Soldiers with dollies filled the back of the truck with crates of God knew what. Ammunition, he guessed by the way the truck settled on its springs. “Go get ’em, Pop!” one of the young white men yelled to him. Cincinnatus grinned and waved. He was plenty old enough to be that kid’s father. And Pop didn’t burn his ears the way Uncle would have. The soldier would have said the same thing to a white man Cincinnatus’ age. In the CSA, Uncle was what whites called a Negro too old to get stuck with boy.
The truck convoy rumbled south, toward the river. With so much weight in the rear, Cincinnatus’ deuce-and-a-half rode a lot smoother than it did empty. He drove past gun pits where gun bunnies stripped to the waist worked like men possessed to throw more shells at the Confederates. Some of the U.S. soldiers were already lobster-red from too much sun. Cincinnatus glanced at his own brown arm. There weren’t many things white men had to worry about that he didn’t, but sunburn was one of them.
Every so often, incoming shells burst. Think what you would about the men who followed Jake Featherston, but they had no quit in them. Wherever they could hit back, they did.
“This way! This way!” A sergeant with wigwag flags directed the trucks toward slab-sided boats plainly made to cross rivers no matter what the unpleasant people on the other bank had to say about it. Cincinnatus rolled into one.
“All the way forward!” a sailor told him. “We hold two trucks, by God.” Cincinnatus rolled up till his front bumper kissed the landing craft’s rear wall. The sailor rewarded him with a circle from his thumb and forefinger. Cincinnatus waved and nodded, as he had with the young soldier who loaded the truck. He knew how the man in blue meant the gesture. Whether the sailor did or not, though, Cincinnatus also happened to know that to Germans (many of whom had crossed from Cincinnati to Covington in the easygoing days before the Great War) a very similar hand sign meant you were an asshole.
Another truck followed his into the ungainly boat. It didn’t quite have to bump his machine to let the boat’s crew raise the ramp and dog it shut. “Do I leave my motor on?” Cincinnatus called to the closest sailor.
“Bet your butt, buddy,” the man answered. “You’re gonna wanna hit the ground running, right?”
Cincinnatus didn’t say no. He wished he were someplace where the Confederates couldn’t shoot at him or shell him or drop bombs on his head. Why didn’t you stay in Des Moines, then? he asked himself. A little-no, much-too late to worry about that now. And he knew why he didn’t stay there: he owed the CSA too much. But understanding that and liking it when he headed into danger were two different things.
On land, the landing craft ran well enough to get down into the river. On the Ohio, it ran well enough to cross. On the other side, it got up onto the bank. It didn’t do any of those things very well. That it could do all of them, even if badly, made it a valuable machine. The wall against which Cincinnatus’ truck nestled also proved to be a ramp. It thudded down. He put the truck in gear and rolled off. The other truck in the landing craft followed him.
A corporal pointed at him, and then at some other trucks. “Follow them!” the man yelled. Cincinnatus nodded to show he understood. He wasn’t sure those other trucks came from his unit. That wasn’t his worry, not right now. Somebody’d told him what to do. He just had to do it.
He began to wonder if they’d caught the Confederates flatfooted. There wasn’t a lot of incoming enemy fire. He didn’t miss it, and he hoped that what there was kept missing him. Whenever he could, he glanced east, toward Covington. He could see…exactly nothing. He hoped the police and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards hadn’t shipped all the Negroes in town off to camps farther south. He hoped Lucullus Wood and the other black Reds were finding ways to give the Confederates a hard time, even from behind barbed wire. All he could do was hope. He couldn’t know.
The convoy stopped by a battery of 105s. Soldiers swarmed aboard his truck and unloaded it with locustlike intensity. He waited to see if they would start swearing, the way they might if, say, he carried crates full of machine-gun belts. When they didn’t, he decided the corporal had sent him to the right place after all.
“Where do I go now?” he asked when the truck was empty. “Back across the river to load up again?”
“No, by God.” A U.S. soldier pointed south and west. “We just took a Confederate supply depot. I mean to tell you, the guy who was running it must’ve been a fucking genius. Everything from pencils to pecans to power tools. Ammunition out the ass, too.”
“That don’t do us much good,” Cincinnatus said. “They don’t use the same calibers as we do.”
“Yeah, but we got a lotta guys carrying their automatic rifles. Damn things are great, long as you can keep ’em in bullets,” the soldier said. “We got enough of their ammo at this here dump to keep a lot of our guys going for a long time.”
Cincinnatus liked the way that sounded. When he got to the depot, he decided the soldier who’d sent him there was right: the quartermaster who’d set it up was a genius. If he was still alive, he was bound to be gnashing his teeth that everything he’d labored to gather now lay in U.S. hands. The Confederates hadn’t even got the chance to blow up the ammunition.
This time, Cincinnatus could see what went into the back of his truck. RATIONS, CANNED, the crates said. No doubt U.S. authorities would use them to feed soldiers in green-gray. And no doubt the soldiers in green-gray would grumble when they got them. U.S. canned goods were better than their C.S. equivalents. But Confederate rations were ever so much better than no rations at all.
Confederate prisoners marched glumly up the road toward the Ohio. The U.S. troops in green-gray who herded them along got them off the highway and onto the shoulder to keep them from slowing down the southbound trucks. Some of the men in butternut stared at Cincinnatus’ dark face in the cab of his truck. He sent them a cheery wave and went on driving. So they didn’t think Negroes were good for anything, did they? Well, he hoped he gave them a surprise.
The U.S. soldiers who unloaded the truck didn’t seem so happy. “We’ve got our own canned goods, dammit,” one of them said. “We don’t want this Confederate shit.” His pals nodded.
“Don’t blame me, friends,” Cincinnatus said. “I just brung what they told me to bring.”
“Why didn’t they tell you to bring us a shitload of Confederate cigarettes?” the soldier said. “That woulda been worth somethin’.”
“Fuck it,” said another young man in green-gray. “We’re heading down into tobacco country. We’ll get our own smokes before long.”
“Yeah!” Two or three U.S. soldiers liked the sound of that. So did Cincinnatus, for different reasons. They weren’t more than ten or twelve miles south of Covington, but they thought they could go a lot farther. He’d seen that arrogance in Confederate soldiers before, but rarely in their U.S. counterparts. If they thought going into a fight that they could lick the enemy, that made them more likely to be right.
“General Morrell, he knows what the hell he’s doing,” the first soldier said. Again, he got nothing but agreement from his buddies. Again, Cincinnatus wondered if he was hearing straight. U.S. soldiers usually thought of their generals as bungling idiots-and usually had good, solid reasons for thinking of them that way.
Up ahead, Confederate guns boomed. A few shells came down not too far away. The soldiers laughed. “If that’s the best those bastards can do, they won’t even slow us down,” one of them said.