeroplanes to shoot down that puto?” Hipolito Rodriguez asked. “The Yankees, they got aeroplanes all the time. They look at us like a man peeking at a woman taking a bath in a river.”
Jeff thought of Emily. He couldn’t help imagining her naked. That was all right, when he didn’t imagine Bedford Cunningham naked beside her or on top of her. He answered, “Guess they don’t reckon this here front’s important enough to send us much in the way of flying machines. Yankees always have had more’n us.”
Something fell from the U.S. aeroplane. Pinkard’s first reaction was to hit the dirt, but he checked himself-that wasn’t a bomb. No: those weren’t bombs. They drifted and fluttered in the air like the snowflakes he occasionally saw in Birmingham. Rodriguez stared at them in blank wonderment. Jeff guessed he never saw snow down in Sonora, even if he’d made its acquaintance here this past winter.
“Papers!” Sergeant Albert Cross said. “The bastards are dropping leaflets on us.”
“Rather have ’em drop leaflets than bombs any old day, and twice on Sunday,” Pinkard said.
“Si.” Hip Rodriguez nodded enthusiastic agreement. “With papers, too, I can wipe my ass. This is muy bueno.”
“Probably be scratchy as hell,” Cross said after a judicious pause for thought. “But hey, Hip, you’re right-damn sight better’n nothin’. It’s a fucking wonder all the flies in Texas don’t live in this here trench.”
“You mean they don’t?” Jeff said, kidding on the square. “Could have fooled me.” As if to make him pay for his words, something bit him on the back of the neck. He swatted, but didn’t think he got it.
By then, the fluttering papers had nearly reached the ground. A few drifted back toward the Yankees’ trenches. Others fell in no-man’s-land. Still others came down in and behind the Confederates’ forward line.
Had Pinkard stabbed up with his bayoneted Tredegar, he could have spitted one of the descending leaflets. He didn’t bother. He just grabbed one out of the air. Cross and Rodriguez crowded close to see what the devil the United States thought it worthwhile to tell their foes.
At the top of the leaflet was a U.S. flag that looked to have too many stars in the canton crossed with another one Pinkard hadn’t seen before, a dark banner with the light silhouette of a tough-looking man’s profile on it. The headline below explained: THE UNITED STATES
WELCOME THE STATE OF HOUSTON INTO THE UNION.
“Wait a minute,” Cross said, “Houston’s in Texas, God damn it. I been through there on the train.”
“Here, let me read it,” Jeff said, and did: “ ‘When Texas was admitted to the United States in 1845, it retained for itself the right of forming up to four new states within its boundaries. The people of the state of Houston have availed themselves of the opportunity to break free of the evil and corrupt Richmond regime and found a new political body: in the words of the immortal John Adams, ‘a government of laws and not of men.’ The new state takes its name from Governor Sam Houston, who so valiantly tried to keep the whole of Texas from joining the Confederate States of America. The United States are delighted at this return to the fold of so many upstanding citizens who repent of their grandfathers’ errors.’ ”
Pinkard crumpled up the paper and stuck it in his pocket. “It’s an ass-wipe, sure as hell.” He went down the trench, gathering more leaflets.
Rodriguez and Sergeant Cross also picked up several copies of the announcement, no doubt for the same purpose. Rodriguez peered west, toward the enemy lines and what was presumably the territory of the new state of Houston. “How do they do this?” he asked. “Make a new state where there was no state before, I mean.”
“Same way they did when they stole part of Virginia from us during the War of Secession and called it West Virginia, I reckon,” Pinkard answered with a snort of contempt.
Sergeant Albert Cross added, “Then they went and found themselves enough traitors and collaborators to make themselves a legislature out of, like they done in Kentucky when they went and stole that from us. Wonder how many soldiers they got to use to keep the people from hanging all those bastards from the closest lamp poles.”