"Do Jesus!" Scipio whispered, realizing just how lucky he'd been. The bomb might have been a harvester for people; the blast had cut them down in windrows. Men and women and bleeding chunks that had belonged to men and women lay everywhere. A policeman's head stared sightlessly at a black woman's arm. A disemboweled worker-still somehow wearing his cloth cap-tried to rearrange his guts till he slumped over, unconscious or dead. A man whose face was nothing but raw meat lay on his back and screamed agony to the uncaring sky.
The worst of all this was, Scipio knew what to do. He had been through the nightmare before. This wasn't the first motorcar bomb to hit Augusta-Negroes who hated the Freedom Party had struck before. Scipio began looking for people who'd been badly hurt but might live if someone stanched their bleeding in a hurry. He used whatever he could to do the job: socks, hankies, shirts, shoelace tourniquets.
He wasn't the only one, either. Passersby and the lucky few the bomb hadn't hurt badly did what they could to help the wounded. Scipio found himself bandaging a white policeman with a gaping hole in his calf. "Thank you kindly, uncle," the cop said through clenched teeth.
He meant well. That made the appellation sting more, not less. Even in his pain, all he saw was… a nigger. Scipio wanted to find some way to change his mind. If doing his best to save the white man's life couldn't turn the trick, he was damned if he knew what could.
Clanging bells announced ambulances and fire engines-a building across the street, by the scattered smoking fragments of the auto that had held the bomb, was burning. Scipio hadn't even noticed. He was intent on more urgent things close by him. He did hear the ambulance crews' exclamations of dismay. The men pitched in and helped. To give them their due, they didn't seem to care whether they aided whites or the far more numerous blacks.
"Here, Pop, scoot over-I'll take care of that," one of them said, elbowing Scipio aside. And he did, too, digging a jagged chunk of metal out of a man's back and bandaging the wound with practiced dispatch. Scipio minded pop much less than he'd minded uncle. The fellow from the ambulance could have called anyone no longer young pop regardless of his color, and Scipio's hair was gray heading toward white.
One of the ambulances had a radio. A blood-spattered driver was bawling into the microphone: "y'all got to send more people here, Freddy. This is a hell of a mess-worst damn thing I've seen since the end of the war… Yeah, whatever you can spare. I hope they catch the goddamn son of a bitch who done it. Hang the bastard by his balls, and it'd still be too good for him."
Scipio was inclined to agree with the driver. He would have bet his last dime that the man who planted the bomb was black. That didn't change his opinion. What did the bomber hope to accomplish? He'd killed at least twenty of his own kind, and wounded dozens more. He'd wrecked buses that were taking the Negroes to work that kept them out of camps. And the Freedom Party would probably land on the Terry with both feet after this. Would Jake Featherston's men squeeze another indemnity out of people who had very little to begin with? Or would stalwarts and guards simply fire up Augusta's whites and start a new pogrom? Oh, they had plenty of choices-all of them bad for Negroes.
More ambulances clattered up to the disaster. The fellow who'd pushed Scipio aside nudged him now. "Thanks for your help, Pop. You can go on about your business, I reckon. Looks like we're getting enough people to do the job."
"Yes, suh," Scipio said. "I stays if you wants me to."
The ambulance man shook his head. "That's all right." He looked Scipio up and down. "If you don't have a job you need to get to and a boss who's wondering where you're at, I'm a damnyankee. Go on, get going."
Till the man mentioned them, Scipio had forgotten about the Huntsman's Lodge and Jerry Dover. He surveyed himself. Except for the ruined trousers, he'd do. He didn't have much blood on his boiled shirt, and his jacket was black, so whatever he had on that didn't show.
He thought about going back to the flat to change trousers-thought about it and shook his head. He was already badly late. He supposed he could get another pair at the restaurant. Even if he couldn't, those ruined knees would silently show the rich white customers a little about what being a black in the Confederate States of America was like.
"You sure it's all right?" he asked the ambulance man. The fellow nodded impatiently. He made shooing motions. Scipio left. He discovered his own knees had got scraped when he hit the pavement. Walking hurt. But he was damned if he'd ask anybody to paint him with Merthiolate, not when there were so many people who were really injured.
Whites often stared at him when he walked to the Huntsman's Lodge. A black man in a tuxedo in a Confederate town had to get used to jokes about penguins. Today, the stares were different. Scipio knew why: he was a singularly disheveled penguin. People asked him if he'd got caught in the bombing. He nodded over and over, unsurprised; they must have heard the blast for miles around.
He'd just put his hand out to open the side door to the restaurant when another blast shook Augusta. The sound came from back in the Terry-from the very direction in which he'd just come. "Do Jesus!" he said again. In his mind's eye, he could imagine bombers setting timers in two motorcars parked not too far apart, not too close together. The first one would wreak havoc. Ambulances and fire engines would come rushing to repair the damage-and then the second bomb would go off and take out their crews. Scipio shivered. If he'd guessed right, someone had a really evil turn of mind.
Still shaking his head, he opened the door and went in. He almost ran into Jerry Dover, who'd come hurrying up to find out what the second blast was about. The restaurant manager gaped at him, then said, "Xerxes! You all right? When you didn't show up for so long, I was afraid the bomb-the first bomb, I mean-got you."
"I's all right, yes, suh," Scipio said. "Bomb damn near do get me." He explained how being behind the buses had shielded him from the worst of the blast, finishing, "I he'ps de wounded till de ambulances gits dere. Now-" He spread his hands. His palms were scraped and bloody, too.
"Huh? What do you mean?" Jerry Dover hadn't put the two explosions together. Scipio did some more explaining. Dover's mouth tightened. Now that Scipio had pointed it out to him, he saw it, too. He made a fist and banged it against the side of his leg. "Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch! That's… devilish, is what it is."
"Yes, suh," said Scipio, who would have had trouble coming up with a better word. "I don't know it's so, mind you, but I reckon dat what happen."
"I reckon you're right," Dover said. "You're damn lucky that ambulance man sent you away. If he'd asked you to stay instead…"
"Lawd!" That hadn't occurred to Scipio. But his boss was right. If the man had asked him to stay, he would have, without hesitation. And then that bomb would have caught him, too.
Jerry Dover clapped him on the shoulder. "You sure you're all right to work? You want to go home, I won't say boo. Hell, I'll pay you for the day. You went through a lot of shit there."
"Dat right kind of you, Mistuh Dover." Scipio meant it. His boss was actually treating him like a human being. The restaurant manager didn't have to do that. Few bosses with black workers bothered these days. Why should they, when the Freedom Party and the war gave them a license to be as nasty as they pleased? After a moment, Scipio went on, "All de same to you, though, I sooner stay here. I hopes they keeps me real busy, too. Busier I is, less I gots to think about what done happen."
"However you want. I ain't gonna argue with you," Dover said. "But you better rustle up another pair of pants from somewhere. The ones you got on don't cut it."