That was how people in California looked at things, anyway. Here in the eastern part of the continent, they had different ideas. They dressed up for the sake of dressing up, the way people out West had up into the middle of the twentieth century. Beckie wondered what had made them change their minds there. Whatever it was, she liked it.
Up in a tree, a little gray bird with a black cap hung upside down from a branch and said, "Chickadee-dee-dee!" in between pecks at bugs. Beckie had already found she liked chickadees. They didn't live around Los Angeles. Too bad.
A highway ran right by the Kanawha. In California, the road would have leaped over the river so it could go straight. People did things differently here. Where the river looped, the road looped, too. You needed more time to get where you were going, but the highway didn't take such a big bite out of the landscape.
Oh, people here did what they had to do. Beckie had looked at the Charleston airport on the Virginia computer network. If she and Gran needed to fly out of here, she wanted to know what it would be like. The Virginians had had to hack the tops off a couple of mountains so planes could take off and land there. Flat space in this part of the state was mighty hard to come by.
A car roared past on the highway. Signs warned drivers to slow down and be careful. Nobody paid much attention to those signs. People drove as if the roads were as wide and straight as the ones in California. They drove that way—and they paid for it. On the way to the fish hatchery, Beckie had walked past a couple of wrecks. She was coming up to one of them now. She shook her head. The car hadn't made a curve. It went off the road and straight into a tree. The flat tires and the rust on the fenders said it had been there a long time.
She wondered what had happened to the driver. By the way the windshield was scarred, nothing good. She hoped he'd lived, anyhow.
Why do I think it was a he? she wondered. Women could also crash cars. But guys were more likely to, here or in California or, for that matter, in Europe. Testosterone poisoning, Beckie thought with a scornful sniff. Women didn't usually do things like tromp on the gas to see how fast the car would go. She'd been in a car with a guy who did that, just for the fun of it. Nothing bad happened that time—it didn't always, or even most of the time. But she tried not to ride with him any more.
There was Jephany Knob, now due north of her and about as close as she could get unless she felt like crossing the highway and picking her way to it through the woods. She didn't. It stuck up and it had a funny name, and that was about it.
Or so she thought, till she noticed a couple of people up near the top of the knob. What were they doing up there? Why would you want to climb the knob, anyhow? To watch birds? People here didn't seem to do that, or not so much as they did in California.
But they did hunt. Hunting struck her as even stranger than fishing. Wild turkeys and grouse and squirrels and deer were a lot smarter than fish. Maybe that was why she felt wronger—was that a word?—about killing them.
Here, though, people didn't hunt just for the sport of it, if there was such a thing. They hunted for the pot. Beckie'd liked Brunswick stew till Mrs. Snodgrass told her the meat in it was squirrel. Then she almost lost dinner. Gran never turned a hair. All she said was, "Goodness, I don't remember the last time I ate squirrel."
It wasn't bad, if you didn't think about what it was. It didn't taste like rabbit, which Beckie had had before. It didn't taste like anything but itself, not really. If she and Gran stayed at the Snodgrasses' a while longer, they would probably have it again. I can eat it, Beckie thought. I guess I can, anyway.
One of the people on Jephany Knob saw her, too. He pointed her way. His friend stopped whatever he was doing and looked at her, too. The first man raised a rifle to his shoulder. He fired—once, twice. The bullets cracked past Beckie's head, much too close for comfort.
With a small shriek, she scurried behind a tree. He was trying to kill me, she thought. He was. What's he doing? Did he think I was a deer? Or did he know I was a person? Is that why he aimed at me? She had no answers. She wished she had no questions. Now she knew what was worse than being bored: being scared to death.
No more shots came. Peering out ever so cautiously, she saw that the other man was yelling at the one with the gun. It wasn't aimed her way any more. She hoped it was all just a crazy mistake. Even so, she crawled away from there and stayed under cover as much as she could all the way back to Elizabeth.
When Justin heard that Virginia and Ohio really had declared war on each other, he waited for missiles to start flying or guns to start going off or computers to start catching viruses or... something. When nothing happened—and when nothing went right on happening—he almost felt cheated.
"Chances are not much will happen," his mother said. "Virginia declared war on Ohio to make a lot of people farther east happy."
"But those aren't the people who border Ohio," Justin said.
"I know," Mom answered. "But they're the white people in the parts of Virginia with lots of African Americans. They're the ones who think Ohio is giving African Americans guns. So they're the ones who want to do something about their neighbors." She set a bone down on her plate. "This is good chicken, Randy."
"Thanks," Mr. Brooks answered. "I'd take more credit for it if I didn't buy it around the corner."
"It's good anyhow," Justin said. It was hot and greasy and salty—what more could you want from fried chicken? His plate already held enough bones to build a fair-sized dinosaur. But he didn't want to talk chicken—he wanted to talk politics. "Why did Ohio declare war on Virginia, then?"
"If somebody pokes you, won't you poke him back?" Mom answered. That made the two squabbling states sound like a couple of six-year-olds.
"Besides, Ohio really is running guns," Mr. Brooks added.
"It is?" That wasn't Justin—it was his mother. She sounded astonished.
"Sure," Mr. Brooks said calmly. "The more trouble Virginia has, the better off Ohio is. The folks in Ohio can see that as well as anybody."
"How long have you been running this shop?" Mom asked slowly.
For a second, Justin thought Mom was changing the subject. Then he realized she wasn't. She'd found a polite way to ask, Have you been here so long, you're starting to think like a Virginian?
Mr. Brooks understood her. "It's a fact, Cyndi," he said. "I don't have anything good to say about segregation. Who could? Black people here . . . Well, who'd blame them for feeling the way they do about whites? But a race war won't make things better. Besides, they're bound to lose—a lot more whites here than blacks. And even if they win, what do they get? Another Mississippi." He grimaced. "That's no good, either."
"But why would Ohio want to touch off a civil war in Virginia?" Justin asked.
"A lot of it has to do with the coal trade," Mr. Brooks answered. "There's coal on both sides of the border here, but Ohio started mining it before Virginia did. Virginia works cheaper than Ohio, and she's taking away some of the markets Ohio's had for a while. Ohio doesn't like that."
"It would be nice if Ohio were giving the African Americans guns because it wanted them to get their rights," Justin said.
Mr. Brooks nodded. "Yeah, it would be nice, but don't hold your breath. The people in Ohio don't like Negroes much better than the people in Virginia do. Oh, they don't have laws holding them down in Ohio, but that's mostly because Ohio hasn't got enough Negroes to make laws like that worth bothering about. There aren't a lot of Negroes in this alternate except in the old South."