Harry Turtledove - Return engagement

Again, no details, but it sounded good to anyone who already liked the USA. Since Mary didn't, she hoped the Yanks were lying again. She expected they were. What else did Yanks do but lie? They'd lied about Alexander, lied so they could line him up against a wall and shoot him.

What goes around comes around, Mary thought. And it hasn't finished coming around yet. One of these days, she would get back to the farm where she'd grown up. Not yet-the time wasn't ripe quite yet. But it would be.

Robert Quinn looked up from the papers on his desk when Hipolito Rodriguez walked into Freedom Party headquarters in Baroyeca. "Hola, Senor Rodriguez," Quinn said. "I don't often see you except on meeting nights."

"Usually, I am working on the farm during the day," Rodriguez said. "But I've been thinking about what you said about the Confederate Veterans' Brigades."

"Ah. Have you?" Quinn smiled broadly. "I'm glad to hear it, senor. And what have you decided about them?"

"I would like to join," Rodriguez said simply.

"?Bueno!" Quinn jumped up from his chair and stuck out his hand. He pumped Rodriguez's. "Congratulations! I think you are doing the right thing for yourself and the right thing for your country."

"For myself, I'm sure I am," Rodriguez replied. "I've studied what the law gives, and it's generous. It gives more than I could make if I stayed on my farm." He knew why that was so, too, though he didn't mention it. The law that set up the Veterans' Brigades was bound to be geared to the richer Confederate northeast. What would have been barely enough to get by on there seemed like a lot more in Sonora and Chihuahua. He went on, "Do you have the papers I will need to sign?"

Quinn shook his head. "No. They are not here. You will find them at the alcalde's office. This is a government matter, not a Freedom Party matter."

"What is the difference?" Rodriguez asked, honestly confused.

"Many times, it is not so much," Quinn admitted. "But military affairs-except for the Freedom Party guards-belong to the government, and even the guards end up getting their gear through the Attorney General's office. So yes, you do this there."

"Then I will. Muchas gracias, senor. Freedom!"

Back before the Freedom Party rose to power, the alcalde's office had been a sleepy place. It had been a center of power, yes, but a small one. The dons, the big landowners, were the ones who'd given the orders. But the Party had broken them; Rodriguez had been in a couple of the gunfights that turned the trick. These days, the alcalde and the guardia civil took orders from Hermosillo and from Richmond, which meant from the Party. If those orders sometimes came through Robert Quinn, they did so unofficially.

All the same, the clerk to whom Hipolito Rodriguez spoke seemed unsurprised to see him. The man had the paperwork ready for him to fill out. He even had a voucher for a railroad ticket, though not the exact date. A telephone call to the train station took care of that. "You leave for Texas day after tomorrow. The train goes out at twenty past ten in the morning. You must be here by then."

"I will." Rodriguez knew the train often ran late. But it didn't always, and he didn't think he could get away with taking a chance here. In the last war, the Army had been very unhappy with people who ran late.

"One other thing," the clerk said. "How is your English? You will have to use it when you go to the northeast."

They'd both been speaking the English-laced Spanish that remained the dominant language in Sonora and Chihuahua. Rodriguez shrugged and switched to what he had of real English: "I do all right. Learn some when I fight before, learn some from ninos, learn some from wireless. No is muy good, but is all right."

"Bueno," the clerk said, and then, "That is good." His English was smoother than Rodriguez's-almost as good as, say, Robert Quinn's Spanish. He went on in the CSA's leading language: "Be on the train, then, the day after tomorrow."

Rodriguez was. His whole family-except for Pedro, who was in Ohio-came with him to the station to say good-bye. He kissed everybody. The train pulled in two minutes early. He'd hoped for more time, but what you hoped for and what you got too often had little to do with each other. He climbed on board, showed the conductor the voucher, and took a seat by the window. He waved to his wife and children till the train chugged off and left them behind.

He hadn't gone this way since he headed off for basic training more than half a lifetime before. He'd been jammed into the middle of a crowded car then, and hadn't had much chance to look out. Now he watched in fascination as the train climbed up through the Sierra Madre Occidental and then down into the flatter country in Chihuahua.

Some Chihuahuans got on the train as it stopped at this town or that one. They and the Sonorans jeered at one another in the same mixture of Spanish and English. To English-speaking Confederates, Sonorans and Chihuahuans alike were just a bunch of damn Mexicans. They knew how they differed, though. Rodriguez made as if he were playing an accordion. Norteno music, with its thumping, German-based rhythms and wailing accordions, was much more popular in Chihuahua than in Sonora, though some musicians from the northern part of his state played it, too.

More things than the music changed when the train got into northern Chihuahua. Rodriguez started seeing bomb damage. Once, the train sat on a siding for most of a day. Nobody gave any explanations. The men going into the Veterans' Brigades hadn't expected any-they'd been in the service before, after all. Rodriguez's guess was that the damnyankees had managed to land a bomb, or maybe more than one, on the tracks.

Eventually, the train did start rolling again. When it went over a bridge spanning the Rio Grande between El Paso del Norte and El Paso, it crossed from Chihuahua into Texas. Rodriguez braced himself. So did a lot of the other middle-aged men in the car with him. They weren't entering a different country, but they were coming into a different world.

Some of the men who got on near the Rio Grande were short and dark and swarthy like most of them, and spoke the same English-flavored Spanish. But some-and more and more as the train rolled north and east-were big, fair, light-eyed English-speakers. They eyed the men already aboard with no great liking. They thought of Rodriguez and his kind as greasers and dagos-not quite niggers, but not white men, either. Rodriguez remembered his soldier days, and threatening to kill a white man who'd called him names once too often. He wondered if he'd have to do it again.

Then one of the Texans peered through bifocals at one of the men who'd got on the train in Chihuahua. "Luis, you stinking son of a bitch, is that you?"

The other fellow-Luis-stared back. "Jimmy? Si, pendejo, is me." He got up. The two men embraced and showered each other with more affectionate curses in English and Spanish.

"This little bastard drug me back to our lines after I got hit on a trench raid over in Virginia-drug me on his back, y'all hear?" Jimmy said. "I coulda bled to death or been a prisoner for a coupla years, but he done drug me instead. Doc patched me up, an' I was back in the line in three weeks."

"Then he save me," Luis said in English no better than Rodriguez's. "He-?como se dice?-he kick grenade away before it go off."

"Hell, I was savin' my own ass along with yours," Jimmy said. "It wasn't nothin' special."

After that, none of the other white men in the car acted rude toward the brown men they rode with. Rodriguez didn't know what they were thinking. He doubted that had changed much. But so what? A man's thoughts were his own business. What he did, he did in public.

When the train stopped in Fort Worth, the conductor shouted, "All out for guard training here!"