A brakeman stuck his head into the compartment, shouted, “Rivington! Alf out for Rivington! Half an hour layover.”
Mollie Bean got to her feet. “This here’s where I leave.”
“Good luck to you, Melvin.” “Y’all take care now, you hear?” “We uns will miss you.” Whether she was called Melvin or not, her disguise could not have held up much longer, not from the way the Castalia Invincibles hugged her as she walked to the front of the car.
Caudell got off at Rivington too, though he intended to board again, for he was traveling through to Rocky Mount. He told himself he just wanted to stretch his legs and to get a look at the town from which the marvelous Confederate repeaters had sprung, but somehow he was not surprised to end up walking beside Mollie.
“I’m sorry you chose to stop here,” he said after a little while.
“On account of what I’m likely to be doin’, you mean?” she asked. He felt himself reddening, but had to nod. Mollie sighed. “Readin’ and cipherin’ or no, I couldn’t set on anything else that seemed promisin’, if you know what I mean.” She looked up at him. “Or was you maybe thinkin’ of takin’ me along with you?”
Caudell had thought of it, more than once. Being with Mollie as a soldier, as a companion, made him think differently about her—and in many ways more of her—than any other woman he’d known. But…she was still a whore. He could not make himself forget that. “Mollie, I—” he said, and could not go on.
“Never mind, Nate.” She set a hand on his arm. “I shouldn’t’ve asked you. I know how things are. I just hoped—Oh, shitfire.” The more she sounded like a soldier, the harder the time he had remembering she was anything else. She forced animation into her voice: “Will you look at this place? Don’t hardly seem like the same town I left two years ago.”
Caudell looked. The train tracks ran down the middle of what passed for Rivington’s main street. The train station was of familiar Southern type, with clapboard walls, an eight-foot roof overhang on either side to keep off the rain, and unloading doors for freight and passengers. But everything was freshly painted and almost preternaturally clean; two Negroes with long-handled mops went around swabbing off soot as Caudell watched. Several others picked up trash and tossed it into sheet-metal bins. He’d never seen anything like that before anywhere.
Just west of the station stood a row of warehouses that were plainly new: the pine boards from which they’d been built were a bright, unweathered straw color. Sentries wearing the motley green-brown that was the uniform of the Rivington men and carrying AK-47s walked a beat around the warehouses. They looked alert and dangerous, and measured Caudell with their eyes when he glanced their way. They did not seem much impressed, which irritated him. What sort of action had they been through?
“Never seen them before,” Mollie said; Caudell wondered if she meant the warehouses or their arrogant guards. She pointed to the corduroyed road that ran west from the new buildings until it disappeared into the pine woods that grew almost to the edge of town. “That there’s new, too. Wonder where it goes? Never knew anybody to live out that way.”
“Fancy road to go nowhere,” Caudell said; corduroying was expensive.
“Have to ask at the Excelsior.” Mollie nodded toward a rather shabby hotel a few doors down from the station. It hadn’t been repainted any time recently. Neither had the general store, the Baptist church, or the blacksmith’s shop nearby. They seemed reassuringly normal. But beyond them was another hotel that. dwarfed the old Excelsior. It was smaller than the Powhatan in Richmond, but not much. In bold red letters above the doorway, its sign said NOTAHILTON. “What’s a Notahilton?” Mollie said, her eyes wide. “That’s new since I left. So are the bank and the church by it.”
“Damned if I know what a Notahilton is,” Caudell answered. “Shall we wander over and find out?”
“Wouldn’t want you to miss your train, Nate. Fellow said half an hour.”
“Just because he said it doesn’t make it so. Half an hour train time is usually an hour and a half if you’re not railroading.” Despite his confident words, Caudell glanced back toward the train. The local Negroes certainly seemed more diligent than the ordinary run of slaves. He supposed he oughtn’t to have been surprised; if the Rivington men worked niggers hard in the army, they would hardly let them slack at home.
But his eyes opened wide at the vim with which a crew of four black men hauled wood from a covered rick and tossed it into the tender, at the care with which another slave, this one hardly more than a boy, oiled the trucks under each car. In his experience, most niggers would not have bothered to lift the oil can as they went from one car to the next: they would let a stream of oil spill onto the ground, though it had cost a dollar and a half a gallon even before the war. This Negro wasted not a drop; few white mechanics would have been so fussy.
Caudell stuck his hands in his trouser pockets. One hand closed on his pay warrant. He took it out. “I know what I can do fast, though: turn this into money. Let’s try your new bank instead of the Notahilton.”
“I got one of them, too,” Mollie said. “Let’s go.”
FIRST RIVINGTON BANK proclaimed the gilded sign above the entrance. Three clerks waited behind a high counter. A guard stood inside. He nodded politely to Caudell and Mollie. Caudell nodded back, also politely: the guard carried a repeater with the safety off and wore green-brown. He looked like a combat soldier.
“How can I help you gentlemen?” asked the clerk whom Caudell and Mollie approached. He had an accent like Benny Lang’s. Caudell passed him the warrant. “Forty dollars? Yes, sir, with pleasure.” He opened a drawer on his side of the counter, took out two big gold coins, a tiny gold dollar, two silver dimes, and a large copper cent, then passed them across the polished marble. “Here you are.”
Caudell gaped at the coins. “Gold?” he said, his voice a startled croak.
“Yes, sir, of course,” the clerk said patiently. “Forty dollars is 990 grains, or two ounces thirty grains. These are one ounce apiece.” He picked up the big coins, let them ring sweetly against the counter. They were like no coins Caudell had seen before, with the profile of a bearded man on one side and an antelope on the other, but below the antelope were magic words: 1 oz. GOLD, .999 FINE. The clerk went on, “Thirty grains of gold comes to $1.21, which is your balance here.”
“I—never expected gold at all,” Caudell said. “Just banknotes.” No matter how big a lie that .999 FINE was, he had to come out ahead on this deal. He also abruptly understood why the First Rivington Bank needed a guard with an AK-47.
The clerk frowned at him. “This is Rivington, sir. We deal properly here, especially to soldiers.” His eyes dared Caudell to challenge him. All at once, Caudell was convinced his gold was the real thing. He scooped it up.
“Pay me, too.” Mollie passed the Rivington man her warrant.
“Twenty-six dollars, Private, makes 643-½ grains, which is…” The clerk thought for a moment.” A trifle more than an ounce and a third.” He took out another of those one-ounce coins, another one smaller but otherwise identical—”Here is a quarter-ounce piece. “—a gold dollar, three quarters, and, after another pause for thought, a one-cent piece. “That should do it.”
Mollie and Caudell both shook their heads in disbelief as they left the bank. “Gold,” Mollie whispered. “I got me a bit of a stake.”
“Me, too,” Caudell said. Rivington men might trade gold dollars for Confederate dollars one for one, but no one else did. Forty dollars in gold would take him a long way. “Let’s go spend some of it, and have ourselves a drink at that Notahilton.”