In at the Death (63 page)

“Six million? Seven? Ten?” Morrell shrugged helplessly. “I don’t think anybody knows exactly. Maybe they can figure out how many Negroes the Confederates shipped to their camps. I bet it’d be easier to count how many are left now, though. Then subtract from how many there were before the Freedom Party started killing them, and the number you get is how many bought a plot.”

“Those Freedom Party bastards had to be out of their skulls,” Parsons said: far from the first time Morrell had heard that opinion. “Imagine all the effort they put into killing colored people. All the camps they had to build, all the trains they had to use…They would have done better if they aimed that shit at us.”

“They would have done a hell of a lot better if they’d put their Negroes into factories to make stuff to throw at us, or if they put them in uniform and pointed them at us,” Morrell said. “Or that’s how it looks to me, anyhow. But they saw it different. Far as Featherston was concerned, getting rid of Negroes was every bit as important as whaling the snot out of us.”

Parsons spiraled a forefinger by his right ear. “Out of his skull,” he repeated.

“Yeah, I think so, too—most of the time. But for people who were crazy, they sure went at it like they knew what they were doing.” Morrell shivered. “Those camps ran like barrel factories. Negroes went in, and corpses came out. If that was what they were aiming for, they couldn’t have done a smoother job.”

“I know. Those phony bathhouses, so the colored people wouldn’t know they were gonna get it till too late…” Parsons shuddered, too. “But don’t you have to be crazy to
want
to do something like that?”

“When the Ottomans started killing Armenians after the Great War, I sure thought so,” Morrell answered. “Maniacs in fezzes…But shit, the Confederates aren’t
that
different from us, or they weren’t till they started yelling, ‘Freedom!’ all the damn time. Biggest difference is, they had lots of Negroes and we only had a few. So could
we
do something like that, too?”

Harlan Parsons looked horrified. “Christ, I hope not!”

“Yeah, well, so do I,” Morrell said. “But what’s that got to do with anything? If we decide we can’t stand Negroes or Jews or Chinamen or whoever the hell, do we fish the designs for these asphyxiating trucks out of the file and start making our own?”

“I don’t
think
so, sir,” his second-in-command replied. “For one thing, the Confederates went and did that. Maybe we can learn our lesson from them.”

“Here’s hoping.” Morrell nodded. “You might have something there. I sure hope you do. Who’d want to go down in history as the next Jake Featherston?” He answered his own question: “Nobody. I hope.”

“Now if only the people down here could get it through their damn thick heads that what the Freedom Party did was wrong,” Parsons said.

“If they would have thought it was wrong, it never would have happened in the first place,” Morrell said. “If they hadn’t voted Featherston in, or if they hadn’t let him go after the colored people…They did, though. And you said it, General. This is a whole different landscape here now.”

How
would
the area that had made up the CSA get along without Negroes to do the jobs whites didn’t want or felt to be beneath their dignity? He’d already seen part of the answer. Lots of Mexicans had come north to work in the fields and to wait tables and cut hair and clean house. Unless the USA posted machine guns every few hundred yards along the Rio Grande, the Mexicans would keep on coming, too. They could do less and get more money for it here than they could in Francisco José’s ramshackle empire. Without machine guns, how were you going to keep them away?

Well, that wasn’t his worry. The Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of War would figure out what to do about it, and then they’d tell him. And then he would have to do it—or try to, if it turned out to be one of the stupid orders that came out of Philadelphia every now and then.

Bang!
When Morrell heard that noise, he ducked first and thought later. So did Harlan Parsons. Nothing else happened, though. Parsons straightened with a sheepish smile. “I
think
it was only a backfire.”

“I think you’re right,” Morrell said. “That’s a relief, isn’t it? One of these days, we may even be able to hear that noise without flinching.”

“One of these days—but not soon,” Parsons said.

Morrell nodded. The war hadn’t just changed the Confederate States. It had changed his own country. And it had changed
him
, and changed every soldier on both sides who came through alive. Starting at loud noises was the least of it. The last time around, one Confederate soldier came out changed enough to convulse his country a generation later. Who would change things this time around—and how?

C
ongratulations, Dr. O’Doull! Congratulations, Lieutenant Colonel O’Doull!” Colonel Tobin said. He was the U.S. officer in charge of this part of Alabama, and he was proud of it, God help him. He handed Leonard O’Doull the little velvet box containing a lieutenant colonel’s silver oak leaves as if it were the Holy Grail.

“Thank you, sir.” O’Doull was much less impressed. He also suspected Tobin had chosen to promote him to try to persuade him to stay in the Army. If so, the man was barking up the wrong tree. “Sir, I’ve been away from my family a long time now. With the war over and done, I’d like to arrange to return to civilian life.”

“So would we all,” Tobin said. “But you can’t deny soldiers are still getting wounded, can you? And you can’t deny they’re coming down with, uh, unpleasant diseases, either.” He didn’t want to come right out and say VD.

“No, sir. I can’t deny any of that. Still, it is peacetime—formally, anyhow. And with our new antibiotics, a medic can do just as much for syphilis and gonorrhea as I can.”

Colonel Tobin winced when he heard the names. But he didn’t retreat. “I’m very sorry, but the United States still need you. You did sign up to serve at the country’s pleasure, you know.”

That was a trump against most men in U.S. service. Against Leonard O’Doull? Not necessarily. “Sir, meaning no disrespect, but I’m going to have to get hold of my government and see what it thinks of your refusing to discharge me.”

“
Your
government?” Tobin had bushy eyebrows, and got a good theatrical effect when he raised one. “You have a different one from everybody else’s?”

“Yes, sir,” O’Doull said, which made the colonel’s eyebrow jump again—this time, O’Doull judged, involuntarily. He pulled a maroon passport out of his trouser pocket. “As you see, sir, I’m a citizen of the Republic of Quebec. Actually, I have dual citizenship, but I’ve lived in the Republic since the last war. I met a girl up there, and I stayed and started a practice in Rivière-du-Loup.”

“Good God. Let me see that.” Tobin took the Quebecois passport as if it were a poisonous snake. He found the page with O’Doull’s picture and grunted in surprise, as if he truly hadn’t expected to see it there. Shaking his head, he handed the passport back. “You’d better get hold of your officials. If they write me and say they want you to go on home, I have a reason to turn you loose. Till then, though, you’re a U.S. military physician, and we do need your services.”

Damn
, O’Doull thought. He had no idea whether the authorities in the Republic would send that kind of letter. But he couldn’t deny that Colonel Tobin was playing by the rules. “All right, sir. I’ll do that, then.” O’Doull put the passport back in his pocket. Colonel Tobin seemed glad to see him go.

“Well, Doc? Any luck?” Goodson Lord asked him when he got back to the aid station.

“Depends on what you mean.” O’Doull displayed his new rank insignia. Sergeant Lord shook his hand. “As for getting out,” O’Doull went on, “well, yes and no. If I can get a letter from my mommy—I mean, from my government—Tobin will have a real, live piece of paper to give him an excuse to turn me loose. Till then, I’m here.”

“Hope like hell they give it to you,” Lord said. “If I had an angle like that, you bet your sweet ass I’d use it. Playing a horn beats the crap out of this.”

“You’re a good medic,” O’Doull said.

“Thanks. I try. Some guy comes in bleeding, you don’t want to let him down, you know what I mean?” Lord said. “Even if I am halfway decent, though, it’s not like I want to do it the rest of my life.”

“That seems fair,” O’Doull allowed.

He wondered how long the United States would be able to occupy the Confederate States. The government might want to do it, but the soldiers on the ground were a lot less enthusiastic. They chafed under the discipline they’d accepted without thinking when their country was in peril.

They drank whatever they could get their hands on. They got into brawls with the locals and with one another. Despite all the thunderous orders against fraternizing with Confederate women, they chased skirt as eagerly as they would have back home. And what they chased, they caught. They caught all kinds of things—the penicillin they got stuck with testified to that.

“I don’t know what the hell her name was,” said a private most unhappy about his privates—he had one of the drippiest faucets O’Doull had ever seen. “It was dark. She said, ‘Five dollars,’ so I gave it to her. Then she gave it to me.”

“She sure did. Bend over. I’m going to give it to you, too,” O’Doull said. The soldier whined when the shot went home. O’Doull persisted: “Where was this? At a brothel? We need to know about those.”

“No…” The soldier sighed with relief as the needle came out. “I was going back to my tent after I stood sentry, you know? And she called, and I felt like it, so I paid her and I screwed her in the bushes. And the bitch gave me something to remember her by.”

O’Doull sighed. “Oh, God, I am so tired of this.”

“Yeah, well, let me tell you somethin’, Doc—it’s even less fun on this end of the needle.” The soldier did up his pants. “Is that it? Am I done?”

“No. You have to come back in three days for another shot,” O’Doull answered. The other man groaned. O’Doull felt like groaning himself.
This is why I need to get out of the Army
, he thought glumly. “And I have to see your dogtags. Your superiors in the line need to know you came down venereal.”

The soldier with the clap
really
didn’t like that. If Goodson Lord and Eddie hadn’t opportunely appeared, he might have stormed out of the aid station and forgotten about the second half of his cure. Eddie held a wrench; Sergeant Lord had a tire iron. O’Doull got the information he needed.

As soon as he’d written that down, he started in on the letter to the powers that be in the Republic of Quebec. Finding an envelope for it was easy. Coming up with a postage stamp wasn’t. Soldiers in Confederate territory who were writing to the USA got free franking. Writing to Quebec, O’Doull didn’t, and he’d used his last stamp a few days before on a letter to Nicole. He thought about using Confederate stamps, but they’d been demonetized. Eventually, a mail clerk came up with the requisite postage, and the letter went on its way.

And then he forgot about it. He went back to being a busy Army doctor, because an auto bomb killed several U.S. soldiers and wounded two dozen more. He hated auto bombs. They were a coward’s weapons. You could be—and, if you had any brains, you were—miles away when your little toy went off. And you could laugh at what it did to the people you didn’t like.

Digging jagged chunks of metal out of one soldier after another, O’Doull wasn’t laughing. He didn’t think the locals would be laughing very long, either, even though they probably were right now. “How many hostages will the authorities take after something like this?” he asked.

“Beats me,” Goodson Lord answered. “But they’ll shoot every damn one of ’em. You can bet your last nickel on that.”

“I know. And that will make some diehard mad enough to build another bomb, and then it just starts up again. Ain’t we got fun?” O’Doull said.

“Fun. Yeah,” Lord said. “How’s this guy doing?”

“We would have lost him in the last war—this kind of belly wound, peritonitis and septicemia would have got him for sure. But with the antibiotics, I think he’ll pull through. His colon’s more like a semicolon now, but you can live with that.”

“Ouch!” Lord said. The pun seemed to distress him more than the bloody work he was assisting with. He’d done the work lots of times. The pun was a fresh displeasure. O’Doull had pulled it on Granny McDougald before, but not on him.
I’m getting old
, he thought.
I’m using the same jokes over and over
.

After he’d repaired as best he could the wounded who were brought to him, he took a big slug of medicinal brandy, and poured another for Goodson Lord. He wouldn’t have done that during the fighting. No telling then when more casualties were coming in, and he’d wanted to keep his judgment as sharp as he could. Now he could hope he wouldn’t have anything more complicated than another dose of clap to worry about for a while.

He lit a cigarette. It was a Niagara, a U.S. brand, and tasted lousy. But the C.S. tobacco firms were out of business—for the moment, anyway. Bad smokes beat no smokes at all.