Starsky

"Will you quit squirming."

"I'm itchy. And hot...and this war never even happened out here."

"That's not the point, Starsk. It's about...recreating history."

"You can't recreate a history that never happ-"

"Shh!"

Wool. I hate wool. I haven't got much interest in sheep either. Not only was I forced to wear wool pants, a wool coat, wool vest, wool socks. But it was all dark blue.

Hutch wasn't wearing wool. I can't remember what he called it but it had sounded like jean-something and it was light tan. Given what he was wearing we shouldn't have even been standing together but somehow through the course of the day one of us had taken the other prisoner.

Since I didn't have my gun anymore, I guess I was the captive. My capture had been a setup to give Hutch and I a chance to catch each other up on the case, but that had only taken about two minutes. Once I had a chance to relax it felt like the collar on the jacket was rubbing my neck raw and Hutch insisted that I keep it buttoned to the top, just because I had a few stripes on the sleeves.

The job hadn't been that bad at first, but that had been three days ago. For the most part we were playing along, making connections and waiting for something to happen.

"Starsk, you're supposed to be an officer. Could you at least act like it?"

"If I'm an officer, you can't tell me what to do, sergeant." I sneered, then worked my shoulders until the collar was off my neck and I could feel the barely existent breeze.

"Sure I can, I'm not in your army."

Thirty yards ahead of us a group of younger guys were duking it out like trained stuntmen, throwing punches and jabbing at each other with bayonets. Real bayonets, according to the guy playing General Grant. With sharp pointy ends. When I'd casually asked how many times somebody had to be carted away from one of these things with a bayonet sticking out of him, the short man just laughed and walked away.

Watching them fight now was like watching a bomb being defused. You couldn't look away, no matter how much you didn't want to see the carnage.

"Hey."

"Hm."

"Starsk?"

"What?"

"Prisoner exchange, come on."

A wagon had pulled up, drawn by two scrawny looking mules that looked about as comfortable strapped to the wagon as I was smothered in wool.

The wagon itself was full of ragged, tired looking soldiers all dressed similar to Hutch. On the side I'd chosen, the officers were sticklers about appearance. Other than the occasional unit patch, we were all supposed to look the same. On this side, the side of the enemy, it was anything goes. Some wore the butterscotch colored cloth, some gray, some light blue, some wore bright red pants and blue blousy shirts with a sash. The thing that tied the men together wasn't their uniforms but their attitudes.

I'd spent a few hours around these men, a lot of them real vets or sons of vets, and felt more welcome than I did on my own side.

The confederate soldiers coming back ignored me as they stepped down off the wagon. Most of them were young, some even teenagers, but one old guy sat at the back of the wagon with a grimace on his face.

Hutch climbed up into the wagon bed with another man and helped the old guy to his feet with practiced ease, walking him to the tailgate and helping him down. The other guy took over, walking the old man back towards the tent fly that had been put up for some shade.

"Who's that?"

"Kevin."

"Kevin?"

"Yeah." Hutch said with a fond smile. "Old guy, always comes out to these things, and wanders over to the other side before the battles start in the morning. Past three days he's just showed up on the first prisoner exchange wagon."

While the Rebs loaded the other Yankee prisoners that I'd been captured with into the wagon I watched the old man climb the hill and settle his bones into a canvas sling-back chair. "You talk to him?"

"No. He sat in on the music last night but he keeps to himself." Hutch said, squinting thoughtfully.

"Maybe he knows something." I said.

"Maybe he wants to be left alone." Hutch responded.

"Maybe it's our job to find out." I said.

Hutch thought about it then finally nodded. "There's supposed to be a neutral zone ball tonight. Be a good place to catch up."

"Yeah the dance..." I smirked, the raw irritation around my neck instantly disappearing. "There's suppose to be a lot ladies there from the town."

"Yes, but you have to remember that you're an officer and a gentleman."

"I'd rather be a private and a cad."

"I'm sure you would, dirty Yank."

"Lousy Reb."

"Get up there."

I was the last to board the wagon and therefore the one responsible for holding up the shaky tail gate. We pulled away from the Rebel command center and were soon out of sight of the camp and the battle. The other men in the wagon wanted nothing to do with me and sat in groups of two or three playing with worn cards, sipping out of flasks or trying to sleep on the rocking wagon.

We were miles out of LA, far enough from the city that the sounds and the smog and buzz of modern life was obsolete. There weren't even power lines. Just wide open country and a bunch of guys in wool uniforms, shooting guns at each other.

If it weren't for the wool I might have enjoyed it.

"You there, hold up."

The driver shouted "Ho!" and drew up on the reins somewhere between the two fighting armies. A cloud of dust that had been following us coated each of the prisoners in the back of the wagon with a fine layer, then blew on ahead.

I leaned back so that I could see around the shoulders of a rail thin kid with pimples and squinted at the man dressed in black, standing in the middle of the dirt lane.

"Prisoner transport, Mister." Our driver declared before muttering again to the skittish mules.

"I'm the Reverend George Usher, on my way to conduct Sunday service for General Grant. Could I disturb you for a ride?"

"You didn't walk out this way, did ya Reverend?" The driver joked jerking the hand brake forward, making the wagon a little more stable.

Usher chuckled as he climbed up onto the front seat. He might have been in his forties, with salt and pepper hair and beard. There was something about him that made me uncomfortable.

"No...no I was rather foolish and didn't tie my horse securely earlier. Silly beast ran away the moment your cannons began to fire. I was hoping some young horseman would be willing to catch him up once I arrived in your camp."

"I can deliver you to General Grant, but you don't want to be in my camp, Reverend. Not if you're a friend of the Yanks." The driver said.

"You may not be a friend of the Yankees, but they certainly trust you." Usher responded, looking pointedly back at us.

"It ain't trust so much as an agreement. They give me back my boys whole, and I do the same for them." The driver muttered, releasing the brake and starting the mules.

I watched the trees and shrubs and dirt pass by and listened to the two talk. It was like stepping back in time. The driver had a drawl, straight from the Kentucky hills, teeth missing and tobacco stains in his beard. The men around me smelled of sweat and fire smoke and black powder. The reverend, barely sweating in his black wool frock coat, had the air of self-righteous divinity about him. Maybe he was a preacher in real life. Maybe he was an actor, and played a preacher on TV. Whoever he was in reality, he was 100% the Reverend Usher on the seat of that wagon.

In fact he stayed in character, cheerfully chatting with the driver for another mile before I caught sight of the horse following our wagon. The reins were loose but not dragging, as if the rider had intended for the horse to be able to move without tripping over them. The saddle was still firmly attached and there was a boot for a long rifle, but the gun wasn't there.

"Hey uh..Reverend. Is that your horse back there?"

When he didn't respond I figured he didn't hear me. "Hey Buster!" I shouted, drawing dirty looks from the rest of the men in the wagon. "Reverend...there's a horse back there."

This time I knew he had to have heard me since everybody else had. Still, I was ignored. I was beginning to feel like I just didn't belong in the club. Irritated I decided to take things into my own hands. I dropped the tailgate and slid off the end of the wagon, closing my eyes against the dust and waiting for it to blow past.

The horse stayed where he was and none of the other men in the wagon made a protest. The pimply kid stared at me as the wagon kept trundling on, but I couldn't tell if he was happy or sad to see me go.

"Ok, horse." I said, approaching the animal as casually as possible. "You're going to stand still, and I'm going to walk you back to your owner. Then I'm going to take a nap and you can eat some hay. Sound good?"

I paused about ten feet away, the sole object of the horse's attention. I didn't know if the horse was a girl horse or a boy. How old it was. I couldn't see a brand and didn't know what to call the saddle. But the urge to mount the thing and ride it into camp was strong. I'd grown up watching cowboy movies and riding a broom horse around the neighborhood. Maybe this wouldn't be my last chance to play cowboy, but I couldn't resist making it my first.

The horse seemed calm enough, and stood still letting me put my hand on its nose. I got the reins in hand and slipped them over the horse's ears like I'd seen John Wayne do a hundred times. I had my foot in the stirrup, hands on the saddle and pushed up, swinging my leg out and over.

Hutch

There had been some accidents but the accidents hadn't been reported by the reenactors.

For the fifth year in a row hundreds of historians and descendants of civil war veterans had been gathering for about a month, setting up their circa-1863 commune and living the lives of soldiers, artisans, and civilians of that time. Outsiders were tolerated but not really welcome and the event had never been advertised anywhere. They called it a gathering, small 'g', and kept it to themselves.

The problem was each year's month of seclusion had ended with unexplained and tragic accidents. The first year, but for a young man losing a finger at the end of a cannon, was a great success. The second year a bayonet fight had gotten out of hand, and one man claimed to have felt a real bullet pass him during a battle.

Captain Weatherly, the reenactor acting as my direct superior, brushed the incidents off as excessive youthful vigor. A bit of drama at the end of a long and trying month. I carefully broached the subject of the incident the third year that ended with an entire unit leaving early, carrying a man on a stretcher who nearly bled to death.

"I'm surprised nobody tried to report it or call an ambulance." I mentioned casually.

"Sergeant Hutchinson…" The captain began before sighing, disappointed in my naivete. "We come here to escape the trappings of the modern world. We have surgeons on each side. That those men chose to ignore the medical help available is their own concern. "

For a long moment Weatherly gazed out over the valley that faced us, scanning the rows of hundreds of tents, each grouped into company streets with a fire at each end.

"As to reporting the incident. It was reported. Those men followed the proper chain of command before they pulled out." The captain's chest puffed out, his chin lifting in pride.

I had intended to ask about the following year. The rumors that a man had died, been buried somewhere in the field and left without a word spoken to family, friends or the police.

Before I could ask, the captain excused himself and hurried away to the command tent. That had been the longest conversation I had been able to get out of the man. After the second day that Starsky had been captured we both agreed that we were quietly being shut out.

Either our cover had been blown or my feeling about this "gathering" was right. We were the outsiders and we hadn't passed muster yet. Asking more questions about the touchy subject wasn't going to get me anywhere good. What we needed was time.

But time here moved at its own pace. And I was afraid that we were going to run out, and the 'gathering' would end before we could get anything solid. The ball tonight would be the first time we had the chance to make direct contact with the civilians that also participated.

A ghost town five miles away from the battlefields had been rebuilt to house civilians, shops, and most importantly, the families, wives and girlfriends of the men on the battlefield. Each weekend the battles ended and the town would host a ball on Saturday evening. Most of the day the commanding officers had been warning the men about the behavior that was expected of them in the town, and that none of them were to be drunk when they returned to camp. It was an unspoken point of honor for most of the men in the ranks to get as drunk as possible on Saturday night, and appear as fresh and sober as possible at the Sunday service the following morning.

By the time the wagons began to arrive to transport the men to the town most had already filled, emptied and refilled the flasks they carried in their breast pockets. The ritual preparation before the dance was one that I recognized from my own brief time in the army and I fell into the rhythm of the men jostling for space in front of a tiny mirror, snagging towels out of the hands of their tent mates and doing everything possible to clean up after a week of sweat, gunpowder and smoke, without benefit of showers.

The uniform I had borrowed came with a blue sash and a frock coat, both of which were only meant to be worn on formal occasions. A fellow sergeant helped me put the accouterments together remarking sarcastically that I couldn't have been a sergeant long, and leaving it at that.

In a drug exchange, a jail cell or a even a honky tonk I might have fit right in. In this world where the men lived and breathed a time most of us knew nothing about, I was sticking out like a sore thumb. If I was sticking out…Starsky was a talented undercover cop, but he had his limits.

The trip to town took an hour. This late in the year the sky had already begun to darken by the time we neared the collection of buildings. No more than a dozen structures, including a tent city, the town was already well populated with soldiers from both sides. Signs around the border of the town declared it a neutral zone and in keeping with the spirit of those signs, none of the men with me had come armed beyond the occasional pocket knife.

Women in hoop-skirts and men in top coats and hats stood around welcoming the soldiers with a spirit of frivolity that was almost Dickensian in nature. A celebration to end all celebrations, except that this was all going to happen again next week.

There were so many men there I knew finding Starsky would take some time. Before long I had a blonde with ringlets and green eyes latched onto me, calling me captain and tittering at everything I said. She dragged me onto the dance floor for the first dance, nothing more than a promenade of men and women around the large open barn that was the centerpiece of the town. Each dance was called by the host or hostess, but for the waltzes. Each was meant as a means for the men to meet as many women in one dance as possible, and vice versa.

For an hour, between diversions to the refreshment table, I danced with Sadie, the blonde, and Darcy, a brunette, and didn't see anything of my partner. The party was to run til midnight, and I knew that some of the men on both sides had to remain in camp on guard. It wasn't until General Grant arrived with his entourage of officers, and without Starsky, who was supposed to have been one of his adjutants, that I started to worry.

Getting to the general was as impossible as getting an impromptu audience with the president of the United States. I had shucked Darcy and was nearly in ear shot when the dance was interrupted by shouts, whoops and shots from outside.

I moved with the flood of the curious, spilling out into the street to see a parade of horsemen entering the town with torches and shotguns brandished. At the center of the column, pulled behind two deputy marshalls was a man in a torn Yankee uniform. His face was covered in blood on one side from a head injury, his uniform torn, and he stumbled blindly behind the horses, wrists tied to two ropes that endeavored to tear his arms from their sockets.

I knew my partner instantly and felt Darcy's hand clamp down on my arm in the same moment that I started to charge forward.

"Don't, handsome." She said with a pronounced drawl, her voice down low.

I swallowed around the bile that was rising, watching Starsky lose his footing and go down on his knees in the dirt only to be dragged back to his feet. "Don't? That man's gonna be killed."

Darcy shook her head eyes fixed dazedly on my partner, wet with tears, and terrified. "Anybody who interferes with the marshall will be too."

I shoved Darcy's hand from my arm and snapped, "This is ridiculous."

The crowd that had been rowdy, cheerful and vibrant minutes before had begun to fall into a frozen hush as the parade came to a stop in front of a false fronted structure labeled Justice Hall. The provost marshall and his men had begun to dismount, oblivious to their audience. Just as the marshall did nothing to explain the condition of my partner, no one in the crowd did anything to stop the armed men.

Perhaps the only armed men in the town, I realized.

By the time I fought my way through the crowd of stiff-armed onlookers the marshall, his men, and their prisoner had disappeared into Justice Hall, slamming the door shut behind them. I stepped away from the crowd and found myself in an open space that felt like a canyon, all eyes staring at me, or past me at the closed double doors. I turned, lost in the looks of panic, fear, regret, shame, acceptance. The faces of humanity facing its own foibles without the courage to do anything about it.

Disgusted I went to the door and stepped into a narrow lobby with doors branching off to both sides of the room, and a set of open double doors leading into what looked like a court room.

My entrance stopped the near silent proceedings. The provost marshall had been climbing into the chair at the head of the room, slipping into a black robe. Two of his men stood on either side of my partner, holding him up by his biceps in a witness box. The other three had been gathered in a corner of the room, standing next to a man dressed in a reverend's frock.

One of Starsky's eyes was swelling shut, his lip puffing out on the same side and bleeding. His shirt and pants were torn showing bruised skin and bloody gashes. I'd never before see what a man looked like after being dragged behind a horse, but I knew instinctively that they had done just that to my partner. When he was finally able to focus on me I caught the unswollen side of his mouth curving up in a smile that disappeared behind a wince.

"The courtroom is closed to the public, sergeant." The marshall called, his tone businesslike and cold.

"Oh this is a courtroom is it?" I retorted, furious. "I suppose that makes you the judge."

"Who I am is none of your concern. Bailiff, remove that man."

One of the deputy marshalls gathered in the corner started toward me, his gun still held across his chest and pointed at the ceiling. Before he got too far the man in the reverend's frock raised his hand and said, "Marshall, it would seem that the case against the young lieutenant is lopsided. If the sergeant wishes to advocate, let him."

"You people are insane. I'm not going to advocate, I'm going to take that man to a doctor and then to the police."

The moment I said it I saw Starsky's head shake, a flash of warning entering his good eye before his chin dropped to his chest.

The marshall considered me for a moment, chewing on what had to have been a wad of tobacco stuffed into his mouth. The court was silent, the men not moving, speaking, barely breathing. From the moment he had entered the town the marshall had been the puppet master of mindless robots.

When he finally sat, the grotesque play began, regardless of my presence.

"This man was caught stealing a horse. The reverend there observed him stealing the animal...and horse theft is a capital offense."

"So you beat him?"

"His punishment will be decided once the particulars of the incident have been thoroughly explored."

"You tied him and dragged him behind a horse!" I shouted, convinced I was surrounded by malfeasants that had lost their minds. "That's not punishment enough?"

"His injuries were the result of his attempt at evading the law, sergeant."

"You're no law." I breathed, my heart pounding out my chest. "You're a freak in a costume."

The marshall leaned back in his chair and spat on the floor, considering me for a moment while he chewed. "That uniform you're wearing used to mean something, son. Why should the passage of a little time make its meaning any less important?"

The question echoed around the room as I started down the center aisle, heading straight for my partner. None of the marshall's men stopped me, waiting for their commander to guide their every move.

Up close I could smell the blood on him, could see the sweat and the dirt caked on his cheeks. To my surprise his breathing was steady despite the quake his arms. The men holding him stared at me stoned faced until, barely audible, the marshall said, "Let him go."

Both men released Starsky and I slid my arms under his as he drifted forward.

"And put both of them in the jail. Justice can wait til after the sabbath, can't it, Reverend?"

I tried to pull one of Starsk's arms over my shoulder but he tensed the minute I moved his wrist, his face contorting. "Hang on, buddy. Hang on."

I decided on a shoulder carry, but there were so many gashes on his chest, there wouldn't be a way of carrying him without making it worse.

One of Starsky's hands had found its way to my shoulder and his fingernails were digging into the cloth, twisting it and pulling the collar tighter against my neck. I was trying to help but I was only making it worse for him. There wouldn't be a gentle way of carrying him I realized, and bent to hoist him over my shoulder.

"No.." Starsky said through gritted teeth. "Just go."

"I'm not leaving."

"You don't understand. This isn't LA. You gotta get outta here."

"I'm not going anywhere." I said firmly, staring at the eye that Starsky could keep fully open until it closed in acceptance.

"Can you walk?" I asked and Starsky nodded, shuffling one foot forward, then the other until he could step down out of the witness box.

I started the both of us toward the double doors feeling like I was walking in a dream world. One arm was wrapped around Starsky's chest, the other hand dug into his waist band, keeping him upright without hurting him. We were flanked by the deputy marshalls until we reached the door and they had to step to the side and let us through first.

Neither of us spoke a word, but I went back and Starsky went forward in the same moment. My elbow crashed into the bridge of a nose and Starsky lunged for one of the double doors, swinging it shut and into the face of the other deputy. I had a gun barrel in my hand when it went off. I ignored the sound and the burn of the barrel and shoved the stock into the broken nose twice before the man fell back into the room.

By the time I had the second door closed, Starsky had found a flag stand and was threading the thin worked iron through the door handles.

"That's not going to hold 'em for long." I said, ducking under Starsky's arm and dragging him upright.

His teeth ground together, his body stiff, but he moved with me, helping me get the both of us out the door. The streets beyond it were deserted again, the crowd focused on the dance as if nothing had happened.

As if a man claiming to be a marshall, dragging a half-dead man into town behind a horse and holding a shotgun trial was perfectly normal.

Anger flashed through me and I searched the street for a wagon, a horse, anything that could get the two of us out of town quick.

I didn't expect to see Darcy and Sadie hiding at the corner of the building. Watching them together I could instantly see that they were related. Sadie was waving us over and Darcy was watching the street and the alley beside the Justice Hall.

I had no reason to trust or distrust them, but at the moment had no other choice. We followed the girls down the alley, moving as quickly as Starsky could manage.

TBC