Cincinnatus-Cincinnatus Driver, as he was learning to think of himself these days-turned to the driver nearest him and said, “The lieutenant don’t give two whoops in hell if we get ourselves killed. If the cargo don’t get through to where it’s supposed to go, that’s a different story. That ticks him off plenty.”
Herk chuckled. “You got that one right.” He was as white as Lieutenant Straubing, and Cincinnatus, despite spending a lot of time on the road with him, even getting shot up by some of those diehards with him, still had no idea what his last name was, or even if he owned one. He’d always just been Herk. Now he went on, “The lieutenant treats the cargo like he was paying for it out of his own pocket.”
“Yeah,” Cincinnatus said. He watched the roustabouts load more trucks. He’d done that work himself, before he’d convinced the U.S. forces to let him drive instead-and to pay him more money for doing it. Despite his own experience at their job, he muttered, “I wish they’d move faster, damn it.”
Herk didn’t make any cracks about lazy niggers. Lieutenant Straubing would have given him seventeen different kinds of hell if he had. Men of one color giving men of another a hard time about it interfered with getting materiel down to the front, so he refused to tolerate it. What Herk did say was, “You’ve been itchy to get on the road lately, haven’t you? Kid givin’ you a hard time at home?”
“Nah, it ain’t that so much,” Cincinnatus answered. “When I’m movin’, though, nobody’s botherin’ me, you know what I’m sayin’? There’s just me and the truck and the road, that’s all.”
“Yeah, sure-unless somebody’s layin’ in the bushes with a goddamn machine gun like happened before,” Herk said.
“Happen inside Covington easy as it can outside,” Cincinnatus said. “Had a man shot dead on my own front stoop, remember. Could have been me shot dead out there, easy as that other fella.”
When he was on the road, he didn’t have to worry about whether every stranger he passed on the sidewalk would carry tales about him to Luther Bliss…or to Apicius-no, Apicius Wood -and his Red friends…or to Joe Conroy and however many other Confederate diehards still operated in Covington. When he was on the road, he was free. Oh, he had to obey Lieutenant Straubing’s orders, but his spirit was free. That counted for more than he’d ever imagined.
At last, the cargo bay in his truck was full. Whistling under his breath, he cranked the White’s engine to loud, flatulent life. When it was going, he jumped into the cab and fed it more gas. Other trucks rumbled awake, too. With Lieutenant Straubing in the lead, they headed south.
More of the road down to Tennessee was paved every time Cincinnatus drove it. He suspected that wasn’t true only of the road that went through Covington. The United States would need to move supplies down every highway they could. When the war ended, Kentucky would have a pretty fine network of paved roads, or at least the north-south strands of such a network.
A man in the trucking business-a man like Cincinnatus Driver, say-might do well for himself. There were some rich Negroes in the USA: not many, but a few. That put the USA a few up on the CSA. “A chance,” Cincinnatus muttered. No one sitting beside him in the cab could have heard the words, but that didn’t matter. He knew what he was saying. “All I want is a chance. I ever get it, I’ll make the most of it.”
He wasn’t going to hold his breath hoping he would get it. Laws against blacks weren’t so tough as they were in the CSA, though that varied from state to state. What didn’t vary was that most whites in the USA would have been just as well pleased if they could have readmitted Kentucky without its Negroes.
He rolled past a truck by the side of the road, the driver, a black man, out there with a jack and a pump and a patch, repairing the puncture. Cincinnatus hoped it was only one of those things that happened now and again, and that the diehards hadn’t gone and strewn the road with nails or broken glass or specially made four-pronged inner-tube biters. That would make a lot of trucks late, and that would make Lieutenant Straubing unhappy. Very little else would, but that was guaranteed to do the trick.
Parts of the country were very much as they had been before the war began: prosperous farmlands raising wheat and corn and tobacco and horses. More, though, looked as if a mad devil had lost his temper and spent twenty years kicking it to pieces. That wasn’t even so far wrong, except that war had done the job faster than any devil could have managed.
Near Covington, almost three years had passed since U.S. forces overran the countryside. Grass had grown over trenches; rain had softened their outlines; some of the rubble and wrecked buildings had been cleared away; some had even been rebuilt. The farther south Cincinnatus went, the fresher the scars of war got. The Confederate States had fought as hard as they could to keep Kentucky one of their number-the tormented landscape told of their effort. But it spoke even more loudly of their failure.
Cincinnatus’ luck held: he got through the day without a puncture. After a stop for fuel for the truck and a bowl of pork and beans from an Army kettle at midday, he rolled on steadily until, toward evening, he crossed from Kentucky into Tennessee. He started passing bands of soldiers heading toward the front. They got off onto the soft shoulder for the truck convoy and smiled and waved as the big, square, clumsy machines passed them. They even smiled and waved at Cincinnatus. They had the world by the tail, and they knew it.
He also steered the truck past columns of men coming away from the front. A few of them, a very few, showed the same high spirits as the soldiers who were replacing them. Most simply trudged along toward the north, putting one foot in front of the other, their faces and no doubt their minds far away. They’d seen so much hell, they didn’t yet realize they’d escaped it-or perhaps they’d brought it with them.
They’d converted the White from acetylene lamps to electric ones not too long before; Cincinnatus enjoyed being able to throw light on the dimming road ahead at the turn of a knob, without having to stop and get out. He’d liked it even better the first time he’d done it in the rain.
At last, about nine o’clock, they pulled into the supply depot. “We expected you an hour ago,” complained an officer with a quartermaster’s badge: crossed sword and key over a wheel on which perched an eagle. Cincinnatus had never known a quartermaster with a good word to say to or about the men who fetched him the supplies he then grudgingly disbursed.
“Sorry, sir,” Lieutenant Straubing said. “We made the best time we could.” He had to give a soft answer: the other man outranked him.
“Likely story,” the quartermaster sniffed. “Well, you’re here now, so we’ll unload you.” He made it sound as if he were doing the truck convoy an enormous favor.
“That’s good, sir,” Straubing said equably. “I can certainly see you’ve been ready for us this past hour.”
In the cab of his truck, Cincinnatus chuckled. Nobody was waiting to unload the trucks. Plenty of people should have been. Straubing knew just how to place the dart to get the most damage with it. “Lieutenant…” the other officer began, doing his best to make Straubing wish he’d never been born. But the truth was too obvious for him to bluster his way past it. He seemed to deflate like a punctured observation balloon that hadn’t caught fire. Then he started shouting for soldiers to get off their lazy backsides and come unload the trucks.