“You might say so.” Cincinnatus stubbed out his cigarette and twisted his hands as if he were wringing a chicken’s neck-or a man’s. “Yeah, you just might say so.”
They got rolling again a few minutes later, carrying this, that, and the other thing down past Delphi to where the United States were building up for the attack on Chattanooga. Armored cars accompanied the column. So did a couple of half-tracks full of soldiers. The powers that be probably cared very little about the truck drivers’ safety. What they were hauling? That was another story. Here in Tennessee, the column needed all the protection it could get. The only land the United States really held here was land their men were standing on. Everything else belonged to the Confederates.
Even shot-up autos by the side of the road could be deadly dangerous. One of them blew up with an enormous roar as an armored car went by. The vehicle got two flat tires and a dent, but otherwise withstood the blast. Whoever set off the auto bomb would have done better to wait for a soft-skinned truck.
U.S. machine guns sprayed the woods, but that was a forlorn hope. They also fired at other roadside wrecks, which turned out to be a good idea. One burnt-out command car exploded while the closest U.S. vehicle was still a quarter of a mile away. Cincinnatus whooped when it did. “One of Featherston’s fuckers cussin’ his head off now!” he said jubilantly.
The jubilation didn’t last. It never did. Infiltrators or holdouts started shooting at the trucks. A deuce-and-a-half lurched off the road with a driver wounded or dead. Another coughed to a stop when it took a bullet through the engine block. A couple had tires flattened and had to change them. An armored car stayed behind with them to obstruct the snipers and to shoot at them if they broke cover. Along with most of the other drivers, Cincinnatus went on.
Night was falling when they got to the supply dump. Soldiers holding dim red flashlights guided them to the unloading point. More men waited there with wheelbarrows and dollies. Off in the distance, artillery rumbled.
“Come on, youse guys! Move it!” a familiar voice shouted. Cincinnatus swore under his breath. If that wasn’t Sergeant Cannizzaro, he was a blond. “Took youse long enough to get here!” the quartermaster sergeant complained.
Telling him where to go and how to get there was bound to be more trouble than it was worth. Cincinnatus just sat in the cab of his truck and wished he could have a cigarette. Signs all over the dump screamed NO SMOKING! at the top of their printed lungs.
“Here you go, Jack.” Somebody handed him a sandwich through the open window.
“Why, thank you kindly,” Cincinnatus said in glad surprise. He was even more surprised-and even gladder-when he bit into it. That thick slab of ham had never lived in a U.S. Army ration can. He didn’t know where the soldier came up with it, but it was mighty good.
He wished for a bottle of beer to go with it. No sooner had he wished than another soldier came along and gave him a bottle of…Dr. Hopper. Soda pop wasn’t the same, but it wasn’t bad, either. It had to be plunder, same as the ham. The taste reminded him he was back in the CSA. Dr. Hopper didn’t come over the border-at least, he’d never seen it up in Des Moines. He hoped they dropped a bomb on the factory that made the stuff…maybe after he’d got hold of a couple of cases for himself for old time’s sake.
Swearing soldiers unloaded his truck. He thought the cussing in this war was even worse than it had been the last time around. People then sometimes seemed faintly embarrassed at what came out of their mouths. Nowadays, men didn’t even notice they were turning the air blue. They swore as automatically as they breathed-and profanity seemed as necessary as air.
“Hey, Sergeant!” somebody called. “You got beds for us?”
“What? You ain’t goin’ back right away?” Cannizzaro sounded genuinely amazed.
A volley of curses-purposeful, not automatic-washed over him. Cincinnatus added his two cents’ worth to the barrage. The idea of crawling along in the dark with useless taped-up headlights, waiting for raiders he couldn’t see to open up, was less than appealing.
Sergeant Cannizzaro knew when he was outgunned. “Awright, already!” he said. “Stay here.” He might have been outgunned in the literal sense. Cincinnatus had traded in his.45 for a captured Confederate submachine gun. Other drivers carried Springfields or even C.S. automatic rifles-although U.S. infantrymen in the line grabbed most of those. “Like I said, ain’t got no beds,” Cannizzaro went on. “Youse can spread out bedrolls on the ground, or youse can sleep in your trucks. Ain’t nobody gonna give you no trouble till morning, honest to God.”
Cincinnatus slept under his truck. More men stayed in their cabs, but he couldn’t stretch out at full length in there. With his battered carcass, sleeping all scrunched up mostly meant not sleeping. A crumpled-up jacket made a good enough pillow. Cincinnatus’ battered bones creaked as he turned and twisted to get as comfortable as he could. All that wiggling might have kept him awake for-oh, an extra thirty seconds.
He came back to himself the next morning when somebody gave him a shake and said, “You fuckin’ die under there, Pop?”
“I was restin’,” Cincinnatus said with as much dignity as he could manage around a yawn.
“Yeah, well, you’ll be arrested if you don’t get your ass in gear,” the other soldier said, and he went off to torment somebody else.
Breakfast was scrambled eggs and more slices of that terrific ham. Wherever it came from, Cannizzaro and his merry men had a lot of it. “You ever see anybody skinny in the Quartermaster Corps?” Bruce Donovan asked.
“Yeah, well, what the hell?” Most of the time, Cincinnatus would have been as eager as the other driver to slander Sergeant Cannizzaro and his ilk. Since the guys at the supply dump were sharing their bounty this morning, he was willing to let them off easy.
He wasn’t jumping up and down at the idea of going back up north to get more supplies. Oh, the Army needed them-no doubt about it. But running the gauntlet again, even with armored escorts, didn’t thrill him.
That hardly crossed his mind before Donovan said, “To think I volunteered for this shit.” Cincinnatus couldn’t have put it better himself. Since he couldn’t, he finished his coffee and limped back to his truck.
The convoy hadn’t gone far before it had to stop. The Confederates must have sent bombers over in the night, and a couple of them had scored direct hits on the highway. The bombs must have been big ones, too-the craters were thirty or forty feet wide and at least half that deep. Nobody was going anywhere on that road, not for a while, especially since similar craters pocked the fields to either side.
Army engineers with bulldozers were busy repairing the damage. Soldiers in green-gray went through the bushes to clear out snipers so the engineers could work without harassing fire. That made Cincinnatus jealous, but the engineers weren’t even moving targets. They were sitting ducks.
More engineers were stretching lengths of steel matting-the kind used to make emergency airstrips-across the field to serve as a makeshift road while the real one was getting fixed. After about half an hour, the job was done well enough to suit them. They waved the lead truck forward.
Cincinnatus was glad he wasn’t driving lead. But where the deuce-and-a-half ahead of him went, he followed. The matting was a little higher than an ordinary curb would have been. His truck didn’t like climbing up onto the stuff, but it could. He bumped along, then jounced down, then climbed up onto another strip of matting. Skirting the bomb craters went slowly, but it went. And those soldiers out there beating the bushes were keeping him safe along with the engineers. He tipped his cap to them, though they couldn’t see him do it.
Everybody stepped on the gas once he got back onto the paved highway. Cincinnatus was happy to mash the pedal down to the floorboard. He knew he might be rushing toward danger, not away from it. All the same, he’d felt like a sitting duck himself back there. He was glad to get away.