When the Great Days Come Read online

  The barking of rifles had started up again from General Gordon’s rear-guard on the road behind them when the courier arrived. He was thin as a skeleton, like Death himself come to call. He saluted and handed Lee a sealed communiqué. “Sir, from General Grant.”

  Lee held the note warily, as if it was a snake. He knew what it was: another message from General Grant, politely suggesting that he surrender his army.

  The question was, what was he going to say in return?

  The car jolted, shuddered, and jerked again while momentum equalized itself along the length of the train, and Cliff lifted his pen from the paper, waiting for the ride to steady again. What was he going to say in return? That was the problem.

  He had an arresting central image, one that had come to him whole: Robert F. Lee surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant, the soldiers lined up somberly along a country road, heads down, some of the Confederates openly in tears, Lee handing his sword to Grant while a light rain fell, both men looking solemn and grim . . . How to justify it, though? Counterfactuals had become increasingly popular in recent years—perhaps because the public had been denied the opportunity to play soldier during the Great War—until now they were now almost respectable as pulp stories went, and you could make decent money selling them. But in writing Counterfactuals, you had to provide some kind of tipping-point, some event that would have changed everything that came after—and it had to be at least superficially plausible, or the fans, armchair historians all, would tear you to pieces. Having the Confederates win the War was a common enough trope in the genre, and a number of stories had been written about how Lee had won at Gettysburg or had pushed on out of Virginia to attack and burn Washington when he had the chance, forcing capitulation on a terrified Union, but Cliff was after something more subtle—a tale where the Confederates still lost the War, but lost it in a different way, with different consequences as a result. It was hard to see what would have motivated Lee to surrender, though. True, he was nearly at the end of his rope, his men exhausted and starving, being closely harried by Union forces who were chasing him relentlessly West —but in the real world, none of that had brought him to the point of seriously contemplating surrender. In fact, it was at that very point when he’d said that he was determined “to fight to the last,” and told his officers and men that “We must all determine to die at our posts.” Didn’t sound much like somebody who was ready to throw in the towel.

  Then, just when things looked blackest, he had narrowly avoided a closing Union trap by breaking past Phil Sheridan at Appomattox Court House, and kept on going until he reached the Blue Ridge Mountains, there to break his army up into smaller units that melted into the wilderness, setting the stage for decades of bitterly fought guerilla war, a war of terror and ambush that was still smoldering to this day. It was hard to see what would have made Lee surrender, when he didn’t contemplate it even in the hour of his most extreme need. Especially as he knew that he could expect few compromises in the matter of surrender and little or no mercy from the implacable President Johnson . . .

  He was spinning his wheels. Time for a drink.

  Outside, the sun had finally disappeared below the horizon, leaving only a spreading red bruise behind. The darkening sky was slate-gray now, and hard little flakes of snow were squeezing themselves out of it, like dandruff sprinkled across felt. He hoped that the weather didn’t work itself into a real blizzard, one that might hold them up on the way back. Like everyone else, he wanted to get the ceremony over with and get back home before Christmas—even though all he really had to look forward to was a turkey sandwich at a Horn & Hardart’s and an evening drinking in a journalist’s hangout with many of the same people he was already sharing a train with in the first place.

  Cliff stored his notebook in his carpetbag, and pushed out into the corridor, which was rocking violently from side-to-side, like a ship in a high sea, as the track-bed roughened. He made his way unsteadily along the corridor, bracing himself against the wall. Freezing needles of winter cold stabbed at him between the cars, and then stale air and the smell of human sweat swallowed him as he crossed into one of the coach cars, which was crowded with passengers, pinch-faced civilians in threadbare clothes, including whole families trying to sleep sitting up in the uncomfortable wooden seats. Babies were crying, women were crooning to them, couples were fighting, someone was playing a Mexican song on a beat-up old guitar, and four Texans in the stereotypical but seemingly obligatory Stetsons—Texans were being seen around more frequently these days, now that relations had been normalized with the Republic of Texas—were playing poker on one of the seats, with onlookers standing in the aisles and whooping with every turn of the cards.

  There were three more coach cars to push your way through, and Cliff was glad to get beyond them into the alcoves between the cars, even though the cold air nipped at him each time. He never had liked noise and crowds, which was one reason why he’d always preferred small towns to the big cities. With things the way the were, though, the big cities like Chicago and Minneapolis were where the work was, and so he had no choice but to live there, as long as the Minneapolis Star paid his bills.

  Even out here, between the cars, you could smell the tobacco stink coming from the next compartment, and when he opened the door and stepped into the bar car, tobacco smoke hung in such a thick yellow cloud that you could barely see. Most of the newsmen on the train were in here, standing around the bar or sitting grouped on stools around the little tables. Like Cliff, most of them had shunned the dining car and brought bags of sandwiches from Chicago, to save their meager expense-account money for the bar.

  Cliff was hailed with the usual derisive, mildly insulting greetings, and two of the boys squeezed apart to make room for him at the bar. He was well-enough liked by the other newsmen, although his hobby of writing Counterfactuals and Westerns, even the occasional Air War or Weird Fantasy, marked him out as a bit strange. Half of these guys probably had an unfinished draft of the Great American Novel stashed away in a drawer somewhere, but in public you were supposed to give lip-service to the idea that to a real newsman, the only kind of writing that mattered was journalism.

  “Hey, Cliff,” John said. “Finish another masterpiece?”

  “Aw, he was probably just jerking-off,” Staubach said.

  Cliff smiled tolerantly and bought a round. He was already several drinks behind. The wunderkind from the Chicago Tribune—he was supposed to be nineteen, but to Cliff it didn’t look like he could be more than thirteen—was trying to get an argument about The Gathering Clouds of War in Europe going with Bill, a big amiable Michigan Swede who rarely paid any attention to anything outside of the box-scores on the sports page, unless it was a racing form. “The United States will never get involved in a foreign war,” the kid was saying, in his surprisingly deep voice. “Bryant kept us out of the Great War, and Hoover will keep us out of this one, too.” He was short and pudgy, pasty-faced, with a sullen, cynical, seen-it-all air unusual in one so young. A few of the boys had held the fact that he was a New York Jew against him for awhile, but he was basically good-natured behind his gruff exterior, and smart as a whip, with just the kind of savage black humor that reporters liked, and so most of them had warmed to him.

  He was trying to get a rise out of Bill, who had been incautious enough to express mild Interventionist sentiments a few times in the past, but Bill wasn’t rising to the bait. “Guess England and Germany will just have to take care of de Gaulle without our help,” Bill said amiably. “They’re up to it, I guess.”

  “We’ve got enough problems of our own without worrying about de Gaulle,” John threw in.

  “Fuck DeGauile and the horse he fucking rode in on,” Staubach said. “Who’s got the cards?”

  “Language, gentlemen!” old Matthews said sternly. They all jeered at him, but they acquiesced, Staubach rephrasing his question to “Okay, who’s got the frigging cards?” Although he was as erect and natty as ever, impeccably dressed, looking every inch the distinguished senior correspondent, Matthews had been drinking even harder lately than reporters usually drank, and was already a bit glassy-eyed. The kid was supposed to be his assistant, but everybody knew that he’d been writing his column for him, and doing a better job of it than Matthews ever had.

  John had the cards, but they had to wait through another couple of rounds for one of the little tables to open up, as the more prosperous passengers, or those who were more finicky about their food, drifted off to the dining car up front. “Crowded in here,” Cliff commented. “Where are all the politicians, though? You’d think they’d be nine-deep around the bar.”

  “Aw, they got a bar of their own, coupla cars up,” Staubach said.

  “Got the first three cars, all to themselves,” Bill threw in, with a grin. “And a sergeant with a carbine on the platform outside, to make sure Lindbergh and the rest of them don’t get bothered by the hoi poloi.”

  “Sure, little do they care that the poor bastard has to freeze his nuts off all the way to Montgomery,” John said, which drew another admonishment of “Language!” from Matthews, although, as he was already more than half-fried, it was clear that his heart wasn’t in it anymore. The bartender—who, on a train like this, traveling through the Occupied Territories, was likely to be a soldier in civilian clothes, with a carbine of his own tucked under the bar—grinned at them over Matthews’s head.

  At last a table opened up, and they settled in for their usual nickel-and-dime game of draw. Mathews kept fumbling with his cards, having trouble holding them in a proper fan, forgetting whose bet it was, and changing his mind about how many cards he wanted, and soon was the big loser—as big as it got in this penny ante game, anyway. Every time the kid lost a ha
nd, he would curse with an inventive fluency that was almost Shakespearian, and that kept the rest of them chuckling. Since he never deigned to use the common “four-letter words,” even Matthews couldn’t really complain, although he grumbled about it. Bill played with his usual quiet competency and was soon ahead, although Cliff managed to hold his own and split a number of pots with him.

  After about an hour and a half of this, the smoke and the noise, and the fact that Matthews was no longer able to keep from dropping his cards every time he picked them up, and was getting pissy about it, made Cliff deal himself out.

  “Going back to the room,” he said, “see if I can get a couple of pages done before the rest of you guys show up.

  “Can’t keep Wild West Weekly waiting,” Bill said.

  “Aw, he’s just going to jerk-off again,” Staubach mumbled, peering at his cards.

  Cliff waved at them and walked away, moving a little more unsteadily than was entirely justified by the lurching of the car. Truth was, left to his own devices, Cliff wasn’t that heavy a drinker—but if you were going to be accepted by the boys, you had to drink with them, and reporters prided themselves on their ability to put it away, another way in which the kid—who seemed to have a hollow trunk, as well as two hollow legs—fit right in in spite of his youth. Cliff could feel that he was at the edge of his ability to toss it back without becoming knee-walking drunk, though, which would lose him respect with the boys, so it was time to call it a night.

  There was snow crusted on the footplates between the cars now, although it didn’t seem to be snowing anymore outside. Cliff decided that he’d better clear his head if he was going to get any writing done, and walked back through the now-darkened coach cars and the sleeping cars to the observation platform on the back of the rear car.

  It was bitterly cold outside, his breath puffing out in tattered plumes, but the snow had stopped, and the black clouds overhead had momentarily parted, revealing the fat pale moon. They were still moving through thick forest, the snow-shrouded ghosts of the trees gleaming like bones in the darkness, but now the ground on one side of the track fell steeply away, opening the world up to space and distance and the dimly perceived black bulks of nearby hills. There was a fast little mountain stream down there, winding along at the bottom of the slope, and in the moonlight he could see the cold white rills it made as it broke around streambed rocks.

  The train slowed while going up the next long incline, and a dark figure broke from the trees, darted forward, and sprang onto the observation platform, grabbing the railing. As Cliff flinched back in shock, the figure threw a leg over the railing and pulled itself up. It paused, sitting on the top rail, one leg over, and looked at Cliff. It was a man, thin, clean-shaven, with a large nose and close-cropped hair bristling across a bullet-head, clutching a bindle in one hand. As Cliff gaped, the man smiled jauntily, said, “Evenin’, sport!”, and put one finger to his lips in a shushing gesture. Then he swung his other leg over the railing, hopped down to the platform, and sauntered by Cliff, giving him a broad wink as he passed.

  Up close, even by moonlight, you could tell that his clothes were patched and much-mended, but they seemed reasonably clean, and although he exuded a brief whiff of sweat and unwashed armpits and sour breath as he passed, it wasn’t too strong or too rank. He couldn’t have been on the bum for too long, Cliff thought, or at least he must have been finding work frequently enough to enable him to keep himself moderately clean. The tramp disappeared into the car without a backwards glance, presumably to lose himself among the coach-class passengers or find a water-closet or a storage cubical to hide in for the night. There were thousands of such ragged men on the road these days, drifting from place to place, looking for work or a handout, especially down here in the Occupied Territories; the economy was bad enough in the States, but down here, whole regions had never really recovered from the War in the first place, the subsequent decades of guerilla war and large-scale terrorism—with whole armies of unreconstructed rebels still on the loose and lurking in the hills, many of them by now composed of the children and grandchildren of the original soldiers—tending to discourage economic growth . . . especially with raiders knocking down new factories or businesses as fast as they sprang up, to discourage “collaboration” with the occupying forces.

  Cliff knew that he really should report the tramp to the conductor, but it was difficult to work up enough indignation to bother, and in the end he decided not to even try. It was hard to blame him for wanting to be inside the train, where it was warm, rather than out there in the freezing night.

  Up ahead, around a long curve, you could see the engine itself now, puffing out bursts of fire-shot black smoke like some great, stertorously gasping iron beast. The smoke plume wrapped itself back around the observation platform, making him cough and filling his mouth with the ashen taste of cinders, and that, plus the fact that he was beginning to shiver, told him that it was time to go back inside himself. If his head wasn’t clear by now, it wasn’t going to be.

  When Cliff got back to their compartment, though, it became obvious that it didn’t matter whether his head was clear or not; he wasn’t going to get any more writing done tonight. The conductor had already rearranged the compartment into its sleeping configuration, folding away the benches and lowering two bunks from each opposing wall, one stacked above the other. Somewhat surprisingly, his roommates were already back from the bar. Matthews, in fact, was already soddenly asleep on one of the lower bunks, gurgling and snoring, still fully clothed, although Bill was fussing with him, trying to get him undressed, with little success. Cliff gathered that the old man had passed out in the bar, or come near to it, and his compatriots had hauled him back to the roomette. Even out here, you could smell the booze coming off of him.

  With the bunks folded down, there was hardly space enough for Bill and the kid to stand in the tiny compartment, and Cliff had to hover in the doorway, half out in the corridor, waiting for someone to make room for him. The kid at last got impatient with Bill’s efforts to undress Matthews and bumped him aside, saying harshly “Oh, leave the poor old pfumpt alone.” With a curious tenderness that belayed the gruffness of his tone, he took off the old man’s shoes and stowed them under his bunk, and loosened his tie. “He’ll just have to sleep in his clothes for once like the rest of us, instead of those stupid woolen pajamas.”

  As if to demonstrate, Bill climbed into the other bottom bunk—fully dressed except for his shoes; it was a good idea to keep your wallet in your pocket, too, since sneak-thieves were known to riffle through bags left on the floor in a compartment while the occupants slept—and put his hat over his eyes. Cliff slid inside, now that some floor space had opened-up, and closed the door on the corridor.

  They had come down out of the hills by now, and stopped at a tiny station for no readily apparent reason. There was a small town out there, two or three streets of two-story storefronts laid out parallel to the tracks, some dilapidated old wooden houses with big overgrown yards set further back. The storefronts carried faded signs that said things like HUDSON’S HICKORY HOUSE or BROWN FURNITURE COMPANY, but none of them looked like they’d been open for awhile, and several had boarded-up windows. Nothing was moving out there except a dog pissing on a lamp pole.

  “What a dump!” the kid said, turning to look at Cliff. Up close like this, he had a habit of partially covering his mouth with his hand when he spoke; he was embarrassed about his teeth, which he never brushed, and were green. “No wonder all the colored folks moved up North.”

  “Getting lynched and shot and burned-out by Lee’s Boys probably had something to do with it too,” Bill said dryly, lifting his hat for a second. “Turn off the light. I want to get some sleep.”

  The kid vaulted up into the bunk above Matthews. Cliff took his shoes off, stuffed his carpetbag into his bunk to use as a pillow, shut off the light, and climbed into the other upper in the dark, nearly falling when the car lurched as the train started moving again.

  Cliff lay awake in the darkness for awhile, feeling oddly apprehensive and jittery for no particular reason he could identify, listening to the snoring and moaning of his roommates. He tried picturing himself back on his grandfather’s hill farm near the confluence of the Wisconsin and the Mississippi, playing fetch with his old buff-colored coon dog, and eventually the steady swaying movement of the car rocked him to sleep.