Not everybody was so lucky. The guerrillas were doing what they could for their wounded. What they could do was pitifully little. They could bandage. They could suture-crudely. They could put alcohol or iodine on injuries. If they were desperate enough, they could put ether on a rag and go after a bullet with stolen forceps. Past that…no. Was there a black doctor, a black surgeon, anywhere in the CSA? Cassius didn’t think so. Oh, maybe in New Orleans. People went on and on about what Negroes in New Orleans were supposed to be able to do.
Were there any Negroes, surgeons or otherwise, in New Orleans these days? Or had they all gone to the camps like the rest of Cassius’ family? If they had, would any of them ever come out again?
Cassius feared he knew the answer. He knew it, but he didn’t want to think about it. Thinking about it would have meant thinking about his mother and father and sister.
“We gots to get outa here,” Gracchus said. “Even if that fucker wasn’t on the wireless-an’ he was bound to be, damn him-they gonna come see how come their airplane done crashed.”
“Ambush ’em?” Cassius asked.
Gracchus blinked. He thought. At last, reluctantly, he shook his head. “Don’t reckon we could pull free an’ disappear fast enough afterwards,” he said. “They be on our trail like bloodhounds.” Had he ever read Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Cassius had, though the novel remained banned in the CSA sixty years after the slaves were-allegedly-manumitted. But he didn’t think Gracchus could read at all.
He couldn’t very well argue with the guerrilla leader about the risks. Since he couldn’t, he made himself nod instead. “Whatever you say.”
To a commander, that was always the right answer. Because it was, Gracchus condescended to explain: “This ain’t the Army. I lose my men, I can’t pick up no telephone an’ git mo’. I gots to find ’em, same way I found you. Sometimes I gots to learn ’em to fight, way I learned you. Don’t want to lose ’em. Happens, but I don’t want it to. Want the ofays an’ the Mexicans to lose their bastards instead.”
He’d learned war in a sternly practical school. Cassius knew he himself remained a beginner, even if he was a beginner who’d just luckily aced an important test. He nodded and gave back the magic words once more: “Whatever you say.”
“I say we gets outa here,” Gracchus declared. And they did. If Cassius wished for what might have been…this wasn’t the first time, nor the most urgent. He hurried away with the rest.
Every time Jonathan Moss read in captured papers about U.S. advances deeper into Tennessee, he wanted to head north. When he and Nick Cantarella escaped from Andersonville, he never imagined men in green-gray could penetrate the Confederacy the way the USA’s soldiers were. Jake Featherston’s butternut-clad troops were pushing into western Pennsylvania then, and it hadn’t been clear whether anything or anybody could stop them.
No matter what Moss wanted to do now, his desires ran up against reality in the shape of Spartacus. “Tennessee line still a hell of a long ways from here,” the guerrilla leader said. “Got to git around Atlanta some kinda way if we heads up there. That ain’t country I know.”
“Could you pass us on to an outfit that operates north of you?” Moss asked. “You know, like the Underground Railroad in the old days?”
Spartacus only shook his grizzled head. “Yankee sojers come down here, fine. Till then, I needs you an’ Nick too much to turn loose of you.”
And that was that. The two white men might slip away on their own, but what could they do next? They would be all alone in a country that hated them, all alone in a country where their accents gave them away whenever they opened their mouths. Could they get up to Chattanooga on their own? It seemed unlikely. The only hope for help they had came from other bands of black guerrillas. And would some other band’s chieftain be any more willing to let them go than Spartacus was? One more unlikelihood.
And if Moss and Cantarella got caught trying to slip away, they would forfeit Spartacus’ trust. That wouldn’t be good. That would be about as bad as it could get, in fact. So they didn’t go north. They went east with the guerrillas instead.
They moved mostly by night. More and more often, Confederate authorities-or maybe it was just the locals on their own-put up a barnstormer’s review of antique airplanes during the day to keep an eye out for guerrilla bands. Moss watched the two-deckers from the cover of pine woods with a fierce and terrible longing.
“You could fly one of those fuckers, couldn’t you?” Nick Cantarella asked one day, first making sure no blacks were in earshot.
“In my sleep,” Moss answered at once. “I flew worse junk than that in the Great War-not a lot worse, some of the time, but worse.”
Cantarella looked around again and dropped his voice even lower. “You think we could steal one?”
“You’re reading my mind-you know that?” Moss spoke hardly above a whisper. “I only see one hitch.”
“Yeah? Walking up to the damn thing, hopping in, and flying off?”
Moss paused. “Well, two hitches,” he said sheepishly.
“What’s the other one?”
“From here, we need a full tank of gas to get up to the U.S. line. We run low, we can’t stop at the local Esso station and tank up.”
“Not hardly.” The younger man laughed. Then he sobered again. “So how do we know how much gas is in the son of a bitch we take?”
“I fire up the engine and look at what the fuel gauge says,” Moss answered. “No matter what it says, though, I’ve got to take off after that. This isn’t one of those deals where you can try again if you don’t like what you see.”
“Suits me,” Cantarella said. “Suits me fine. Far as I can tell, we’ve done our duty by these people and then some. Time to do our duty for the US of A, too. And you know what else?”
“Tell me,” Moss urged.
“We got one great big thing going for us when we waltz up to that airplane.” Cantarella waited till Moss made a questioning noise. Then he said, “We’re white. They won’t be looking for ofays”-he grinned when he used the word-“to up and steal a flying machine, not in a month of Sundays they won’t.”
Moss didn’t need to think about that very long before he nodded. “Well, you’re right. Too bad we won’t be able to see the looks on their faces after we take off.”
It sounded so good, so easy, so inevitable, that they overlooked something: they weren’t anywhere near an airstrip. They didn’t come anywhere near one for quite a while, either. Their sole relationship with airplanes was hiding from them.
After a few days, Moss told Cantarella, “You ought to suggest to Spartacus that we go hit an airport so they can’t spy on us so well.”
“I ought to?” The Army officer pointed at him. “What about you?”
“No.” Moss shook his head. “If it comes from you, it’s strategy. He’s used to that. If it comes from me, it’s The pilot wants to get his hands on an airplane. And he’d be right, ’cause I do. Better the other way.”
Whiskers rasped under Cantarella’s fingers as he scratched his chin. “Yeah, that makes sense. I’ll do it,” he said at last. “Don’t know whether he’ll listen to me, but it’s a pretty good shot.”
“A lot depends on how well they guard their airstrips,” Moss said. “If they’re locked up tight, Spartacus won’t want anything to do with them, and how do you blame him? But if he knows one where the locals are asleep at the switch…”
If there was an airstrip like that, Spartacus would know about it. The grapevine worked. Not all Negroes had disappeared from Confederate society-just most of them. There were still cooks and maids and janitors. They heard things. They knew things. And what they heard, what they knew, they managed to pass to guerrilla leaders like Spartacus.