"Sure, Sarge." Squidface said the only thing he could.
They tramped into Hugo in full combat gear, weapons loaded and ready. Finding the jail was the easiest thing in the world-it was the building with the mob in front of it. A squad of scared-looking U.S. soldiers in the jail looked as if they didn't think they could hold the mob out if it attacked. They might well have been right, too.
"Break it up there!" Armstrong yelled from behind the crowd of irate Alabamans. "Go home!"
They whirled, almost as one. For a second, he wondered if they would charge his men. The sight of so many more soldiers in green-gray-and so many automatic weapons-seemed to give the locals pause. "We want the nigger!" one of them yelled. Then they all took up the cry: "We want the nigger!"
"Well, you aren't gonna get him," Armstrong said. "He's ours to deal with, once we work out what really went on. You people go on home. First, last, and only warning: we start shooting, we don't quit."
"What he done to that white gal, just killin's too good for him!" shouted a man with a gray mustache stained by tobacco juice. "We're gonna-"
"You're gonna shut the fuck up and go home right now, or you're gonna end up dead," Armstrong broke in. "Those are the only choices you got. We'll deal with the colored guy, or maybe with the whore he was trickin' with." That caused fresh tumult. He silenced it by chambering a round. The harsh snick! cut through the crowd noise like a sharp knife through soft sausage. "Enough of this shit," Armstrong said. "Beat it!"
He wondered if they would rush him in spite of everything. He also wondered if he and his buddies could shoot enough of them to break the rush before they got mobbed. Then, sullenly, the crowd dispersed. They were willing to kill to defend Confederate womanhood, but less enthusiastic about dying for it.
"Whew!" Armstrong said.
"Yeah." Squidface nodded. "Ain't you glad the war's over?"
"Christ, we almost started it up again," Armstrong said. "And you want to keep on doing crap like this? You gotta be out of your tree."
"Hey, I won't be bored, anyway," Squidface made light of it, but he wasn't about to change his mind. "Got a butt on you?"
"Sure." Armstrong handed him a pack. "Wonder if that coon really did give her the old what-for?"
"Who cares?" Squidface paused to flick his Zippo, sucked in smoke, and went on, "Way I look at it is, all the shit these white Freedom Party assholes gave the spades, who gives a shit if they get some of their own back eight inches at a time?"
"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."