If they started getting rough…He had no movie-style illusions about his own toughness. If they started cutting things or burning things or breaking things or running a few volts-you didn't need many-through sensitive places, he would sing like a mockingbird to make them stop. Anybody would. The general rule was, the only people who thought they could resist torture were the ones who'd never seen it. Oh, there were occasional exceptions, but the accent was on occasional.
Major Tyler shrugged. "Our legal staff has some doubts about conviction, though we may go ahead anyway. If you were captured in our uniform…But you weren't."
"Don't sound so disappointed," Potter said.
"What did you think when that colored kid shot President Featherston?" the Yankee asked out of a blue sky.
"I didn't know who did it, not at first," Potter answered. "I saw him fall, and I…I knew the war was over. He kept it going, just by staying alive. If he'd made it to Louisiana, say, I don't think we could have beaten you, but we'd still be fighting. And I'd known him almost thirty years, since he was an artillery sergeant with a lousy temper. He made you pay attention to him-to who he was and to what he was. And when he got killed, it was like there was a hole in the world. We won't see anyone like him any time soon, and that's the Lord's truth."
"I say, thank the Lord it is," Tyler replied.
"He damn near beat you. All by himself, he damn near did."
"I know. We all know," Tyler said. "And everybody who followed him is worse off because he tried. He should have left us alone."
"He couldn't. He thought he owed you one," Potter said. "He was never somebody who could leave anybody alone. He aimed to pay back the Negroes for screwing him out of a promotion to second lieutenant-that's how he looked at it. He wanted to, and he did. And he wanted to pay back the USA, too, and you'll never forget him even if he couldn't quite do it. I hated the son of a bitch, and I still miss him now that he's gone." He shook his head. Major Tyler could make whatever he wanted out of that, but every word of it was true.
XVI
T he doctor eyed Michael Pound with a curious lack of comprehension. "You can stay longer if you like, Lieutenant," he said. "You're not fully healed. You don't have to return to active duty."
"I understand that, sir," Pound answered. "I want to."
He and the doctor wore the same uniform, but they didn't speak the same language. "Why, for God's sake?" the medical man asked. "You've got it soft here. No snipers. No mines. No auto bombs or people bombs."
"Sir, no offense, but it's boring here," Pound said. "I want to go where things are happening. I want to make things happen myself. I needed to be here-I needed to get patched up. Now I can walk on my hind legs again. They can put me back in a barrel, and I'm ready to go. I want to see what the Confederate States look like now that they've surrendered."
"They look the way hell would if we'd bombed it back to the Stone Age," the doctor said. "And everybody who's left alive hates our guts."
"Good," Pound said. The doctor gaped. Pound condescended to explain: "In that case, it's mutual." He held out his hospital-discharge papers. "You sign three times, sir."
"I know the regulations." The medical man signed with a fancy fountain pen. "If you want a psychological discharge, I daresay you'd qualify for that, too."
"Sir, if I want a discharge, I'll find a floozy," Pound said. As the doctor snorted, Pound went on, "But you've even got things to really cure VD now, don't you?"
"As a matter of fact, we do. Curing stupidity is another story, worse luck." The doctor kept one copy for the file and handed back the rest. "Good luck to you."
"Thanks." Pound took the papers and limped across the street to the depot there for reassignment.
"Glutton for punishment, sir?" asked the top sergeant who ran the Chattanooga repple-depple. He was not far from Pound's age, and had an impressive spread of ribbons on his chest-including one for the Purple Heart with two tiny oak-leaf clusters on it.
"Look who's talking," Pound told him. The noncom chuckled and gave back a crooked grin. Pound asked, "What have you got for me?"
"Armor, eh?" the sergeant said, and gave Pound a measuring stare. "How long did you wear stripes on your sleeve instead of shoulder straps?"
"Oh, a little while. They finally promoted me when I wasn't looking," Pound said.
"Thought that was how things might work." The sergeant didn't have to be a genius to figure it out. A first lieutenant with graying, thinning hair and lines on his face hadn't come out of either West Point or the training programs that produced throngs of ninety-day wonders to lead platoons. Every so often, the school of hard knocks booted out an officer, too. The sergeant shuffled through papers. "What's the biggest outfit you were ever in charge of?"
"A platoon."
"Think you can swing a company?"
Pound always thought he could do anything. He was right more often than he was wrong, which didn't stop him from occasionally bumping up against a hard dose of reality. But, since he would never again be able to get back to the pure and simple pleasures of a gunner's job, he expected he could handle a larger command than any he'd had yet. "Sure. Where is it?"
"Down in Tallahassee, Florida," the personnel sergeant said. "Kinda tricky down there. They didn't see any U.S. soldiers during the war, so a lot of them don't feel like they really lost."
"No, huh?" Pound said. "Well, if they need lessons, I can give 'em some."
"There you go. Let me cut you some orders, then. I'll send a wire to the outfit down there, tell 'em they've got their man. And we'll give you a lift to the train station." The sergeant sketched a salute. "Pleasure doing business with you, sir."
"Back at you." Pound returned the military courtesy.
Seeing the train gave him pause. It said-screamed, really-that the fighting wasn't over yet. A freight car full of junk preceded the locomotive. If the track was mined, the car's weight would set off the charge and spare the engine. There was a machine gun on the roof of every fourth car, and several more gun barrels stuck out from the caboose. You didn't carry that kind of firepower unless you thought you'd need it.
He already knew what Georgia looked like. He'd helped create that devastation himself. He was moderately proud of it, or more than moderately. He changed trains in Atlanta. Walking through the station hurt, but he didn't let on. Released Confederate POWs in their shabby uniforms, now stripped of emblems, also made their way through the place. They were tight-lipped and somber. Maybe the people in Tallahassee didn't know the CSA had lost the war, but these guys did.
The new train also had a freight car in front and plenty of guns up top. Pound looked out on wrecked vehicles and burnt farmhouses and hasty graves-the detritus of war. He thought the devastation would have a sharp edge marking the U.S. stop line, but it didn't. Bombers had made sure of that. Towns had got leveled. Bridges were out. He sat there for several hours waiting for the last touches to be put on repairs to one.
"Why don't we go back or go around?" somebody in the car asked.
"Because that would make sense," Pound said, and no one seemed to want to argue with him.
He got into Tallahassee in the late afternoon, then, and not the morning as he'd been scheduled to do. It wasn't remotely his fault, but he didn't think it would endear him to his new CO, whoever that turned out to be.
A sergeant standing just inside the doorway held a sign that said LIEUTENANT POUND. "That's me," Pound said. "Sorry to keep you waiting."