“Merle!” By her tone, Edna Grimes would make Dad pay for that, no matter how true it was.
“Oh, come on, Edna. I was joking,” he said. At the same time, though, he tipped Armstrong a wink. He wasn’t joking a bit, but he didn’t feel like fighting with his wife. He looked at the bandages on Armstrong’s leg. “How did it happen?”
“We were pushing north toward Winnipeg. The Canucks had a strongpoint in a farmhouse,” Armstrong answered. “I was one of the guys moving up, and the damn machine gun got me. Bad luck, that’s all, like I said before.” He paused. “How did you get wounded, Dad?” He’d never felt able to ask before. Now they both belonged to the same fraternity. He’d had himself a.30-caliber initiation.
“It was a trench raid,” Merle Grimes answered without the slightest hesitation. “We used to pull them all the time, to grab a few prisoners and see what the guys on the other side were up to. The front didn’t move then the way it does nowadays. We got in, we threw some grenades around, we caught some Confederates, and we were on our way back when some son of a bitch-excuse me, Edna-nailed me from behind. Stinky Morris and Herm Cassin got me back to our side of the line, and it was off to an aid station after that. It hurt like a…Well, it hurt like anything.”
“Yeah. I found out about that. For the first little bit, it was just like somebody knocked me down. But not for long.” Armstrong shook his head. “No, not for long.” He didn’t want to remember that, so he asked, “How are things back in D.C.?”
“Well, we aren’t occupied,” his mother said. “It was bad when the Confederates took the town last time around, and it was really bad when the USA took it back. I wasn’t much older than you are now when that happened. But in between there was a long stretch that was pretty quiet, when the front was too far north to let guns reach us. Bombers weren’t so much back then.”
“They are now,” his father said. “The Confederates still come over us two or three nights a week. We’re not far from their fields, so they can really load up. We go to the cellars when the sirens start howling, and we hope for the best. You can’t do much else. It’s almost like being in the line, except you don’t get to shoot back yourself.”
“I guess.” Armstrong had no idea what civilian life in wartime was like. He’d been a conscript when the shooting started. “You have enough to eat and everything?”
“That’s better than it was the last time around,” his mother said.
“I was in the service the last time around, so I can’t compare,” his father said, “but it’s not too bad. Not much meat-there’s this horrible chopped ham that comes in cans.” He and Armstrong’s mother both made faces. He went on, “What we get mostly isn’t exciting, and a lot of the fruits and vegetables are canned, too. But nobody’s going hungry. Your rations sound like they’re better than what we ate in the trenches. Boy, I never wanted to see another bean after I got out.”
“We always bitch about what we get,” Armstrong said.
His father laughed. “King David’s soldiers probably did the same thing.”
“Yeah, probably,” Armstrong said. “But the biggest thing I don’t like is that you get bored. There aren’t that many different kinds of rations, and some guys won’t like some of them, so that cuts it down more. You’re always happy when you can scrounge some chickens or a pig. Once in Utah, we ate a goat.”
His mother made a disgusted noise. His father just sounded interested as he asked, “How was it?”
“Better than I expected,” Armstrong answered. “Kinda tough and kinda gamy, but we had this Polack in the squad-Eyechart, we called him, ’cause his name looked really weird with all those s’s and z’s and w’s-who stewed it and stewed it, and it ended up so it was better than rations, anyway.”
“Sounds like he had some practice in the old country,” his father said.
“Him or his folks-I think he was born here,” Armstrong said. “But the coffee’s lousy and the cigarettes are worse. That’s the, uh, dirty end of the stick.”
Merle Grimes chuckled at the just-in-time censorship. Then he said, “Close your eyes.” Armstrong did. When his father said he could open them, he found himself looking at three packs of Raleighs. “These are for you.”
“Wow, Dad! Thanks!” Armstrong knew he would have to share them with his wardmates. He didn’t care. They were wonderful anyhow. “Where’d you get ’em?”
“A friend of mine has a son who captured a Confederate truck crammed full of them,” his father answered.
“Wow,” Armstrong said again. Short of nabbing Jake Featherston, he couldn’t think of anything better. “That guy should’ve won the Medal of Honor.” He hadn’t thought a visit from his parents could turn out so well. A truckload of Raleighs! That was almost better to think about than Susan.
Nothing official ever came of Cincinnatus Driver’s run-in with Sergeant Cannizzaro. He hadn’t thought it would. Technically, he was a civilian, so they couldn’t even court-martial him. The most they could do was take away his gun and ship him home. That would have pissed him off, but it wouldn’t have broken his heart. He knew he had a better chance of living to a ripe old age in Des Moines than he did hauling supplies through the CSA.
But there were more kinds of results than official ones. The way he handled himself when the Confederates hit the supply column and the way he stood up to the jerk of a U.S. quartermaster sergeant won him respect from his fellow drivers.
“You’re all right, you know?” Hal Williamson sounded half surprised when he said it as they dug into ration cans somewhere in central Tennessee. “Never had much to do with colored fellows before. Ain’t a whole lot of ’em in Manchester, New Hampshire. You kinda believe what folks say. But like I said, you’re all right. You’re just-a guy.”
“What did you expect?” Cincinnatus paused to light a Raleigh. The Confederate from whom he’d taken the pack wouldn’t be smoking again, unless he smoked down in hell. “I ain’t got horns. I ain’t got a tail.” He was thinking about hell, all right.
“Not what I meant.” Williamson cast about for a way to say what he did mean. He was about Cincinnatus’ age, with steel-rimmed bifocals and with three fingers gone from his left hand. He gestured with that mutilated hand to make his point. “I didn’t figure you people’d have the balls to do some of the things you done.”
“Niggers’re like any other folks.” Cincinnatus used the word on purpose. He could use it, though he would have slugged Williamson had he heard it from the white man’s lips. “Some’s smart, some’s dumb. Some’s brave, some’s cowards. Some’s good-lookin’, some’s mullions.” Hal Williamson blinked at that bit of black slang, but he followed it. Cincinnatus went on, “Maybe I got balls, maybe I don’t. But even if I do, that don’t say nothin’ about what niggers’re like. It only goes to show what I’m like. You see what I mean?”
“Maybe.” Williamson lit a cigarette of his own. “It’s like sayin’ all Jews are cheap or all Mexicans’ll pull a knife on you if you look at ’em sideways.”
He probably knew even less about Mexicans than he did about Negroes. There might be a Negro or two in Manchester, but Cincinnatus would have bet there were no Mexicans. Still, he got the point. “That’s what I’m sayin’,” Cincinnatus told him. “Biggest difference between black folks and white folks is, you’re white and we’re black. Next biggest difference is, you been on top. If we was on top, you bet we’d treat you just as shitty as you treated us.”
Williamson blinked again behind those glasses. Cincinnatus chuckled silently; the idea that Negroes could be on top plainly had never occurred to the other driver. “Son of a bitch,” Williamson said after a moment, and then, “Well, I bet you would. It’s…What do you call it? Human nature, that’s what.”
“Reckon so,” Cincinnatus said. “Tell you some more human nature: I ever get my hands on Jake Featherston…Do Jesus!”
“Yeah,” the white man said. “But for me it’s on account of he jumped my country. It’s personal for you, ain’t it?”