Jonathan Moss pushed the stick forward. The nose of the Wright 27 went down. He opened the throttle. The fighter dove like a stooping hawk—dove faster than any hawk dreamt of flying. Acceleration shoved him back in the seat. He eyed the airspeed indicator with something like awe—320, now 330! That was easily three times as fast as a Great War fighting scout could have flown, and he wasn’t giving the aeroplane everything it had.
He watched the altimeter unwind at an awesome rate, too. If I don’t pull up pretty soon, I’m going to make a big hole in the ground. Major Finley won’t be very happy with me if I do that. Neither will Laura.
Reluctantly, he pulled back on the stick. He did it a little at a time, not all at once. He had a good notion of the fighter’s limits. Even so, the wings groaned at the force they had to withstand. Pulling out of a dive like this would have torn the wings right off a machine built of wood and canvas. His vision grayed for a couple of seconds as blood poured down out of his brain, but then color returned.
“Jesus!” he said hoarsely when he was flying level once more. He caressed the curved side of the cockpit as if it were the curve of a lover. He’d never known, never imagined, an aeroplane that could do things like this.
He looked around, wondering where the hell he was. Puffy cloud shadows dappled the green and gold geometry of Ontario fields and woodlots. Then he spotted the Thames. The river naturally led his eye back to London. The Labatt’s brewery was much the biggest building in town. Once he spied it, he also knew where the airfield outside would be.
As he flew back toward the field, the wireless set in the cockpit crackled to life: “A-47, this is A-49. Do you read me? Over.”
A-49 was another fighter. Moss peered here and there till he spotted him at ten o’clock high. “I read you loud and clear, A-49. Go ahead. Over.” He had to make himself remember to thumb the transmit button. He’d never had to worry about wireless chatter in the Great War.
“Up for a dogfight, old-timer?” the pilot of A-49 asked. Punk kid, Moss thought scornfully. The younger man went on, “Loser buys the beer at the officers’ club. Over.”
“You’re on, sonny boy. Over and out,” Moss snapped. With altitude, the other pilot had the edge. Moss pulled back on the stick to climb. He gave the fighter all the gas he had so he wouldn’t lose too much airspeed. His opponent zoomed toward him. He spun away, heading for one of those pretty little clouds. He beat the other fighter to it, then snapped sharply to his left, still climbing for all the Wright was worth.
A moment later, he whooped like a wild man. The guy in A-49 had done just what Moss thought he would: flown straight through the cloud and looked around for him. That wasn’t good enough, not anywhere close. Moss dove on his foe from behind. Of itself, his thumb went to the firing button atop the stick. He pulled his nose up and fired past the other aeroplane.
A startled squawk came from the wireless set at the sight of tracer rounds streaking by. Laughing exultantly, Moss said, “Sonny boy, you are dead as shoe leather. That beer’s going to taste mighty good. Over.”
“How did you do that?” The pilot of A-49 had to remember to say, “Over.”
“I was playing these games when you were a gleam in your old man’s eye,” Moss answered. “The aeroplanes change. The tricks don’t, or not much. Shall we go on in now?”
“Yeah.” The young fighter pilot, like any good flier, had thought he was the hottest thing in the sky. Chagrin filled his voice when he discovered he wasn’t, or at least not today.
Moss had to find the Thames and London and the airstrip all over again. He was slower doing that than the kid in A-49, and wasn’t ashamed to follow the other fighter in. He had to remind himself to lower his landing gear, too; that was one more thing he hadn’t had to worry about during the Great War.
He jounced the landing, hard enough to make his teeth click. But A-47 came to a stop before the end of the runway. The prop spun down to immobility. Moss pulled back the canopy and got out of the fighter. Only then, with the breeze on him, did he realize he was drenched in sweat. The dogfight had squeezed it out of him. He’d known it wasn’t real, but his body hadn’t.
Major Rex Finley came trotting up. “Those were your tracers?” he demanded. Moss nodded. Finley put hands on hips. “I wouldn’t have been very happy if you’d shot Jimmy down. Neither would he, as a matter of fact.”
“Sorry,” said Moss, who was anything but. “He challenged me. He called me an old man. I whipped him, and I wanted to make damn sure he knew it.” He waved to the other pilot, who walked toward him shaking his head. “Who’s buying that beer?”
“Looks like I am,” Jimmy said ruefully. Sweat plastered his dark-blond hair to his head and glistened on his face. His body had thought it was the real thing, too. He caught Major Finley’s eye. “He got me good, sir. He knows what he’s doing up there.”
“Well, we’ve had to scrape some rust off,” Finley remarked. Moss nodded. He couldn’t argue with that. He hadn’t flown for twenty years, and the state of the art had changed. But Finley nodded. “I’ve seen worse.”
“Thanks,” Moss said. “I don’t know why I gave this up. It’s more fun than … damn near anything I can think of. I guess when the war ended I just wanted to get back to what I was doing beforehand.”
Major Finley nodded. “A lot of people did.” He’d stayed in uniform himself, of course, doing his job so most people in the USA could get back to what they’d been doing beforehand. Moss knew as much. Finley had to know he knew, but none of that showed in the officer’s voice as he went on, “Of course, having fun isn’t the only reason you’re doing this. Not a whole lot of folks get to have fun with the taxpayer footing the bill.”
“Congressmen—that’s about it,” Moss agreed. Finley and Jimmy both laughed.
Laughing or not, though, Finley said, “That’s about the size of it, yeah. So all right—you’ve proved you can still play on the first team. I’m not talking about conscripting you. But if we run into trouble, can we count on you?”
Jonathan Moss let out a long breath before he answered. “Yes,” he said at last. “But if you try to put me in the air to shoot up Canucks in another rising … well, I’m not the best man for that job, and you or whoever else I serve under had better know it ahead of time.”
“The Army knows who your wife is and what you’ve been doing since you moved up to Canada,” Finley said dryly. “We do sometimes have to break parts in our machine. We try not to put parts into places where they’re bound to break.”
Thinking back to his own flying days, Moss decided Finley was probably right. Not certainly—nothing that had to do with the Army was certain—but probably. He said, “How about that beer now? It’ll taste twice as good with somebody else buying.” The grin Jimmy gave him was half sheepish, half I’ll get you next time. Jonathan’s grin said only one thing. Oh, no, you won’t.
But Moss wasn’t grinning when he drove back to Berlin. He understood why Major Finley worried about where his pilots would come from. The USA had been holding Canada down for more than twenty years now. The Canucks showed no sign of wanting to become Americans, none at all, despite a generation’s worth of schooling and propaganda. But the United States couldn’t just turn them loose and wave good-bye. If they did, the British would be back twenty minutes later. And then … “Encirclement,” Moss muttered. That had been the U.S. strategic nightmare from the end of the War of Secession to the end of the Great War. With the Confederate States feeling their oats again, encirclement would be a disaster.
The way the world looked wasn’t the only reason Moss’ grin slipped on the way home. “Daddy!” Dorothy squealed when he walked in the door, and did her best to tackle him. That best was pretty good; it would have drawn a penalty on any football field from Edmonton down to Hermosillo.
“Hi, sweetie.” Moss squeezed his daughter, too, though not with intent to maim. “Where’s your mom?”
“I’m here,” Laura called from the kitchen. “Where else would I be?”
After disentangling himself from Dorothy, Moss went into the kitchen and gave his wife a kiss. She kissed him back, but not with any great enthusiasm. “What smells good?” he asked, pretending he didn’t notice.
“Roast pork,” she said, and then, “Did you have a good time shooting up the countryside?”
Her voice had an edge to it. “I didn’t shoot up the countryside,” Moss answered steadily. “I would have shot down one American half my age if this were the real thing.”
He’d hoped the prospect of a Yank going down in flames would cheer Laura, but it didn’t. She said, “If anything really happened, the two of you would fly on the same side—and you’d fly against Canada. Are you going to tell me I’m wrong?”
“They wouldn’t do that to me,” Moss said. “I was talking about it with Major Finley.”
“Ha!” she said. “If fighting started, they’d do whatever they pleased.”
She could have been right. But Jonathan shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. They know what I’ve been doing since I came to Canada. They want people they can trust to carry out their orders, and I don’t think I qualify.”
“Are you sure? Isn’t it likely they just want Yanks who know how to fly?”
That paralleled Moss’ own worries too closely for comfort. Angry because it did, he snapped, “You sound like those Canadians who want to murder me because I was born in the United States, no matter what I’ve tried to do up here.”
Laura turned red. “There are Canadians who want to murder me, too, because you were born in the United States. Me!” She sounded furious. She was descended from, and named for, the first Laura Secord, who in the War of 1812 had done for the Canadians what Paul Revere had for the Americans in the Revolution: warned of oncoming enemy soldiers and saved the day. Laura was proud of her ancestry, and was as much a Canadian patriot as her ancestor had been.
“Yes, I know that,” Moss said. “If you think it doesn’t worry me, you’re crazy.”
Hostages to fortune, he thought unhappily. “If anything happened to you and Dorothy, I’d—”
“You’d what?” Laura broke in. “Hop in an aeroplane and machine-gun my people from the sky for revenge? That’s not the right answer, you know.”
Maybe it wasn’t. It was exactly what Moss had been thinking. He knew he couldn’t say that to his wife. He kissed her again instead. She looked as if she would rather have gone on arguing. To his relief, she didn’t.
Hipolito Rodriguez hadn’t been on a train for a long time: not since he laid down his rifle at the end of the Great War and came home to Baroyeca from west Texas. Then he’d had the taste of defeat in his mouth, sour as vomit after too much beer. Now, as the car rattled and jounced toward Hermosillo along the twisting track, he was having the time of his life.
Why not? Many of his friends from Baroyeca rode with him: among others, Carlos Ruiz and Felipe Rojas and Robert Quinn, who’d brought the Freedom Party to his home town. And better yet, Jorge and Miguel rode with him, too. What could be better than going into action with your own sons at your side? Nothing he could think of.
Everybody in the car seemed to feel the same way. Men chattered and sang snatches of Freedom Party songs and passed bottles of tequila and whiskey back and forth. Nobody got drunk, but a lot of people got happy. Rodriguez knew he was happy.
He kept an eye on his boys. He didn’t want them making fools of themselves and embarrassing him in front of his comrades. But they did fine. They mostly stared out the window, watching the landscape change. Even in the Freedom Youth Corps, they hadn’t gone so far from home.
As the crow flew, Hermosillo was about 150 miles northwest of Baroyeca. The railroad line from the little mining town to the capital of Sonora was no crow. It went west from Baroyeca to Buenavista, south to Terim, west to Guaymas on the coast, and then, at last, north to Hermosillo. That made the journey take twice as long as it would have by a more direct route, but Rodriguez didn’t mind. No, he didn’t mind at all.
He nodded to Robert Quinn. “Gracias, muchas gracias, señor, for arranging to have the Freedom Party pay for our fares. We never would have been able to come otherwise.”
“El gusto es mio,” Quinn answered with a smile. “The pleasure is also that of the Partido de Libertad. This is important business we are going to tend to in Hermosillo. We need all the help we can get. We need it, and we are going to have it. No one can stop us. No one at all.”
Hipolito Rodriguez nodded again. “No. Of course not.” Hadn’t he seen Don Gustavo, his one-time patrón, turned away from the polling place in Baroyeca? Hadn’t he helped turn him away? Yes, indeed, nothing could stop the Freedom Party.
They got into Hermosillo late that afternoon. It was as big a city as Rodriguez had ever seen—big enough to make his sons’ eyes bug out of their heads. The train station stood a couple of miles north of downtown. Rodriguez wondered whether they would have to march down to the Plaza Zaragoza, the square where they would go into action, but buses draped with PARTIDO DE LIBERTAD banners waited for them. The men from Baroyeca weren’t the only Freedom Party members who’d come to Hermosillo on the train. By the time everybody filed aboard the buses, there weren’t many empty seats.
The ridge line of the Cerro de la Campaña rose higher in the southern sky as the buses rolled down toward the Plaza Zaragoza. Rodriguez noted the hill only peripherally. He was used to mountains. The profusion of houses and shops and restaurants and motorcars was something else again. More than half the signs, he noted, were in English, which had a stronger hold in the city than in the Sonoran countryside.
Hermosillo’s two grandest monuments stood on either side of the Plaza Zaragoza. To the west was the Catedral de la Asunción, to the east the Palacio de Gobierno. A cathedral had stood next to the plaza since the eighteenth century. When Sonora passed from the Empire of Mexico to the Confederate States in the early 1880s, the original adobe building had been crumbling into ruin. The replacement, not completed till the early years of the twentieth century, dwarfed its predecessor in size and splendor. With its two great bell towers and elaborate ornamentation, it put Rodriguez in mind of a gigantic white wedding cake.
It dwarfed the Palacio de Gobierno on the other side of the square, though that brick-and-adobe structure was impressive in its own right. And, since the Palacio de Gobierno housed the governor and legislature of the state of Sonora, it was of more immediate concern to the Freedom Party than the cathedral. God could take care of Himself. Secular affairs needed a nudge in the right direction.
Freedom Party men already jammed the Plaza Zaragoza. They greeted the latest set of newcomers with calls of, “Freedom!” and “¡Libertad!” and handed out signs, some in Spanish, others in English. Rodriguez looked up at the one he got. In English, it said, REPEAL THE SEVEN WORDS!
Robert Quinn translated for him, knowing he didn’t have much written English: “Abrogan las siete palabras.” The Freedom Party man went on, “You understand what that means?”
“Oh, sí, sí,” Rodriguez said. “The Constitution.”
“That’s right.” Quinn nodded. “The way it is now, it says”—he switched from Spanish to English—” ‘The Executive power shall be vested in a President of the Confederate States of America. He and the Vice-President shall hold their offices for the term of six years; but the President shall not be reeligible.’ ”
“But if we take out the last seven words, President Featherston can run again next year,” Rodriguez said.
“Exactamente,” Quinn agreed. “That’s what the Constitutional amendment the legislature is debating will do. South Carolina and Mississippi demanded that the Congress in Richmond call a Constitutional convention, so it did, and the convention reported out this amendment. As soon as two-thirds of the states in the CSA ratify it, it becomes the new law.”
“It will become law, won’t it?” Rodriguez asked anxiously.
“Oh, yes. Absolutamente.” Quinn grinned. “The Partido de Libertad has a big majority in both houses of the legislature here in Sonora, and in all the other states it needs to pass the amendment. This demonstration is mostly for show. But show is an important part of politics, too, eh?”
“Yes.” Rodriguez’s time in the Freedom Party had left him sure of that. “If people see many other people want the change made, they will all be happy with it.”
“Just so. You are a clever fellow, Señor Rodriguez.” Quinn hesitated, then asked, “Have you ever thought of doing anything but farming?”
“Not for myself. It’s what I know, and I am not ready to move to the big city to try something else,” Rodriguez answered. “For my sons, though—well, who knows?”
The sun sank toward the western horizon. Rodriguez’s belly growled and rumbled. He wondered what he would eat, and if he would eat anything. Quinn hadn’t told him to bring food along. He wished the Freedom Party man would have; even a few tortillas would have helped hold emptiness at bay.
But he started worrying too soon. Here and there, fires began to burn in the Plaza Zaragoza. The savory smell of cooking meat rose from them. “Form lines!” somebody shouted. “Form lines to the nearest fires! Form lines, and you’ll all be fed!”
A lot of the Freedom Party followers were veterans. They knew how to queue up. Some of the younger fellows in the plaza milled about at first, but not for long. Shouts and elbows got them into place.
A woman whose features said she had more Spanish blood than Indian handed Rodriguez two rolled tortillas filled with carne asada when he got to the head of the line. “Gracias, señora,” he said.
“De nada,” she answered. “¡Libertad!”
“¡Libertad!” he echoed, and then got out of the way so she could feed the man behind him. He took a big bite from one of the tortillas. Carne asada was a Sonoran specialty; the grilled, spicy beef came with chilies that made him long for a cold beer to put out the fire in his mouth.
He looked around hopefully, but didn’t see anybody passing out bottles of beer. After a while, though, he did hear someone calling, “¡Agua! Agua fresca aquí.” He got into another line, eating as he snaked forward. A dipperful of fresh water gave him most of what he wanted, though he still would rather have had beer.
He wondered if anyone would pass out blankets. Nobody did. He hadn’t slept on bare ground since the Great War ended. He also wondered if his sons would complain, but they didn’t. He supposed they’d spent their fair share of time sleeping outdoors in the Freedom Youth Corps. They knew enough to close up with him and several other men. The night got chilly, but all that body warmth kept anyone from having too bad a time.
Rodriguez woke before sunup. He didn’t remember getting so stiff and sore in the trenches in Texas. Of course, that had been half a lifetime earlier. When Miguel and Jorge climbed to their feet, they seemed fresh enough. More lines formed, these for tortillas for breakfast and for strong coffee partly tamed with lots of cream.
More Freedom Party men came into the square in the early morning hours. They dressed like townsfolk, not peasants. Rodriguez guessed they were native Hermosillans. They didn’t need feeding, but they got their signs on the edge of the plaza. Things had to look right.
And things had to sound right. When the real demonstration got under way a little past nine, the chants had been carefully organized. “¡Abrogan las siete palabras!” the Freedom Party men roared in rhythmic unison, and then, in English, “Repeal the seven words!” After that came choruses of, “Featherston!” and “¡Libertad!” and “Freedom!” Then the cycle began again.
Newsreel cameras filmed the crowd in the Plaza Zaragoza. Rodriguez wondered how many state capitals had chanting crowds putting pressure on legislators and governors. Enough. He was sure of that. The Freedom Party would make sure the Constitutional amendment took effect well before next year’s elections.
Not everything that happened in the Plaza Zaragoza was official and planned in advance. Somebody behind Rodriguez tapped him on the shoulder. When he looked around, a man with a big black mustache passed him a flask. He swigged, expecting tequila. Good brandy ran down his throat instead. “¡Madre de Dios!” he said reverently, and handed the flask to Jorge, who stood next to him. His son gulped, coughed, and then grinned.
The bells in the cathedral had just struck twelve when a man in a somber black suit came out of the Palacio de Gobierno. He held up his hands. Little by little, the demonstrators stopped their choruses. “I am pleased to inform you,” he called in English, “that the amendment to our dear Confederate Constitution has passed both houses of the legislature of Sonora. We have voted to repeal the seven words! Freedom!” Then he said the same thing in Spanish.
The Plaza Zaragoza went wild. Men threw hats in the air. Others threw their signs in the air. Still others cursed when those came down—they were heavy enough to hurt. “Freedom!” some shouted. Others yelled, “¡Libertad!”
Rodriguez shouted in Spanish, then in English, and then in Spanish again. Which language he used didn’t seem to matter. The Freedom Party had won. Jake Featherston had won. That made him feel as if he’d won, too.
Someone started a new chant: “Nothing can stop us!” He gladly joined in. How could he not believe that, when it was so obviously true?
Armstrong Grimes didn’t want to get out of bed. He mumbled and tried to stick his head under the pillow when his mother shook him awake. “Get up!” Edna Grimes said sharply. “Annie’s already eating breakfast. You don’t want your father coming in here, do you? You’d better not, that’s all I’ve got to tell you.”
He didn’t. With a last resentful mutter, he got to his feet and went into the bathroom to take a leak and brush his teeth and splash cold water on his face. He looked at himself in the mirror, trying to decide whether he needed to shave. He had his mother’s long, oval face, but his coloring was darker, more like his father’s. “Hell with it,” he said to his reflection. He’d shaved the day before, and at sixteen he didn’t have much more than peach fuzz to begin with. He also had pimples, which made shaving even less fun than it would have been otherwise.
Back to his room. He put on a checked shirt and a pair of slacks. He would rather have worn blue jeans, but his father wouldn’t let him get away with it, not when he was going to high school. Some of his friends wore dungarees all the time. He’d pointed that out to his old man—pointed it out in loud, shrill, piercing tones. It hadn’t done him any good at all. Merle Grimes wasn’t a man to bellow and carry on. But once he said no, he wasn’t a man to change his mind, either.
With a martyred sigh, Armstrong carried his three-ring binder and the books he’d brought home the night before out to the kitchen. Annie, who was four, was making a mess of a bowl of oatmeal. Armstrong’s mother had a plate of scrambled eggs and toast and a glass of milk waiting for him. His father was digging into a similar breakfast, except he had coffee instead of milk. “Morning,” he said.
“Morning, Pa,” Armstrong answered. Breakfast resigned him to being up.
Then his father had to go and ask, “Did you get all your homework done?”
“Yes, Pa,” Armstrong said. As much of it as I understood, anyhow, he added, but only to himself. His junior year, which had started two weeks earlier, hadn’t been much fun so far. If algebra wasn’t something Satan had invented to torment indifferent students, he couldn’t imagine what it was.
“You’d better keep your grades up, then,” Merle Grimes said. He could do algebra. Armstrong gave him a resentful look. His father could do algebra with effortless ease. What he couldn’t do was show Armstrong how he did it. Because this is how it works, he’d say, and wave his hands and cast a spell (that was how it looked to Armstrong, anyway) and come up with the right answer. And when Armstrong tried waving his hands … he’d add when he should have subtracted, or he’d forget what to do with a negative number, or he’d just stare at a problem in helpless horror, with no idea how to start it, let alone finish.
His father got his pipe going and worked his way through the newspaper. He didn’t have to get to the office till half past eight, so he could take his time. Armstrong had to be at Roosevelt High at eight o’clock sharp, or else the truant officer would start sniffing around. That meant he had to gobble his breakfast—no great hardship for a sixteen-year-old boy, but he didn’t like getting up from the table while his old man lingered.
Annie waved good-bye. His mother called, “So long, son,” as he went out the front door. His only answer was a grunt. As soon as he got around the corner, he lit a cigarette. The first drag made him cough. He felt woozy and lightheaded and a little sick; he was just learning to smoke. Then his heart beat harder and he felt more alert. He enjoyed that feeling, even if it wasn’t the main reason he’d started smoking. People he liked smoked. So did people he wanted to be like. That counted for more.
He smoked two cigarettes on the way to Roosevelt, but made sure the pack was out of sight before he got to the campus. Smoking there was against the rules. The principal had a big paddle in his office, and he wasn’t shy about using it.
“Morning, Armstrong,” a boy called.
“Hey, Joe,” Armstrong answered. “Can I get some answers to the algebra from you?”
Joe shook his head. “I don’t know how they do that stuff. I’m gonna flunk, and my old man’s gonna beat hell out of me.”
“Me, too,” Armstrong said dolefully. He still had a couple of periods to go before he had to turn in the math homework, such as it was. He didn’t look forward to English literature, which he had first, with any great enthusiasm, either. Memorizing chunks of The Canterbury Tales in the original incomprehensible Middle English wasn’t his idea of fun. But getting walloped because he didn’t do it also wasn’t his idea of fun, so he tried.
English Lit did have one compensation. He sat next to Lucy Houlihan, a redhead who had to be one of the three or four prettiest girls at Roosevelt High. That would have been even better had Lucy had the slightest idea he existed. But she didn’t. She had a boyfriend: Frankie Sprague, the star tailback on the Regiment. Still, she couldn’t shoot Armstrong for looking at her, as long as he didn’t drool too much while he was doing it.
The textbook, naturally, didn’t include “The Miller’s Tale.” Herb Rosen, one of the class brains, had found out about it, and started whispering. By the time the whispers got to Armstrong, they were pretty distorted, but the piece still sounded juicier than anything the class was studying. He wondered why they couldn’t read the good stuff instead of boring crap about sweet showers.
A trail of sniggers ran through the class. “The Miller’s Tale” would do that. “And what is so funny?” Miss Loomis inquired. She was a tall, muscular spinster with a baritone voice. She didn’t use a paddle. She wielded a ruler instead, with deadly effect. Nobody said anything. The sniggers didn’t stop, but they did ease. Miss Loomis looked at the students over the tops of her half-glasses. “That will be quite enough of that,” she declared, and got on with the lesson.
As soon as Miss Loomis turned back to the blackboard, Lucy asked Armstrong, “Why is everybody laughing?” She hadn’t heard, then. Well, some guys would be shy about saying such things to a girl.
Armstrong wasn’t shy about anything—and having Lucy notice him for any reason at all was a reasonable facsimile of heaven. He gleefully told her everything he’d heard about “The Miller’s Tale.” Odds were, Chaucer wouldn’t have recognized it. It was still plenty to make Lucy turn pink. Armstrong watched the blush in fascination—so much fascination that he didn’t notice Miss Loomis bearing down on him.
Whack! The ruler scorched his knuckles. He jumped and yelped in pain. Miss Loomis fixed him with a glare that would have paralyzed Jake Featherston. “That will be enough of that,” she said, and marched back up to the front of the classroom.
Lucy, damn her, didn’t even say she was sorry.
He was glad to flee English Lit for government, even though Miss Thornton, who taught it, was almost as big a battle-axe as Miss Loomis. She didn’t look so formidable, being round rather than tall, with a bosom about the size of the USS Remembrance. But she was a stickler for detail. And, naturally, she picked on him. “Why is the new Confederate Constitutional amendment so important?” she demanded.
“Uh,” he said, and said no more. He remembered his father saying something about the amendment, but couldn’t remember what to save his life—or his grade.
“Zero,” Miss Thornton said crisply, and wrote it in the roll book. She asked Herb Rosen. Herb didn’t just read Chaucer for fun; he even read textbooks for fun.
“Because now their president can be elected for lots of terms, not just one,” he answered. “It looks like the Freedom Party is setting things up for him to be president for life.”
A girl stuck up her hand. Miss Thornton nodded to her. She said, “I don’t think that’s true. Our presidents can be elected more than once, and nobody’s ever been president for life.”
“That’s because we’ve got a custom of stopping after two terms. Even Teddy Roosevelt lost when he tried for a third one,” Herb said. That touched off a discussion about the role of unwritten custom in government.
Armstrong Grimes listened with no more than half an ear. Somebody was going to be on top, and somebody else was going to get it in the neck. That was how things worked, as far as he could see, and nobody could do anything much about it. The most you could do was try to be the fellow who came out on top.
Miss Thornton left him alone for the rest of the period. But when the class ended, he had to go on to algebra, and he got it in the neck. Mr. Marr, the algebra teacher, had lost his right arm during the war. He’d had to teach himself to write and eat lefthanded. He’d done it, too, and come away convinced that anybody could teach himself to do anything. But Armstrong hadn’t been able to teach himself to do algebra.
He had to go up to the board to try a problem. He butchered it. Mr. Marr glared at him. “If you multiplied one side of the equation by six, why didn’t you multiply the other side by six, too?” he snapped.
“Uh, I don’t know,” Armstrong answered helplessly.
“Well, that’s obvious,” Mr. Marr said. “Sit down.” He did the problem himself. When he did it, it looked easy. Multiply, subtract, and what do you know? X equals seven. Armstrong knew he wouldn’t be able to do it himself, not if he lived to be a hundred.
“Not your day today,” somebody said when the bell rang and they escaped to lunch: a period’s worth of freedom.
“No kidding,” Armstrong said. “They can’t teach for beans, and I’m the one who gets in trouble on account of it.” That a lot of the other students in his classes were having no trouble at all didn’t occur to him. Far easier to blame his teachers than himself.
After lunch came chemistry. He’d had hopes for chemistry. If they’d shown him how to make things that blew up, he would have worked hard. But learning that lithium was always +1, oxygen was always -2, and carbon was ±4 left him cold. He staggered through a quiz, and hoped he got a C.
Wood shop went better. His hands had some skill in them, even if he’d never make a big brain. He was making a spice rack for the kitchen, and everything was going about as well as it could. Mr. Walsh stopped and watched him work with a file and sandpaper. The shop teacher nodded. “Not bad, Grimes,” he said. “You keep it up, and you’ll have no trouble finding a job when you get out of high school.”
The only reason Armstrong intended to graduate was that he knew his old man would murder him if he didn’t. He didn’t tell that to Mr. Walsh. If the teacher hadn’t heard it a million times before, he would have been amazed.
At last PE, and Armstrong came into his own. He was stronger and faster than most of the other boys in his class, and he reveled in it. And from PE he went straight to football practice. He was only a second-string defensive end, but he threw himself into every play as if his life depended on it. The harder he practiced, the more playing time he’d get when the game came Friday night.
And there across from him, taking snaps in the single wing, was Frankie goddamn Sprague. Think you’re going to get your hand under Lucy Houlihan’s blouse, do you? Armstrong spun past the tackle trying to block him, steamrollered the fullback, and knocked Frankie Sprague right on his ass.