In at the Death (78 page)

“So don’t listen to me.”

“Like I ever did.” As long as they were zinging each other, Armstrong was happy enough. But they’d come much too close to getting serious there, and getting serious made him nervous.

He wasn’t the only U.S. soldier who got nervous in Alabama. Somebody well up the chain of command had the bright idea that a football game between occupiers and locals might show people that men from the USA weren’t so different from anybody else—no horns, no tails, no pitchforks.

The company CO asked Armstrong, “Didn’t you play football in high school?”

“Some,” he answered. “I was second string. I wasn’t that great or anything.”

“You want a chance to knock Confederates on their ass without getting gigged for it?”

“Where do I sign up?”

Squidface wanted nothing to do with that. “I’m glad I’m a little guy,” he said. “Those assholes on the other side, they’re gonna be lookin’ for a chance to rack you up. This ain’t gonna be no friendly game.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll work out on them, too,” Armstrong said.

“They better have plenty of ambulances ready,” Squidface said darkly.

They got uniforms. Whoever was in charge of what they were calling the Peace Bowl had clout. U.S. soldiers wore blue suits, their Confederate counterparts red. They got cleats to take the place of their boots. They got helmets. Armstrong wondered if he wouldn’t do better with his regular steel pot than with this leather contraption.

The athletes on the U.S. team were in much better shape than the high-school guys had been. Armstrong felt he’d earned something when he got named a starting tackle. They had a quarterback who could really throw and a couple of ends who could catch. The ends weren’t the swiftest in the world, but they’d do.

They played the Peace Bowl at a high-school stadium. U.S. soldiers filled half the stands, locals the other half. To make sure the bowl stayed peaceful, the locals got frisked before they could go inside.

Armstrong got his first look at the red team then. He didn’t like what he saw. They were slimmer and rangier than the U.S. players. They looked fast. That wasn’t what worried him, though. One glance told him these guys were going to play as if they were fighting to hold the U.S. Army out of Chattanooga. Squidface had it straight. Peace Bowl, nothing. This wouldn’t be football. This would be war.

The red team—they seemed to call themselves the Wolves—won the toss. When the U.S. kicker booted the ball, Armstrong thundered down the field. The first collision was always welcome. He slammed into a guy in red. “Yankee cocksuckin’ motherfucker,” the man said, and tried to lift a knee into his family jewels.

“Kiss my ass, Charlie.” Armstrong twisted and took the knee on his hip pad. “You want to play like that? We’ll play like that.”

“Bring it on,” the other guy said.

And they did. Both sides did, the whole game long. Armstrong got punched and elbowed and gouged and kicked. Every tackle was a piling-on penalty. It was trench warfare, only without trenches. The Confederates
were
faster. The U.S. team was a touch stronger.

One Confederate broke his leg. As far as Armstrong could tell, that was an accident—the tackle looked clean. One U.S. player had his shoulder dislocated. On the next play, the Wolf who dislocated it got racked up. Armstrong couldn’t see just what happened to him; somebody was trying to step on his face. Whatever it was, the guy in red got carried off on a stretcher.

With four minutes to go, the Confederates punted to the U.S. team. The blues were on their own thirty, down 28–24. “This is it,” the quarterback said in the huddle. “We get a touchdown, we win. We fuck up, we look like chumps in front of these shitheads and in front of our own guys. We gonna let that happen?”

“No!” they chorused.

“All right. Short pass into the left flat on three. Let’s go get ’em.”

“You shot my brother, asshole,” said the guy across the line from Armstrong.

“Don’t worry, cuntlips,” Armstrong said sweetly. “You’re next.”

And he was right, but not the way he meant it. The first mortar bomb hissed in then, and burst right on the midfield stripe. But the red team shielded the blue from most of the fragments. As soon as Armstrong heard the bang, he flattened out. So did the Alabaman who didn’t like him, but the guy in red was bleeding from his back and his leg.

“Fuck,” he said hoarsely.

Another Confederate player was down with a ghastly head wound. It proved again what Kaiser Bill’s army had found out the hard way in the Great War—leather helmets didn’t do one damn thing to stop shell fragments. A couple of U.S. soldiers clutched at themselves and groaned, too. Their uniforms showed the blood more than their opponents’.

Armstrong crawled over to the closer one. He didn’t want to rise up, in case more mortar rounds landed on or near the football field. And they did—one near the far end zone, and another, gruesomely, in the side of the stands filled with people cheering for the red team. Screams and shrieks and wails rose high and shrill.

“Son of a bitch!” Armstrong said, not entirely displeased. “We may not even have to take hostages this time. They’re doing it to themselves.”

The wounded U.S. player expressed an opinion that would have assigned every white person in the former Confederacy to an even warmer if less humid clime. Then he said, “I wish I could bandage myself. This cloth doesn’t tear for shit.”

“Hang on.” Armstrong extracted a small clasp knife from his right sock. “I’ll fix you up.”

“What are you doing with that?” the other soldier asked.

“Never can tell when it’ll come in handy,” Armstrong said, slicing at the fellow’s shirt. “If I could’ve got my hands on a derringer, I would’ve packed one of those, too.” He cut at the soldier’s tight trousers so he could see the wound. “Not too bad. Looks like you’re sliced up some, but I don’t think there’s any iron in there.”

“Oh, boy,” the injured player said. Armstrong knew it was easier to be optimistic if you weren’t the guy who’d stopped one.

Another round burst on the far side of the field, and then another one in the Confederate side of the stands. The bastards with the mortar could have done much worse to the people they were trying to harm. Instead, they unleashed horror on the men and women who would have applauded had damnyankees been sliced to cat’s meat.

“I think the game’s over,” somebody not far away said.

“Boy, I bet he had to go to college to be smart like that,” Armstrong said.

“Heh,” said the wounded football player lying beside him. “I hope they drop on that fucking mortar crew pretty damn quick.”

“Good luck,” Armstrong said. Mortars didn’t make a great big bang when they went off. If you drew a mile-and-a-half circle around the football field, the crew was…somewhere in there. If they wanted to throw their weapon in a Birmingham, go somewhere else, and set up again, they could do that, too. And most of the soldiers who could be chasing them were here at the game instead.

The guys in green-gray were emptying from the stands as fast as they could without panic. Medics came out to get the injured off the field. They’d been there for the football injuries, but they knew how to deal with battlefield wounds, too. They’d had plenty of practice. Armstrong stayed right where he was. He wished he could have stashed an entrenching tool in his sock. Like every U.S. soldier in the CSA, he felt pinned down.

E
verything faded. Cassius found that out the hard way. He could remember the fierce, incredulous joy he’d known when he shot Jake Featherston, but he couldn’t feel it any more. All he had now was the memory, and it wasn’t the same thing.

Fame faded, too. It wasn’t that people didn’t recall what he’d done, here more than half a year later. He got greeted with smiles and nods wherever he went. But he wasn’t fresh news any more. Too much had happened since. The United States was about to get a new President. That was why he’d been invited down to Washington, D.C.: to see Tom Dewey inaugurated.

He wondered if his would be the only black face at the inauguration. He feared it might. Down in the CSA, he’d always been among his own kind. But Negroes in the United States were thin on the ground. He had to get used to dealing with white people.

A lot of them didn’t know how to deal with him, either. The ones who treated him like an eight-year-old who wasn’t very bright were easy to avoid. Even the ones who plainly meant well, though, often acted as if they couldn’t expect much from him. In some ways, they bothered him more than the other kind, because they were harder to shake off.

“Such neat handwriting!” gushed the desk clerk at Willard’s Hotel when Cassius checked in the evening of January 31. He looked at his signature.
Cassius Madison
, it said in his ordinary script, which was not too bad and not too good. Everybody in the USA needed a surname. He’d taken his from the town outside of which he shot Jake Featherston. Only later did he learn it also belonged to a U.S. President from before the War of Secession. Were Cassius white, the clerk never would have remarked on how he wrote. The man had to be surprised he could write at all.

Once he’d checked in, Cassius knew what to do at a hotel. He tipped the man who carried his bags up to his room. Watching a white man do what would have been nigger work in the CSA was a kick.

“Thanks,” the fellow said, pocketing the half-dollar. “You want a girl, buddy, you talk to me. I’ll get you a lulu, I will. Fifteen bucks, and you’ll be a happy guy—I guarantee it.”

“Not right now,” Cassius answered. Right after he came to the USA, he couldn’t keep women away from him, not that he tried very hard. But they didn’t throw themselves at him like that any more—another sign his fame was wearing thin, and one he really regretted.

The bellhop shrugged. “You change your mind, you can find me. My name’s Pete. See you around.” He strode out of the room.

Cassius shrugged. He didn’t like paying for it. He did like doing it, though, so maybe he’d hunt up Pete and maybe he wouldn’t. In the meantime, he looked at the room-service menu. He ordered a steak and a salad and fried potatoes. Experience had taught him that those were hard for even a kitchen asleep at the switch to screw up too badly.

Another white man, this one with a foreign accent, brought the dinner into his room on a cart. Cassius tipped him, too. With a nod that was almost a bow, the waiter left. Cassius attacked the steak. They’d got medium-rare right, and the meat was pretty tender. He’d had plenty worse.

He went to bed without looking for Pete. He felt more tired than virtuous. He didn’t know why sitting on a train for the trip down from Boston should have worn him out—he hadn’t done anything
but
sit. But he’d seen several times that traveling long distances could be as wearing as a march with Gracchus’ guerrillas.

After the alarm clock woke him, he showered and shaved and dressed in a sober suit set off by a bright red tie. Then he went downstairs for breakfast.

Willard’s, at the corner of Fourteenth and Pennsylvania Avenue, was only a couple of blocks from the White House, on whose battered grounds the inauguration ceremony would take place. It was even closer to the security perimeter, which featured barbed wire, machine-gun nests, and search points.

Even though Cassius had one of the most recognizable faces in the USA and an official invitation, he got frisked. “I shot the President of the CSA,” he complained. “You reckon I’m gonna shoot the President of the USA?”

“Not our job to take chances,” answered the soldier patting him down. “But I’ll tell you something—Congresswoman Blackford came through this checkpoint a few minutes ago. She was married to a guy who was President. One of our gals searched her anyway.” He paused. “You’re clean. Go on through.”

“Thanks,” Cassius said. If they were searching members of Congress, they hadn’t singled him out because he was a Negro. He’d wondered.

He showed his invitation to an usher who might have been a soldier dressed up for the occasion. “Oh, yes, sir,” the man said—he couldn’t have been more than a year or two older than Cassius. “Come with me. We’ve got you a place right near the podium.”

Cassius went past bleachers filling up with dignitaries and their wives. A woman waved to him. That
was
Congresswoman Blackford—the soldier hadn’t been lying to him. He waved back.

There was a special grandstand right behind the podium where the new President would be sworn in. Newsreel cameras in front of the podium would capture the moment so people all over the country could see it. They were sure to capture Cassius. He didn’t mind. Till he learned some skill to help him get through the rest of his life, all he had to trade on was the one moment when his rifle spoke for him.

Some of the people sitting around him were generals and admirals. Others had to be important Democratic dignitaries. Their party had been out of office for eight years. Now they got to run things again. They were friendly to him. They shook his hand and congratulated him. Then they went back to chatting with one another, talking about all the things they would do now that they could do them.

The seats on the podium started to fill up: there were the incoming Vice President and his wife. There was the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. There were outgoing President La Follette and his wife. And there, at last, were incoming President Dewey and
his
wife—and a flock of hard-eyed bodyguards around them.

Vice President Truman was sworn in first. He gave no speech and had no counterpart to shake his hand. President La Follette had been Vice President before the Confederate bomb killed his predecessor, and the office stayed empty after he left it.

When Truman sat down, Dewey stood up. So did La Follette, who took his place beside the Chief Justice. The new President took the oath: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

As soon as Dewey finished the oath, President—no, ex-President—La Follette took a step forward and shook his hand. Then he sat down on the podium. The Chief Justice also shook hands with President Dewey. He too sat down.