O’Doull shook his head. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the corporal. No, the trouble was just the opposite. As long as Confederate operatives sounded reasonably Yankeelike, they could hide in plain sight till they went off to work mischief in the middle of the night.
No doubt U.S. operatives were doing the same thing on the other side of the border, and helping C.S. Negroes in their sputtering civil war against Jake Featherston’s government. O’Doull hoped they were, anyhow. But that didn’t do him, or this train, any good at all.
Three hours later, after a repair crew filled in a crater and laid new track across it, the train got rolling again. By then, the sun was going down in the west and O’Doull was going up in smoke. If he was going to be useful, he wanted to be useful. He couldn’t do a damn thing stuck here on a train track.
Unlike most trains, this one rolled through the night all lit up. Trains full of soldiers and weapons and raw materials sneaked along, trusting to darkness to hide them from Confederate aircraft. This one showed its true colors, and the enemy left it alone.
There were whispers that the Confederates sometimes used the Red Cross to disguise troop movements. O’Doull hoped that wasn’t so. It would make C.S. raiders want to disregard the symbol when the USA used it, and it would make the United States distrust even legitimate Confederate uses. Things were hard enough as they were. Did they have to—could they—get even worse?
XI
BACK WHEN Cincinnatus Driver lived in Confederate Covington before the Great War, he hadn’t liked going to the zoo. Animals in cages had reminded him too strongly of the black man’s plight. Then when he moved up to Des Moines after the war, he’d been able to take his kids to the zoo there and enjoy it himself. He’d felt freer there—and, to be fair, Des Moines had a much fancier zoo than Covington’s.
Now things had come full circle. Here he was, back in Covington. Here he was, back in the CSA. And here he was, caged.
When the barbed-wire perimeter around the colored quarter went up, a few blacks figured it was just for show, to let colored people know who was boss without really intending to imprison them. Cincinnatus could have told them they were fools. The Freedom Party lied about plenty of things, but not about what it thought of Negroes. Some of the optimists tried to slip between the strands or attacked them with wire cutters, right there where the guards could see them.
Cincinnatus had known for years what automatic-weapons fire sounded like. Hearing it again saddened him without greatly surprising him. The guards’ callousness afterwards did surprise him. They left the bodies they’d shot where they fell, so the sight and, after a day or two, the stench would intimidate the Negroes inside the perimeter.
He didn’t talk to Lucullus about the odious and odorous events. For one thing, visiting Lucullus probably put him on some kind of list. The powers that be in Covington already had too many reasons to put him on a list. And, for another, Lucullus remained in a state of shock at being closed off from the outside world. Cincinnatus had never dreamt the barbecue cook could stay downcast for so long, but that seemed to be what was going on.
With Lucullus . . . disabled, Cincinnatus took his troubles to the Brass Monkey instead. He didn’t talk about them in the saloon, but that didn’t mean they didn’t go away. A lot of things dissolved in beer, and there was whiskey for what beer wouldn’t melt.
Covington’s colored quarter had always had a lot of saloons. People there had always had a lot of trouble that needed dissolving. Saloons were the one kind of business in the colored part of town that was doing better now than before the wire went up. Even more sorrows than usual needed drowning. And the Confederate authorities no doubt learned all sorts of things from saloon talk. Some of what they learned might even have been true.
Cincinnatus perched on a stool under one of the two lazily spinning ceiling fans. He slid a dime across the bar. “Let me have a Jax,” he said.
“Comin’ up.” The bartender took one out of the cooler, popped the cap with a church key, and handed Cincinnatus the beer.
Resting his can against one knee, Cincinnatus closed both palms around the cold, wet bottle. “Feels good,” he said, and held it for a little while before lifting it to his lips and taking a long pull. “Ah! That feels even better.”
“I believe it.” Sweat beaded the barkeep’s forehead the way condensation beaded the bottle. In his boiled shirt and black bow tie, he had to be hotter and more uncomfortable than Cincinnatus was.
Motion up near the ceiling caught Cincinnatus’ eye. He glanced up. It was a strip of flypaper, black with the bodies of flies it had caught, twisting in the breeze from a nearby fan. That strip had been there since Cincinnatus started coming into the Brass Monkey, and probably for a long time before that. The dead flies couldn’t be anything but dried-up husks. Plenty of live ones buzzed in the muggy air.
Two stools down from Cincinnatus, a very black man in dirty overalls waved to the bartender. “Gimme ’nother double,” he slurred. By his voice and his potent whiskey breath, he’d had several doubles already. The bartender took his money and gave him what he asked for.
The drunk stared down into the glass as if the amber fluid inside held the meaning of life. Maybe, for him, it did. He gulped it down. When the glass was empty, the drunk set it on the bar and looked around. Whatever he saw, Cincinnatus didn’t think it was in the Brass Monkey. During the last war, soldiers had called the glazed look in his eyes the thousand-yard stare. Too much combat and too much whiskey could both make a man look that way.
“What is we gonna do?” the drunk asked plaintively. Was he talking to Cincinnatus, to the bartender, to himself, or to God? No one answered. After half a minute of silence, the Negro brought out the question again, with even more anguish this time: “What is we gonna do?”
The barkeep ignored him, polishing the battered bar top with a none too clean rag. God ignored the drunk, too—but then, God had been ignoring Negroes in the CSA far longer than the Confederacy had been an independent country. If the man was talking to himself, would he have asked the same question twice? That left Cincinnatus. He thought about ignoring the drunk like the bartender, but he didn’t have a polishing rag handy. Swallowing a sigh, he asked, “What are we gonna do about what?”
“Oh, Lordy!” Resignation and annoyance mixed in the bartender’s voice. “Now you done got him started.”
The drunk, lost in his own fog of alcohol and pain, might not have heard the barkeep. But Cincinnatus’ words somehow penetrated. “What is we gonna do about what?” he echoed. “What is we gonna do about us?—dat’s what.”
He might have been pickled in sour mash. That didn’t mean the question didn’t matter. No, it didn’t mean anything of the sort. Cincinnatus wished it did. “What can we do about us?” he asked in return.
“Damfino,” the drunk said. “Yeah, damfino. But we gots to do somethin’, on account of they wants to kill us all. Kill us all, you hear me?”
His voice rose to a frightened, angry shout. Cincinnatus heard him, all right. So did about half the colored quarter of Covington, Kentucky. Even the bartender couldn’t ignore him anymore. “Hush, there. Easy, easy,” the man said, putting away the rag. He might have been trying to gentle a spooked horse. “Ain’t nothin’ you kin do about it, Hesiod.”
Hesiod muttered and mumbled to himself. “Gots to be somethin’ somebody kin do,” he said. “Gots to be. If’n they ain’t, we is all dead.”
Before the barbed wire went up, Cincinnatus would have taken that for no more than a drunk’s maunderings. He still took it for a drunk’s maunderings—what else was it?—but not just for that, not any more. If Freedom Party goons wanted to reach into the quarter they’d cordoned off, take out some Negroes, and do away with them, they would. Who’d stop them? Who’d even know for certain what they’d done?
Hesiod slapped four bits on the bar. “Gimme ’nother double,” he said, and then, as if still ordering the drink, “Gots to kill them ofays. Kill ’em, you hear m
e?”
“Here you is.” The bartender set the drink in front of him. “Now you get outside o’ this. When you ain’t drinkin’, shut your damn mouth. You gonna open it so wide, you falls in.”
There was another home truth, even if the Brass Monkey was a long way from home. Somebody in the dive—maybe even the barkeep himself—was bound to be spying for the white man, spying for the government. Some blacks thought they could make deals with the devil, grab safety for themselves at the expense of their fellows, their friends, their families.
Cincinnatus didn’t believe it, not for a minute. Like any wild beast, sooner or later the Freedom Party would bite the hand that fed it. Anyone who thought it would do anything else was bound to be a sucker. No, Jake Featherston had never bothered lying about what he aimed to do with and to Negroes, because that was exactly what so many whites in the CSA wanted to hear.
“Them ofays come in here, we gots to shoot ’em! Shoot ’em, hear me?” Hesiod said.
The only trouble with that was, the white men would shoot back. And they were the ones with the heavy weapons. Lucullus Wood had seen as much, and Lucullus knew more than anybody else about the guns the Negroes in Covington had. Lucullus, no doubt, had brought a lot of those guns into the colored part of town.
Expecting a drunk to know what Lucullus knew was bound to be blind optimism. Cincinnatus did say, “Anybody shoot at the ofays, everybody gonna be real sorry.” He didn’t want Hesiod grabbing a .22 and trying to blow out the brains of the first white cop he saw.
“Everybody real sorry already,” Hesiod said, breathing more bourbon into Cincinnatus’ face. “How you reckon things git worse?”
Before Cincinnatus could say anything to that, the bartender spoke up: “Things kin always git worse.” He did not sound like a man who intended to let himself be contradicted.
And he did not impress Hesiod. “What they gonna do? Line us up an’ shoot us?”
“Matter of fact, yes.” This time, Cincinnatus spoke before the barkeep could. “They’d do that. They wouldn’t lose a minute o’ sleep, neither.”
“But they’s already doin’ it. Already,” Hesiod said triumphantly. “They ship your ass to one o’ them camps, you don’t come out no more. They shoots you there, else they kills you some other kind o’ way. Might as well shoot back at them ofay motherfuckers. They come after us, we gots nothin’ to lose.”
A considerable silence followed. Both Cincinnatus and the bartender wanted to tell Hesiod he was wrong. Both of them wanted to, but neither one could. He was too likely not to be wrong at all.
Cincinnatus finished his Jax, set the bottle on the bar, and walked out of the Brass Monkey. The tip of his cane tapped against the sawdust-strewn floor, and then against the battered sidewalk outside. He still carried the cane everywhere he went, but it wasn’t a vital third limb for him the way it had been when he was first getting around after the car hit him. He wasn’t as spry as his father, but he got around tolerably well these days.
Seneca Driver was listening to the wireless when Cincinnatus came back to the house where he’d grown up. The Confederates and the Yankees were jamming each other’s stations extra hard these days, and most of what came out of the wireless set’s speakers were hisses and unearthly whines.
“What you doin’ home so quick, Son?” Seneca had been born a slave, and still spoke with the broad accent of a black man who’d never had a chance to get an education. “Reckoned you’d stay down at de saloon longer.”
“No.” Cincinnatus shook his head. “Can’t get away from bad news anywhere.” After so many years in Iowa, his own speech sounded half-Yankee, especially by comparison to what he heard around himself here. He laughed bitterly. And a whole fat lot of good not sounding ignorant was likely to do him!
“These is hard times,” Seneca said. “We gots to be like turtles an’ pull our heads into our shell an’ not come out till things is better.”
Most of the time, that would have been good advice. Cincinnatus was sure it had worked for his father many times before. But what were you supposed to do when those troubling you wanted to smash the turtle’s shell to get at the meat inside? What then? Cincinnatus had no answers, and feared no one else did, either.
****
Somewhere up ahead, a machine gun started chattering. Armstrong Grimes threw himself flat. Bullets cracked past overhead. Any time you could hear bullets cracking, they came too damn close.
Armstrong shared a stretch of brick wall near the southern outskirts of Salt Lake City with Yossel Reisen. “Don’t these Mormon maniacs ever give up?” he demanded—more of God, probably, than of the Congresswoman’s nephew.
God had nothing to say. Yossel did: “Doesn’t look like it. Long as they’ve got guns and people to shoot ’em, they’re going to keep fighting.”
“People.” Armstrong made it into a swear word. Yossel was too right. Some of the Mormons who carried rifles, pistols, and grenades were women. Some of the Mormons who crewed mortars and machine guns were women, too. From everything Armstrong had seen, they fought just as hard and just as well as their male counterparts. He didn’t know if that old saw about the female of the species’ being more deadly than the male was true, but in Utah she sure wasn’t any less deadly.
Mormon women usually fought to the death whenever they could. They had their reasons, most of them good. U.S. soldiers who captured women in arms were inclined to take a very basic revenge. That went against regulations. Officers lectured about how naughty it was. It went on happening anyway. Armstrong didn’t see how to stop it. If he caught some gal who was trying to kill him . . . It was more interesting than thinking about shooting a guy the size of a defensive tackle, that was for sure.
Down in the Confederate States, some of the black guerrillas were of the female persuasion. The bastards in butternut who caught them served them the same way. U.S. propaganda said that only went to show what a bunch of cruel and miserable bastards the Confederates were. Armstrong didn’t doubt the Confederates were cruel and miserable bastards; they’d come too close to killing him too many times for him to doubt it. But raping captives wasn’t one of the reasons he didn’t, not anymore. He understood the enemy in ways he hadn’t before.
That sparked a new thought. He turned to Yossel Reisen and said, “You ever get the idea we’re more like the assholes on the other side of the line who’re trying to kill us than we are like the fancy-pants fuckers back in Philly who give us orders?”
He realized he could have picked somebody better than the Jew to ask. Yossel’s aunt was one of those fancy-pants folks. If he’d wanted to, he almost certainly could have got out of being conscripted. That he hadn’t either spoke well for him or said he was a little bit nuts, depending.
But he nodded now. “Oh, hell, yes. I wonder how many guys in the War Department have ever had lice. Maybe a few in the last war, when they were lieutenants or something.”
“Not many, I bet,” Armstrong said. “People like that, they would’ve found cushy jobs back then, too.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised.” Reisen took a pack of cigarettes out of a tunic pocket, stuck one in his mouth, and offered the pack to Armstrong. Once they were both smoking, he went on, “Did I ever tell you my Uncle David only has one leg?”
There weren’t a whole lot of families in the USA that didn’t have a wounded or mutilated male relative. Armstrong said, “Maybe you did. I think so, but I’m not sure.”
“Aunt Flora could have kept him out of the Army if he’d wanted her to. Same with me,” Yossel said, his voice matter-of-fact. “But you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. Otherwise, how can you stand yourself?” After a moment, he added, “Did I ever tell you Uncle David’s a fire-breathing Democrat?”
“Yeah, I think you did,” Armstrong answered. Because Reisen seemed to expect him to, he asked, “How does your aunt like it?”
“She doesn’t,” Yossel said, as matter-of-factly as before. “They still get along with each other well enough, b
ut they argue whenever they talk about politics.”
Before Armstrong could say anything, a horrible screech filled the air. “Screaming meemies!” he yelled, and folded himself as small as he could, down there in the foxhole that was now suddenly, horribly, on the wrong side of the fence. Yossel Reisen did the same.
The spigot mortar burst with a roar like the end of the world. A lot of the rounds from the Mormons’ weird makeshift artillery were duds. The ones that weren’t packed a hell of a wallop. The ground shook under Armstrong. For a horrid moment, he thought the foxhole would collapse and bury him alive.
What if it did? The headline would be FORMER FIRST LADY’S NEPHEW KILLED IN COMBAT! Armstrong would make a one-sentence add-on to the story—Another soldier also died—if that.
When he could hear anything but the thunder of the explosion, he heard people screaming. There in the bottom of the hole, his eyes met Yossel Reisen’s. He knew exactly what Yossel was thinking, because he was thinking the same thing himself. Oh, hell, or words to that effect.
He wanted to come out of the safety of the foxhole about as much as he wanted to dance naked in front of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City wagging his pecker at the gilded statue of the Angel Moroni. That might get him shot faster than this. On the other hand, it might not.
But you had to pick up your buddies. That had been drilled into him since day one of his abbreviated basic training. He’d seen the sense of it in the field, too, which wasn’t true of a lot of the crap they’d fed him in basic. If you didn’t help your buddies when they needed it most, they wouldn’t help you if you did—and you were liable to.
“Come on, dammit.” He and Yossel said the same thing at the same time, as if they were an old married couple. They’d both been around this particular block often enough, that was for damn sure.
Up they went, keeping their bellies rattlesnake-low on the ground. Rex Stowe was out there, too. The sergeant made no bones about disliking several of the new men in his section. He came to help them anyway. They were part of his job—and, again, he expected them to do the same for him.
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