"Keepin' tabs on me?"
"Damn straight I was," Bliss replied. "You deserve it. But things are all over now. The United States won, and if we kill enough Confederates to keep the rest quiet we'll do all right."
He waited. Cincinnatus laughed again. "What? You reckon I'm gonna argue with you? We better kill a lot of them bastards. Otherwise, they'll be killin' us too damn soon."
"Well, we agree about something, anyway," Luther Bliss said. "I hope to God I never see you again. You gave me too much to worry about-more than Lucullus, even. He was smarter than you, but I always knew where he stood. With you, I had to wonder."
"You son of a bitch," Cincinnatus said. "You kept me in jail for two years. Wasn't for that Darrow ofay, you never woulda let me out."
"I still say I was doing the USA a favor by keeping you in." Nothing would ever make Bliss back up or admit he might have been wrong, either.
The two men warily sidled past each other. Cincinnatus went on toward the barbecue shack. He didn't trust Bliss' word about anything-he had to see with his own eyes. But the secret policeman wasn't lying here. The place Lucullus had taken over from his father sat quiet and deserted. Oh, the building still stood, but piles of dead leaves and broken windows said no one had come here for a long time. Even the wonderful smell that had always wafted from the shack was gone. You could gain weight just from that smell. No more, dammit. Nothing in Covington would ever be the same.
Sighing, Cincinnatus walked on to the house his father and mother had shared till she passed away. He'd lived there himself, getting over his accident, helping to take care of her as she slid deeper into senility, and then simply trapped in Covington. The house was still standing, too. Cincinnatus supposed his father still owned it. Even with a shell hole in the front yard and a little shrapnel damage, it was bound to be worth something.
Who would want to buy a house in the colored district, though? How many Negroes would want to live here, even with Covington passed back to the USA? How many Negroes were left to live in Covington and all the other towns that had flown the Stars and Bars? Not enough. Nowhere close to enough. Would whites eventually settle in this part of town, too? Or would they tear everything down and try to pretend Negroes had never been a part of life south of the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio?
Cincinnatus couldn't know which, but he sure knew which way he'd bet.
Sore and sad, he walked on through the almost-deserted quarter instead of heading back to the bus stop and the train ride on to his family. His feet knew where he was going better than his head did. Before long, he found himself in front of the Brass Monkey. He'd drowned a lot of sorrows in that bar while he was stuck here.
He almost jumped out of his shoes when a voice floated out through the door: "C'mon in! We're open!"
"Do Jesus!" Cincinnatus walked inside. There was no electricity, so his eyes needed a little while to adjust to the dimness. A black man sat at the bar, nursing a whiskey. Another one stood behind it, fanning himself. It was the same bartender who'd been there before. "Didn't reckon I'd see you alive," Cincinnatus remarked.
"I could say the same thing about you," the man answered. "When the police done took you away, I reckoned you was dead meat."
"I was on a list," Cincinnatus said.
"Figured you was. That's why they took you away."
"No, a different kind o' list. They went an' exchanged me an' my pa fo' a couple of Confederates who got stuck up in the USA."
"Lucky," the bartender observed.
"Yeah, I reckon," Cincinnatus said. "How'd you get by?"
"Me? I was lucky a different kind o' way." The bartender fanned harder and didn't go on.
The black man at the bar said, "Cambyses, he done the butternut bastards enough favors, they didn't take him off to no camp."
"Shut your mouth!" the bartender squawked indignantly.
"Shit, don't make no difference now," the other man said. "Me, I done the same damn thing. I ain't what you call real proud o' myself, but I ain't dead, neither, an' a hell of a lot o' folks is."
Cincinnatus had been about to buy himself a drink-he could have used one. Instead, he turned around and walked out. Had those two Negroes survived by ratting on their fellows? He'd always wondered about Cambyses, and he seemed to have been right to wonder. Had they bought their lives at too high a price?
They wouldn't say so. As for Cincinnatus, he was mostly surprised the Confederates had let them live. Maybe the whites just hadn't had time to kill them before Covington fell. How many Negroes down here had made the same Devil's bargain to survive? He was heading back to Des Moines, back to the USA. He thanked God he wouldn't have to find out.
W ith a wheeze that said it might not get much farther, the train stopped at the little station in Baroyeca. Jorge Rodriguez wore his butternut uniform, shorn of his stripes and all Confederate insignia. It was all the clothing he had. He'd been living on the ration cans the Yankees gave him when they let him out of the POW camp. If he never ate anything that came from a tin can again, he wouldn't be sorry. He was even sick of the famous deviled ham. Enough was enough, and then some.
Jorge was the only one who got off at Baroyeca. There on the platform stood his mother, his brother Pedro, and his sister Susana and two of her little children. Jorge hugged everybody and kissed everybody and slapped Pedro on the back. His older brother had been a POW much longer than he had.
"Do you know when Miguel is getting home?" Jorge asked.
Their other brother had been captured, too, and wounded as well. Pedro shook his head. "I haven't heard anything. One of these days, that's all."
"Soon, God, please." Their mother crossed herself.
When Jorge saw the alcalde's house, he saw the Stars and Stripes flying above it. "Even here!" he said in dismay.
"Even here," Pedro agreed. "We lost. You can get into big trouble if you show the Confederate flag. All we can do is what the Yankees tell us-for now."
He sounded as if he was ready to pick up the fight again if he ever saw the chance. Jorge wasn't so sure. He'd seen a lot more war than his brother had-enough to satisfy him for a long, long time, if not forever. As long as you could live your life, how much difference did it really make which flag flew over the alcalde's house?
There was Freedom Party headquarters, where his father spent so much time. It stood empty, deserted. "What happened to Seсor Quinn?" Jorge asked.
"He went off to war himself, when things got hard and they started calling in older men," his mother answered. "After that, nobody here knows. He hasn't come back-I know that."
"Maybe he will," Jorge said. Who could guess how long all the Confederate soldiers would need to come home, especially if they lived in out-of-the-way places like Baroyeca? Maybe Robert Quinn lay in a U.S. hospital. Maybe he was still in a camp. As the war ran down and surrender finally came, the Yankees took prisoners by the tens, maybe by the hundreds, of thousands.
"Let's go home," his mother said. Actually, what she said was Vamos a casa. She mixed English and Spanish indiscriminately. Most people her age did. Jorge and Pedro smiled at each other. They'd used more English even when they lived here. Since going into the Army, the only time Jorge had spoken any Spanish was when he ran into another soldier from Sonora or Chihuahua. Even then, he and the other man would mostly speak English so their buddies from the rest of the CSA wouldn't tab them for a couple of dumb greasers.
Home was a three-mile walk. Jorge carried his little nephew part of the way. After a sixty-pound pack and a rifle on his back, Juanito didn't seem to weigh much. It was hot, but Jorge was used to heat. The air was dry, anyhow; he wouldn't have to wring himself out when he got to the farmhouse.