“All right. Now I get it. Color me dumb,” Moss said. “Yeah, we could build a machine-gun mount if we had ourselves a truck.”
“Bet your ass we could,” Cantarella said. “Couple-three of these smokes are better mechanics than half the guys you’d find in a motor pool. They’re used to working with scrap metal and junk, ’cause they couldn’t get anything else.”
“Let’s talk to Spartacus,” Moss said.
They put their case to the guerrilla leader. “Ain’t hard gettin’ us a truck, or as many as we need,” he said. “All we gots to do is steal ’em.” He took the prospect for granted. “Wish we had us mo’ machine guns. We could fit ’em out like they was tanks, damn near.” That was the old-fashioned British word for barrels.
Cantarella shook his head. “Well, no, not quite. The thing about barrels is, they’re armored. Somebody shoots up one of these trucks, it’s gonna be shot up, all right. Can’t get too gay with ’em, or you’ll be sorry quick. You hear what I’m sayin’?”
“I hear you,” Spartacus answered. “Makes sense. Still and all…Reckon we can git some o’ the ofays round these parts to shit their pants?” He grinned.
“Oh, I think we might. I think we just might,” Cantarella answered. “We ought to make the mount so we can take it off a truck in a hurry. Sometimes a truck will get shot up. Sometimes we’ll have to leave it behind ’cause we can’t hide it. Shame to have to build a whole new mount again if something like that happens, you know?”
“That makes sense, too,” Spartacus allowed. His grin got wider. “We’s gonna put trouble on wheels.”
“Hell, yes,” Cantarella said.
Three pickups walked with Jesus in Vienna that very night. The guerrilla band’s blacksmiths got to work on one the next morning. Spartacus stashed the other two in an abandoned Negro village a few miles outside of town. Jonathan Moss found places like that heartbreaking. How many of them were there, from one end of the CSA to the other? And what happened to the people who used to live in them? Nothing good-that was only too plain.
The colored blacksmiths got the idea about fitting a machine gun on a truck as soon as Cantarella started explaining. One of them-a man named Caligula-said, “Don’t need to give us no sermon on the mount, suh.” He sent the white man a sly smile.
Cantarella winced. Moss groaned. The Negroes broke up. Moss looked at them with new eyes from then on. Anyone who made puns that bad was-damn near had to be-a real live human being, and deserved to be slapped down just like anybody else.
And the mount the blacksmiths came up with was beautifully simple. They fastened a short length of upright iron pipe to the truck bed. If they lost the truck, they would lose it, too. Into it they stuck a longer pipe whose outer diameter matched the inner diameter of the bottom part of the mount. And on top of that they fixed the machine gun.
Jonathan Moss admired the result. “If you were going to make these as a regular thing, you couldn’t do any better,” he said. “Where did the pipe come from?”
“Reckon some plumber wonder where the pipe go, suh,” Caligula answered with another sidelong grin.
All the Negroes were eager to take their new toy out on the road, so eager that they almost came to blows. They all knew how to serve the machine gun. Only a handful of them, though, could drive. That was funny, in a frightening way. Spartacus sidled up to Moss and asked, “How you like to be our driver?”
How would I like that? Moss wondered. He was less useful to the guerrillas than Nick Cantarella, simply because he knew less about the infantryman’s trade. But he damn well could drive a truck. “Sure,” he said after no more than a second’s hesitation. “Put somebody who knows where he’s going in the cab with me, though. I didn’t grow up around here, so I don’t know all the little back roads that’ll get me out of trouble.”
“I go with you my ownself,” Spartacus said. “Reckon I knows this country tolerable good.” He let out a nasty chuckle. “Reckon we gonna give the ofays a little bit of a surprise, too. Yeah, jus’ a li’l bit.”
What will the Confederates do to me if they recapture me fighting alongside the black guerrillas? Moss decided he didn’t want to know, not in any detail. He also decided he couldn’t afford to be taken, not any more. “Let me have a pistol,” he said, and mimed shooting himself in the head.
“Oh, yes. We takes care o’ dat,” Spartacus promised, and he did. The.45 he handed Moss the next morning was an officer’s sidearm. It would do the job, all right.
Strategy was simplicity itself. About an hour after sunup, they set off up the road from Vienna, heading north toward the even smaller town of Pinehurst about ten miles away. Anything they passed, they shot up. The first auto they came up to was driven by a fat, gray-haired white man. He started to give Moss a friendly smile as the pickup truck passed his beat-up gray Birmingham. The smile changed to a look of horror when he saw Spartacus on the seat beside Moss. A moment later, a burst of machine-gun fire finished him and set his motorcar on fire.
Spartacus and the blacks in the back all whooped. “Do Jesus!” the guerrilla leader yelled. “This here gonna be fun!”
That white man wouldn’t think so. But then, if he was one of the yahoos who went around yelling, “Freedom!” he was helping the Confederate States’ government visit wholesale slaughter on their blacks. If he happened to get in the way of a little retail slaughter coming the other way-well, too damn bad.
A tractor sat in a cotton field not far from the side of the road. “Stop the truck!” Spartacus told Moss. He followed the black man’s order. Spartacus pointed out the window. “Put some holes in that fucker!” he yelled. The gun crew obeyed. The tractor sent a plume of black, greasy smoke up into the sky.
They wrecked two more tractors and a combine. Jonathan Moss nodded to himself. Those were the tools that let white farmers get along without black sharecroppers. They were handy, yes, but they were also expensive. How would those whites like watching them go up in flames?
The gunners sprayed an oncoming automobile with bullets. It went off the road, flipped over, and burned like a torch. “This is fun!” Spartacus shouted. Moss nodded. Destruction for the sake of destruction brought a nasty thrill with it, almost as if he were a staid married man visiting a whorehouse.
There was a checkpoint outside of Pinehurst: a sleepy one, manned by three or four Great War veterans too old or too infirm to do anything more strenuous. They were just going through the motions. They didn’t expect any trouble as the pickup truck drew near. Spartacus ducked down so they couldn’t see him next to Moss.
When the machine gunners in the back of the pickup opened fire, the guards toppled like tenpins. “Git!” Spartacus told Moss. “Go left, then left again soon as you can.”
The road up to Pinehurst was paved; the one onto which Spartacus put Moss was nothing but a dirt track. Red dust rose in choking clouds, for it hadn’t rained lately. “The dust will let them track us,” Moss said.
“So what?” Spartacus answered. “We be long gone by the time they catch up to us-an’ if we ain’t, they be sorry.” He probably wasn’t wrong about that. Pursuers-even riflemen-coming up against a machine gun would get a lethal surprise.
He sent Moss and the pickup bouncing along back roads and tracks nobody who hadn’t known these parts for years would have been able to follow. Moss’ teeth clicked together more than once. They weren’t necessarily good tracks. One of them had a hog wallow right in the middle. Spartacus pointed straight ahead. Moss gunned the engine and leaned on the horn. The machine gunners solved the problem a different way. As hogs scrambled out of the muck, the gunners shot them.
The truck sprayed stinking mud as it went through. “Stop!” Spartacus yelled when it got to the other side. Moss hit the brakes. The machine-gun crew hopped out and threw three carcasses into the back of the pickup. “We don’t just shoot up the ofays,” Spartacus said happily. “We eats good today, too.”