“Good enough,” Lucullus said, and then, loudly, to a waitress, “You fetch me a cup of coffee, Lucinda sweetie?” Lucinda laughed and waved and went to get it. Lucullus turned back to Cincinnatus. “You know how it’s got the canvas top you can put up to keep rain off the sojers or whatever other shit you got in there?”
“I reckon I do,” Cincinnatus answered. “White truck had the same kind o’ thing in the last war. What about it?”
“Here’s what,” Lucullus said. “How come you’d take a bunch o’ them trucks and take off that whole canvas arrangement and close up the back compartment in a big old iron box?”
“Who’s doin’ that?” Cincinnatus asked.
Now Lucullus did drop his rumbling bass voice. “Confederate gummint, that’s who,” he said solemnly. Lucinda set the coffee in front of him. He swatted her on the behind. She just laughed again and sashayed off.
“Confederate government?” Cincinnatus echoed. Lucullus nodded. Cincinnatus did a little thinking. “This here ironwork armor plate?”
“Don’t reckon so,” Lucullus answered. “Ain’t heard nothin’ ’bout no armor. That’d be special, right?—it ain’t no ordinary iron.”
“Armor’s special, all right. It’s extra thick an’ extra hard,” Cincinnatus said. Lucullus started to cough. After a moment, Cincinnatus realized he was trying not to laugh. After another moment, he realized why. “I didn’t mean it like that, goddammit!”
“I know you didn’t. Only makes it funnier,” Lucullus said. “Figure this here is regular ironwork, anyways.”
“Well, my own truck back in Iowa’s got an iron cargo box. Keeps the water out better’n canvas when it rains. Keeps thieves out a hell of a lot better, too.”
“These here is Army trucks—or trucks the gummint took from the Army,” Lucullus said. “Reckon they gonna be where there’s sojers around. Ain’t got to worry ’bout thievin’ a whole hell of a lot.”
This time, Cincinnatus laughed. “Only shows what you know. You ain’t never seen the kind o’ thievin’ that goes on around Army trucks. I know what I’m talkin’ about there—you’d best believe I do. You start loadin’ stuff in Army trucks, and some of it’s gonna walk with Jesus. I don’t care how many soldiers you got. I don’t care how many guns you got, neither. Folks steal.”
Maybe his conviction carried authority. Lucullus pursed his lips in what was almost a parody of deep thought. “Mebbe,” he said at last. “But it don’t quite feel right, you know what I mean? Like I told you, these here ain’t exactly no Army trucks no more. They was took from the Army. I reckon they be doin’ somethin’ else from here on out.”
“Like what?” Cincinnatus asked.
“Don’t rightly know.” Lucullus Wood didn’t sound happy about admitting it. “I was hopin’ you could give me a clue.”
“Gotta be somethin’ the government figures is important.” Cincinnatus was talking more to himself than to Lucullus. “Gotta be somethin’ the government figures is real important, on account of what’s more important than the Army in the middle of a war?”
He couldn’t think of anything. Lucullus did, and right away: “The Freedom Party. Freedom Party is the goddamn gummint, near enough.” He was right. As soon as he said it, Cincinnatus nodded, acknowledging as much. Lucullus went on, “But what the hell the Freedom Party want with a bunch o’ gussied-up trucks?”
“Beats me.” Cincinnatus finished his sandwich. “That was mighty good. I wish you didn’t haul me outa bed in the middle o’ the night to eat it.”
“Didn’t get you over here for that.” Lucullus’ face could have illustrated discontented in the dictionary. “I was hopin’ you had some answers for me.”
“Sorry.” Cincinnatus spread his hands, pale palms up. “I got to tell you, it don’t make no sense to me.”
“I got to tell you, it don’t make no sense to me, neither,” Lucullus said, “but I reckon it makes sense to somebody, or them Party peckerheads over in Virginia wouldn’t be doin’ it. They got somethin’ on their evil little minds. I don’t know what it is. I can’t cipher it out. When I can’t cipher out what the ofays is gonna do next, I commence to worryin’, an’ that is a fac’.”
“Sorry I’m not more help for you,” Cincinnatus said again. “I know trucks—you’re right about that. But you know a hell of a lot more about the Freedom Party than I do. I ain’t sorry about that, not even a little bit. I wish to God I didn’t know nothin’ about ’em.”
“Don’t we all!” Lucullus said. “All right, git on home, then.” He turned to the man who’d brought Cincinnatus to the barbecue place and sat silently while he and Lucullus talked. “Git him back there, Tiberius.”
“I take care of it,” the other man promised. “Don’t want no trouble.” He caught Cincinnatus’ eye. “You ready?”
Slowly, painfully, Cincinnatus rose. “Ready as I ever be.” That wasn’t saying a hell of a lot. He knew it, whether Tiberius did or not.
They went out into the eerie, blackout-deepened darkness. Everything was quiet as the tomb: no bombers overhead tonight. A police car rattled down a street just after Cincinnatus and Tiberius turned off it, but the cops didn’t know they were around. Lights were for emergencies only. Tiberius laughed softly. “Curfew ain’t so hard to beat, you see?” he said.
“Yeah,” Cincinnatus answered. Tiberius stayed with him till he went up the walk to his folks’ house, then disappeared into the night.
Cincinnatus’ father was up waiting for him. “You did come home. Praise the Lord!” Seneca Driver said.
“Wasn’t the police at the door, Pa,” Cincinnatus answered. “Sorry you woke up while I was tendin’ to it.”
“Don’t worry about that none,” his father said. “Got us plenty o’ more important things to worry about.” Cincinnatus wished he could have told him he was wrong. And he could have, too—but only if he were willing to lie.
Tom Colleton felt proud of himself. He’d managed to wangle four days of leave. That wasn’t long enough to go home to South Carolina, but it did let him get away from the front and down to Columbus. Not worrying about getting shelled or gassed for a little while seemed a good start on the road to the earthly paradise.
It also proved too good to be true. As he got on the train that would take him from Sandusky to Columbus, a military policeman said, “Oh, good, sir—you’ve got your sidearm.”
“What about it?” Tom’s hand fell to the pistol on his hip.
“Only that it’s a good idea, sir,” the MP answered, his white-painted helmet and white gloves making him stand out from the ordinary run of noncoms. “The damnyankees down there aren’t real happy about the way things have gone.”
“Unhappy enough so that a Confederate officer needs to pack a pistol?” Tom asked. The MP gave back a somber nod. Tom only shrugged. “Well, if U.S. soldiers couldn’t kill me, I’m not going to lose too much sleep over U.S. civilians.” That got a grin from the military policeman.
The train was an hour and a half late getting into Columbus. It had to wait on a siding while workmen repaired damage—sabotage—to the railway. Tom Colleton fumed. “Don’t get yourself in an uproar, sir,” advised a captain who’d evidently made the trip several times. “Could be a hell of a lot worse. Leastways we haven’t had any fighters shooting us up this time around.”
“Gurk,” Tom said. No, he hadn’t come far enough to escape the war—not even close.
And he was reminded of it when he got into Columbus. The city had been at the center of a Yankee pocket. The U.S. soldiers who’d held it had fought hard to keep the Confederates from taking it. They’d quit only when they ran too low on fuel and ammunition to go on fighting. That meant Columbus looked as if rats the size of automobiles had been taking big bites out of most of the buildings.
The porter who fetched suitcases from the baggage car for those who had them was a white man. He spoke with some kind of Eastern European accent. Tom stared at him. He’d rarely seen a white man doing nigger work,
and in the CSA few jobs more perfectly defined nigger work than a porter’s.
This fellow stared right back at him. That wasn’t curiosity in his eyes. It was raw hatred. Measuring me for a coffin, Tom thought. He’d wondered if the MP had exaggerated. Now he saw the man hadn’t. The weight of the .45 on his hip was suddenly very comforting.
Union Station was a few blocks north of the state Capitol, whose dome had taken a hit from a bomb. Fort Mahan, which had been the chief U.S. military depot in Ohio, was now where visiting Confederates stayed. It lay a few blocks east of the station, on Buckingham Street. Sentries checked Tom’s papers with scrupulous care before admitting him. “You think I’m a Yankee spy?” he asked, amused.
“Sir, we’ve had us some trouble with that,” one of the sentries answered, which brought him up short.
“Have you?” he said. All three sentries nodded. Two of them had examined his bona fides while the third covered them and Tom with his automatic rifle. Tom asked, “You have a lot of problems with people shooting at you, stuff like that?”
“Some,” answered the corporal who’d spoken before. “We gave an order for the damnyankees to turn in their guns when we took this here place, same as we always do.” He made a sour face. “Reckon you can guess how much good that done us.”
“I expect I can,” Tom said. If the United States had occupied Dallas and tried to enforce the same order, it wouldn’t have done them any good, either. People in both the USA and the CSA had too many guns and too many hiding places—and the Yankees hated the Confederates just as much as the Confederates hated the Yankees, so nobody on either side wanted to do what anyone on the other side said.
The sentry added, “It’s not shooting so much. We’ve hanged some of the bastards who tried that, and we’ve got hostages to try and make sure more of ’em don’t. But there’s sabotage all the time: slashed tires, busted windows, sugar in the gas tank, shit like that. We shot a baker for mixing ground glass in with the bread he gave us. They even say whores with the clap don’t get it treated so as they can give it to more of us.”
“Do they?” Tom murmured. He hadn’t been with a woman since the war started. But Bertha was a long way away. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. He’d thought he might . . . Then again, if what this fellow said was true, he might not, too.
“I don’t know that that’s so, sir,” the corporal said. “But they do say it.” He gave Tom his papers again. “Pass on, and have yourself a good old time.”
Don’t eat the bread, Tom thought. Don’t lay the women. Sounds like a hell of a way to have a good old time to me. At least he didn’t say the bartenders were pissing in the whiskey.
He found the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters without any trouble. Fort Mahan bristled with signs, some left over from when the USA ran the place, others put up by the Confederates. He got a room of his own, one of about the same quality as he would have had in the CSA. Two stars on each collar tab helped. Had he been a lieutenant or a captain, he probably would have ended up with a roommate or two.
Since the sentry hadn’t warned that they were pissing in the booze, he headed for the officers’ club once he’d dumped his valise in the room. He got another jolt when he walked in: the barkeep was as white as the railroad porter. Tom walked up to him and ordered a highball. The man in the boiled shirt and black bow tie didn’t bat an eye. He made the drink and set it on the bar. “Here you go, sir,” he said quietly. His accent declared him a Yankee.
Tom sipped the highball. It was fine. Even so . . . “How long have you been tending bar?” he asked.
“About . . . fifteen years, sir,” the fellow said after a moment’s pause for thought. “Why, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Just wondering. What do you think of the work?”
“It’s all right. Money’s not bad. I never did care for getting cooped up in a factory. I like talking with people and I listen pretty well, so it suits me.”
“Doesn’t it, oh, get you down, having to do what other folks tell you all the time? Serving them, you might say?”
He and the bartender both spoke English, but they didn’t speak the same language. The man shrugged. “It’s a job, that’s all. Tell me about a job where you don’t have to do what other people tell you. I’ll be on that one like a shot.”
Tom decided to get more direct: “Down in the Confederate States, we’d call a job like this nigger work.”
“Oh.” The barkeep suddenly found himself on familiar ground. “Now I see what you’re driving at. Some other people have asked me about that. All I got to tell you, pal, is that you’re not in the Confederate States any more.”
“I noticed that.” Shaking his head, Tom found an empty table and sat down. The man behind the bar plainly didn’t feel degraded by his work. A white Confederate would have. You’re not in the CSA any more is right, Tom thought. That was true.
A couple of other officers came in and ordered drinks. One of them nodded to Tom. “Haven’t seen you before,” he remarked. “Just get in?”
“That’s right,” Tom answered. “Nice, friendly little town, isn’t it? I always did enjoy a place where I could relax and not have to look over my shoulder all the time.”
The officer who’d spoken to him—a major—and his friend—a lieutenant-colonel like Tom—both laughed. After they’d got their whiskeys, the major said, “Mind if we join you?”
“Not a bit. I’d be glad of the company,” Tom said, and gave his name. He got theirs in return. The major, a skinny redhead, was Ted Griffith; the other light colonel, who was chunky and dark and balding, was Mel Lempriere. He had a pronounced New Orleans accent, half lazy and half tough. Griffith sounded as if he came from Alabama or Mississippi.
They started talking shop. Aside from women, the great common denominator, it was what they shared. Ted Griffith was in barrels, Lempriere in artillery. “We caught the damnyankees flatfooted,” Lempriere said. “It would’ve been a lot tougher if we hadn’t.” Actually, he said woulda, as if he came from Brooklyn instead of the Crescent City.
“Reckon that’s a fact,” Griffith agreed. “Their barrels are as good as ours, and they use ’em pretty well. But they didn’t have enough, and so we got the whip hand and ripped into ’em.”
“Patton helped, too, I expect,” Tom said. He got to the bottom of his highball and waved for a refill. The bartender nodded. He brought over a fresh one a minute later.
“Patton drives like a son of a bitch,” Lempriere said. “Sometimes our guys had a devil of a time keeping up with the barrels.” He and Major Griffith both finished their drinks at the same time. They also waved to the barkeep. He got to work on new ones for them, too.
Once Griffith had taken a pull at his second drink, he said, “Patton’s a world-beater in the field. No arguments about that. If the Yankees hadn’t had their number-one fellow here, too, we’d’ve licked ’em worse’n we did. Yeah, he’s a damn good barrel commander.”
He didn’t sound as delighted as he might have. “But . . . ?” Tom asked. A but had to be hiding in there somewhere. He wondered if Griffith would let it out.
The major made his refill disappear and called for another. Dutch courage? Tom thought. “Patton’s a world-beater in the field,” Griffith repeated. “He does have his little ways, though.”
Mel Lempriere chuckled. “Name me a general officer worth his rank badges who doesn’t.”
“Well, yeah,” Griffith said. “But there’s ways, and then there’s ways, if you know what I mean. Patton fines any barrel man he catches out of uniform, right down to the tie on the shirt underneath the coveralls. He fines you if your coveralls are dirty, too. How are you supposed to run a barrel without getting grease and shit on your uniform? I tell you for a fact, my friends, it can’t be done.”
“Why’s he bother?” Tom asked.
“Well, he likes everything just so,” Griffith answered, which sounded like an understatement. “And he likes to say that a clean soldier, a neat soldier, is a
soldier with his pecker up. I suppose he’s got himself a point.” Again, he didn’t say but. Again, he might as well have.
Lieutenant-Colonel Lempriere laughed again. “You know any soldier in the field longer’n a week who hasn’t got his pecker up?”
That brought them around to women. Tom had figured they’d get there sooner or later. He asked about the local officers’ brothels, and whether the girls really did steer clear of cures for the clap. Lempriere denied it. He turned out to be a mine of information. As Tom had, he’d been in the last war. Ted Griffith was too young. He listened to the two lieutenant-colonels swap stories of sporting houses gone by. After a while, he said, “Sounds like bullshit to me, gentlemen.”
“Likely some of it is,” Tom said. “But it’s fun bullshit, you know?” They all laughed some more. They ended up yarning and drinking deep into the night.
When the USS Remembrance sortied from Honolulu, Sam Carsten had no trouble holding in his enthusiasm. The airplane carrier wasn’t going any place where the weather suited him: up to Alaska, say. She could have been. The Tsars still owned Alaska, and Russia and the United States were formally at war. But they hadn’t done much in the way of fighting, and weren’t likely to. The long border between the U.S.-occupied Yukon and northern British Columbia on the one hand and Alaska on the other was anything but the ideal place to wage war.
The western end of the chain of Sandwich Islands, now . . .
Midway, a thousand miles north and west of Honolulu, had a U.S. base on it. The low-lying island wasn’t anything much. Aside from great swarms of goony birds, it boasted nothing even remotely interesting. But it was where it was. Japan had seized Guam along with the Philippines in the Hispano-Japanese War right after the turn of the century, and turned the island into her easternmost base. If she took Midway from the USA, that could let her walk down the little islands in the chain toward the ones that really mattered.
Japan didn’t have anyone to fight but the USA. The United States, by contrast, had a major land war against the Confederate States on their hands. They were trying to hold down a restive Canada. And the British, French, and Confederates made the Atlantic an unpleasant place—to say nothing of the Confederate submersibles that sneaked out of Guaymas to prowl the West Coast.
Settling Accounts Return Engagement: Book One of the Settling Accounts Trilogy Page 46