Harry Turtledove - Return engagement

Mort mimed staggering under the weight of the basket. Mary mimed tripping him so he really would fall. They both laughed. She spread out the blankets on the grass. Mort set down the basket with a theatrical groan of relief. Even after he set it down, he kept listing to the right, as if the weight had permanently bent him. Alec thought that was funny, too.

Mort's condition improved remarkably once Mary opened a Moosehead for him. He gulped about half the bottle and then sat down. "Is that a hawk up there in the sky?" he asked, pointing towards a wheeling shape high overhead.

"No, that's a turkey vulture," Mary answered at once. "See how the wings go slanting up a bit from the body? Hawks mostly carry theirs flat."

"A vulture, is it?" Mort said. "It must know how worn out I am from hauling that basket."

"Well, you can make it lighter so you won't have to carry so much back to town," Mary said.

"I aim to do that very thing," he answered. "Let me have some of the fried chicken, if you'd be so kind."

Before long, he'd turned a lot of chicken into bones. He liked light meat, Mary liked dark, and Alec was partial to giblets. They damaged the cole slaw and the potato salad, too, and the two grownups got rid of several bottles of beer. The bones, inevitably, drew ants. That vulture, or another one, soared past again. "We're not going to leave it much to eat," Mary said.

"Good," Mort said. "I'd rather gobble up all this good stuff myself than leave it for an ugly old bird with a bald pink head."

Every so often, a motorcar would rattle past. A couple of drivers honked their horns at the picnickers. When they did, Mary would wave and Mort solemnly lift the straw hat from his head. Alec paid no attention to salutations from the passersby. He was busy picking wildflowers and hunting bugs.

They'd been there a little more than an hour, and had reached the filling-in-the-corners stage of things, when an eastbound train roared past. That made Alec sit up and take notice, even if he'd ignored the passing autos. The great wheel-churning, smoke-belching locomotive was too grand and noisy to ignore. The engineer blew a long, mournful blast on his whistle, too. And once the steam engine had gone by, there were still all the boxcars and flatcars and tank cars to admire, and at last the caboose-this one painted yellow instead of the more usual red.

"Wow!" Alec's eyes shone. "I want to make one of those go when I get big."

"Maybe you will," Mort said. "It's a good job."

For all the sense he made to his son, he might as well have started speaking Eskimo. Alec couldn't imagine that being an engineer was work, and often hard work to boot. He would have paid, and paid anything he happened to have, for the privilege of riding in that thundering monster.

"Want another piece of pie, anyone?" Mary asked.

"Twist my arm," Mort said lazily. "Not too big a piece, or I'm liable to explode."

"Kaboom!" Alec yelled. "Can I have another piece, too, Mommy?" If he hadn't been eating cherry pie, the sticky red all around his mouth would have meant he'd got a split lip.

Mary was cutting him the new piece when a truck pulled off the road behind their Oldsmobile. It had a blue-gray body and a green-gray canvas top over the bed. Half a dozen soldiers who wore blue-gray uniforms and carried bayoneted rifles jumped out and advanced on the Pomeroys.

Their leader was a sergeant with a salt-and-pepper mustache. "What you do here?" he asked in bad English.

"We're having a picnic." Mort waved to the basket. "Want some fried chicken?"

The sergeant spoke to his men in French. They plundered the picnic hamper as if they'd heard food might be outlawed tomorrow. All the leftovers and all the beer-and even the iced tea-vanished inside of fifteen minutes. Mary knew she'd made more food than her family needed. She hadn't made enough for a squad of hungry Quebecois infantry.

"You too close to train tracks," the sergeant said, gnawing the last meat off a drumstick. "You no come here no more. It could be I have to run you in. But you not doing nothing bad, you just have food. You go home, you don't get in no trouble. You be happy, we be happy. C'est bon?"

"Oui, monsieur. Merci." Mort had picked up a little French at the diner.

The Quebecois sergeant beamed at him. He ruffled Alec's reddish-brown hair. "Mon fils, he about this big," he said. He added something in French. His men got back in the truck. It rolled away.

"That was funny," Alec said.

"Ha," Mary said in a hollow voice. "Ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha."

Mort picked up the basket. It hardly weighed anything now. "So much for leftovers," he said, and then, "Damn Frenchy was right. We might as well go home now. There's sure no point to staying any more."

"If they do things like that, they only make people want to blow up trains," Mary said. "Can't they see?"

"Doesn't look like it," Mort said. "Me, I'd sooner blow up their barracks right now." He carried the basket to the auto and put it in.

Mary rolled up the picnic blankets. Alec tried to get rolled up in one of them. When he kept trying till he annoyed her, she swatted him on the bottom. After that, he behaved-for a little while. She tossed the blankets into the Olds. Mort, of course, had been joking about blowing up the garrison's headquarters in Rosenfeld. Mary had really contemplated it. She'd never done more than contemplate it, though. It wouldn't have been easy to pull off, and would have been risky.

Blowing up a train, on the other hand, or the tracks, or a train and the tracks… The Canadian prairie was enormously wide. Only bad luck the Frenchies' patrol had driven past while they were picnicking. To come out here by herself would be easy. In spite of the signs on the bulletin board inside the post office, it didn't seem dangerous.

For the first time, she looked forward to the day when Alec would go off to school. That would give her back several hours of free time during the day. She laughed. She hadn't even thought about free time in years.

"What's funny?" Mort asked.

"Nothing, really." She looked back toward where they'd been eating. "Have we got everything?"

"Everything the Frenchies didn't eat, yeah," her husband answered. "I'm surprised they didn't walk off with our plates and our spoons."

"They're the occupiers. They can do what they want," Mary answered.

Mort came back with something suggesting exactly what the Frenchies could do, and where. Alec's eyes got big and round. Mary was surprised, too, though she didn't show it. Mort had always been a Canadian patriot, but he'd always been a lukewarm Canadian patriot, one who grumbled about the occupation and disliked it, but who wasn't likely to do anything more than grumble. Now…

Experimentally, Mary said, "This is what the Yanks have done to us."

"I didn't mind the Yanks all that much," Mort said. "I guess maybe I'd got used to them-I don't know. But these Frenchies… I can't stand 'em. They think they're better than white people, and we just have to stand here and take it."

That was moderately promising, but only moderately. It wasn't anything that gave Mary a real handle to pull. But maybe she'd get one with him, sooner or later. Meanwhile… Meanwhile, she opened the passenger-side door. "Let's go home."

Mort started the auto. Making a U-turn back onto the road was easy-no traffic in either direction. Back toward Rosenfeld they went.

Like a lot of people in the Confederate States, Jefferson Pinkard had been waiting for Over Open Sights for a long time. The prison-camp boss liked having things spelled out for him. As long as they were, he didn't have to do a whole lot of thinking on his own. And he was an orderly man. If he had the rules, he'd follow them, the same way as the prisoners in Camp Dependable had to follow the rules he laid down.