“Well, I try.”
“Yeah.” Sloane scratched his head. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. They’ve already done more than I reckoned they could, so who knows what the fuck they’re liable to do next? Do you want to take chances?”
Before Dover could answer, air-raid sirens wailed. “We’re going to take chances whether we want to or not,” he said, and grabbed his helmet and ran for the closest trench. Sergeant Sloane was right behind him.
Antiaircraft guns around the depot thundered. Dover was glad he had steel between his skull and the chunks of shrapnel that would start falling out of the sky any second now. You were just as dead if your own side killed you as you were any other way.
Fighter-bombers streaked by low overhead, the U.S. eagle in front of crossed swords plainly visible. One trailed fire and smoke. It slammed into the ground and blew up. “That’ll learn ’em!” Sloane yelled.
But other explosions came from the depot not far away. Some were single, others multiple: bombs touching off more explosions on the ground. What Jerry Dover had to say scuttled several commandments. He’d arranged ordnance in small lots with thick earthen dikes between them. That minimized the damage, but didn’t, couldn’t, stop it.
The surviving U.S. airplanes came back for another pass at the depot and the trucks, this time with their cannons and machine guns. Dover said something even worse. He yanked his.45 out of its holster and fired several shots at the U.S. warplanes. That did no good, of course. He’d known it wouldn’t. “Goddamn useless thing,” he growled in disgust.
“Antiaircraft guns aren’t doing a hell of a lot better,” Stonewall Sloane said.
“Fuck them, too,” Dover said. The veteran noncom blinked, then laughed. Dover wasn’t laughing. He was furious. “We ought to have something that really will shoot airplanes down, dammit. All these things do is make noise.” The guns, at the moment, were making a godawful racket.
“Rockets, maybe?” Sergeant Sloane didn’t sound as if he took that seriously, even if he was the one proposing it.
But Dover said, “Why the hell not? They’ve got ’em for barrels. Why not airplanes? They’re a lot easier to wreck.”
“Harder to hit, though,” Sloane said.
“That’s for the guys with the high foreheads and the thick glasses,” Dover said. “I bet we’ve got people working on it. I bet the damnyankees do, too. If they figure it out first, that’s bad news.” He scrambled out of the trench and trotted toward the depot to do what he could to control the damage-and to see how much damage there was to control. Right now, he couldn’t find much good news for the CSA.
Cassius skirted Milledgeville, Georgia, the way he skirted every town he approached. Milledgeville was a fair-sized place, with maybe 5,000 people in it. It was laid out with the idea that it would become the state capital-and it did, till brawling, bumptious Atlanta displaced it after the War of Secession. A sign on the outskirts bragged that Milledgeville was where Georgia legislators voted to leave the Union. Cassius didn’t think that was anything to be proud of.
What would life be like in the United States? It probably wouldn’t be good; he didn’t suppose life for Negroes was good anywhere. But it couldn’t be like this. He was skinny and dirty. He smelled bad-the only chances he got to wash were in streams he walked past. He was hungry most of the time.
And, at that, he didn’t have it so bad. He wasn’t in a camp. He didn’t know what his family was going through, not exactly. Nobody knew exactly except the people who got carted away. The only thing people on the outside knew was that the ones who got carted away didn’t come back.
Most Negroes in the cities had been rounded up and taken away. It was harder out in the countryside. They were more scattered, harder to get into one place with barbed wire all around it. Guerrillas scared some whites out in the country to death. Others, though, weren’t so bad. Quite a few let you do odd jobs in exchange for food and a place to sleep and maybe a dollar or two.
Some of the farms had women running them, all the menfolk gone to war. Cassius learned it was harder to get a handout or even a hearing at those places than at the ones with white men on them. Women on their own commonly carried shotguns or rifles, and didn’t want to listen to a hard-luck story. “Get lost before I call the sheriff,” they would say-either that or, “Get lost before I shoot.”
But they didn’t call the sheriff. In spite of an Augusta passbook, Cassius hadn’t had any trouble going where he pleased. If he stole, that might have been a different story. Except for trifles-a few eggs here, some matches there-he didn’t. His parents had raised him the right way. He wouldn’t have put it like that, not after the way he knocked heads with his father, but that was what it amounted to.
He stayed in the pine woods after getting run off a farm west of Milledgeville. With summer coming soon, nights were mild. Mosquitoes tormented him, but they would have done that anywhere except behind screens. He didn’t worry about animals; bears and cougars were hunted into rarity. People, on the other hand…
He’d already seen Mexican soldiers on the march. He made sure they didn’t see him, ducking into a stand of trees once and hiding behind a haystack another time. Those yellowish khaki uniforms made him angry-what were they doing in his country? He wouldn’t have got nearly so upset about butternut or gray.
That was his gut reaction, anyhow. When he thought about it, he laughed at himself. As if the Confederate States were his country, or any Negro’s country! The idea was ridiculous. And native whites would have been rougher on him or anyone else his color than these foreigners were.
He chopped wood for a farmer later that day. The blisters he’d got the first time he did it were starting to turn to calluses. The farmer gave him ham and grits and a big mug of homebrew. Making your own beer was against the law in Georgia, but plenty of people both white and black turned criminal on that score.
“You work good,” the farmer said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice.
“Thank you, suh,” Cassius answered.
As others had before him, the white man asked, “Want to stick around?” He gave Cassius a shrewd look. “Sooner or later, you’re gonna run into trouble wandering around the countryside-or else trouble’s gonna run into you.”
Cassius only shrugged. Whatever happened to him out here couldn’t be worse than what had happened to his father and mother and sister in Augusta. “Sorry, suh, but I got to be movin’ on,” he said.
“Whatever you want.” The farmer shrugged, too, but Cassius didn’t like the glint in his eye. He left a little earlier than he would have otherwise, and headed south where he had been going west. As soon as he got out of sight of the farmhouse, he took the first westward track he found. Luck was with him, because he came up to another farm just as the sun was going down. He scouted the place from the edge of the woods, and didn’t see or hear any dogs. When it got really dark, he sneaked into the haystack, which gave him a much better bed than bare ground would have.
He hadn’t fallen asleep yet when gunfire split the night: several bursts from submachine guns, with single shots from a pistol in between them. He wondered what that was all about. No, actually he didn’t wonder-he feared he knew. Had that farmer called the local sheriff or militia commander or whoever was in charge of the people with guns and said, “There’s an uppity nigger southbound from my place. Reckon you ought to take care of him”?
Deputies or Mexicans must have picked on the first Negro they saw heading south on that road. That black wasn’t Cassius, but they didn’t know or care-especially after he started shooting back at them. Cassius felt bad about snaring the other colored man in his troubles, and hoped the fellow got away.
If they were after me, they would’ve snagged me, he thought, shivering as he burrowed deeper into the sweet-smelling hay. If I didn’t notice that damn ofay looking all sly…