“He’s talking about the auto bombs in New York City,” Yossel answered, not looking up from the letter. “He says there were four of them-one on Wall Street, one in the Lower East Side where I grew up, and two in Times Square.”
“Two?” Armstrong said.
“Two,” Yossel repeated, his face grim. “One to make a mess, and then another one that went off fifteen minutes later, after the cops and the firemen showed up.”
“Oh.” Armstrong grimaced. “That’s a dirty trick. Confederate Connie hasn’t talked about anything like that.”
“Probably doesn’t want to give the shvartzers in the CSA ideas if they’re listening to her,” Yossel said. Armstrong nodded; that made pretty good sense. Yossel went on, “Waste of time, I bet. If the Mormons can figure it out, you’ve got to figure the shvartzers can, too.”
“Bet you’re right. It’s a goddamn lousy war, that’s all I’ve got to say. Poison gas and blowing the other guy’s cities to hell and gone and both sides with maniacs blowing their own cities to hell and gone… Some fun,” Armstrong said. “And these fucking Mormons won’t quit till the last one’s dead-and his ghost’ll haunt us.”
As if on cue, somebody shouted, “Incoming!” Armstrong threw himself flat even before he heard the shriek of the incoming round. It was a terrifying wail. The Mormons had something homemade and nasty. Artillerymen called it a spigot mortar. Most soldiers called the projectiles-each about the size of a wastebasket with fins-screaming meemies.
When they hit, they made a roar like the end of the world. They were stuffed with explosives and scrap iron, to the point where they were almost flying auto bombs themselves. The only drawback they had that Armstrong could see was that, like most of the Mormons’ improvised weapons, they couldn’t reach very far. But when they did get home…
Blast picked him up and slammed him down again, as if a professional wrestler-or possibly God-had thrown him to the canvas. He tasted blood. When he brought a hand up to his face, he found his nose was bleeding, too. He felt his ears, but they seemed all right. After he spat, his mouth seemed better. His nose went on dripping blood down his face and, as he straightened, onto the front of his tunic. That was all right, or not too bad. Anything more and he would have worried about what the screaming meemie had done to his insides.
Instead, he worried about what the horrible thing had done to other people. The corporal who’d brought the mail forward was torn to pieces. If not for the sack, Armstrong wouldn’t have recognized him. Poor bastard wasn’t even a front-line soldier. Wrong place, wrong time, and he’d make another closed-casket funeral.
Shouts of, “Corpsman!” rose from half a dozen places. There weren’t enough medics close by to see to everybody at once. Armstrong bandaged wounds and tied off one tourniquet and gave morphine shots with the syrettes in the soldiers’ first-aid kits: all the things he’d learned how to do since he got thrown into battle the summer before.
Yossel Reisen was doing the same sorts of things. He also had a bloody nose, and he’d put a bandage on the back of his own left hand. More blood soaked through it. “There’s a Purple Heart for you,” Armstrong said.
Reisen told him where he could put the Purple Heart, and suggest that he not close the pin that held it on a uniform.
Armstrong gave back a ghastly grin. “Same to you, buddy, only sideways,” he said. They both laughed. It wasn’t funny-nothing within some considerable distance of where a screaming meemie went off was funny-but it kept them both going and it kept them from shrieking. Sometimes men who’d been through too much would come to pieces in the field. Armstrong had seen that a few times. It was even less lovely than what shell fragments could do. They only ruined a man’s body. When his soul went through the meat grinder…
Belatedly, U.S. field guns started shelling the place from which the screaming meemie had come. Odds were neither the men who’d launched it nor the tube from which it started its deadly flight were there anymore.
“Bastards.” Even Armstrong wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the Mormons on the other side of the line or the gunners on his own. It fit both much too well.
“Need to talk to you for a minute in my office, Xerxes,” Jerry Dover said when Scipio walked into the Huntsman’s Lodge.
Scipio was already sweating from the walk to work in formalwear under the hot Augusta sun. When his boss told him something like that, he started sweating all over again. But he said the only thing he could: “Be right theah, suh.” Maybe-he dared hope-this had to do with restaurant business. Even if it didn’t, though, he remained at the white man’s beck and call.
Dover’s office was as crowded and as filled with lists of things to do as ever. The restaurant manager worked hard. Scipio never would have presumed to think otherwise. The ashtray on the desk was full of butts, a couple of them still smoldering.
Dover paused to light yet another cigarette, sucked in smoke, blew it out, and eyed Scipio. “What’s your address, over in the Terry?” he asked.
That wasn’t what Scipio had expected. “Same one you got on all my papers, suh,” he answered. “I ain’t moved or nothin’.”
“For true?” Jerry Dover said. “No bullshit? No getting cute and cagey?”
“Cross my heart an’ hope to die, Mistuh Dover.” Scipio made the gesture. “How come you needs to make sure o’ dat?”
His boss didn’t answer, not right away. He smoked the cigarette down to a little dog-end in quick, savage puffs, then stubbed it out and lit a new one. When he did speak, he went off on a tangent: “I don’t reckon your wife and your young ’uns have ever seen the inside of this place.”
“No, suh, they ain’t never,” Scipio agreed, wondering what the hell Dover was going on about. The restaurant-by which he naturally thought of the part the customers never saw-was crowded enough with the people who had to be there: cooks, waiters, busboys, dishwashers. Others would have fit in as well as feathers on a frog. The manager had to know that better than he did.
No matter what Jerry Dover knew, he said, “Why don’t you bring ’em by tomorrow night when you come in for your shift? They get bored, they can spend some time here in the office.”
“Suh, my missus, she clean white folks’ houses. She already be at work when I comes in here,” Scipio said.
Dover frowned. “Maybe you tell her to take the day off tomorrow so she can come in with you.”
“People she work fo’ ain’t gwine like dat,” Scipio predicted dolefully. Blacks in the CSA never had been able to risk antagonizing whites. With things the way they were now, even imagining such a thing was suicidal.
The second cigarette disappeared as fast as the first one had. Dover lit a third. He blew a stream of smoke up at the ceiling. “Scipio,” he said softly, “this is important.”
Scipio froze, there in the rickety chair across the desk from the restaurant manager. Jerry Dover used that name to remind Scipio who had the power here.
By why he would want to use that power for this purpose baffled the Negro. Sending him down to Savannah made sense. This? This seemed mere whim. A man who expended power on a whim was a fool.
In the tones of an educated white man, Scipio said, “Perhaps you will be good enough to tell me why you require my family’s presence, sir?”
Dover’s eyes widened. He laughed out loud. “Goddamn!” he said. “She told me you could do that, but I plumb forgot. That’s fucking amazing. You ought to go on the wireless instead of some of those muttonheads they’ve got.”
“As may be, sir,” Scipio answered, and Jerry Dover laughed again. The black man added, “You still have not answered my question.” He dared hope Dover would. Skin color was the most important thing in the CSA; no doubt about it. But accent ran color a close second. If he sounded like an educated white man, the presumption that he was what he sounded like ran deep.