WELCOME TO BEAUFORT, a sign said. Jorge would have guessed the name was pronounced Bofort. What his guess was worth, he found out when a man with bushy white side whiskers called, "Welcome to Bew-fort, y'all! Where d'you go from here?"
Jorge hadn't the faintest idea. Somebody-probably an officer-called, "Where's your train station?"
"Mile outside o' town," the old-timer said, pointing west. "We like our peace and quiet, we do. Ain't but one train a day anyways."
"Jesus H. Christ!" the officer exploded. "This is as bad as it would've been before the War of Secession!"
"No, sir." The white-whiskered man shook his head. "We had the hurricane back in '40, and the really bad one back in '93, an' we came through both o' them. And besides, we was full o' niggers in the old days. Ain't hardly got no more coons around now, though. Don't hardly miss 'em, neither. More room for the rest of us, by God."
Odds were the Negroes had done most of the hard work. Sailors had to jump down from the Dixie Princess and grab the mooring lines that bound her to the pier. Gangplanks thudded onto the rickety planking.
"Disembark! Form up in column of fours!" an officer shouted. "We will proceed to the railroad station and board transportation for Virginia!"
"Well, now we know what we're doing, anyway," Gabe Medwick said.
"Sн." Jorge nodded. "But one train a day? How big a train is it gonna be? How long we gonna have to wait?" He looked up at the sky, which was sunny and blue. "We ain't that far from Savannah, even now. What if a damnyankee airplane sees us? They come and drop bombs on our heads, that's what."
"Better not happen, that's all I've got to say." Medwick shivered at the idea, though the day felt more like spring than winter.
Down the gangplanks went the soldiers. As corporals, Jorge and Gabe tried to gather their squads together, but they didn't have much luck. The soldiers had got too mixed up in the desperate boarding in Savannah. "Hell with it," Sergeant Blackledge said-he was trying to gather a whole section, and having no more success than the squad leaders. "We'll sort things out when we get wherever the hell we're going."
They marched through Beaufort. Though it wasn't at all far from Savannah, the war might have forgotten all about it. Only some small, shabby houses with broken windows and with doors standing open spoke of the blacks who'd lived here till not long before.
Old men and those too badly maimed to fight-and a few women, too-crewed fishing and oystering boats. Truck gardens grew all around the town. Women and kids and the old and injured tended them, too.
At the station, the railroad agent stared at the long butternut column in unabashed horror. "What in God's name am I supposed to do with y'all?" he said.
"Get on the telegraph. Get trains down here, dammit," an officer answered. "We got out of Savannah. They want us up in Virginia. Fuck me if we're gonna walk."
"Well, I'll try," the agent said doubtfully.
"You better." The officer-he was, Jorge saw, a colonel, with three stars on each side of his collar-didn't even bother disguising the threat.
The agent clicked away on the telegraph. A few minutes later, an answer came back. "They'll be here in two-three hours," he reported.
Jorge would have bet that the time promised would stretch, and it did. The trains didn't get there till midafternoon. He had enough food in his pockets and pouches to keep from getting hungry before then, but he wondered if anybody would feed the soldiers on the way north. He wondered how bad the fighting would be, too. He'd served in Virginia before coming down to Tennessee. Wherever things get tough, that's where they send me. He was surprised at how little he resented that. It wasn't as if he were the only one in the same boat.
On the train, his two stripes won him a seat, even if it was hard and cramped. What with all the men standing in the aisles, he counted himself lucky. No matter how uncomfortable he was, he didn't stay awake long.
His eyes opened again when the train rolled through the town of St. Matthews. Except for a good many women wearing widow's weeds, the place seemed as untouched by the war as Beaufort. Jorge wasn't used to landscapes that hadn't been torn to bits. A town with all its buildings intact, without barricades and foxholes and trenches, seemed unnatural.
"It does, doesn't it?" Gabe Medwick said when he remarked on that. "It's like the place isn't important enough to blow up, almost."
Jorge hadn't looked at it quite like that, which didn't make Gabe wrong. He turned to ask one of the soldiers in the aisle what he thought, only to discover that the man was sound asleep standing up, much deeper under than Jorge had been on the Dixie Princess. How exhausted did you have to be to lose yourself so completely while you were upright?
After that, the train passed into North Carolina. There was a sign by the tracks that said so. The license plates on the autos went from white with blue letters and numbers to orange with black. Other than that, he couldn't see any difference. If the Confederate States had a safe haven, he was rolling through it.
Somebody at the front of the car dished out ration tins from a crate. They weren't good, but they were better than nothing. Drinks were bottles of Dr. Hopper, warm and fizzy. Jorge belched enormously.
Virginia was another sign at the border, and motorcar license plates with yellow characters on a dark green background. It was also, before long, the cratered, shattered, bombed-out landscape Jorge had grown used to. He nodded to himself. He knew what he'd be doing here.
R and R. Armstrong Grimes had gone out of the line in hostile country before. Did the people in Utah hate U.S. soldiers even more than the people here in Georgia did? He wouldn't have been surprised. But the locals here had nastier weapons with which to make their lack of affection known.
That meant Camp Freedom-the name had to be chosen with malice aforethought-had maybe the most extensive perimeter Armstrong had ever seen. Foxholes and barbed-wire emplacements and machine-gun nests and entrenchments gobbled up the fields for a couple of miles around the camp on all sides.
"Shit on toast," Squidface said as Armstrong's weary platoon made its way through the maze of outworks. "What all's inside here, the fucking United States mint?"
"They don't have soldiers, the bad guys go and take the mint away," Armstrong said.
"Well, yeah, Sarge, sure." Squidface spoke in calm, reasonable tones. "But they care about money, and they mostly don't care about us."
Armstrong grunted. It wasn't as if the PFC were wrong. Soldiers got the shitty end of the stick every day of the week, and twice on Sundays. If the other side didn't screw you, the assholes in green-gray who stayed safe behind the line would. The only people he trusted these days were smelly, dirty men in ragged uniforms that said they actually did some fighting. They knew what was what, unlike the jerks who campaigned with typewriters and telephones.
He didn't love MPs, either, not even a little bit. One of the snowdrops-he wore a white helmet and faggy white gloves-pointed and said, "Delousing station and showers are over that way. Where's your officer, anyway?"
"In the hospital." Armstrong jabbed a thumb at his own chest. "This is my outfit now."
The MP sniffed. A platoon with a sergeant in command couldn't be anything much, his attitude said. Somebody from the back of the platoon said, "Boy, Featherston's fuckers'd send him to Graves Registration in nothing flat."
"Who said that, goddammit?" the MP shouted. "I'll kick the crap out of you, whoever you are."
"Don't worry, Sergeant. I'll deal with him," Armstrong promised. All right, so the snowdrop wasn't yellow. But he didn't realize combat troops wouldn't fight fair. They'd ruin him or kill him, and then laugh about it. Getting away in a hurry was the best plan.