Cassius paused to fiddle with the sling to his Tredegar. When he first got the rifle, he messed with it all the time, trying to make the nine-pound weight comfortable. Now, as often as not, he forgot he was carrying it. If the sling hadn’t found some way to twist, he wouldn’t have noticed it.
“When I was in the city, I reckoned country niggers lived in these little villages,” he said. “Y’all’d grow your own corn and raise chickens and pigs and like that. An’ I reckoned there’d be plenty o’ vittles.”
“Used to be like dat,” Gracchus said bitterly. “I was a sharecropper. Had me a pot belly-best believe I did.” He was skinny as a snake now, and at least as mean. “Freedom Party git in, they start makin’ all kinds o’ harvesters an’ combines an’ shit. Put all us niggers outa work, fucked them villages like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Got the factories set up so they could make barrels, too,” Cassius said.
“That’s a fact.” Gracchus eyed him. “You ain’t dumb, is you?”
“Me?” Cassius said in surprise. He always thought of himself as pretty dumb. He measured himself against his father-what young man doesn’t? His father, as far as he could tell, knew everything there was to know. He could even talk white, and do it better than most whites could. He’d tried to teach Cassius some of what he knew. Cassius could read and write and cipher. Past that, he hadn’t cared to learn. For the first time, he wondered if he’d made a mistake. It was too late, of course. Life didn’t hand you many second chances. If you were black in the CSA, life didn’t hand you many first chances.
“I ain’t talkin’ about Demosthenes over there,” Gracchus said. Demosthenes was larger than Cassius, stronger than Cassius, braver than Cassius. As far as Cassius could tell, Demosthenes feared nothing and nobody. He was hung like a horse, too. On the other hand, he was so dumb he had to remind himself out loud how to tie his shoes. Gracchus went on, “We need folks who’ll do whatever somebody tells ’em to do, an’ do it right now. Gots to have folks like dat, no two ways about it. But we gots to have people who kin think some, too.”
“Me?” Cassius said again.
“Reckon so,” Gracchus answered. “Next thing we gots to see is if folks jump when you tells ’em to. We fight the damn Mexicans again, you try it. See what happens. Things go good, got us a new officer.”
“Me?” Cassius knew he was starting to sound like a broken record. What he didn’t know was whether he wanted to be an officer. He didn’t like other people ordering him around. His father could speak volumes on that…if he was in a position to speak volumes on anything. Cassius didn’t see why other people would want him ordering them around, either.
But Gracchus had no doubts. From everything Cassius had seen, Gracchus hardly ever had doubts. That was one of the things that made him a leader. “You,” he said now, with a decisive nod. “If you kin do the job, you better step up an’ do it.”
That cut close to the bone. Francisco Jose’s Mexicans had made most unwilling soldiers when they first came to the CSA. Now they seemed to realize they weren’t going home any time soon, and that it was the black guerrillas’ fault. Just as blacks wanted revenge on whites, so the Mexican soldiers wanted revenge on blacks.
And if they didn’t, unconscripted Confederate whites did. The lame, the halt, the old, the very young…Some of them could take rifles out into the field and go after the rebels haunting Georgia. And even the ones who couldn’t served as sentries and guards and did all they could to make life difficult for raiding bands of Negroes-and to fire up the Mexicans so they fought harder, too.
All of which made this march through the central part of the state grim and hungry. Gracchus had scouts out before and behind, to the left and to the right. He knew the guerrillas were hunted, all right. So far, though, they kept slipping through the net.
And how much good does it do? Cassius wondered. He wished he hadn’t thought of the raiders as haunting the Georgia countryside. That made them too much like ghosts of what had been there before, what would never come back to life again. Whites in the towns were real. Everything out here…Well, so what? A lot of town dwellers had to see things that way, anyhow.
But without the countryside, where would the Confederates States get their cotton and peanuts and tobacco, their corn and rice and hogs? Thanks to the Freedom Party and the machinery, the countryside needed far fewer workers to produce its crops than it had ten years earlier. But it still needed some, and it still needed the machines. If farmers and farmworkers got shot, if combines got torched, how was the Confederacy supposed to bring in any kind of harvest at all?
Nobody challenged the guerrilla band as it tramped along a narrow blacktop road. Gracchus probably knew where the fighters were going, but Cassius had no idea. The countryside was a whole different world, and not one where he belonged. He knew every alleyway and corner of the Terry-and much good that ended up doing him. Now he had something new to learn. And he would…if he lived long enough.
Something buzzed overhead. For a second, Cassius thought it was a stupid country bug that didn’t come into cities. Then he saw other guerrillas pointing and heard them swearing. His eyes followed their upraised fingers. The biplane circling up there had been obsolete as a fighting machine since the mid-1920s, if not longer. But it did just fine spotting people who couldn’t shoot it down.
“Goddamn thing,” Gracchus snarled. “Bet your ass some fucker with a wireless set bringin’ sojers down on us.”
That struck Cassius as much too likely. But the biplane pilot had other things in mind, too. He dove on the guerrillas. “Scatter!” three blacks yelled at the same time.
The airplane mounted two machine guns set above the engine and firing through the prop. Cassius could see them winking on and off, on and off, as the pilot fired one short burst after another. Afterwards, he couldn’t have said why he didn’t run like most of the other men. It wasn’t lack of fear. With bullets from the guns cracking past and with others pinging and shrieking as they ricocheted off the paving, he would have been an idiot not to be afraid. Hadn’t Gracchus just called him a smart fellow?
Wounded men screamed to either side of the road. Cassius raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired two shots at the swooping biplane. He knew he wasn’t the only guerrilla shooting at it. But he was sure one of his shots caught the pilot in the chest. He had a good bead on the man, and saw him throw up his arms when he was hit. The biplane never pulled out of the dive, but slammed into the ground less than a hundred yards away.
“Do Jesus!” Cassius exclaimed through the crunching thud of the impact and the roar of the fireball that went up an instant later. “Do Jesus!” Machine-gun rounds in the burning wreck started cooking off, pop! pop! pop!, like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. A bullet snapped past Cassius’ head, as if the pilot were still fighting back from beyond the grave.
“You the one who nailed that ofay asshole?” Gracchus asked, coming out from between the rows of corn that grew to either side of the road.
“Reckon I am,” Cassius answered. Then he coughed. The breeze was blowing back from the downed airplane toward him. It was thick with the smells of burning fabric, burning fuel, hot metal-and charred flesh. He thought that odor would stay with him the rest of his life.
“How come you didn’t run and hide?” the guerrilla leader asked.
“Beats me,” Cassius said honestly. “Just didn’t think to, I guess.”
“Didn’t think to? Didn’t fuckin’ think to?” Gracchus came up and gave him an affectionate clout in the side of the head. “Hope you do some more not thinkin’ real soon now, you hear? You know what the ofays gonna do when they find out you shoot down their fancy airplane? They gonna shit, that’s what.” He clouted Cassius again, which the younger man could have done without. Cassius knew better than to say so.
He looked down at the asphalt around his feet. Bullet scars pockmarked it. The white man in that airplane had done his level best to kill him. One of the bullet marks lay right between his feet. He started to realize just how lucky he was. It didn’t make him feel proud or brave. No, it made him want to shiver instead.