Hesiod slapped four bits on the bar. “Gimme ’nother double,” he said, and then, as if still ordering the drink, “Gots to kill them ofays. Kill ’em, you hear me?”
“Here you is.” The bartender set the drink in front of him. “Now you get outside o’ this. When you ain’t drinkin’, shut your damn mouth. You gonna open it so wide, you falls in.”
There was another home truth, even if the Brass Monkey was a long way from home. Somebody in the dive-maybe even the barkeep himself-was bound to be spying for the white man, spying for the government. Some blacks thought they could make deals with the devil, grab safety for themselves at the expense of their fellows, their friends, their families.
Cincinnatus didn’t believe it, not for a minute. Like any wild beast, sooner or later the Freedom Party would bite the hand that fed it. Anyone who thought it would do anything else was bound to be a sucker. No, Jake Featherston had never bothered lying about what he aimed to do with and to Negroes, because that was exactly what so many whites in the CSA wanted to hear.
“Them ofays come in here, we gots to shoot ’em! Shoot ’em, hear me?” Hesiod said.
The only trouble with that was, the white men would shoot back. And they were the ones with the heavy weapons. Lucullus Wood had seen as much, and Lucullus knew more than anybody else about the guns the Negroes in Covington had. Lucullus, no doubt, had brought a lot of those guns into the colored part of town.
Expecting a drunk to know what Lucullus knew was bound to be blind optimism. Cincinnatus did say, “Anybody shoot at the ofays, everybody gonna be real sorry.” He didn’t want Hesiod grabbing a.22 and trying to blow out the brains of the first white cop he saw.
“Everybody real sorry already,” Hesiod said, breathing more bourbon into Cincinnatus’ face. “How you reckon things git worse?”
Before Cincinnatus could say anything to that, the bartender spoke up: “Things kin always git worse.” He did not sound like a man who intended to let himself be contradicted.
And he did not impress Hesiod. “What they gonna do? Line us up an’ shoot us?”
“Matter of fact, yes.” This time, Cincinnatus spoke before the barkeep could. “They’d do that. They wouldn’t lose a minute o’ sleep, neither.”
“But they’s already doin’ it. Already,” Hesiod said triumphantly. “They ship your ass to one o’ them camps, you don’t come out no more. They shoots you there, else they kills you some other kind o’ way. Might as well shoot back at them ofay motherfuckers. They come after us, we gots nothin’ to lose.”
A considerable silence followed. Both Cincinnatus and the bartender wanted to tell Hesiod he was wrong. Both of them wanted to, but neither one could. He was too likely not to be wrong at all.
Cincinnatus finished his Jax, set the bottle on the bar, and walked out of the Brass Monkey. The tip of his cane tapped against the sawdust-strewn floor, and then against the battered sidewalk outside. He still carried the cane everywhere he went, but it wasn’t a vital third limb for him the way it had been when he was first getting around after the car hit him. He wasn’t as spry as his father, but he got around tolerably well these days.
Seneca Driver was listening to the wireless when Cincinnatus came back to the house where he’d grown up. The Confederates and the Yankees were jamming each other’s stations extra hard these days, and most of what came out of the wireless set’s speakers were hisses and unearthly whines.
“What you doin’ home so quick, Son?” Seneca had been born a slave, and still spoke with the broad accent of a black man who’d never had a chance to get an education. “Reckoned you’d stay down at de saloon longer.”
“No.” Cincinnatus shook his head. “Can’t get away from bad news anywhere.” After so many years in Iowa, his own speech sounded half-Yankee, especially by comparison to what he heard around himself here. He laughed bitterly. And a whole fat lot of good not sounding ignorant was likely to do him!
“These is hard times,” Seneca said. “We gots to be like turtles an’ pull our heads into our shell an’ not come out till things is better.”
Most of the time, that would have been good advice. Cincinnatus was sure it had worked for his father many times before. But what were you supposed to do when those troubling you wanted to smash the turtle’s shell to get at the meat inside? What then? Cincinnatus had no answers, and feared no one else did, either.
Somewhere up ahead, a machine gun started chattering. Armstrong Grimes threw himself flat. Bullets cracked past overhead. Any time you could hear bullets cracking, they came too damn close.
Armstrong shared a stretch of brick wall near the southern outskirts of Salt Lake City with Yossel Reisen. “Don’t these Mormon maniacs ever give up?” he demanded-more of God, probably, than of the Congresswoman’s nephew.
God had nothing to say. Yossel did: “Doesn’t look like it. Long as they’ve got guns and people to shoot ’em, they’re going to keep fighting.”
“People.” Armstrong made it into a swear word. Yossel was too right. Some of the Mormons who carried rifles, pistols, and grenades were women. Some of the Mormons who crewed mortars and machine guns were women, too. From everything Armstrong had seen, they fought just as hard and just as well as their male counterparts. He didn’t know if that old saw about the female of the species’ being more deadly than the male was true, but in Utah she sure wasn’t any less deadly.
Mormon women usually fought to the death whenever they could. They had their reasons, most of them good. U.S. soldiers who captured women in arms were inclined to take a very basic revenge. That went against regulations. Officers lectured about how naughty it was. It went on happening anyway. Armstrong didn’t see how to stop it. If he caught some gal who was trying to kill him… It was more interesting than thinking about shooting a guy the size of a defensive tackle, that was for sure.
Down in the Confederate States, some of the black guerrillas were of the female persuasion. The bastards in butternut who caught them served them the same way. U.S. propaganda said that only went to show what a bunch of cruel and miserable bastards the Confederates were. Armstrong didn’t doubt the Confederates were cruel and miserable bastards; they’d come too close to killing him too many times for him to doubt it. But raping captives wasn’t one of the reasons he didn’t, not anymore. He understood the enemy in ways he hadn’t before.
That sparked a new thought. He turned to Yossel Reisen and said, “You ever get the idea we’re more like the assholes on the other side of the line who’re trying to kill us than we are like the fancy-pants fuckers back in Philly who give us orders?”
He realized he could have picked somebody better than the Jew to ask. Yossel’s aunt was one of those fancy-pants folks. If he’d wanted to, he almost certainly could have got out of being conscripted. That he hadn’t either spoke well for him or said he was a little bit nuts, depending.
But he nodded now. “Oh, hell, yes. I wonder how many guys in the War Department have ever had lice. Maybe a few in the last war, when they were lieutenants or something.”
“Not many, I bet,” Armstrong said. “People like that, they would’ve found cushy jobs back then, too.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised.” Reisen took a pack of cigarettes out of a tunic pocket, stuck one in his mouth, and offered the pack to Armstrong. Once they were both smoking, he went on, “Did I ever tell you my Uncle David only has one leg?”
There weren’t a whole lot of families in the USA that didn’t have a wounded or mutilated male relative. Armstrong said, “Maybe you did. I think so, but I’m not sure.”
“Aunt Flora could have kept him out of the Army if he’d wanted her to. Same with me,” Yossel said, his voice matter-of-fact. “But you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. Otherwise, how can you stand yourself?” After a moment, he added, “Did I ever tell you Uncle David’s a fire-breathing Democrat?”