American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (67 page)

  Lopat underscored the point, grinning and saying, “I don’t admit one damn thing, Counselor. Not one damned thing.”

  Moss finished his own drink, then got to his feet. “Fine. Don’t admit anything. I’m still going to whale the stuffing out of you when we go back to court tomorrow morning. For now, I’m heading home. See you in the morning.” He plucked his hat off the rack, stuck it on his head, and strode out of the Pig and Whistle in more than a little annoyance. How could you have a civilized discussion with a man who wouldn’t admit one damned thing and was proud of it?

  That Lopat might think the same of him never crossed his mind.

  His Bucephalus started reluctantly. He let out a sigh of relief when it did start. The battery was going, no doubt about it. Pretty soon he’d have to get a new one. Pretty soon he’d have to get a new, or at least a newer, auto, too. Too many things on the Bucephalus were breaking down. And the company had gone out of business in 1929, so parts were hard to come by and ever more expensive.

  He parked it outside his block of flats and hoped it would fire up again in the morning. If it didn’t . . .
If it
doesn’t, I’ll walk in,
 he thought, and reminded himself to set the alarm clock half an hour earlier than usual to give him time to walk if he had to.

  His key turned in the lock. “I’m home!” he called as he stepped in the door. He wondered how glad Laura would be to see him. She’d been happy enough to marry him, but neither of them had been particularly happy since. Moss listened. Silence. “I’m home, honey,” he said again, wondering what sort of trouble he was in.

  But it turned out not to be
that
kind of silence. A moment later, noise came from the bathroom: the unmistakable sound of someone being sick. A moment after that, the water closet flushed.

  Laura came out a minute or so afterwards. She looked distinctly green. “What happened, hon?” Moss asked. “Are you all right?”

  “Better now,” she said, and made a face, probably at the nasty taste in her mouth. “In about eight months, we’ll know if it’s a boy or a girl.”

  For a moment, that seemed a complete
non sequitur
. Then Moss’ jaw dropped. “You mean we’re—?” She nodded. “Doesn’t seem to be much room for doubt any more. I’ve missed a month, and I’ve got morning sickness, even if it isn’t morning right now. We’re going to have a baby, sure enough.”

  “That’s . . . wonderful,” Moss said. A good attorney was never supposed to be caught speechless. He went on, “But . . . how did it happen?”

  His wife’s mouth quirked in a wry grin. “Very much in the usual way, I’m sure. It hasn’t happened any other way since the days of our Lord.”

  He made a face at her. “I didn’t mean
that
. What I meant was, it’s a surprise.” He couldn’t think of the last time he hadn’t worn a safe when they made love.

  “Those things aren’t perfect,” Laura said.

  “Evidently not.” Moss shrugged and laughed. “If it’s a boy, we can call him Broken Rubber Moss. That has a ring to it, don’t you think? Or how about Prophylactina for a girl?”

  “What I think—” Laura Moss didn’t, couldn’t, go on. What ever she’d been about to say, a giggle swallowed it. She tried again: “What I think, Jonathan, is that you’re dangerously insane.” He bowed. “Your servant, ma’am. You’ve known that for a long time, I’m sure.”

  “I certainly have.” She nodded. “There I was, with this mad Yank who kept coming to the farm. I didn’t want any mad Yanks coming to the farm.”

  “I should hope not,” Moss said gravely. “You get into all sorts of trouble if you let those people anywhere near you. You might even end up married to one of them if you’re not careful, and after that anything can happen. Obviously.”

  “Obviously,” Laura echoed. She set one hand on her belly, though the pregnancy didn’t show and wouldn’t for months. “This was as much a surprise to me as it was to you, you know. I didn’t much want a child. Now . . . Now we’ll just have to make the best of it, won’t we?”

  “I don’t know what else we can do.” Moss kissed her on the cheek.

  When he tried to kiss her on the mouth, too, she pulled away, saying, “You don’t want to do that. I haven’t properly cleaned my teeth yet.”

  “Oh.” Jonathan nodded. “Well, why don’t you, then?” While Laura went back to the bathroom, he hurried to the kitchen. The occasion really called for champagne, but they didn’t have any. Whiskey over ice would do the job well enough. He had the drinks ready by the time Laura came out again.

  She took one. They solemnly clinked glasses and drank. Then Moss did kiss her. Her mouth tasted of liquor and toothpaste. She said, “I hope this won’t make me sick again.” After seeming to listen to something internal, she shook her head in relief. “No, I think it will be all right.” As if to prove it, she took another sip. “That’s good.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” Jonathan drank some more, too. He raised his glass. “Here’s to us, and to . . . whom it may concern.”

  “That’s pretty good. I like it a lot better than . . . what you said before.” Laura wouldn’t dignify it by repeating it.

  “All right.” Moss made his drink disappear in a hurry. Along with what he’d had at the Pig and Whistle, it left him owlishly serious. He took his wife’s hands in his and said, “I do love you, you know. I always have.”

  “You always called it love, anyhow,” she said. “I think for a long time it was just what any man feels when he’s been away from women for too long.”

  Since she was bound to be right, he didn’t dignify that with a direct reply. Instead, he said, “Well, you can’t very well accuse me of that now.” As if to prove as much, he kissed her again. His hands resting on the swell of her hips, he continued, “And, since you can’t accuse me of that . . .” He kissed her once more, his lips hard against hers. One of his hands slid to her behind, to press her to him. Her own arms tightened around his back. As the kiss went on, she made a little wordless sound, almost a growl, in the back of her throat.

  He lifted her off her feet. She let out a startled squawk: “Put me down! You’ll hurt your back!” She had a reasonable chance of being right; she wasn’t a small woman, and he was pushing forty. He ignored her all the same, carrying her off to the bedroom. “What
are
you doing?” she demanded.

  “What do you think?” He set her on the bed and got down beside her. His hand slid under her skirt and up her thigh to the joining of her legs. He rubbed there. Her legs slid apart to make it easier for him. He hiked her skirt up and pulled her underpants down, then went back to what he’d been doing.

  She laughed. “I think you’re going to take advantage of me.”

  “Damn right I am.” Jonathan unbuttoned his own fly. He was also going to take advantage of her being pregnant: if he didn’t have to worry about putting on a rubber, he didn’t intend to. He certainly liked it better without.

  They both still wore most of their clothes when he went into her. She wasn’t quite so wet as he would have wanted, but having to force his way in added to his excitement. She wrapped her legs around him and bucked hard. “Come on!” she said as he squeezed and fondled her breasts through the thin cotton fabric of her blouse. As she kindled, she said a good deal more than that. She was the very model of a lady . . . except in the bedroom, when she was well and truly roused. Then anything could happen, and anything could come out of her mouth.

  It hadn’t lately. The two of them had started taking each other for granted since they’d got married.

  Today, though . . . Today they thrashed on the bed and clawed at each other as they hadn’t done since he would drive up to Arthur and they’d picnic and then fornicate at her farmhouse outside the little town.

  His own building pleasure driving him on, Moss rammed at her, not caring in the heat of the moment if he hurt her a little, too. By the way Laura yowled, she didn’t care, either. Suddenly, she arched her back, threw back her head, and let out a long, shuddering moan. At the same time, she squeezed him inside her, so tight that he couldn’t help but erupt.

  “You’re rumpling me,” Laura said a moment later, pushing at him.

  He shook his head and replied with lawyerly precision: “No, sweetheart, I just rumpled you.” She made a face when he gave her a kiss. He laughed, his weight still on her. “If I remember right, that has something to do with why we got married.”

  “You think so, do you?” She pushed at him again, harder this time. He flopped out of her, which reminded him that, despite the fierce lovemaking they’d just enjoyed, he didn’t burn so hot as he had back in his twenties. Then he’d have been ready for a second round as soon as the first was over. Now .

  . . Now he’d wait for tomorrow, or maybe the day after. Laura gave him another shove, and twisted under him, too. “Let me up. Let me set myself to rights.”

  “Oh, I suppose so,” he said. But he couldn’t keep wonder from his voice as he went on, “A baby. How about that?”

  “Yes. How about that?” His wife’s voice softened, too. “It isn’t what I expected, but I’m glad it’s happened.”

  “So am I.” He wondered if he meant it. He decided he did. “About time we put down some roots here.”

  “
I’ve
already got roots here,” Laura said pointedly. She nodded, too, though. “It’s about time we were a family.”

  “A baby,” Moss said again. “I wonder what
he’ll
see by the time he grows up.” The baby would be his age in the early 1970s. What would the world be like then?

 
A
creek ran through the farm on which Mary McGregor and her mother lived. Scrubby oaks and willows grew alongside it. They got some firewood there, which was all to the good. Ducks sometimes nested along it, too, which gave Mary practice with a shotgun and gave her mother and her a tasty dinner every so often. And she would pull trout out of it once in a while, though she seldom had the time to sit and fish.

  The creek and the trees by it also came in handy in other ways. Mary lit a fuse and ducked down behind an oak to wait for the explosion. It came just when she thought it would—a harsh, flat
crack!
 Mallards leaped into the air with a thunder of wings. A couple of crows in a willow flapped away, cawing in alarm.

  Moments later, quiet returned.

  Mary stepped out from behind the tree trunk to see what the dynamite had done. She nodded to herself.

  The stump she’d blown up had landed in the creek, just as she’d thought it would. The hole in the ground it left was about the size she’d expected, too.

  She hadn’t done anything particularly useful—a stump here wasn’t the nuisance it would have been out in the middle of a field. But she’d learned a little more about explosives and fuses, which was knowledge that wouldn’t go to waste, either on the farm or. . . .

 
  Or anywhere else,
 she thought. She was, after all, Arthur McGregor’s daughter. She wondered what had gone through her father’s mind while he waged his long one-man war against the Americans who occupied Canada. He’d never talked about it much—but then, he’d never been one to talk about anything much. What
had
he thought? Her guess was that he’d tried
not
to think about it except while he was actually busy at it. That would have made it harder for him to give himself away when the Yanks came snooping around, which they had again and again.

  Not thinking about it would also have made it easier for him to go on thinking of them as
the enemy
, as abstractions, not as human beings. Killing the enemy was what you did when you went to war. Blowing up men—people—who were just like you, who fell in love and drank beer and got sore backs and dug splinters out of their hands and played checkers . . . That was a different business. It had to be a different business. Mary couldn’t see how anybody would want, or would even be able, to do that.

  Had Major Hannebrink, the American officer who’d ordered her brother Alexander shot during the war, ever imagined him as a human being? Or had Alexander simply been
the enemy
to him? For a moment, Mary came close to understanding how the American could have done what he did, came close to understanding without hating.

  For a moment, and for a moment only. She shoved that understanding away with all the force of the hate she’d nursed ever since the USA invaded her country in 1914.
She
saw Americans as
the enemy
, not as human beings at all. She saw them so, and intended to go right on seeing them so.

  When she got back to the farmhouse, her mother sat at the kitchen table drinking a cup of tea. “I heard the boom,” Maude McGregor said.

  Mary nodded. “I took out a stump,” she said. “I’m getting the hang of it, I think.”

  “Are you?” Her mother’s voice held no expression what ever. “And what will you do with it once you’ve got it?”

  “It’ll come in handy around the farm, Ma,” Mary answered. “You know it will.”

  “Yes—as long as you only use it around the farm,” her mother said. “That’s what worries me. I know you too well.”

 
  I don’t know what you’re talking about
would have been a lie, an obvious lie. “I don’t intend to use it anywhere else,” Mary said. That was a lie, too, but maybe not so obvious. Maybe.

  Maude McGregor looked at her for a long time. “I hope not,” she said at last, and then, “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “Yes, please,” Mary said. Her mother fixed her one. She added milk and sugar herself, and sat down to drink it across the table from her mother. Neither of them said another word till the tea was done—or, for that matter, for several hours afterwards. When they did start speaking to each other again, it was quietly, cautiously, as if they’d had a knockdown, drag-out fight that might pick up again if they weren’t careful.

 
  That’s silly,
 Mary thought.
We didn’t. Not even close. All we did was talk about that stump.
 To her mother, that stump seemed plenty. And Mary herself wasn’t inclined to change her mind. Maybe that was what worried her mother.