“We ought to be able to do all kinds of shit,” the lieutenant said, and paused to light a cigarette. “We ought to still be up at Lake Erie. We ought to still be in Pittsburgh. Fuck, we ought to be in Philadelphia.” He looked at Dover. He did everything but blow smoke in Dover’s face. “And if you want to report me for defeatism, go right ahead…sir. It’s not like I give a good goddamn.”
“I’m not going to report you. I think you’re right.” Only later did Dover wonder if the other officer was trying to entrap him. No hard-faced men in gray trenchcoats swooped down on the tent where he slept during the wee small hours. No one hauled him away for bright lights and hard knocks and endless rounds of questions.
That didn’t keep him from almost getting killed. Just as the Confederates were trying to strengthen their defenses on the southern bank of the Ohio, so the damnyankees were building up north of the river. The first two summers of the war, the Confederates struck when and where they chose. This time, the United States enjoyed the initiative. What they would do with it remained to be seen.
One of the things they did with it was strike at the C.S. positions south of the Ohio from the air. Bombs blasted field fortifications. Fighters streaked low to shoot up anything that moved. Confederate airplanes were bound to be doing the same thing on the other side of the river, but that didn’t help Dover when a Yankee fighter strafed his Birmingham.
“Oh, shit!” the driver said when he saw the airplane in the rearview mirror. He jammed the gas pedal to the floor, which shoved Dover back in his seat. Then he did something his passenger thought smarter than hell, even if it almost put Dover through the windshield: he screeched the brakes, hoping to make the fighter overshoot.
It almost worked, too. Most of the U.S. fighter’s machine-gun bullets chewed up the asphalt in front of the Birmingham. Most-but not all. A.50-caliber slug almost blew off the driver’s head. Bone and blood and brains showered Jerry Dover. Two more bullets, or maybe three, slammed into the engine block. Flames and smoke spurted up from under the hood.
If the driver weren’t already stopping, the auto would have gone off the road at high speed, and probably rolled over and exploded. As things were, it limped onto the soft shoulder. Dover yanked open the door, jumped out, and ran like hell. He managed to get clear before the fire reached the gas tank. A soft whoomp! and the Birmingham was an inferno.
“Jesus!” Dover looked down at himself. He was as spattered with gore as if he were wounded himself. He could smell it. His stomach heaved, but he kept breakfast down.
Looking back at the pyre that marked his driver’s last resting place, he felt guilty about not getting the man out. The rational part of his mind said that was ridiculous-you couldn’t possibly live with nothing left of your head from the ears north. He felt guilty even so, maybe for living where the other man died.
Another Birmingham painted butternut stopped. The officer inside stared from the burning motorcar to Jerry Dover. “You hurt, pal? You need a lift?” he asked.
“I’m all right. I do need a lift,” Dover answered automatically. Then he said, “Christ, what I really need is a drink.” The officer held up a silvered flask. Dover ran for the other Birmingham.
Cincinnatus Driver rolled into Cincinnati, Ohio. His name didn’t have anything much to do with the town, even if he was born in Covington, Kentucky, right across the Ohio River. Negroes in the CSA had long been in the habit of giving their babies fancy names, either from the days of ancient Greece and Rome or, less often, from the Bible. When you didn’t have much but your name to call your own, you got as much out of it as you could.
Cincinnati looked like hell. The Confederates made a stand here before pulling back across the Ohio into Covington. As the USA taught the CSA in Pittsburgh, attacking a built-up area could be hellishly expensive. The bastards in butternut did their damnedest to make it so here.
Great flocks of metallically twittering starlings darkened the sky as they rose when Cincinnatus’ truck convoy rolled by. The war didn’t bother them much, except for the ones unlucky enough to stop bullets or bomb or shell fragments. Those made only a tiny, tiny fraction of the total.
Back when Cincinnatus’ father was a little boy, there were flocks of passenger pigeons instead. Cincinnatus had seen only a handful of those; they were in a steep decline when he was a boy around the turn of the century. They were all gone now, every one of them. Confederate artillery fire killed the last surviving specimen, a female in the Cincinnati zoo, early in the Great War.
By the same token, he remembered starlings arriving in the area not long after the war ended. Some crazy Englishman brought them to the USA in the 1890s, and they’d moved west ever since. He wondered if they filled up some of the hole in the scheme of things that was left when passenger pigeons disappeared.
And then he had more urgent things to wonder about, like whether he’d live long enough to deliver the shells he was carrying in the back of his truck. The Confederates on the far side of the river went right on lobbing their own shells into the ruins of Cincinnati, trying to make them even more ruinous.
Fountains of upflung dirt and smoke rose from not nearly far enough away. Cincinnatus kept on driving. Why not? He was just as likely to stop a fragment standing still as he was moving forward.
The trucks in the convoy stayed well separated from one another. If a shell blew one of them to hell and gone, even one carrying munitions, the blast wouldn’t take out the trucks in front of and behind it. Everybody hoped it wouldn’t, anyhow.
He pulled to a stop in front of the city jail. A lot more than one shell had fallen on that squat, ugly building. The Confederates must have made a stand there. That made sense-a place designed to keep unfriendly people in would also be pretty good at keeping unfriendly people out.
When Cincinnatus got down from the cab of his truck, he was laughing to beat the band. “What’s so funny?” asked one of the other drivers, a white man named Waldo something. “Way you’re going on, anybody would think you did a couple months in there.” He jerked a thumb toward the wreckage of the jail. A big grin took the sting from his words.
“You ain’t so far wrong,” Cincinnatus answered. “Damn Confederates jugged me across the river, over in Covington. But when they went an’ exchanged me, they stopped here an’ got some other guys out, too. So I ain’t sorry to see this place catch hell, not even a little bit.”
“Suits me,” Waldo said. “The more jails they blow up, the happier I am. I’ve done stretches in too goddamn many of ’em. Never any big shit, but I like to drink, and when I drink I like to fight, and so…” His face showed that he’d caught a few lefts and rights, or maybe more than a few, as well as dishing them out. He sounded proud of his escapades. A moment later, in fact, he went on, “I wonder if they got any saloons open in what’s left of this town.”
“You sure you want to find out?” Cincinnatus asked. “You got the government tellin’ you what to do, they can give you a lot more grief if you get in trouble than some city police can.”
Waldo thought it over. He nodded. “Makes sense. Thanks.” If he’d left it there, everything would have been fine. But then he added, “You’re pretty goddamn smart for a nigger, you know?”
The worst part was, he meant it for a compliment. “Thanks a bunch,” Cincinnatus said sourly.
A few more 105s came whistling in, but none of them burst close to where swarms of young soldiers unloaded the trucks. Watching them, Cincinnatus remembered how he’d done the same thing during the Great War. A lot of years had landed on his shoulders since, a lot of years and that encounter with the motorcar he didn’t see before it almost killed him. He still didn’t remember getting hit. He didn’t suppose he ever would.