Out on the sidewalk, a drunken artillery sergeant walked right into him. “Watch where you’re going, you goddamn medal-wearing son of a bitch,” the fellow snarled. By the way his mouth twisted, he was looking for a fight wherever he could find one.
Kimball didn’t feel like fighting, which, since he hadn’t got laid, surprised him. “I’m an officer,” he warned, meaning the sergeant would catch special hell if he fought with him.
“Watch where you’re going, you goddamn medal-wearing son of a bitch, sir,” the sergeant said.
Laughing, Kimball peeled off a five-dollar note he hadn’t spent at supper and pressed it into the noncom’s hand before that hand could close into a fist. The sergeant stared. “Go on, get drunker on me,” Kimball said. He slapped him on the back, then headed off to his barracks close by the James.
Jake Featherston gaped in owlish disbelief at the banknote that had magically appeared in his hand. Even if the fellow who’d given it to him was a Navy man, he had, until the grayback pressed it on him, wanted to smash his face: not only was he an officer, he was a decorated officer. Jake knew damn well he deserved to be an officer. He also knew he deserved several medals, not just one.
“And am I gonna get ’em?” he asked the empty air around him. “Sure I am-same time as I get promoted.” He laughed a loud, raucous, bitter laugh. He wasn’t holding his breath.
He ambled around Capitol Square, like a sailing ship tacking almost at random. That was how he felt, too. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular, just letting his feet and the crowds in the streets take him wherever they would. Half seriously, he saluted the statues of Washington and Albert Sidney Johnston in the square.
“They’d know how to take care of a soldier,” he muttered to himself. Muttering did no good. Complaining out loud did no good, either. He’d seen that when he went to Major Clarence Potter. Maybe if he walked into the Capitol itself and started screaming at congressmen and generals-
He shook his head, which made the world spin alarmingly. No good, no good. It was late. He didn’t know how late it was, but it was late. No congressmen working in the Capitol now, by Jesus. They’d all be in bed with their mistresses. And the generals…the generals would be in bed with Jeb Stuart, Jr. He laughed. The truth in that hurt, though. If the powers that be in the Confederate War Department hadn’t been sucking up to the father of his late, brave, stupid company commander, they would have given him his due. But they did suck up, they hadn’t given it to him, and they damn well never would.
“Bastards,” he said. “Sons of bitches.” The words were hot and satisfying in his mouth, the way the whiskey had been at that saloon-those saloons-earlier. Pretty soon, he figured he’d go looking for another saloon. He was sure he’d have no trouble finding one.
Around him, Richmond didn’t so much ignore the war as take it in stride. He wandered south and east, away from Capitol Square. Plenty of soldiers and sailors on leave clogged the sidewalks and the streets themselves, making people in buggies and motorcars yell at them to get out of the way. They didn’t want to get out of the way, not with so many women to look for, so many stores open so late, so many saloons…
Most of the men in civilian clothes were Negroes. Featherston glowered at them. They were out celebrating as hard as the white people. They had their nerve, he thought. Here white men went out to fight and die, and all the blacks had to do was stay home and have a high old time. Stories of lazy niggers his overseer father had told him ran through his head. He had no doubt every goddamn one of them was true, too.
A big buck in a sharp suit-too sharp for any Negro to deserve to wear-bumped into him. “Watch it, you ugly black bastard,” he snarled.
“Sorry, suh,” the Negro said, but he wasn’t sorry-Jake could see it in his eyes. If people had been paying better attention, the whole Red uprising would have been nipped in the bud. When the fellow didn’t get out of the way fast enough, Featherston shoved him, hard. The black’s hand closed into a fist as he staggered.
A fierce joy lit Jake. “So you want to play, do you?” he said genially, and gave the black buck a knee square in the balls. The fellow went down as if he’d been shot. Jake wished he had shot him. He wished he could shoot all of them. Brushing his hands together, he headed off down the street, leaving the Negro writhing on the pavement behind him. No one said boo.
He was about to cross Franklin Street, a good way down from Capitol Square, when military policemen blocked the way. He felt like cursing them, too, but that would land him in jail, and he still had a couple of days’leave before he had to go back to the Maryland front. So he stood and watched as a long column of soldiers tramped past.
Farther up the street, people were laughing and cheering. A hell of a racket was coming from somewhere up there, too. Jake craned his neck. A moment later, he laughed and cheered, too. Four barrels-nobody who’d faced the Yankee version said tanks-rumbled toward him, battle flags painted on the front and sides. They looked different from the ones the USA manufactured; Featherston wondered whether the CSA had built them or they’d somehow been imported from England.
However that was, he was damn glad to see them. “Give ’em hell!” he shouted, and a soldier riding on top of one of them waved his way. He yelled again: “Let the damnyankees know what it’s like, by Jesus!” Had he been in the infantry, he probably would have shouted even louder.
The barrels were so heavy, their wraparound tracks tore up the concrete surface of the street. They’d probably come through town to build morale. Sure built mine, Jake thought. More soldiers followed, young, serious-looking men intent on keeping step. They’d learn what was important and what wasn’t pretty damn quick. Jake knew that.
Having been born and raised in Richmond, he also knew which railroad station the men and barrels were heading for: the Richmond and Danville. He wished they’d been coming up to Maryland, but the Roanoke front was probably the next best place for them. Grudgingly, he admitted to himself that the Roanoke front might have been the best place to send them. The Yanks were in Virginia there, as opposed to fighting them on their own soil farther north and east.
To celebrate the chance of throwing the damnyankees out of his own state, Jake went into a saloon and poured down whiskey. To celebrate that whiskey, he had another one, and then another. When he came out of the saloon, he’d spent a good piece of the note that Navy man had given him. And, when he came out, he didn’t need to turn his head sharply to make the world revolve.
Off in the distance, he heard, or thought he heard, a low-pitched, droning rumble. More barrels? He shook his head, and almost fell over. The troop trains pulling out? No, this wasn’t a train noise. It was real, though. He hadn’t been sure of that before, but he was now.
It sounded like…aeroplanes. His face twisted in slow-witted puzzlement. “If it is aeroplanes, it’s a hell of a lot of ’em,” he said, thinking out loud. He wondered why the Confederacy would put so many aeroplanes in the sky so late at night. “Damn foolishness,” he mumbled.
The part of his mind that functioned at a level below conscious thought came up with the answer. “Sweet suffering Jesus, it’s the Yankees!” he exclaimed, a moment before the first antiaircraft gun outside the Confederate capital began pounding away at the intruders.
He knew too well how futile antiaircraft fire often turned out to be. At night, hitting your target was even harder. And the United States had put a hell of a lot of aeroplanes in the air. They’d bombed the front. They’d bombed Confederate-occupied Washington. Till now, they hadn’t done much to Richmond. All that, evidently, was about to change. Featherston dove under a bench at a trolley stop, the first shelter he spied.