“Thank you, Jesus!” she said, and squeezed him tight despite her swollen belly.
Cassius was proud of his new boots. They fit him perfectly, and the Mexican soldier who’d worn them before didn’t need them any more. Somebody-Napoleon?-said an army marched on its stomach. Food mattered, all right, but so did your feet. The shoes in which Cassius got out of Augusta were falling apart, so he was glad to get such fine replacements.
“Lucky bastard,” Gracchus said. His feet were very large and very wide. Cassius’ were of ordinary size, like the rest of him. He’d never thought of that as luck before, but maybe it was.
“We’ll get you some, boss,” he said-as much of a title as the guerrilla leader would take.
“Have to slit ’em,” Gracchus said morosely. The shoes he wore now were slit on either side, to make room for his uncooperative feet. What that lacked in style, it more than made up for in comfort. Gracchus eyed Cassius thoughtfully. “You know how to drive?”
“Wish I did.” Cassius shook his head. “Folks never had an auto or nothin’, though. How come?”
“Want to steal me a pickup truck from somewheres, mount a machine gun in the back,” Gracchus said. “Some of the other bands been doin’ it, I hear tell. Raise all kinds of hell that way. Ain’t as good as havin’ our own barrel, but it’s about as good as a bunch o’ niggers can hope for.”
About as good as a bunch o’ niggers can hope for: eleven words that spoke volumes about how things were in the Confederate States of America. Crouched in pine woods, hoping the whites and Mexicans wouldn’t put airplanes overhead to hunt for the band and hoping the trees would screen the fires and guerrillas if they did, Cassius had his own worm’s-eye view of what those words meant.
He also had his own reasons for wanting to hit back at the Freedom Party and everyone who stood with it: everyone in the CSA who wasn’t black, or as close as made no difference. “Don’t know how to drive,” he said, “but you bet I do me some fancy shootin’ if you put me in the back o’ that truck.”
Gracchus chuckled. “Every nigger in the band I talk about this with say the same thing. A couple o’ the gals, they say they give me what you ain’t even got if only I put ’em back dere.”
Cassius hadn’t dared approach the handful of women who marched and fought along with Gracchus’ men. They were tougher than he was, and he knew it. The word intimidated probably would have sprung to his father’s mind. It didn’t occur to Cassius; he just knew that those gals scared hell out of him.
“Where you gonna get a pickup?” If he thought about the truck, he didn’t have to think about the women.
“Off a farm, I reckon,” Gracchus answered. “Damn ofays mostly keepin’ ’em locked up tight nowadays, though. They know what we kin do if we git our hands on one.”
Locks didn’t usually stop Gracchus when he set his mind on whatever lay behind them. His scouts didn’t need long to find a farm with a pickup truck that would do. The farm had a telephone line so the whites there could call for help if guerrillas attacked them. Gracchus only smiled when he noted that. Among the tools his irregulars carried were several wire cutters.
“Dey kin call all dey please,” he said. “It don’t go through, ain’t that a shame?”
The guerrillas grinned, white teeth shining from dark faces. Despite those grins, they spent a couple of days sizing up the farm before they made their move. If the whites brought in riflemen or a machine gun of their own under cover of night, they could give raiders a wicked surprise. Gracchus couldn’t afford to get surprised that way.
After the telephone line was cut, he pitched a rock through a farmhouse window to get the attention of the people inside. When curses said somebody was awake in there, he shouted, “Throw out the keys to your truck an’ we goes away. We don’t hurt nobody. We jus’ takes the truck an’ goes.”
“Over my dead body!” the man inside yelled. In a lower voice, he went on, “Sal, call the militia!”
“Can’t get the operator!” Sal said in despairing tones.
“Las’ chance, ofay!” Gracchus shouted. “We kin hot-wire the truck if we gotta, but we gonna have to shoot you to make sure you don’t start shootin’ your ownself when we takes it away.”
A rifle shot split the night. The bullet didn’t miss Gracchus by much, but it missed. The guerrillas knew what to do. Some of them started banging away to make the people inside keep their heads down. Others, Cassius among them, ran toward the farmhouse. He wished he had a helmet to go with his boots. But a helmet wouldn’t stop a rifle round, either.
The defenders had several firearms. If they raised enough of a ruckus, someone at a nearby farm might telephone the authorities or go out to get help. The guerrillas had to win quickly, take the truck, with luck kill the whites, and disappear before superior force arrived.
“I’ll shift them fuckers,” a Negro called. “Break me a window an’ see if I don’t.”
Cassius was close enough to a window to smash it with the butt of his Tredegar. Had one of the farm family waited on the other side of the glass, he would have caught a bullet or a shotgun blast with his teeth. That crossed his mind only later. He did know enough to get away fast once the stock hit the window.
A few seconds later, a Featherston Fizz sailed in through the opening he’d made. He heard it shatter on the floor inside. That would spread blazing gasoline in a nice, big puddle. “Burn, you goddamn ofays!” he yelled. “Burn in your house, an’ burn in hell!”
Flames lit that room from the inside. They showed a white man standing in the doorway to see if he could do anything about the fire. Cassius snapped a shot at him. He wasn’t the only guerrilla who fired at the white man, either. The fellow went down, either hit or smart enough not to offer a target like that again.
Another Featherston Fizz flew into the farmhouse. Cassius liked the idea of roasting whites with a weapon named for the founder of the Freedom Party. He’d run into a phrase in a book one time-hoist with your own petard. He didn’t know what a petard was (though his father likely would have), but he got the sense of it anyhow. Those Fizzes were petarding the devil out of the family in there.
They stayed in the burning building as long as they could. They stayed a lot longer than Cassius would have wanted to. Then they all charged out the back door at once, shooting as they came. Had they made it to the woods, they might have escaped. But they didn’t. In the light of the fire behind them, they made easy targets. An old man in a nightshirt killed a woman with him before he went down. Another woman, hardly more than a girl, blew off her own head with a shotgun.
They had to fear what the Negroes would have done with them-to them-had they taken them alive. And they had reason to fear that. Revenge came in all kinds of flavors. If you could get some with your dungarees around your ankles…well, why not? It was nothing whites hadn’t done to blacks through the centuries of slavery. Cassius’ own mother couldn’t have been above half Negro by blood. He himself was lighter than a lot of guerrillas in Gracchus’ band. He wasn’t light enough to pass for white, though-not even close. In the CSA, that was as black as you had to be to get reckoned a Negro, as black as you had to be these days to get shipped off to a camp and have your population reduced.
“Let’s get outa here!” Gracchus shouted. “The ofays, they see the fire fo’ sure.”
“We oughta stay, shoot the bastards when they come,” somebody said.
“You dumb fuckin’ nigger, you reckon dey think a fire in the middle o’ the night go an’ happen all by itself?” Gracchus said scornfully. “They don’ jus’ bring the fire engines. They bring the armored cars an’ the machine guns, too-bet your ass they do. I say get movin’, I mean get movin’!”
No one argued any more. Cassius did ask, “We got us the pickup?”