“Hasta luego,” Hipolito Rodriguez told his wife. “I’m going into Baroyeca. I’ll vote, and then I’m going to stay to see how the election turns out.”
Magdalena wagged a finger at him. “And in between times you’ll sit in La Culebra Verde and waste money on cerveza.”
“If a man can’t have a beer or two with his friends, the world is in a sorry state indeed,” Rodriguez said with dignity.
“A beer or two, or four, or six.” Magdalena wagged that finger again, but indulgently. “Go on. Have a good time. I will say you’ve never been one to sit in the cantina all the time and come home drunk four days a week. Libertad!”
“Libertad!” Rodriguez echoed. He put a serape on over his shirt; the weather was about as chilly as it ever got around Baroyeca. He put on a wide-brimmed straw hat, too. It wasn’t raining, but looked as if it might.
The polling place was in one room of the mayor’s house. More often than not, Rodriguez still thought of the mayor as the alcalde; even though Sonora had belonged to the CSA longer than he’d been alive, the old Spanish forms died hard, especially here in the south.
He gave his name, signed on the appropriate line in the record book, and took his ballot into a voting booth. He voted for the Freedom Party candidates for Congress, for his state legislature, and for governor of Sonora. When he’d finished, he folded the ballot, gave it to a waiting clerk, and watched till the man put it into a ballot box.
“Señor Rodriguez has voted,” the clerk intoned, a formula as full of ritual as any in the Mass.
As Rodriguez left the mayor’s office, Jaime Diaz came towards it. They exchanged greetings. From within, someone called out a warning: “No electioneering within a hundred feet of the polling place.”
That too was ritual. Rodriguez snorted. “Electioneering!” he said. “All I want to do is say hello.”
“I can’t chat anyhow,” Diaz said. “I’ve got Esteban back at the general store, and he can’t count to eleven without looking at his toes, so I have to get back there as fast as I can.”
“We’ll talk some other time, then,” Rodriguez said. “Adios.” He didn’t say, Libertad. The fellow inside had warned him against electioneering.
When he wandered over to La Culebra Verde, he found it crowded. Many of the men sitting and drinking had worked in the silver mines that went belly-up soon after the stock market sank. These days, the miners didn’t have much to do with their time but sit around and drink. Rodriguez wondered where some of them came up with the dimes they used to buy beer, but that wasn’t his worry. A lot of the miners, he suspected, would spend money on cerveza before they spent it on their families. That wasn’t the way he would have done it, but they wouldn’t care.
Carlos Ruiz waved to him. He waved back, bought himself a bottle of beer, and joined his friend at a corner table. Ruiz was also a farmer. He might not have a lot of dimes—what farmer ever had a lot of money?—but he did still have some income. “Have you voted?” he asked as Rodriguez sat down across from him.
“Oh, yes. Libertad!” Rodriguez answered. He kept his voice down, though. Some people came into the cantina to brawl as well as to drink. Arguments over politics gave them a good excuse. Rodriguez had seen enough fighting during the Great War that he never wanted to see any more.
“Libertad!” Ruiz said, also quietly. “I think we are going to do very well this year.”
“I hope so,” Rodriguez said. “A pity, though, that it takes trouble to show people what they should have been doing all along.”
His friend shrugged. “If you’re fat and happy, do you want to change? Of course not. You keep on doing what you always did. After all, that’s what made you fat and happy, sí? You need a jolt to want to change.”
“Much truth in that,” Rodriguez agreed. “But the whole country got a jolt in 1917. Too many people try to pretend it never happened. Ah, well—así es la vida.” He shrugged, too, and took a pull at the beer.
The question that had occurred to Rodriguez was also on the minds of the out-of-work miners. One of them asked the man behind the bar for another beer, saying, “You know I’ll pay you soon, Felipe.”
Felipe shook his head. “Lo siento, Antonio, but if you pay me soon you’ll get your beer soon, too—as soon as you pay me, as a matter of fact. I can’t carry people, the way I could when times were better. I hardly make enough money to keep this place open as is.”
Rodriguez had his doubts about that. If a cantina couldn’t make money, what could? Probably nothing. After all, what did hard times do? They drove men to drink.
“My wife is going to get a job any day now,” Antonio whined. “I’ll have the money. By God, I will.”
Women’s jobs in Baroyeca were even harder to come by than those for men. There was, of course, one obvious exception. Somebody behind Antonio—Rodriguez couldn’t see who—said, “She’ll have a nice, comfortable time of it, too, working on her back.”
Rodriguez didn’t think the man who made the crack intended Antonio to recognize his voice, either. Coming from nowhere in particular, a gibe like that might be tolerated. But Antonio whirled, shouted, “Chinga tu madre!” and threw himself at another miner. They rolled on the floor, cursing and clawing and pounding at each other.
Felipe kept a club under the bar. Rodriguez had seen him take it out before, mostly to brandish it for effect. He’d never seen a sawed-off shotgun come out from under there before. Men dove away from the two battling miners.
“Enough!” Felipe yelled. Antonio and his foe both froze. The bartender gestured with the shotgun. “Take it outside. Don’t come back, either—and that goes for both of you. Out—or else I blow holes in you.”
Out they went. Rodriguez realized he was holding his beer bottle by the neck, ready to use it as a club or break it against the table for a nastier weapon. He’d also scooted back his chair so he could dive under the table if he had to. Across from him, Ruiz was just as ready to fight or take cover. Very slowly and carefully, Rodriguez set down the bottle. “Some of the things we learned in the war don’t want to go away,” he remarked sadly.
“You’re right,” Ruiz said. “It’s terrible that we should remember all the best ways to kill the other fellow and keep him from killing us.”
As Felipe made the shotgun disappear, Rodriguez nodded. “Of course, most of the men who didn’t learn those ways are dead now,” he said. “And a lot of the ones who did learn are dead, too. A shell from the yanquis didn’t care who it killed.”
“Oh, yes.” His friend nodded. “Oh, yes, indeed.” Ruiz’s face twisted, as at some memory that wouldn’t go away. Rodriguez didn’t ask him about it. He had memories of his own. Every once in a while—not so often as right after the war, when it would happen every week or two—he would wake up from a dream shuddering and drenched with sweat. Sometimes he would remember what he’d seen in his sleep. Sometimes the details would be gone, but the horror would remain. He didn’t scream very often any more. That made him glad and Magdalena, no doubt, gladder.
Not wanting to think about such things, he got up, bought himself another beer, and got one for Carlos Ruiz as well.
“Muchas gracias, amigo,” Ruiz said when he brought it back.
“De nada,” Rodriguez answered. He sipped from the beer, then asked the bartender, “Qué hora es?”
Felipe wore a big brass pocket watch on a chain. It could have been a conductor’s watch—a thought Rodriguez wished he wouldn’t have had, since the railroad came to Baroyeca no more. The bartender made a small ceremony out of pulling it out and checking it. “Son las cuatro y media,” he answered, and made another ceremony of returning the watch to his pocket.
Half past four. Rodriguez nodded. “Gracias,” he said. Sure enough, by the lengthening shadows outside, the sun was getting low in the west.
Ruiz said, “Pretty soon we can go over to Freedom Party headquarters. The trains may stay away, but the telegraph still comes. We can find out what’s happening in the elections, especially since the polls in the east of los Estados Confederados close earlier than they do here. Let me buy you a beer to pay you back for the one you so kindly got me, and then we’ll see what we see, eh?”
Rodriguez was glad to let his friend buy him a beer. He was a little elevated—not drunk, but a little elevated—as he and Ruiz walked down the street to the shopfront that said FREEDOM! and ¡LIBERTAD!
A couple of men were already there. “Hola, amigos,” Robert Quinn said in his accented Spanish as Rodriguez and Ruiz came in. Three more men followed right behind them. Quinn went on, “Libertad! I wish we had a wireless set here. This town needs electricity, por Dios.”
“If the mines had stayed open . . .” Rodriguez began, and then shrugged, as if to say, What can anyone do?
But Quinn didn’t have that attitude. “Let the Party come into power, and we’ll do something about the mines. We’ll do something about all sorts of things. That’s why you’re here, right? You believe in doing things, not in sitting around and waiting for them to happen.”
Is that why I’m here? Rodriguez wondered. He thought he was here mostly because he couldn’t stand the United States and wanted revenge on them. But if that required doing other things, then it did, that was all.
A messenger from the telegraph office came in with a sheaf of flimsy yellow papers. “Gracias,” Quinn told him, and gave him a dime. He went through the telegrams in a hurry. Then he let out a banshee whoop of a sort Rodriguez hadn’t heard since his days in the trenches. Some of the men there had called the battle cry a Rebel yell. “We’re winning,” Quinn said. “Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida—wherever I have returns, we’re picking up seats in Congress and in the state legislatures. And our men running for governor are ahead in South Carolina and Florida, and the race in Virginia is still very close. Libertad!”
“Libertad!” the Freedom Party men shouted. Rodriguez couldn’t wait for results to start coming in from states closer to Sonora.
To while away the time, Quinn pulled a whiskey bottle out of a desk drawer. He took a pull himself, then passed it around. Rodriguez had always thought whiskey tasted nasty. He still did, but that didn’t keep him from swigging when the bottle got to him. “Ahh!” he said. The stuff might taste bad, but he liked what it did.
More telegrams came in. So did more people. The Freedom Party didn’t look as if it would win the governorship of Virginia after all, but it gained a Senator from Mississippi and another from Tennessee. Before long, it also picked up two more Congressmen in Alabama, a Senator from Arkansas, and several Congressmen from eastern Texas. “Will we have a majority?” Rodriguez asked. Even a few weeks before, the question would have seemed unimaginable. Now . . .
Now, to his disappointment, Robert Quinn shook his head. “No, I don’t think so,” he answered. “But we’re still doing better than anybody thought we could.” He pulled out a fresh bottle of whiskey and led the Party men in a new shout of, “Libertad!”
An hour or so later, returns from Chihuahua started arriving. The Freedom Party men in Baroyeca cheered: their candidate for governor there was well ahead of the Radical Liberal incumbent. And in Sonora itself, two more Congressional districts swung to the Party. As Rodriguez had known he would be, he was very late getting home that night. But he hadn’t known—he’d had no idea—how happy he would be making that long walk in the dark.
Lucien Galtier parked his motorcar in front of the house where his daughter Nicole lived with Dr. Leonard O’Doull. Nicole opened the door at his knock and gave him a hug. “Hello, Papa,” she said. “It’s always good to see you.”
“Is it?” Galtier said. “I don’t want to make a nuisance of myself.” Since Marie died, he’d started visiting his children as often as he could. For one thing, he was lonely. For another, he was sure he was the world’s worst cook. Any evening where he didn’t have to eat what he turned out was an evening gained.
Nicole made a face at him. “Don’t be silly. You know you’re welcome here.”
As if to underscore that, little Lucien came running up shouting, “Grandpère!” When Galtier picked up his namesake, the boy threw his arms around his neck and gave him a big, sloppy kiss.
“You’re growing up,” Galtier told him. “You’re heavier every time I try to lift you.” He turned to his daughter. “It must be that you keep feeding him.”
She snorted. “You sound like Georges. He must get his foolishness from you. Now come in, for heaven’s sake. Sit down. Relax.”
“This is a strange word for a farmer to hear.” But Galtier wasn’t sorry to sit down on the sofa. Leonard O’Doull walked in a moment later, with glasses of applejack and fine Habana cigars.
“I thank you very much,” Galtier said, accepting the brandy and the tobacco. He raised his glass in salute. “To your good health!”
“And to yours,” his son-in-law answered. They both drank, as did Nicole. The applejack went down soft and sweet as a first kiss. Little Lucien ran off to play. O’Doull asked, “And how are you, mon beau-père?”
Lucien shrugged. “As well as I can be, I suppose. It is not easy.” That was as much as he would say. It would also do for an understatement till he found a bigger one, which might come along . . . oh, a hundred years from now.
Dr. O’Doull looked sly. “But of course you have all the pretty ladies for miles around looking in your direction now that, however unfortunately, you are a single man once more.”
He probably meant it for a joke. In fact, Galtier was almost sure he meant it for a joke. But that didn’t mean it held no truth. He’d been amazed how many widows and maiden ladies had come to call on him, to say how sorry they were that Marie was gone . . . and, sometimes quite openly, to size him up. He’d been even more amazed that a couple of farmers, both in the most casual, offhand way imaginable, had brought up their marriageable daughters with him. True, he wasn’t an old man—he wouldn’t see sixty for a few years yet—but what would he do with an eighteen- or twenty-year-old girl? Oh, there was one obvious answer, but he couldn’t even do that so often as he had when he was younger. And, if he were to have a wife younger than his youngest daughter, wouldn’t making love to her feel like molesting a child? Some men his age, no doubt, would have thought themselves lucky to get offers like those. He didn’t.
Making a production out of lighting his cigar meant he didn’t have to answer his son-in-law. Once he had it going, once he’d savored the fine, mild smoke, he asked, “And how is it with you here?”
“Not too bad,” O’Doull answered. Nicole nodded. Galtier did, too, in approval. The American sounded more like a Quebecois with each passing year. It wasn’t just his accent, though the years had also meant that Rivière-du-Loup supplanted Paris in his French. But Americans, from everything Galtier had seen, liked to brag. Not too bad was about as much as a man from this part of the world was ever likely to say. Dr. O’Doull went on, “I wish I could do more about influenza and rheumatic fever and a dozen other sicknesses, but I don’t know of any other doctors anywhere else in the world who wouldn’t say the same thing.”
“Your glass is empty, Papa,” Nicole said, and then did something to correct that.
“Pour me full of applejack, yes, and how will I go home?” Galtier asked, not that he didn’t want the freshened glass. “The one advantage a horse has over an automobile is that the horse knows the way.”
“You can sleep here. You know you’re welcome,” his daughter said.
He smiled. He did know that. He’d even done it once or twice, on nights when he’d been too drunk to find the door, let alone to fit the Chevrolet’s key into the ignition. He might even have slept better here than at home, and that wasn’t because he’d been drunk. Trying to sleep alone in a bed where he’d had Marie beside him for so long . . . He grimaced and took a quick nip from the brandy. No, that wasn’t easy at all.
To keep from brooding about that empty bed back at the farmhouse, he asked his son-in-law, “What do you think of the state of the world?”
That was a question usually good for a long, fruitful discussion. Galtier got one this time, too, but not of the sort he’d expected. The corners of Dr. O’Doull’s normally smiling mouth turned down. He said, “Right this minute, mon beau-père, I like the state of the world not at all.”
“And why not?” Galtier leaned forward, ready to argue with what ever O’Doull said.
“Because I read the newspapers. Because I listen to what they say on the wireless,” O’Doull replied. “How could anyone like it when the Freedom Party doubles its vote in the Confederate States? They hold more than a third of the seats in the Confederate Congress now, and heaven only knows what they’ll do next.”
With a shrug, Lucien said, “This, to me, is not so much of a much. The Confederate States are a long, long way from Rivière-du-Loup.”
His son-in-law looked startled. “Yes, that’s true,” he said after a momentary hesitation. “I still think of myself as an American some ways, I suppose. I’ve been here more than fifteen years now, so it could be that I shouldn’t, but I do.”
“It is not so bad that you do,” Galtier said. “A man should know where he springs from. If he does not know what he was, how can he know what he is?”
“You sound like a Quebecois, all right.” Leonard O’Doull smiled.
“And why should I not?” Lucien replied. “By the good God, I know what I am. But tell me, mon beau-fils, why is this Freedom Party so bad for the United States?”
“Because it is the Confederate party for all those who don’t want to live at peace with the United States,” O’Doull replied. “If it comes to power, there will be trouble. Trouble is what its leader, this man Featherston, stands for.”
“I see.” Galtier rubbed his chin. “You say it is like the Action Française in France, then? Or that other party, the one whose name I always forget, in England?”
“The Silver Shirts.” O’Doull nodded. “Yes, just like them.” He cocked his head to one side, studying Galtier. “And what do you think of the Action Française?”
Lucien Galtier clicked his tongue between his teeth. “That is not an easy question for me to answer,” he said slowly. As if to lubricate his wits, his son-in-law poured him more apple brandy. “Thank you,” he murmured, and drank. The applejack might not have made him any smarter, but it tasted good. He went on, “I would not be sorry to see France strong again. She is the mother country, after all. And even if the Republic of Quebec is a friend of the United States, and so a friend of Germany, which is not a friend of France . . .” He could feel himself getting tangled up in his sentence, and blamed the applejack—certainly easier than blaming himself. He tried again: “Regardless of politics, I care about what happens in France, and I wish her well.”
“Moi aussi,” Nicole said softly.
Dr. O’Doull nodded. “All right. That’s certainly fair enough. But let me ask you something else—do you think the Action Française will do well for France if they take power there? If France goes to war with Germany, for instance, do you think she can win?”
“My heart says yes. My head says no.” Galtier let out a long, sad sigh. “I fear my head is right.”
“I think so, too,” his son-in-law agreed.
“But let me ask you something in return,” Lucien said. “If the Confederate States were to go to war with the United States, do you think they could win?”
“Wouldn’t be easy,” O’Doull said. Then he shook his head. “No. They couldn’t. Not a chance, not now.”
“Well, then, why worry about this Freedom Party?” Lucien asked.
Before O’Doull answered, he poured his own glass of brandy full again. “Because I fear Featherston would start a war if he got the chance, regardless of whether he could win it or not. Because a war is a disaster whether you win or you lose—it’s only a worse disaster if you lose. I’m a doctor; I ought to know. And because”—he took a long pull at the applejack—“who knows what might happen five years from now, or ten, or twenty?”
“Who knows, indeed?” Galtier wasn’t thinking about countries growing stronger or weaker. He was remembering Marie, remembering her well, and then in pain, and then, so soon, gone forever. He gulped down his own glass of apple brandy, then reached for the bottle to fill it again.
Nicole reached out and set her hand on his own work-roughened one. Maybe she was remembering Marie, too. She said, “Hard times mean trouble, no matter where they land. And when they land everywhere . . .” She sighed, shook her head, and got to her feet. “I’m going to see how supper’s doing.”
By the odor of roast chicken floating out of the kitchen, supper was doing very well indeed. For a moment, Lucien kept thinking about his wife. Then he realized Nicole meant the hard times that made it easy for him to hire help with the planting and harvest; with so many out of work in Rivière-du-Loup, he could pick and choose his workers. Some of them had never done farm labor before, but they were pathetically grateful for a paying job of any sort, and often worked harder than more experienced men might have done.
To Leonard O’Doull, he said, “It seems to me, mon beau-fils, that you and I are lucky in what we do. People will always need something to eat, and, God knows, they will always fall sick. No matter what sort of troubles the world has, that will always be true. And so the two of us will always have work to keep us busy.”
“No doubt you are right,” Dr. O’Doull said. “I think you are also lucky you own your farm free and clear and don’t owe much on your machinery. There are too many stories these days of men losing their land because they cannot pay the mortgage, and of losing their tractors and such because they cannot keep up the payments.”
“I’ve heard these stories, too.” Lucien shivered, though the inside of his son-in-law’s house was toasty warm. “To be robbed of one’s patrimony . . . that would be a hard thing to bear.”
“It is a hard thing to bear,” O’Doull said. “That fellow in Dakota a couple of weeks ago who shot his wife and children, shot the sheriff and three of his deputies when they came to take him off the farm he’d lost, and then shot himself . . . Before all this started, who could have imagined such a thing?”
Galtier crossed himself. He’d seen that in the papers, too, and heard about it on the wireless, and he still wished he hadn’t. “God have mercy on that poor man’s soul,” he said. “And on his family, and on the sheriff and his men. That farmer worked a great evil there.”
He let it go at that. He’d told nothing but the truth. If he also said he understood how the desperate American had felt when he knew he must lose his patrimony, Nicole would understand if she was listening from the kitchen, but would Dr. Leonard O’Doull? Lucien doubted it, and so kept quiet.
Then Dr. O’Doull said, “Of all the sins in this world, which is more unforgivable than the sin of not having enough money? None I can think of.” Galtier realized he’d underestimated his son-in-law.
“Well, well.” Colonel Irving Morrell stared at the report on his desk. “Isn’t that interesting?” He whistled tunelessly, then looked back at his aide-de-camp. “There’s no doubt of this?”
“Doesn’t seem to be, sir,” answered Captain Ike Horwitz, who’d gone through the report before giving it to Morrell.
“It makes an unpleasant amount of sense,” Morrell said, “especially from the Japs’ point of view. I wonder how long it’s been going on.” He flipped through the document till he found what he was looking for. “We never would have found out about it at all if that fellow in Vancouver hadn’t had a traffic accident while his trunk was full of Japanese gold.”
“Tokyo’s denying everything, of course,” Horwitz said.
“Of course.” Morrell laced agreement with sarcasm. “But what makes more sense for Japan than keeping us busy with rebellion up here? The busier we are here, the less attention we’ll pay to what goes on across the Pacific. Hell, we did the same thing during the war, when we helped the Irish rise up against England so the limeys would have more trouble getting help across the Atlantic from Canada.”
“A lot of coastline in British Columbia,” his aide-de-camp observed.
“Isn’t there just?” Morrell said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the Japs are operating out of Russian Alaska, too. The Russians have to be afraid we’ll take their icebox away from them one day.”
“Why would anybody want it?” Horwitz asked.
“There’s gold in the Yukon,” Morrell answered. “Maybe there’s gold in Alaska, too. Who knows? The Russians don’t; that’s for sure. They’ve never tried very hard to find out, or to do much else with the place.”
“They tried to sell it to us after the War of Secession—I read that somewhere, a long time ago,” his aide-de-camp said. “I forget what they wanted for it; seven million dollars is the number that sticks in my mind, but I wouldn’t swear that’s right. What ever it was, though, we turned them down because we didn’t have the money.”
“From what the old-timers say, we didn’t have a pot to piss in after the War of Secession,” Morrell said, and Horwitz nodded. Morrell went on, “But that’s neither here nor there. The question is, what do we do—what can we do—about the damned Japanese?”
“At least now we know we’ve got to do something about them,” Horwitz replied.
“Anybody with half an eye to see has known that since the Great War ended. No, since before it ended,” Morrell said. “We didn’t beat ’em; they fought us to a draw in the Pacific, and then they said, ‘All right, that’s enough. We’ll have another go a few years from now.’ And they’re stronger than they used to be. They took Indochina away from the French and the Dutch East Indies away from Holland—oh, paid ’em a little something to salve their pride, but they would’ve gone to war if the frogs and the Dutchmen hadn’t said yes, and everybody knows it.”
“Who could have stopped them?” Horwitz said. “England before the war, yes—but not any more. She’s got to be glad the Japs didn’t take Hong Kong and Malaya and Singapore the same way and head for India. The Kaiser doesn’t have the kind of Navy or the bases to let him fight the Japs in the Pacific. And we’d have to get past the Japanese Philippines to do anything. So . . .”
“Yeah. So,” Morrell agreed sourly. “What they do six thousand miles away is one thing, though. What they do right here in our own back yard—that’s a whole different kettle of fish. If they don’t know as much, we’d better show ’em pretty damn quick.” He’d been aggressive leading infantrymen. He’d been aggressive leading barrels. Now, with a vision that suddenly stretched to the Pacific a few hundred miles to the west, he wanted to be aggressive again.
“What have you got in mind, sir?” Horwitz asked.
“We ought to be flying patrols up and down the coastline,” Morrell answered. “They couldn’t sneak their spies ashore so easily then. And if they have a destroyer or something lying out to sea, we damn well ought to sink it.”
“In international waters?”
“Hell, yes, in international waters, if they’re using it as a base to subvert our hold on British Columbia. All we’d need is to spot a boat and the destroyer. That’d be all the excuse I needed, anyhow.”
Horwitz frowned. “You might start a war that way.”
“Better to start it when we want to than when they want to, wouldn’t you say?” Morrell returned. “Sooner or later, we will be fighting ’em; you can see that coming like a rash. Why wait till they’re ready for us?”
“I don’t think President Blackford wants a war with Japan,” his aide-de-camp said.
“I don’t, either.” But Morrell only shrugged. “But I also don’t think Blackford has a Chinaman’s chance of getting reelected this November. Come next March—”
Horwitz shook his head. “No, they’ve amended the Constitution, remember? The new president takes over on the first of February from now on. With trains and aeroplanes and the wireless, he doesn’t need so long to get ready to do the job.”
“That’s right. I’d forgotten. Thanks. Come February first, then, we’ll have a Democrat in the White House—or Powel House, take your pick—again. Maybe he’ll have better sense. Here’s hoping, anyhow.” Morrell rubbed his chin. “It would be a funny kind of war, wouldn’t it? Not much room for chaps like us: all ships and aeroplanes and maybe Marines.”
“It would be good practice for a war with the Kaiser, if we ever had to fight one of those,” Horwitz said.
“Yes, it would, wouldn’t it?” Morrell grinned at his aide-de-camp. “There’s another report for you, if you feel like writing it—tell the people back in the War Department what you just told me. Back it up with maps and force breakdowns and distance charts and all the other little goodies you can think of.”
Captain Horwitz’s expression was less than overjoyed. “You’ve really got it in for me, don’t you, sir?” he said, about half in jest.
And, about half in jest, Morrell nodded. “Damn right I do. I want to get you promoted again so I don’t have to deal with you any more. If you don’t want to be a major, don’t write the report. I think the last one helped make you a captain.”
“I’ll write it,” his aide-de-camp said. “Anything to escape you.” They both grinned.
But Morrell wasn’t grinning after Horwitz left his office. “The Japs!” he said softly. “Son of a bitch.” As he’d told Horwitz, meddling in Canada did make good logical sense from their point of view. A USA distracted by troubles close to home would be less inclined to look or reach out across the Pacific. But now that Tokyo had got caught with its hand in the cookie jar, the United States would likely . . . do what?
Sure enough, that was what a popular wireless show called the ninety-nine dollar question. For the life of him, Morrell didn’t know why that show didn’t give winners a full hundred bucks, but it didn’t. He took Japanese interference in British Columbia very seriously indeed. But how serious would it look to War Department functionaries back in Philadelphia? That wasn’t so easy to see. He sometimes thought that, if it weren’t for the Sandwich Islands the Navy had captured from the British at the start of the Great War, the War Department would have forgotten the Pacific Ocean and the West Coast existed.
Maybe this would make a useful wakeup call. Maybe it would remind those easterners that the United States did have two coastlines, and that they had unfriendly countries to the west as well as to the east. Maybe. He dared hope.
And maybe, just maybe, having an unfriendly power making a public nuisance of itself would remind even the Socialists of why the United States needed an Army and a Navy in the first place. They’d gone out of their way to conciliate the Confederates. (And the Confederates, to be sure, had gone out of their way to conciliate the USA. They were smart enough to remember they were weak, and not to get into trouble they couldn’t get out of. They were under the Whigs, anyhow. The Freedom Party worried Morrell more than ever, not least because now it looked as if it might come to power one day.)
I wonder if I ought to write my own report. He laughed and shook his head. What point to that? He wouldn’t have been posted to Kamloops if bureaucrats in Philadelphia were likely to pay attention to anything he said. For some people, a report from him might be an argument to do the opposite of what ever he suggested.
Besides, Horwitz might win promotion to major, in which case he would escape Morrell’s perhaps stifling influence on his career. No report would get Morrell the brigadier general’s stars he craved. Promotion during the war had been swift. Promotion after the war . . . Even men in good odor in Philadelphia languished. Promotion for someone who wasn’t might never come.
And if you retire a colonel? Morrell shrugged. He’d done his part to win one war for his country. No one could take that away from him. If they wanted him to count jackrabbits and pine trees out here in Kamloops, he would do it till they wouldn’t let him do it any more. One of these days, they may decide they need someone who knows something about barrels again. You never can tell.
He laughed a bitter laugh. He knew he did a good enough job here in Kamloops, but what he did had nothing to do with the specialized knowledge he’d acquired during the war. Any reasonably competent military bureaucrat could have taken his place and done about as well. That even applied to his proposed solution to Japanese meddling in British Columbia, though he might have wanted to push harder than most uniformed drones would.
He laughed again, this time with something approaching real amusement. Reasonably competent military bureaucrats shuddered at the prospect of ending up in a place like this. They intrigued and pulled wires to stay in Philadelphia, or to go on inspection tours of places like New Orleans. That meant Kamloops and other such garrisons in the middle of nowhere attracted drunks, fools, dullards . . . and people like me, Morrell thought.
When he went home after finishing the day’s stint, he didn’t walk. He couldn’t, not when the last blizzard had left a foot and a half of snow on the ground, snow that piled into drifts higher than a man. Instead, he buckled on the pair of long wooden skis leaning against the wall of the entry hall.
Captain Horwitz came out while Morrell was making sure he’d got everything tight. His aide-de-camp shook his head. “You wouldn’t get me on those things, sir.”
“I know. I’ve tried,” Morrell answered. “I keep telling you—you don’t know what you’re missing. It’s the next best thing to flying with your own wings.”
“I know what I’m missing,” Horwitz said stubbornly. “A broken ankle, a broken leg, a dislocated knee, a broken arm, a broken neck . . . And if I go flying, I’ll do it in an aeroplane, thanks.”
“O ye of little faith.” Holding both ski poles in one hand, Morrell opened the door, then quickly closed it behind him.
Cold smote. He skied down the steps—there was enough snow on them to make it easy—and pushed off for home. Darkness had already fallen. He relished the wind in his face, the play of his muscles as he glided along over the smoothly undulating snow. A shimmer of motion in the sky caught his eye. He stopped, staring up in awe. White and golden and red, the northern lights danced overhead.
He didn’t know how long he simply stood there staring. At last, he got moving again, though he kept looking up to the heavens. Warmth and home and family had their place, no doubt—he was always delighted to get back to Agnes and Mildred. But there were so many who, like Captain Horwitz, closed their souls to this chill magnificence.
“God, I’m sorry for them,” he said, and skied on.