Breakthroughs (56 page)

As soon as that feeling faded even a little, though, she went to a counter and pulled out a can of red paint and a brush. Roosevelt’s limousine was still making its slow way around the corner when she painted a message on the boards covering her shattered window:
OUR COFFEE IS FINE ENOUGH FOR THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. HOW ABOUT YOU?

“Oh, that’s good, Ma,” Edna said, the medal still around her neck.

“It’s better than good,” Nellie said. “It’s
bully
!” Mother and daughter smiled, at ease with each other for one of the rare times since the shooting started.

A horse-drawn cab driven by a white man whose right arm ended in a hook carried Anne Colleton across the bridge from the Georgia mainland to Jekyll Island. “I hope the weather at the hotel will be a little nicer than this,” she said; down near the Florida border, Georgia could give South Carolina lessons in heat and humidity.

“Which hotel were you at again, ma’am?” the driver asked.

“The Laughing January, it’s called,” she answered.

“Oh, yes, ma’am, that’s on the ocean side. It’s always cooler there. Place got the name on account of, before the war, rich Yankees’d come down here to get away from winter. I had to live up in Yankee country and I had the money, reckon I’d do the same thing.”

The road did not go directly to the Laughing January, but meandered around the rim of the island. Most of the interior was swamp and salt marsh and, on the rare ground that rose slightly higher, woods of pine and moss-draped oak. Egrets and herons, their wings as broad as a man was tall, rose from the marshes and flew off with ungainly haste. A cardinal perched on a branch outthrust from an oak added a splash of brightness.

It caught the driver’s eyes, too. “My blood was about that color when the damnyankees blew up my arm,” he remarked, and then, “You got any kin in the war, ma’am?”

“They gassed one of my brothers,” Anne answered. “He’s dead now. The other one’s an officer on the Roanoke front. He was well, last I heard.” If the driver had been on the point of making any cracks along the lines of
a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight
, that forestalled him. He kept quiet the rest of the way to the hotel.

Not all the rich—Yankee and Confederate—had stayed at hotels. Their villas had crushed-shell driveways leading off from the road. Some of the fancy houses were in fine shape, with servants bustling about. Some looked abandoned, forlorn, weather-beaten: men from the United States had probably wintered in them. And some, these days, were charred ruins like Marshlands. She wondered how bad the Red risings had been here. She didn’t ask. She didn’t really want to know.

“Here we are,” the cab driver said at last. “The Laughing January.” The place seemed more like a village than a hotel, with individual cottages surrounding a larger building to the north, the south, and the east, toward the ocean. The driver had been right about the weather. Even inside the cab, Anne could feel as much. It wasn’t cool. It wasn’t dry. It was better than it had been.

After hitching the horse, the driver carried her bags into the lobby. He was handy with his hook but used his right arm only for the lighter pieces. Inside, a colored bellhop took charge of them all.
And what were you doing, there toward the end of 1915?
Anne thought, looking at him. He was all deference now. Under that deference, who could guess what went through his mind? Anne had once thought she could. She didn’t any more.

At the desk, the clerk—a woman—confirmed that her reservation was in order and handed her a shiny brass key with a large 8 stamped onto it. “You’ll have a grand sea view from that cabin, ma’am,” she said, “and the netting on the porch is fine enough to keep out the mosquitoes and the nasty little no-see-’ems, too.”

“That’s good,” Anne said. She got directions on how to find cabin 8, then headed off down the walk with the colored attendant pushing her bags on a little wheeled cart behind her.

“You jus’ here by your lonesome, ma’am?” he asked. “You didn’t bring no servants or nothin’?”

“No,” she said tightly. After folk who had been her servants tried to kill her, she neither wanted anything to do with them nor wanted to acquire new ones, lest they prove to have similarly unfortunate habits.

She gave the attendant half a dollar once he set the bags down on the floor of the front room of her cottage. It would have been an extravagant tip before the war, and was still a good one; he went back toward the main building whistling and with a spring in his step Anne didn’t think was assumed. Would that save her if the Negroes planned another uprising? Her laugh had broken glass in it. She knew better.

She was hanging up a white tennis dress when someone knocked on the frame to the screen door. Maybe it was the bellhop again. Had she dropped or forgotten something? Or maybe—

A Navy officer in tropical whites stood there, his cap under one arm, a cigar dangling from his mouth at a deliberately rakish angle. “Why, Commander Kimball,” Anne drawled, exaggerating her accent to the point of burlesque. “What a pleasant surprise.”

To her genuine rather than assumed surprise, Roger Kimball glared at her instead of grinning. “I didn’t get interested in you because you were cute and sweet and helpless,” he growled. “If I want that, I can buy it on a streetcorner any time I please. I got interested in you because I think you’re the only woman I ever met who’s every bit as ornery and uppity as I am. You don’t like that, I’ll head back to Habana.”

He meant it. She could see as much. She almost did send him packing; if there was one thing she couldn’t stand, it was being upstaged. But he was one of the few men she’d ever met who came close to being as ornery and uppity as she was. She didn’t think he matched her, but he did come close.

And so, when she spoke again, it was in tones she might have used with her brother: “All right, Roger. It takes one to know one, I expect. Come in. How long do you have in Georgia?”

“Four days,” he answered. “Then back on the train and the boat to Cuba, and then back to sea. No rest for the weary.” He stepped past her into the cottage and closed the door. “You have any whiskey in this place? Plenty in mine if you don’t.”

“I don’t know,” Anne said. “I haven’t had a chance to look.”

Kimball nodded. “Saw you on the way over here, with the coon hauling your bags. I usually like a little water in my whiskey, but not here. Jekyll Island water tastes like swamp. They say it’s safe to drink, but it’s nasty.”

“Thanks for letting me know,” Anne answered as they made their way back toward the little cottage’s kitchen—if you came to the Laughing January with a cook and a housekeeper, you could do some very handsome entertaining. “I haven’t tried that yet, either.”

Kimball stopped, so suddenly that she almost ran into him. Voice lazy and amused, he asked, “What else haven’t you tried here?”

Afterwards, she couldn’t sort out which of them grabbed the other first. What followed was as much a brawl as lovemaking. He tore a couple of hooks and eyes from her gauzy summer frock as he got her out of it; she sent one of the gold buttons from his uniform jacket spinning across the room when she yanked it open instead of bothering to undo all the fastenings.

They didn’t even look for the bedroom. For the rough coupling they both wanted, the floor seemed better. Kimball’s weight pinned Anne half against rug, half against polished hardwood. He slammed himself into her as if he wanted to hurt her and please her at the same time.

And he did, both. Her nails clawed stripes down his back as she bucked under him. “Come on, damn you, come on,” she said, her own excitement mounting. She bit his shoulder and tasted blood.

He grunted, drove even deeper into her—she would not have thought it possible—and spent himself. Only a couple of quick heartbeats later, she cried out, too, a noise any cat prowling along a fence would have recognized.

Suddenly, he was heavy upon her. Before she could push him away, he rolled off and to one side. She felt a small pang of regret as he pulled out of her. “
Hell
of a woman,” he muttered to himself, and then spoke directly to her: “You don’t believe in taking prisoners, do you?” He set a hand where she’d bitten, stared at the red smear on his palm, and shook his head. “I was wondering if I’d come out of that one alive.”

Anne rubbed her backside in a fashion no properly refined lady would have used—but then, no properly refined lady would have got rugburn on the area in question by screwing her brains out on the floor. “I thought you were trying to ram me down into the basement,” she replied, not without admiration.

“These places don’t have basements,” Roger Kimball said.

“I knew that,” Anne told him. “The way you were going there, I didn’t think you cared.” Her stretch was an odd blend of satisfied lassitude and abraded posterior.

One appetite for the moment slaked, Kimball remembered another. “We were coming in here for some whiskey, weren’t we?” He got to his feet and searched the cabinets. Curtains covered the windows, but they weren’t thick. A dedicated snoop would have had no trouble spotting his nudity. He didn’t care. Anne admired him again, this time for brazenness—not that she didn’t already know about that. She also admired the red lines on his back…and the back itself.

He grunted again, on a different note from when he’d shot his seed into her, and held up a bottle three-quarters full of amber liquid. “If this cottage is like mine, the bedroom should be…over here,” he said, and sure enough, it was.

He bothered with glasses no more than he’d bothered with clothes. Anne followed his lead, something she was unused to doing. He yanked the cork from the bottle with his teeth when it would not yield to his fingers. “What shall we drink to?” Anne asked.

She wondered if he would say
victory
. She thought he started to, but the word did not pass his lips. Instead, he answered, “To doing our jobs the best way we know how while the world goes to hell around us,” and took a long pull at the bottle.

“Leave some for me,” Anne said. She had to pull it out of his hand. It wasn’t the best whiskey she’d ever had, nor anywhere close, but, if she drank enough of it, it would get her drunk. After she’d swallowed and her eyes stopped watering, she said, “We’re going to lose, aren’t we?”

“Don’t see how we can do anything else,” Kimball said. “Scuttlebutt is, we’ve already started sniffing around for terms.”

“I hadn’t heard that,” Anne said. “I’d have thought President Semmes owed me enough to let me know such things, but maybe not.” Maybe, with her plantation in ruins and her investments in hardly better shape, she wasn’t rich enough to be worth cultivating any more.

“Well, he hasn’t told me about it, either. I don’t know if the stories are true or not,” Kimball said. “Ones I’ve heard say that damned Roosevelt turned us down flat, so it doesn’t matter any which way.” He drank again, then stared at the bottle. “What are we supposed to do after we lose the war? How are we supposed to get over that?”

“The damnyankees did. They did it twice,” Anne said. “Anything those people can do, we can do, too. We have to figure out where we went wrong in this fight and make sure we don’t go wrong that way again.”

“Because there
will
be another round,” Kimball said, and Anne nodded. She reached for the whiskey bottle. He handed it to her. She drank till her eyes crossed. Anything, even oblivion, was better than thinking about spending so many lives and so much treasure—and losing anyhow.

She discovered Roger Kimball’s hand high up on her bare thigh. As she stared at it, it moved higher still. She set the bottle on the floor by the side of the bed and clasped Kimball to her. Love, or even fornication, was better than thinking about what might have been, too.

An aeroplane buzzed high over the line east of Lubbock. Jefferson Pinkard stared up at it. He thought about firing a few rounds—by the way it had come, it was plainly a U.S. machine—but decided not to waste the ammunition. It was so high up there, he had no chance of hitting it.

“Why we don’t got no aeroplanes to shoot down that
puto
?” Hipolito Rodriguez asked. “The Yankees, they got aeroplanes all the time. They look at us like a man peeking at a woman taking a bath in a river.”

Jeff thought of Emily. He couldn’t help imagining her naked. That was all right, when he didn’t imagine Bedford Cunningham naked beside her or on top of her. He answered, “Guess they don’t reckon this here front’s important enough to send us much in the way of flying machines. Yankees always have had more’n us.”

Something fell from the U.S. aeroplane. Pinkard’s first reaction was to hit the dirt, but he checked himself—that wasn’t a bomb. No: those weren’t bombs. They drifted and fluttered in the air like the snowflakes he occasionally saw in Birmingham. Rodriguez stared at them in blank wonderment. Jeff guessed he never saw snow down in Sonora, even if he’d made its acquaintance here this past winter.

“Papers!” Sergeant Albert Cross said. “The bastards are dropping leaflets on us.”

“Rather have ’em drop leaflets than bombs any old day, and twice on Sunday,” Pinkard said.

“Sí.”
Hip Rodriguez nodded enthusiastic agreement. “With papers, too, I can wipe my ass. This is
muy bueno
.”

“Probably be scratchy as hell,” Cross said after a judicious pause for thought. “But hey, Hip, you’re right—damn sight better’n nothin’. It’s a fucking wonder all the flies in Texas don’t live in this here trench.”

“You mean they don’t?” Jeff said, kidding on the square. “Could have fooled me.” As if to make him pay for his words, something bit him on the back of the neck. He swatted, but didn’t think he got it.

By then, the fluttering papers had nearly reached the ground. A few drifted back toward the Yankees’ trenches. Others fell in no-man’s-land. Still others came down in and behind the Confederates’ forward line.

Had Pinkard stabbed up with his bayoneted Tredegar, he could have spitted one of the descending leaflets. He didn’t bother. He just grabbed one out of the air. Cross and Rodriguez crowded close to see what the devil the United States thought it worthwhile to tell their foes.