Even in the Confederate States, though, white musicians borrowed only some of the trimmings from what blacks played for themselves and among themselves. Any white band that played like Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces- assuming a white band could do any such thing, which struck Scipio as unlikely-would have been booed off the stage… or, just possibly, idolized.
Before Scipio could decide which, Bathsheba reached out and tapped him on the arm. "Why you sittin' there?" she demanded. "Let's us dance!"
"All right. We do dat." He got to his feet. He wasn't the most enthusiastic dancer God ever made, but you didn't come to the Ten of Clubs if you didn't want to get out on the floor.
He wasn't the most athletic dancer God ever made, either. He never had been; he'd always owned too much of a sense of his own dignity to let loose as fully as a lot of people, and he wasn't so young as he had been, either. He did his best, knowing Bathsheba's was better-and, as he watched some of the youngsters cavort, knowing there were things he hadn't even imagined. Some of the moves they made were as far beyond him as Satchmo's music was beyond a bored Army bugler.
He shrugged-and found himself trying to do it so it fit the beat. He must have managed; Bathsheba didn't seen too exasperated. All the same, he felt like a sparrow among hummingbirds that could hover and fly backwards and zoom straight up and do a million other things no ordinary bird could ever hope to manage.
Satchmo seemed ready to play all night. Eyes bugging out of his head, trumpet aimed at the sky as if to let God and the angels hear, he wailed on and on. Scipio wasn't ready to dance all night, though his wife might have been. But when he mimed exhaustion, she went back to the table with him so he could catch his breath. He realized that while out on the floor he hadn't once thought about Jake Featherston or the sorry plight of Negroes in the CSA. The music had driven all his worries clean out of his head. He might almost have been making love. He laughed. Some of the young couples out there might almost have been making love while they danced. For all he knew, maybe some of them had.
At two in the morning, the manager said, "We gots to close. We git in trouble with the police if we don't. I's right sorry, but I don't want no trouble with the police, not the way things is."
A few people grumbled, but nobody really raised a fuss. The way things were these days, a black man had to be crazy to court trouble with the police in Augusta or anywhere else. Scipio and Bathsheba got their coats and hats from the girl who'd checked them and walked out into the night.
The Terry was quiet-almost deserted but for the people leaving the Ten of Clubs. A chilly drizzle had begun to fall. The crowd scattered quickly. The Negro district remained technically under curfew, though the cops hadn't bothered enforcing it lately. Still, nobody wanted to get caught and beaten up or shaken down.
Bathsheba hoisted an umbrella. Scipio, who didn't have one, pulled his hat low on his forehead and looked down toward the ground to keep the rain out of his eyes. "Lord, I'm so glad tomorrow's Sunday," his wife said.
He shook his head. "Today Sunday. It be Sunday coupla hours now. Do Jesus, I thanks de Lawd we ain't got to work." Most Sundays, he would have gone to church to thank the Lord. Bathsheba believed, even if he had trouble. This morning, though, it looked as if they would both sleep in, and so would the children.
He turned a corner, then stopped short. Men were moving up ahead. He couldn't see much-street lights in the Terry hadn't worked for years. But if those weren't rifles being passed back and forth… If they weren't, he'd never seen any. He turned around and, without a word, signed for Bathsheba to back away, raising a finger to his lips to show she needed to be quiet while she did it.
For a wonder, she didn't argue. For a bigger wonder, none of those men with rifles came after them. Maybe they'd been so intent on their own business, they hadn't noticed the people who'd spotted them. Maybe the drizzle had helped, too.
Whatever the reason, Scipio knew he was lucky to get away in one piece. He and Bathsheba took a different street home. As they made their escape, a snatch of whistled music pursued them. It wasn't any tune Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces played, but he'd heard it before just the same. It was the "Internationale."
Reds had come-come back-to the Terry. They'd come back, and they had guns.
"Holy Jesus!" One of the yeomen in the USS Remembrance's wireless shack yanked off his earphones and stared at his pal. "You hear that, Zach?"
"Sure as hell did," Zach answered, scribbling furiously on the pad in front of him.
"What's up?" Sam Carsten asked. As usual when not on duty, he was killing time in the wireless shack. It was warm-the aeroplane carrier cruised between Florida and the U.S.-occupied Bahamas-but at least he was out of the sun. He wished the yeomen weren't wearing earphones. That way, he could have heard whatever it was, too. But they liked to get rid of distractions from the outside world-nosy officers, for instance-when they listened to Morse.
Zach finished writing, then dropped the pencil. "Signal going out in clear to the Confederate Army and Navy, sir," he answered. "Their vice president- Willy Knight, his name is-has resigned, and he's under arrest."
"Christ!" Sam said. The other yeoman-his name was Freddy-was on the phone to the bridge with the news. Carsten heard a startled squawk on the other end of the line when it went through. He felt like squawking himself. Instead, he asked, "How come, for the love of Mike?"
"Story they're giving out is, he was the fellow behind the stalwarts who tried to take out Featherston a couple weeks ago," Zach said.
"Christ!" Carsten repeated, louder and with more emphasis this time. "That's the kind of crap that happens in Argentina or Nicaragua or one of those places, not up here."
"Yes, sir." The yeoman nodded. He knew better than to come right out and contradict an officer, no matter how stupid that officer had just been. He got his barb in, all right, but politely: "Except it just did."
"Well, what do they do now?" Sam asked. "They arrested Knight, you say? They going to give him a blindfold and a cigarette and stand him up against a wall?"
"No report on that, sir," Zach answered. "Only an alert. He has resigned. He has been arrested. No orders issued in his name are to be obeyed."
Sam wondered exactly what that meant, too. Had Willy Knight tried to get the Army, or some of it, to move against Jake Featherston? If he had, it didn't sound as if he'd had much luck. Luck or not, though, nobody in either the USA or the CSA had ever tried to play that particular game before.
"He wanted to put on a Napoleon suit, but it turned out to be three sizes too big," Sam judged. Both yeomen in the wireless shack nodded this time.
He hung around the wireless shack, hoping for more details, but no more seemed forthcoming. About ten minutes later, the klaxons began to hoot, ordering the crew to general quarters. He thought it was a drill. He hoped it was a drill. He got down to his station in the bowels of the Remembrance in jig time even so.