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?