He shivered, regardless of how hot and muggy the evening was. In his imagination, he could see her thrashing on the bed with-whom? The face on the male form riding her didn’t matter. It wasn’t his own. That was enough, and bad enough.
His fists bunched. This is all moonshine, he told himself fiercely. He’d never had any reason to believe Emily would want to be unfaithful to him. If ever two people loved each other, Emily and he were those two. But he’d never been away from her before. And she didn’t just love him. She loved love, and he knew it. Moonshine, dammit, moonshine.
When he hadn’t said anything for some little while, Rodriguez quietly asked, “You are lonely, amigo?”
“You bet I am,” Pinkard said. “Ain’t you?”
“I am lonely for my esposa, my wife. I am lonely for my farm. I am lonely for my village, where I go to drink in the cantina. I am lonely for my proper food. I am lonely for my lengua, where I can talk and I don’t got to think before I say every word. I am lonely for not being nowhere near these yanquis who try of killing me. Si, I am lonely.”
Jeff hadn’t thought of it like that. Even though the filthy picture in his imagination wouldn’t go away, he said, “Sounds like I got it easy next to you, maybe.”
“Life is hard.” Rodriguez shrugged. “And after life is done, then you die.” He shrugged again. “What can anyone do?”
It was a good question. It was, when Pinkard thought about it, a very good question. If there were any better questions out there, he had no idea what they might be. “You do the best you can, is all,” he answered slowly, and then looked around at the hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere he was currently inhabiting. “If this here is the best I can do, I been doin’ somethin’ wrong up till now.”
“I also think this very thing,” Rodriguez said with a smile. “Then I think what they do to my compadres who do not come into the Army when it is their time. Beside that, this is muy bueno.”
“Yeah, you try and dodge conscription, they land on you with both feet.” Pinkard yawned. Exhaustion was landing on him with both feet. He spread his blanket under him-too hot to roll himself in it-and smeared his face and hands with camphor-smelling goo that was supposed to hold the mosquitoes and other bugs at bay. As far as he could see, it didn’t do much good, but he was happier with it in his nostrils than with what he smelled like after God only knew how long since his last bath.
The next morning, Captain Connolly got the company moving before sunup. The promised drive on Lubbock hadn’t happened. Nobody was saying much about that, but nobody was very happy with it, either. Trying to build a front to keep the damnyankees from moving deeper into Texas wasn’t the same as throwing them out of the state when they had no business there.
What can anyone do? Hip Rodriguez’s question echoed in Jeff’s mind. So did his own answer. You do the best you can, is all. If the best the CSA could do was keep the USA from pushing deeper into Texas, the war wasn’t going the way everybody’d figured it would when it started.
The Yankees were extending their line northward, too. Texas, Jeff thought wearily as he tramped through it, had nothing but room. The invaders kept hoping they could get around the Confederates’ flank, and the job for the boys in butternut was convincing them they couldn’t.
A brisk little fire fight developed, both sides banging away at each other from little foxholes they scraped into the hard earth as soon as the bullets started flying. Neither U.S. nor C.S. forces were there in any great numbers; it was almost like a game, though nobody wanted to be removed from the board.
“Hold ’em, boys,” Captain Connolly yelled. “Help’s on the way.” Firing at a muzzle flash, Jeff figured the Yankees’ commander was probably shouting the same thing. One of them would prove a liar. After a moment, Jeff realized they both might prove liars.
But Captain Connolly had the right of it. A battery of three-inch howitzers came galloping up behind the thin Confederate line and started hurling shrapnel shells at the equally thin Yankee line. The U.S. soldiers, without artillery of their own and not dug in to withstand a bombardment, sullenly drew back across the prairie. The Confederates advanced-not too far, not too fast, lest they run into more than they could handle.
“We licked ’em,” Jeff said, and Hip Rodriguez nodded. Pinkard took off his helmet to scratch his head. Victory was supposed to be glorious. He didn’t feel anything like glory. He was alive, and nobody’d shot him. He fumbled for tobacco and a scrap of paper in which to wrap it. Right now, alive and unshot would do.
Barracks swelled Tucson, New Mexico, far beyond its natural size. In one of those barracks, Sergeant Gordon McSweeney sat on a cot wishing he were someplace, anyplace, else. “I want to get back to the field,” he murmured, more than half to himself.
Ben Carlton heard him. McSweeney outranked Carlton, but, as cook, the latter enjoyed a certain amount of license an ordinary private soldier, even a veteran, would not have had. “Rather be here than that damn Baja, California desert,” he declared, “and you can take that to church.”
McSweeney shook his head. He was big and tall and fair, with muscles like rocks, a chin and cheekbones that might have been hewn from granite, and pale eyes that looked through a man, not at him. He said, “A soldier’s purpose is fighting. If I am not fighting, I am not fulfilling my appointed purpose in life.” If he did not do that, his infinitely stern, infinitely just God would surely punish him for it in the days to come.
Carlton would not be silenced. “To hell with my appointed purpose, if the damn fool who appointed me to it gets his brains out o’ the latrine bucket. Sendin’ us down there with no support or nothin’, that was murder, and that’s all it was.” He stuck out his own chin, which was nowhere near so granitic as McSweeney’s. “Go ahead and tell me I’m wrong. I dare you.”
From most men, to most men, that would have been an invitation to fight. Gordon McSweeney reserved his wrath for the men on the other side, a fact for which his mates had had a good many occasions to be thankful. “God predestined our failure, for reasons of His own,” he said now.
Ben Carlton looked as if he had bitten into something that tasted bad-something he cooked himself, then, McSweeney thought. “Damn me to hell if I can see how God’s will had anything to do with poor Paul bleedin’ to death like a stuck pig way the devil out in the middle of the desert,” Carlton said.
McSweeney’s gaze fixed on him as if over the sights of a Springfield. “God will surely damn you to hell if you take His name in vain.” His expression softened, ever so slightly. “Paul Mantarakis, as I saw, was a brave man, for all that he was a papist.”
“He weren’t no Cath-o-lic,” Carlton said. “He was whatever Greeks are-orthosomething, he called it.”
“He carried with him a rosary of beads, which condemns him of itself. A pity, I admit, for he was a man of spirit.” McSweeney spoke with the assurance of one who knew himself to be a member of the elect and thus assured salvation.
Carlton gave it up. “There’s worse men than Paul as are still breathing in and out,” he said.
“Such is God’s will,” McSweeney answered. “Only a fool, and a blasphemous fool at that, would question it. Be assured: the unjust shall have their requital.”
He got left alone after that, which suited him well enough. Even in the crowded trenches of western Kentucky, he had been left alone a good deal. He knew why: a man of fixed purpose naturally confounded the greater number who had none, but drifted through life like floating leaves, going wherever the current chanced to take them. God anchored him, and anchored him firm.