Clang! The machine-gun fire from the Confederate barrel abruptly stopped. Wary as a wild animal, Chester Martin raised his head. The barrel was burning. Hatches flew open as crewmen tried to escape. With a fierce glee, Martin and his comrades shot them down. Out of their steel snail shell, they were easy meat.
Martin looked around and grimaced. “Stretcher-bearers!” he shouted, his voice cracking with urgency. “Stretcher-bearers!”
He ran over to David Hamburger, the closest wounded soldier. The kid was clutching his left thigh and howling like a wolf. Martin didn’t think he knew he was doing it. Bright red blood trickled out between his fingers. When he saw Martin, he stopped howling and said, “I’m going to write my congresswoman about this.” His voice was amazingly calm.
“Yeah, you do that,” Martin said. “Let’s have a look at what you caught there.” Reluctantly, Hamburger took his hands away. The wound was in the middle of the thigh. Martin whistled in a minor key. A bullet to the inside, and the kid would have bled out in short order. This was better news, but it wasn’t what you’d call good.
“Here, we’ll take him, Sarge.” A couple of stretcher-bearers paused beside the wounded man.
“Do your best. He’s a good fellow, and his sister’s in Congress.” With the stretcher-bearers there, Martin couldn’t wait around. He awkwardly patted David Hamburger on the shoulder, then hurried past the blazing hulk of the Confederate barrel and on through Centreville.
Confederate artillerymen were made to quit the high ground east of the little Virginia town only with the greatest reluctance. Some of the gun crews stayed till they could fire at the advancing barrels over open sights. They took heavy casualties, though; splinter shields were no match for the firepower bearing down on them.
A Rebel gunner, one of the last on the field, shook his fist at the oncoming U.S. soldiers as his crew limbered up their field piece. He shook it again as they galloped away. Martin shot at him, but missed. He shrugged. One man didn’t much matter. The high ground belonged to the USA.
Joe Conroy was about the last man in the world Cincinnatus wanted to see. By the look on the fat, white storekeeper’s face, Cincinnatus was about the last man in the world he wanted to see, too. “Come to gloat, I reckon,” Conroy said, shifting a plug of tobacco from one cheek to the other.
“Got nothin’ to gloat about, suh,” Cincinnatus answered. With Kentucky a state in the USA these days, he didn’t have to be so deferential to a white man as he would have before the war, when the state still belonged to the CSA. But Conroy was a Confederate diehard. Cincinnatus figured using the old ways was a good idea if he hoped to learn anything.
He might not learn anything anyhow. Conroy sneered at him. “Yeah, a likely story. You go on and tell me you don’t know what the hell happened to my store after me and Tom Kennedy, God rest his soul, taught you how to make those little firebombs that ain’t no bigger’n cigars.”
“Mr. Conroy, suh, I don’t know what the hell happened to your store,” Cincinnatus said evenly. “I didn’t have nothin’ to do with burnin’ it down. That there is the truth, and you can take it to the bank.”
That there was a lie, and his mother would have boxed his ears for telling a lie had she been here to listen to it. But his mother wasn’t anywhere around, and he told the lie with great aplomb. “Huh,” Conroy grunted, as if to say he didn’t believe it for a minute. But then he went on, “If you don’t know about it, who the hell does?”
Cincinnatus shrugged. “Who the hell knows about how Tom Kennedy got hisself killed, suh?”
He didn’t think he’d made the question too obvious. Conroy had offered him another question on which to hang it, so he didn’t seem to be pulling it in from out of the blue. The storekeeper looked down at the park bench on which they sat at opposite ends before giving an answer more oblique than usefuclass="underline" “Never could figure out what the hell Tom saw in you.”
“Swear to Jesus, suh, never did figure out what he was doin’ there outside my door,” Cincinnatus said.
Conroy’s eyes were narrow slits, almost hidden in folds of fat. Cincinnatus still couldn’t decide whether he was clever or just sly. Now he said, “They were after him-what do you think?”
Only a lifetime of disguising his feelings toward whites and the stupid things that came out of their mouths let Cincinnatus keep from barking scornful laughter at that. Had nobody been after Kennedy, nobody would have shot him. “Who’s ‘they,’ Mr. Conroy?” he asked. “That’s what I’m tryin’ to find out.”
“Well, now,” the storekeeper said slowly, “I don’t rightly know. Could have been a whole bunch of different folks.”
Cincinnatus wanted to grab him by the neck and shake him till his narrow eyes popped. “You got any notion who?” he asked, as gently as he could. “Been a lot o’ different folks comin’ round askin’ me questions I ain’t got no good answers for, ’less I talk way too much.”
Unless I tell them who Tom Kennedy’s friends are, was what he meant. Would Conroy be bright enough to figure that out, or would he need a more direct hint? The only more direct hint Cincinnatus could think of was a whack in the teeth. That would be satisfying, but…
Conroy got what he was talking about. The white man’s absurd little rosebud mouth puckered up as if he’d bitten into the world’s sourest pickled tomato. “Who?” he repeated, sounding like an unhappy owl. “Could have been one of those Kentucky State Police bastards. Could have been some of the Red niggers, too. You’d know more about that than I would, I reckon.”
He gave Cincinnatus a stare that meant, I can talk, too. Cincinnatus hid a grimace. Everybody could talk about him to somebody. He said, “From what I seen, Mr. Kennedy and the Reds didn’t get on too bad.”
“I told him to watch out for ’em just the same,” Conroy said. “Can’t trust a Red. He’ll yell ‘Popular Front!’ today and kick you in the nuts tomorrow. Tom thought he could handle it. He always thought he could handle everything.”
That did sound like the Kennedy Cincinnatus had known. Conroy’s characterization of the Reds wasn’t far wrong, either, though Cincinnatus wouldn’t have admitted it to the storekeeper.
And Conroy wasn’t through, either. He continued, “Could even have been some of our own boys. I’ve heard this one and that one go on about how Tom was selling us all down the river.”
“That a fact?” Cincinnatus pricked up his ears. “You got names for any o’ those fellows?”
Conroy looked down at his shoes, which were every bit as scuffed and battered as Cincinnatus’. He didn’t say anything. After a while, Cincinnatus realized he wasn’t going to say anything. Everybody played his cards close to his vest in this game. Kennedy and Conroy were the only two Confederate holdouts Cincinnatus had ever met. Conroy didn’t care to give him the key to more.
In casual tones, Cincinnatus said, “Luther Bliss’d ask a lot more questions than I do, and he’d ask ’em a lot harder, too. I been down to the Covington city hall. I know what I’m talkin’ about.”
“Yeah, and he gave you money out of his own pocket, the cold-blooded son of a bitch,” Conroy snapped.
Cincinnatus sighed. Teddy Roosevelt had done him a good turn, but Bliss had put barbs in it. Still casually, Cincinnatus said, “Maybe he’d listen if I was to tell him somethin’, then.”
“Maybe he would. And if you was to tell him somethin’, maybe some smart nigger who wasn’t quite as smart as he reckoned he was would get a bullet through the ear one day when he’s drivin’ that big ugly old White truck o’ his that’s plumb full o’ shit the damnyankees’re shootin’ at his countrymen. Or maybe his wife’d have a little accident. Or maybe his kid.”
“I ain’t the only one accidents can happen to, Conroy.” Cincinnatus had to work to hold his voice steady. Plenty of people had threatened him. Threatening his family was an alarming departure.