Wounded men screamed to either side of the road. Cassius raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired two shots at the swooping biplane. He knew he wasn’t the only guerrilla shooting at it. But he was sure one of his shots caught the pilot in the chest. He had a good bead on the man, and saw him throw up his arms when he was hit. The biplane never pulled out of the dive, but slammed into the ground less than a hundred yards away.
“Do Jesus!” Cassius exclaimed through the crunching thud of the impact and the roar of the fireball that went up an instant later. “Do Jesus!” Machine-gun rounds in the burning wreck started cooking off, pop! pop! pop!, like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. A bullet snapped past Cassius’ head, as if the pilot were still fighting back from beyond the grave.
“You the one who nailed that ofay asshole?” Gracchus asked, coming out from between the rows of corn that grew to either side of the road.
“Reckon I am,” Cassius answered. Then he coughed. The breeze was blowing back from the downed airplane toward him. It was thick with the smells of burning fabric, burning fuel, hot metal-and charred flesh. He thought that odor would stay with him the rest of his life.
“How come you didn’t run and hide?” the guerrilla leader asked.
“Beats me,” Cassius said honestly. “Just didn’t think to, I guess.”
“Didn’t think to? Didn’t fuckin’ think to?” Gracchus came up and gave him an affectionate clout in the side of the head. “Hope you do some more not thinkin’ real soon now, you hear? You know what the ofays gonna do when they find out you shoot down their fancy airplane? They gonna shit, that’s what.” He clouted Cassius again, which the younger man could have done without. Cassius knew better than to say so.
He looked down at the asphalt around his feet. Bullet scars pockmarked it. The white man in that airplane had done his level best to kill him. One of the bullet marks lay right between his feet. He started to realize just how lucky he was. It didn’t make him feel proud or brave. No, it made him want to shiver instead.
Not everybody was so lucky. The guerrillas were doing what they could for their wounded. What they could do was pitifully little. They could bandage. They could suture-crudely. They could put alcohol or iodine on injuries. If they were desperate enough, they could put ether on a rag and go after a bullet with stolen forceps. Past that…no. Was there a black doctor, a black surgeon, anywhere in the CSA? Cassius didn’t think so. Oh, maybe in New Orleans. People went on and on about what Negroes in New Orleans were supposed to be able to do.
Were there any Negroes, surgeons or otherwise, in New Orleans these days? Or had they all gone to the camps like the rest of Cassius’ family? If they had, would any of them ever come out again?
Cassius feared he knew the answer. He knew it, but he didn’t want to think about it. Thinking about it would have meant thinking about his mother and father and sister.
“We gots to get outa here,” Gracchus said. “Even if that fucker wasn’t on the wireless-an’ he was bound to be, damn him-they gonna come see how come their airplane done crashed.”
“Ambush ’em?” Cassius asked.
Gracchus blinked. He thought. At last, reluctantly, he shook his head. “Don’t reckon we could pull free an’ disappear fast enough afterwards,” he said. “They be on our trail like bloodhounds.” Had he ever read Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Cassius had, though the novel remained banned in the CSA sixty years after the slaves were-allegedly-manumitted. But he didn’t think Gracchus could read at all.
He couldn’t very well argue with the guerrilla leader about the risks. Since he couldn’t, he made himself nod instead. “Whatever you say.”
To a commander, that was always the right answer. Because it was, Gracchus condescended to explain: “This ain’t the Army. I lose my men, I can’t pick up no telephone an’ git mo’. I gots to find ’em, same way I found you. Sometimes I gots to learn ’em to fight, way I learned you. Don’t want to lose ’em. Happens, but I don’t want it to. Want the ofays an’ the Mexicans to lose their bastards instead.”
He’d learned war in a sternly practical school. Cassius knew he himself remained a beginner, even if he was a beginner who’d just luckily aced an important test. He nodded and gave back the magic words once more: “Whatever you say.”
“I say we gets outa here,” Gracchus declared. And they did. If Cassius wished for what might have been…this wasn’t the first time, nor the most urgent. He hurried away with the rest.
Every time Jonathan Moss read in captured papers about U.S. advances deeper into Tennessee, he wanted to head north. When he and Nick Cantarella escaped from Andersonville, he never imagined men in green-gray could penetrate the Confederacy the way the USA’s soldiers were. Jake Featherston’s butternut-clad troops were pushing into western Pennsylvania then, and it hadn’t been clear whether anything or anybody could stop them.
No matter what Moss wanted to do now, his desires ran up against reality in the shape of Spartacus. “Tennessee line still a hell of a long ways from here,” the guerrilla leader said. “Got to git around Atlanta some kinda way if we heads up there. That ain’t country I know.”
“Could you pass us on to an outfit that operates north of you?” Moss asked. “You know, like the Underground Railroad in the old days?”
Spartacus only shook his grizzled head. “Yankee sojers come down here, fine. Till then, I needs you an’ Nick too much to turn loose of you.”
And that was that. The two white men might slip away on their own, but what could they do next? They would be all alone in a country that hated them, all alone in a country where their accents gave them away whenever they opened their mouths. Could they get up to Chattanooga on their own? It seemed unlikely. The only hope for help they had came from other bands of black guerrillas. And would some other band’s chieftain be any more willing to let them go than Spartacus was? One more unlikelihood.
And if Moss and Cantarella got caught trying to slip away, they would forfeit Spartacus’ trust. That wouldn’t be good. That would be about as bad as it could get, in fact. So they didn’t go north. They went east with the guerrillas instead.
They moved mostly by night. More and more often, Confederate authorities-or maybe it was just the locals on their own-put up a barnstormer’s review of antique airplanes during the day to keep an eye out for guerrilla bands. Moss watched the two-deckers from the cover of pine woods with a fierce and terrible longing.
“You could fly one of those fuckers, couldn’t you?” Nick Cantarella asked one day, first making sure no blacks were in earshot.
“In my sleep,” Moss answered at once. “I flew worse junk than that in the Great War-not a lot worse, some of the time, but worse.”
Cantarella looked around again and dropped his voice even lower. “You think we could steal one?”
“You’re reading my mind-you know that?” Moss spoke hardly above a whisper. “I only see one hitch.”
“Yeah? Walking up to the damn thing, hopping in, and flying off?”
Moss paused. “Well, two hitches,” he said sheepishly.
“What’s the other one?”
“From here, we need a full tank of gas to get up to the U.S. line. We run low, we can’t stop at the local Esso station and tank up.”
“Not hardly.” The younger man laughed. Then he sobered again. “So how do we know how much gas is in the son of a bitch we take?”
“I fire up the engine and look at what the fuel gauge says,” Moss answered. “No matter what it says, though, I’ve got to take off after that. This isn’t one of those deals where you can try again if you don’t like what you see.”
“Suits me,” Cantarella said. “Suits me fine. Far as I can tell, we’ve done our duty by these people and then some. Time to do our duty for the US of A, too. And you know what else?”