No, he didn't know this fellow. Because he didn't know him, he couldn't trust him. Back when Kentucky belonged to the USA, Luther Bliss, the head of the Kentucky State Police (which might as well have been the Kentucky Secret Police), hadn't worked him over too badly when he had him in his clutches. Whoever Bliss' counterpart was now that Kentucky had gone back to the CSA, Cincinnatus didn't think he would show such restraint.

At the far end of the bar, Menander raised his head. Tears streaked his cheeks. His face might have been one of those masks of tragedy you sometimes saw on theater curtains. "I tell you what we ought to do," he said in a terrible voice. "We ought to kill us some o' them white cocksuckers. We should ought to kill 'em, I say. Reckon they leave us alone then, by Jesus."

"Reckon they kills us, too," the bartender said quietly.

"They killin' us now," Menander cried. "We gots to make 'em stop."

The bartender got busy with the rag. It swished over the top of the bar. He watched it intently as he worked, but it didn't seem to be enough to distract him from his thoughts. He tossed it into that secret space under the bar that could hold almost anything: a cleaning rag, a bottle of maraschino cherries, a smaller bottle of knockout drops, a blackjack, a sawed-off shotgun. The rag disappeared with a damp splat. He lit a cigarette and took a long, meditative drag.

Cincinnatus wondered if all the smoke would stay in the man's lungs, but he blew out a blue cloud of it. Only after that did he say, "Menander, I know you is hurtin', but you got to watch what you say and where you say it."

He might have been a father warning his little boy to look both ways before he crossed the street. Like the little boy if he happened to be in a crabby mood, Menander wasn't having any of it. "For Chrissake!" he burst out. "You tellin' me some nigger here-some lousy nigger here-give me away to the motherfuckin' Freedom Party?"

"I didn't say that," the bartender answered. "You done said that."

"Some ofays sell their souls for a quarter," Cincinnatus answered. Menander nodded eagerly at that. But then Cincinnatus went on, "How come you reckon niggers is any different?"

Back in Iowa, nigger was a term of abuse. Here in Kentucky, blacks used it casually among themselves to describe themselves. Some whites here used it as a casual descriptive term, too-some, but not all. In the mouth of a Freedom Party stalwart, it was ugly as could be. Despite the hot, muggy day, Cincinnatus shivered. In a stalwart's mouth, the word had an evil rasp he'd never heard with any other.

Menander stared at him. "I don't reckon any nigger'd be a dog low enough to sell out his own kind."

Both Cincinnatus and the bartender laughed at him. So did both old men playing checkers in the corner. Menander's eyes heated with drunken rage. "Calm yourself," Cincinnatus told him. "I didn't say niggers was worse'n white folks. That ain't so. But if you reckon they's better, you got a ways to go to prove it."

"Don't see no niggers goin''round yellin,, 'Freedom!' " Menander spat.

"Well, no," Cincinnatus admitted, "but I figure you would if we was on top and the ofays was on the bottom. When the Reds rose up in the last war, what was they but Freedom Party men with different flags shoutin' different slogans?"

By the time the black Marxists rose in the CSA, Covington and most of Kentucky were under U.S. occupation. The rebellion had been muted here. Lucullus Wood, a Marxist still, would have been irked to hear Cincinnatus compare the Reds to the Freedom Party. Word of what was said in the Brass Monkey was likelier to get back to him than it was to reach the Freedom Party, too. Cincinnatus sighed. It wasn't as if he hadn't said what he believed.

"There's a difference, though," Menander insisted.

"What's that?" Cincinnatus asked.

"The ofays, they deserves it," Menander said savagely. "Got my brother, got…" His voice trailed away into a slur of curses. How much whiskey had he downed?

That was the obvious question. From cursing, Menander started crying again. He'd put down a lot of whiskey, which answered the obvious question. But wasn't there another related question, maybe not so obvious? Wasn't Jake Featherston saying, The niggers, they deserve it over in Richmond? Too right he was.

And what could anybody do about that? In the short run, fight back and hope Featherston couldn't lick the USA. In the long run… In the long run, was there any answer at all to whites and blacks hating each other?

Cincinnatus hadn't seen all that much hate in Des Moines. But there weren't that many Negroes in Des Moines, either: not enough to trigger some of the raw reactions only too common in the Confederate States. The United States were happy they didn't have very many Negroes, too. Immigrants-white immigrants-took care of what was nigger work in the CSA.

Yeah, the USA can do without us, Cincinnatus thought glumly. Can the CSA? Over in Richmond, Jake Featherston sure thought so.

"Keep them moving forward, goddammit!" Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Colleton yelled into the mike on his portable wireless set. The company commanders in his regiment, or at least their wireless men, were supposed to be listening to him. If they weren't, he'd hop in a motorcar and shout sense right into their stupid faces.

In many ways, Ohio was an ideal place for a mechanized army to fight. The country was mostly flat. It had a thick road and railroad net, which was the whole point of pushing up through it in the first place. And if the Confederate Army ever ran short of transport, which happened now and again, motorcars commandeered from the damnyankees often took up the slack. There were even gas stations where autos and trucks and barrels could tank up.

Right now, his regiment stood just outside of Findlay, Ohio. The town lay in the middle of rich farming country punctuated by oil wells. Back in the 1890s, the oil had set off a spectacular boom in these parts. The boom had subsided. Some of the oil still flowed. The Yankees were fighting like the devil to keep the Confederates from seizing the wells that did survive.

Tom didn't give a particular damn about the oil wells. He would have, but he'd been ordered not to. As far as he was concerned, the only thing that was supposed to matter was getting to Lake Erie. He'd promised the men he would strip naked and jump in the lake when they did.

That had produced a mild protest from the regimental medical officer, Dr. David Dillon. "Why don't you promise them you'll jump in an open sewer instead?" Dillon asked. "It would probably be healthier-a little more shit, maybe, but not nearly so many nasty chemicals."

"Seeing how many nasty chemicals the Yankees have been shooting at us, to hell with me if I'm going to flabble about what they pour in the lake," Colleton had answered. The medical officer found nothing to say to that.

Now Tom could see Findlay through his field glasses. It had been a nice little city, with a lot of ornate Victorian homes and shops and office buildings left over from the boom-town years. Now bombardment and bombing had leveled some of the buildings and bitten chunks out of others. Smoke from fires in the town and from destroyed wells nearby made it harder to get a good look at the place.

Somewhere in all that smoke, U.S. artillery still lurked. Shells fell a few hundred yards short of where Tom Colleton was standing. If he and his men stayed where they were, they'd get badly hurt when the Yankees found the range.

He wouldn't have wanted to stay there anyhow. The Confederates hadn't invaded Ohio to hold in place. "Advance!" he shouted again. "We aren't going to shift those sons of bitches if we stand around with our thumbs up our asses!"

Behind him, somebody laughed. He whirled. There stood a rawboned man about his own age with the coldest pale eyes he'd ever seen. He wore three stars in a wreath on each side of his collar: a general officer's rank markings. Among the fruit salad on his chest were ribbons for the Purple Heart and the Order of Albert Sidney Johnston, the highest Army decoration after the Confederate Cross. Also on his chest was the badge of a barrel man, a bronze rhomboid shape like the Confederate machines from the last war.