When you had to order something more than once, it was a sign people weren’t listening to you. Soldiers would screw if they got the chance. Who wouldn’t? And Confederate blacks were more likely to carry the clap and syphilis than whites. Who would have bothered treating them, back in the days before the war? Even up in Covington, Cincinnatus knew he might easily have got himself a dose if he hadn’t married young. Plenty of guys he knew had.
“What the hell are we going to do with this country once we get done stomping it flat?” Williamson asked, as if his fellow drivers had an answer that eluded the President of the United States and the Congress in Philadelphia. “Everybody white who stays alive’ll hate our guts. All that means is another war as soon as these assholes get back on their feet.”
“Sure worked that way last time around,” Cincinnatus said.
“Anybody sticks his head up and causes trouble, we got to kill him. Simple as that.” Donovan made it sound simple, anyhow.
“How does that make us any better than Jake Featherston?” Williamson asked.
“I’ll tell you how.” Cincinnatus did have an answer for that. “If you’re black here, you don’t gotta stick your head up. Freedom Party don’t care. They want to kill you any which way. Long as we leave folks who don’t cause trouble alone, we’re miles ahead of them bastards, miles and miles.”
Williamson grunted. “Well, you’re right about that.” He pulled out the pack of cigarettes again, looked at it, and shook his head. “Nah. This’ll keep. I want to grab some shuteye, is what I really want to do.”
“Yeah!” Cincinnatus and Donovan both sounded eager. Cincinnatus always sounded eager for sleep these days. He was working harder than he would have in civilian life, and he wasn’t as young as he had been once upon a time.
His back wouldn’t like sleeping on the floor wrapped in a blanket, with a rolled-up jacket doing duty for a pillow. The rest of him didn’t care at all. He sank into slumber like a submersible slipping below the surface of the sea, and he dove deep.
It was still dark when he woke. For a muzzy moment, he thought another thunderstorm was pummeling northern Georgia. Then he realized this was manmade thunder. Muzzle flashes flickered on the walls of the battered house where he slept. The artillery roared and roared and roared again.
“Gun bunnies are working overtime.” Hal Williamson sounded as drunk with sleep as Cincinnatus felt.
“Hope they blast the shit outa whatever they’re aimin’ at.” Cincinnatus waited for some comment from Donovan. All he heard was a snore. He would have thought this barrage loud enough to wake the dead. Evidently not. A few minutes later, he was asleep again himself. You could get used to damn near anything.
Were the fellow who shook him awake at sunup in the Army, he would have been a top sergeant. The man had a leg gone below the knee and was a couple of years older than Cincinnatus, so he was a civilian, too. But he sure as hell acted like a top kick. “Come on, you lazy bums!” he yelled. “You think the goddamn war’s gonna wait for you to get your beauty rest?”
“Have a heart, Ray,” Cincinnatus groaned-a forlorn hope if ever there was one. But hot coffee and real fried eggs resigned him to being conscious. What the ration cans called scrambled eggs weren’t worth eating, even if the ham that came with them wasn’t too bad.
“Where we going?” Williamson asked as he refilled his tin coffee mug.
“Southeast.” Also like a good top sergeant, Ray had all the answers. “Soon as we break out of these fucking chickenshit mountains, get out into the flat country, the Confederates can kiss their sorry ass good-bye. They can’t stop us now. Weather can sometimes, but they can’t. We get down into the flat country, they won’t even slow us down.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe he was wrong. It sounded good to Cincinnatus any which way. The latest depot was only a few hundred yards off. He drove his truck over to it. Soldiers filled the back with heavy wooden crates of artillery ammunition. He liked that. If they needed more shells farther forward, things were going the way they were supposed to.
He didn’t know exactly where the truck convoy was heading. All he had to know was that he was going the same way as the truck in front of him. He shook his head. No, one more thing: if they got bushwhacked, he knew he had to fight back. He had plenty of ammo for the piece on the seat beside him.
But the convoy got through. There’d been more bushwhacking farther north. Here, the Confederates still seemed startled to see Yankee invaders. Cincinnatus feared that wouldn’t last long. If the Confederates could raise hell behind U.S. lines in Kentucky and Tennessee, they could do it here, too.
The gun bunnies were happy to see them. Even though summer was gone and the day was cool, a lot of artillerymen stayed stripped to the waist. “Keep this shit coming, buddy!” said a blond kid with a skull-and-crossbones on his left upper arm. “We’ll blow the whole damn CSA to hell and gone.”
“Sounds good to me,” Cincinnatus answered.
“Yeah, I bet,” the youngster said. “If you could push a button and smash up the country, you’d do it like that, I bet.” He snapped his fingers.
“You was in my shoes, wouldn’t you?” Finding a white man who understood what a Negro might be feeling always surprised Cincinnatus.
Then the gun bunny winked at him. “Bet you can keep a secret,” he said. Cincinnatus made a noncommittal noise. The artilleryman went on, “One of my great-great-grandfathers was about the color you are. Maybe we’re cousins, way the hell down the line.”
“Maybe we are.” Cincinnatus kept his voice neutral as he asked, “So you’re passin’, then?” The fellow with the tattoo couldn’t have more than one-sixteenth Negro blood in him: less, probably, since Cincinnatus had some white blood in him. If the gun bunny hadn’t said he was part colored, Cincinnatus never would have guessed.
“Yeah, I’m passing. It’s easier. You’ve got to know that. None of my girlfriends ever knew-that’s for damn sure. And besides, if the government thought I was a nigger, they never would have let me join the Army. And you know what? I want to kick Jake Featherston’s ass just as much as you do.”
“More power to you, then,” Cincinnatus told him. Would the artilleryman’s kids, when he had them, ever find out they were part Negro? And would it be good or bad if they didn’t? Some of each, probably-most things worked out like that. After a moment, Cincinnatus added, “I got me a couple of half-Chinese grandbabies in Des Moines.”
“How about that? Country’s turning into a regular zoo.” The kid grinned. Cincinnatus grinned back. They reached out at the same time and shook hands.
Driving away from the front, Cincinnatus wondered how many people with a thin streak of Negro blood were passing for white in the CSA. As many as could get away with it; he was sure of that. Acting white instead of black made things easier and more convenient in the United States. Down here, it was a matter of life and death.
He rolled past a burnt-out Confederate barrel in a field. U.S. technicians were salvaging what they could from the machine. Four hastily dug graves lay nearby. Cincinnatus nodded to himself. Death wasn’t coming just to Negroes in the CSA. Whites were getting their share, too. “Good,” he muttered, and drove on.
Jake Featherston stared at the situation maps pinned to the wall of his underground office. He swore under his breath. Despite everything George Patton could do, the abscess in northwestern Georgia was bursting, and damnyankees were spreading all over the landscape. How the hell was the country supposed to hang on to Atlanta? How the hell was it supposed to go on with the war if it couldn’t?
He swore again. He knew the answer to that: uranium bombs. Somehow, the Confederacy had to stand the gaff till they were ready, and to hope like anything the USA didn’t get them first. “Got to hang in,” Featherston said softly. “Got to hang on. Got to.”