He was glad he had a tent when it started to pour about eight that night. Rain bucketed down out of the sky. It wasn't a warm summer rain, either: not the kind you could go out in and enjoy. The nasty weather said the seasons were changing. It would turn everything but paved roads into soup, too. Morrell muttered to himself. Enough mud could bog down barrels. That would slow things here.
He did some more muttering a moment later. If it also rained like this in Virginia, it wouldn't do the building U.S. offensive any good. That wasn't his campaign, but he worried about it. He worried about it all the more because it wasn't his campaign. But all he could do was worry. The weather did as it pleased, not as he pleased.
He'd just stretched out on his cot when Confederate bombers came over Caldwell. The drumming rain drowned out the drone of their motors. The first he knew that they were around was a series of rending crashes off in the woods east of the little town. Frightened shouts came from nearby houses. Morrell almost laughed. Civilians got a lot more excited about bombing than soldiers did.
With those clouds overhead, the Confederates were bombing blind. Morrell didn't worry that they would actually hit Caldwell… until the bomb impacts started walking west from those first blasts. The lead bombers had missed their targets by a lot. But the ones behind them, trying to bomb from the same point as they had, released their bombs too soon, an error that grew as it went through the formation.
That sort of thing happened all the time. Here, though, it was bringing the bombs back toward where they should have fallen in the first place. Morrell had taken off his boots to get comfortable. He put them on again in a tearing hurry, not bothering to tie them. Then he bolted from his tent and ran for the closest shelter trench.
He splashed and squelched getting down into it. It filled rapidly with cursing crewmen from his remaining barrels. However much they cursed, they kept their heads down. A chunk of bomb could do as neat a job as a headsman's axe-but a messy one would leave you just as dead.
"Here they come," somebody said as bombs started falling inside Caldwell. The ground shook. Fragments hissed and screeched not nearly far enough overhead. As Morrell bent to tie those boots, he hoped the civilians had had the brains to go down into their basements.
One crash was especially loud, and followed by a flash of light. "Fuckin' lucky bastards," a soldier said. "If they didn't just blow a barrel to hell and gone, I'm a monkey's uncle." Ammunition cooking off inside the stricken machine proved him right.
Another, different-sounding, crash probably meant a bomb had come down on a house. Going to the basement wasn't likely to save the poor bastards who'd lived there. Morrell sighed a wet sigh. Nothing to be done about it-and it wasn't as if U.S. bombers weren't visiting the same kind of hell on Confederate civilians.
"Pay those stinking sons of bitches back for getting me all wet and muddy," a barrel man said. Civilian casualties worried him even less than Morrell. His own discomfort was another story.
The bombs stopped falling. Morrell stood up straight and looked out of the trench. The barrel that had taken a direct hit was still burning in spite of the rain. By that yellow, flickering light, Morrell saw that two or three houses had fallen in on themselves. They were trying to burn, too, but weren't having an easy time of it in the downpour.
"Come on," he said. "Let's see what we can do for the locals."
A civilian lay in the middle of one of the streets, suddenly and gruesomely dead. What had he been doing out there? Watching the bombs come down? Did he think it was sport? No one would ever know now.
Other people came staggering out of houses. Some of them were wounded. Some were simply in shock, and crying out their terror to whoever would listen, or maybe to the world at large. "My baby! My baby!" a woman shrieked. She was holding the baby, which was also shrieking.
A corpsman took the baby from her. After looking it over-carefully, because fragments could produce tiny but deadly wounds-he spoke in tones of purest New York City: "Lady, ain't nuttin' wrong wid dis kid but a wet diaper."
"But the poor thing is frightened half to death!" the woman said.
What the corpsman said after that was memorable, but had very little to do with medicine. The woman squawked indignantly. Irving Morrell filed away some of the choicer-the corpsman would have said chercer-phrases. When he found a moment, he'd aim them at Philadelphia.
When Scipio looked in his pay envelope, he thought the bookkeeper at the Huntsman's Lodge had made a mistake. That had happened before, two or three times. As far as he could tell, the bookkeeper always erred in the restaurant's favor. He took the envelope to Jerry Dover. "I hates to bother you, suh, but I's ten dollars light."
Dover shook his head. "Sorry, Xerxes, but you're not."
"What you mean?" For a second, Scipio thought the restaurant manager thought he'd pocketed the missing banknote before complaining. Then he realized something else was going on. "You mean it's one o' them-?"
"Contributions. That's right. Thought you might have seen the story in the Constitutionalist yesterday, or maybe heard about it on the wireless. It's on account of the bombing in the Terry."
"Lawd!" Scipio burst out. "One o' dem bombs almost kill me, an' now I gots to pay fo' it? Don't hardly seem fair." It seemed a lot worse than unfair, but saying even that much to a white man carried a certain risk.
Jerry Dover didn't get angry. He just shrugged. "If I don't short you and the rest of the colored help, my ass is in a sling," he said. If it came to a choice between saving his ass and the black men's, he'd choose his own. That wasn't a headline that would make the Augusta Constitutionalist.
Scipio sighed. Only too plainly, he wasn't going to get his ten dollars. He said, "Wish I seen de newspaper. Wish I heard de wireless. Wouldn't be such a surprise in dat case."
"How come you missed 'em?" Dover asked. "You're usually pretty well up on stuff." He didn't even add, for a nigger. Scipio had worked for him a long time now. He knew the colored man had a working brain.
"One o' them things," Scipio said with a shrug of his own. He'd missed buying a paper the day before. He hadn't listened to the wireless very much. He did wonder how he'd managed not to hear the newsboys shouting the headline and the waiters and cooks and dishwashers grousing about it. "Been livin' in my own little world, I reckon."
"Yeah, well, shit like that happens." Dover was willing to sound sympathetic as long as he didn't have to do anything about it.
Before Scipio could answer, a dishwasher came up to their boss. "Hey, Mr. Dover!" he said. "I got ten clams missin' outa my envelope here!"
"No, you don't, Ozymandias," the manager said, and went through the explanation again. Scipio knew a certain amount of relief that he hadn't been the only one not to get the word.
Ozymandias, a young man, didn't take it as well as Scipio had. He cussed and fumed till Scipio wondered whether Jerry Dover would fire him on the spot. Dover didn't. He just let the Negro run down and sent him out the door. Quite a few white men boasted about being good with niggers. Most of them were full of crap. Jerry Dover really was good with the help at the Huntsman's Lodge, though he didn't go around bragging about it.
Of course, Dover was good with people generally, whites as well as Negroes. We are people, dammit, Scipio thought. The Freedom Party had a different opinion.
Dover said, "You be careful on the way home, you hear? Don't want your missus and your young ones grieving on account of some bastard who's out prowling after curfew."
"I's always careful," Scipio said, and meant it. "But I thanks you fo' de thought."
He went out into the black, black night. Augusta had never been bombed, but remained blacked out. Scipio supposed that made sense. Better safe than sorry was a pretty good rule.
The weather was cooler and less muggy than it had been. As fall came on, the dreadful sticky heat of summer became only a memory. It wasn't cold enough to put all the mosquitoes to sleep for the winter, though. Scipio suspected he'd get home to his apartment with a new bite or two. He couldn't hear the mosquitoes buzzing any more unless they flew right past his ears. Those nasty whines had driven him crazy when he was younger. He didn't miss hearing them now-except that they would have warned him the flying pests were around.