Страница 119 из 169
“I’m sure we’ll stop in Philadelphia on our way to Clovis,” his adjutant said. “The War Department can brief us there.” Captain-no, Major-Toricelli had a well-developed sense of caution, too.
Not even the stars on his shoulder straps kept Dowling from being searched before he got into the War Department. “Sorry, sir,” said the noncom who did the job. “Complain to the Chief of Staff if you want to. Rule is, no exceptions.”
Dowling didn’t intend to complain. As far as he could see, the rule made good sense. “How many people bombs have you had?” he asked.
“Inside here? None,” the sergeant answered. “In Philadelphia? I think the count is five right now.”
“Jesus!” Dowling said. The man who was patting him down nodded sadly.
He felt like saying Jesus! again when he got a look at the situation map for the Texas-New Mexico border. The so-called Eleventh Army had a division and a half-an understrength corps-to cover hundreds of miles of frontier. The bombers that had plastered Dallas and Fort Worth had long since been withdrawn to more active fronts.
Only one thing relieved his gloom: the Confederates he was facing were just as bad off as he was. Where he had a division and a half under his command, his counterpart in butternut commanded a scratch division, and somebody had been scratching at it pretty hard. Dowling thought he could drive the enemy a long way.
After studying the map, he wondered why he ought to bother. If he advanced fifty miles into Texas, even a hundred miles into Texas-well, so what? What had he won except fifty or a hundred empty, dusty miles? All those wide-open spaces were the best shield the Confederacy had. Advance fifty or a hundred miles into Virginia and the CSA staggered. Advance fifty or a hundred miles into Kentucky and you cut the enemy off from the Ohio River and took both farming and factory country. Texas wasn’t like that. There was a lot of it, and nobody had done much with a lot of what there was.
“Are you sending me out there to do things myself, or just to keep the Confederates from doing things?” he asked a General Staff officer.
That worthy also studied the map. “For now, the first thing is to make sure the Confederates don’t do anything,” he replied. “If they take Las Cruces, people will talk. If they go crazy and take Santa Fe and Albuquerque, I’d say your head would roll.”
“They’d need a devil of a lot of reinforcements to do that,” Dowling said, and the colonel with the gold-and-black arm-of-service colors didn’t deny it. Dowling went on, “They’d have to be nuts, too, because even taking Albuquerque won’t do a damn thing about wi
“Looks that way to me, too,” the colonel said.
“All right, then-we’re on the same page, anyhow,” Dowling said. “Now, the next obvious question is, who do I have to kill to get reinforcements of my own?”
“Well, sir, till we settle the mess in Pe
“All right. You seem honest, anyhow. I’ll do what I can,” Dowling said.
When he headed to the Broad Street Station for the roundabout journey west, he discovered fall had ousted summer while he wasn’t looking. The temperature had dropped ten or twelve degrees while he was visiting the War Department. The breeze was fresh, and came from the northwest. Gray clouds scudded along on it. No red and gold leaves on trees, no brown leaves blowing, not yet, but that breeze said they were on their way.
Home. Cinci
The apartment and the neighborhood seemed even more amazing to his father. “Do Jesus!” Seneca Driver said. “It’s like I ain’t a nigger no more. Don’t hardly know how to act when the ofay down at the corner store treat me like I’s a man.”
Cinci
No such gloom troubled his father. “Bought me a pack of cigarettes, an’ I give the clerk half a dollar. An’ he give me my change, an’ he say to me, ‘Here you is, sir.’ Sir! Ain’t nobody never call me ‘sir’ in all my born days, but he do it. Sir!” He might have been walking on air. Then something else occurred to him. “That clerk, he call a Chinaman ‘sir,’ too?”
“Reckon so,” Cinci
“Not likely!” His father snorted at the idea. “I seen Chinamen in the moving pictures before, but I don’t reckon I ever seen one in the flesh in Covington. Now I ain’t just seen ’em-I got ’em in the family!” He thought himself a man of the world because of that.
“They’ve got you in the family, too,” Cinci
“They is welcome in my family, long as they make that good beer,” Seneca Driver said. Cinci
Cinci
“You’re a U.S. citizen, Pa,” he said suddenly. “Once you’ve lived in Iowa long enough to be a resident, you can vote.”
His father was less delighted than he’d expected. “Done did that once in Kentucky,” Seneca Driver replied. “There was that plebiscite thing, remember? I done voted, but they went ahead an’ gave her back to the CSA anyways.” He plainly thought that, since he’d voted, things should have gone the way he wanted them. Cinci
Elizabeth came out of the kitchen and into the front room. “You two hungry?” she asked. “Got some fried chicken in the icebox I can bring you.” She thought Cinci
“I would like that. Thank you kindly,” Seneca said. Cinci