Most of the hostages died as well as men could. Four or five wept and begged. It did them no good. Chester called, “Ready!…Aim!…Fire!” over and over again. Finally, the men in green-gray cut down the last bloody body.
“Bury your dead,” Captain Rhodes told the townsfolk. “And remember, chances are whoever made us do this is still right here with the rest of you. Some of you may even have a pretty good notion who he is. But he kept quiet, and you kept quiet, and this is what you get. You leave us alone, we won’t harm you. If you break the laws of war, you’ll pay. You have paid.”
The courthouse square stank of cordite and blood and shit. It stank of fear, too; Chester had smelled that smell too many times to have any doubts about what it was. For once, he didn’t smell his own fear.
He made sure he patted each man from the firing squad on the back. “You did good,” he told them. “That wasn’t easy, doing what you guys did. I’m proud of you.”
“Those fuckers had it coming,” said one of the men in green-gray. Several other soldiers nodded.
But another man said, “You’re right, Sarge-it wasn’t easy. They were just…people. They didn’t hurt anybody. I did this once, but I don’t think I ever want to do it again.”
“All right, Lewis. You won’t, then,” Martin promised. “Go off and smoke a cigarette. If you’ve got any booze, take a knock. I’ll look the other way. You earned it.”
“I don’t, Sarge,” Lewis said mournfully.
“Don’t worry about it, Frankie,” another soldier said. “I got a pretty good idea where you can get your hands on some.”
Chester turned his back so they wouldn’t see him smile. They were kids doing a man’s job. What about me? he wondered. I’m no kid any more. He was trying to do a man’s job, too, and it wasn’t any easier for him than it was for them.
Arifle on his shoulder, Jonathan Moss trudged along through the muggy hell that was summertime in Georgia. He turned to Nick Cantarella and remarked, “Up at 25,000 feet, where I’m supposed to be fighting, it’s cold enough for me to need fur and leather. Even up above this, it’s still that cold.”
“Yeah, well, that’s how the ball crumbles,” the infantry officer answered. “That’s the way the cookie bounces.”
Spartacus looked from one escaped U.S. POW to the other. “You damnyankee ofays, you fuckin’ crazy, you know dat?” the guerrilla leader said.
“Thanks,” Moss said, which wasn’t likely to convince Spartacus he was wrong. Cantarella chuckled. A couple of the blacks who were close enough to listen to the byplay tapped index fingers against their temples or spun them by their ears to show whom they agreed with.
The guerrillas held the countryside. It did them less good than Moss wished it would. With so many big farms growing one big crop-cotton or peanuts or tobacco-and with so many Negroes taken off the countryside after agriculture was forcibly mechanized, the rebels had a devil of a time feeding themselves. Some of their raids on towns came from no better reason than the need to steal enough food to keep from starving.
Towns were going hungry, too. Trains had cars that mounted machine guns and cannon. Trucks traveled in convoys with machine-gun-toting command cars. Guerrilla bands shot at them and planted explosives under roads and along railroad tracks anyway. Spartacus’ machine-gun-carrying pickup had done some nasty work driving alongside roads and shooting up trucks that stuck to them.
“What are we going to do next?” Moss asked Spartacus. Back in the USA, he wouldn’t have imagined ever taking orders from a black man. But Spartacus unquestionably led this band. A word from him to his followers and both Moss and Cantarella would die the next instant.
But all he said was, “Don’ know fo’ sho’. Wish to Jesus I did. Best thing I kin think of is to keep on movin’ east. Foraging do seem better over dat way.” He had a Tredegar slung over one shoulder-and a ham slung over the other.
“Not so many Mexicans over that way, neither,” Nick Cantarella said. Moss could follow Cantarella when he spoke. He could follow Spartacus when he spoke, too. Trying to follow one of them on the heels of the other sometimes made him feel he was shifting mental gears too fast for comfort.
“Not yet,” Spartacus said. “Dey hear we’s operatin’ in them parts, though, dey git over there pretty damn quick.”
“Maybe,” Moss said. “But maybe not, too. They aren’t what you’d call eager to mix it up with us.”
“Not their fight,” Cantarella said. “I was them, I wouldn’t want anything to do with a bunch of crazy-ass smokes.”
“Ofays hereabouts make them greasers fight,” Spartacus said. “Make ’em pretend to fight, anyways. How good they aim, how hard they push when they comes after us…Mebbe a different story.”
“Has been so far,” Moss said. Francisco Jose’s soldiers showed no more enthusiasm about being in Georgia than Moss would have shown in the Yucatan. And if peasants in the Yucatan tried to kill him when he came after them, he wouldn’t go after them very hard.
“Big worry is, they’re liable to find an officer with a wild hair up his ass,” Cantarella said. “They get a guy who makes his troops more afraid of him than they are of us, they can give us trouble.”
Before Moss or Spartacus could answer, the guerrillas’ point man waved. Everybody stopped. They were coming out of pine woods into more open, more cultivated country. Or maybe they weren’t coming out. “What’s up?” Spartacus asked in a penetrating whisper.
“Somethin’ don’t look right up ahead,” answered the point man, a small, scrawny, very black fellow named Apuleius.
“Don’t look right how?” Spartacus asked. “What you mean?”
Apuleius shrugged. “Dunno. Too quiet-like, maybe.”
“Reckon somebody’s layin’ for us out there?” Spartacus asked. The point man shrugged again. Spartacus frowned. “Can’t go back or stay here fo’ good,” he said. Nobody argued with him; that was self-evidently true. His frown got deeper. “We gonna have to smoke ’em out, then. I’ll go out, see what they do.”
An Army officer would have sent a private, or several privates, into the open to do the same job. Spartacus led by force of personality, not force of military law. He had to show the men who followed him that he was worth following. That meant exposing himself to danger instead of them.
Out of the woods he sauntered. He left his Tredegar and the ham behind; he might have been a happy-go-lucky Negro without a care in the world. He might have been…if Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party hadn’t made Negroes without a care in the world extinct.
Along with the rest of the band, Moss and Cantarella watched from the woods. Moss knew more than a little relief that Spartacus hadn’t told the two white men to scout what was up ahead. If Mexican soldiers lurked in the fields, their color might have done the trick. But their accents would have betrayed them to Confederates as soon as they opened their mouths.
For a moment, Moss thought Apuleius was flabbling about nothing. Spartacus strolled along, and nobody bothered him. Then a shout rang out, seemingly from nowhere. Like a chipmunk popping out of its hole, a gray-haired Confederate in a gray uniform stood up in what looked like a plain old field of peanuts. He pointed a rifle at Spartacus.
Three other white men appeared and went over to the Negro. One of them held out his hand. Spartacus produced papers. They were more or less genuine; the Negro whose picture was on them even looked something like the guerrilla leader. Spartacus pointed east down the road toward Perry, the closest town.
The whites put their heads together. After a minute or two, they waved for him to pass on. He sketched a salute and walked off in the direction toward which he’d pointed.
Back in the woods, the men he led scratched their heads. “What you reckon we should oughta do now?” one of them asked Nick Cantarella. He wasn’t Spartacus’ second-in-command in any formal sense. But the Negroes recognized that he had a professional’s sense of tactics.