“Not quite the ass end of nowhere,” Reggie said, liking the sound of the phrase. “I saw those oil wells when I came up through Duncan.”
“Yeah, they count for somethin’, or the brass reckons they do, anyways,” Hairston admitted. “You ask me, though, you could touch a match to this whole goddamn state of Sequoyah, blow it higher’n hell, an’ I wouldn’t miss it one goddamn bit.”
On brief acquaintance with Sequoyah, Bartlett was inclined to agree with the profane sergeant. To a Virginian, these endless hot burning plains were a pretty fair approximation of hell, or at least of a greased griddle just before the flapjack batter came down. Somewhere high up in the sky, an aeroplane buzzed. Reggie’s head whipped round in alarm. For the briefest moment, half of him believed he wouldn’t see any man-made contraption, but the hand of God holding a pitcher of batter the size of Richmond.
Hairston said, “We’ll take you out on patrol tonight, start gettin’ you used to the way things are around here. It ain’t like Virginia, I’ll tell you that. Ain’t nothin’ like Georgia, neither.”
His voice softened. Reggie hadn’t been sure it could. He asked, “That where you’re from?”
“Yeah, I’m off a little farm outside of Albany. Hell.” The sergeant’s face clouded over. “Probably nothin’ left of that no more anyways. By what I hear tell, them niggers tore that part o’ the state all to hell and gone when they rose up. Bastards. You think about things, it ain’t so bad, not havin’ that many of ’em around.”
“Maybe not.” Reggie had been in the Yankee camp all through the Red Negro uprising. The U.S. officers had played it up, and the new-caught men had gone on and on about it, but it didn’t feel real to him. It was, he supposed, like the difference between reading about being in love and being in love yourself.
Hairston stuck his head out of the foxhole and looked around in a way that gave Bartlett the cold shivers. Do that on the Roanoke front and some damnyankee sniper would clean your ear out for you with a Springfield round. But nothing happened here. The sergeant finished checking the terrain, then squatted back down again. “Yanks are takin’it easy, same as us.”
“All right, Sarge.” Reggie shook his head. “I am going to have to get used to doing things different out here.” He didn’t think he’d ever get used to exposing any part of his precious body where a Yankee could see it when he wasn’t actually attacking.
As promised, Hairston took him out into no-man’s-land after the sun went down. No-man’s-land hereabouts was better than half a mile wide; he’d counted on a couple of hundred yards of it back in Virginia, but seldom more than that.
Going on patrol did have some familiar elements to it; he and his companions crawled instead of walking, and nobody had a cigar or a pipe in his mouth. But it was also vastly different from what it had been back in the Roanoke valley. For one thing, some of the prairie and farmland north of Duncan hadn’t been cratered to a faretheewell.
For another…“Doesn’t stink so bad,” Bartlett said in some surprise. “You haven’t got fourteen dead bodies on every foot of ground. Back in Virginia, seemed like you couldn’t set your hand down without sticking it into a piece of somebody and bringing it back all covered with maggots.”
“I’ve done that,” said Napoleon Dibble, one of the privates in the squad. “Puked my guts out, too, I tell you.”
“I puked my guts out, too, the first time,” Bartlett agreed. But it wasn’t quite agreement, not down deep. By the way Nap Dibble talked, he’d done it once. Reggie had lost track of how many times he’d known that oozy, yielding sensation and the sudden, stinking rush of corruption that went with it. By the time the damnyankees captured him, having it happen again hadn’t been worth anything more than a mild oath.
Something swooped out of the black sky and came down with a thump and a scrabble only a few yards away. Hissing an alarm, Reggie swung his rifle that way. To his amazement, Sergeant Hairston laughed at him. “Ain’t nothin’ but an owl droppin’ on a mouse, Bartlett. Don’t they got no owls up on the Roanoke front?”
“I don’t hardly remember seeing any,” Reggie answered. “They’ve got buzzards, and they’ve got crows, and they’ve got rats. Don’t hardly remember seeing mice-rats ran ’em out, I guess. Hated those bastards. They’d sit up on their haunches and look at you with those beady little black eyes, and you’d know what they’d been eating, and you’d know they were figuring they’d eat you next.” Napoleon Dibble made a disgusted noise. Ignoring him, Bartlett finished, “The one good thing about when the Yankees would throw gas at us was that it’d shift the rats-for a little while.”
“Gas,” Hairston said thoughtfully. “Haven’t seen that more than a time or two out here. Haven’t missed it any, neither, and that’s a fact. You run up against any of those what-do-you-call-’ems-barrels?”
“No, I’ve just heard about those, and seen ’em on a train after I got out of the Yankee camp,” Bartlett answered. “They hadn’t started using them by the time I got captured. They have ’em out here?”
“Ain’t seen any yet,” the sergeant said. “Like I told you, this is the ass end of the war. Those armored cars, now, I’ve seen some of those, but a trench’ll make an armored car say uncle.”
“Don’t like ’em anyways,” Nap Dibble said, to which the other members of the squad added emphatic if low-voiced agreement.
Not too far away-farther than the owl that had frightened Reggie, but not all that much-something started screaming. He froze. Was it a wounded man? A crazy man? A woman having a baby right out in the middle of no-man’s-land? “Coyote,” Sergeant Hairston explained laconically. “Scares you out of a year’s growth the first time you hear one, don’t it?”
“Lord, yes.” Reggie knew his voice was shaky. His heart pounded too fast for him to feel more than mildly embarrassed. Crazy coyotes were something he hadn’t had to worry about back on the Roanoke front.
And then, from up ahead, he heard a noise he did recognize: the metallic click of a bayonet against a rock. He stiffened and stared around for the nearest shell hole into which to dive. The other members of the patrol looked around, too, but not with the tight-lipped intensity they would have shown back in Virginia. Softly, Pete Hairston called, “That you, Toohey?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Who the hell else is it gonna be?” A Yankee voice came floating out of the night. The accent was different from the one Ralph Briggs had tried to get Reggie to learn, but it wasn’t like anything that had ever been heard in the CSA. Toohey went on, “Your damn artillery don’t ease up, you’re gonna run into a patrol where the sergeant don’t feel like doin’ any business ’cept shootin’ you Rebs.”
“Chance we take in this here line o’ work,” Hairston answered. “You got what you said you was gonna have?”
“Sure as hell do.” Something in a jug sloshed suggestively. Toohey went on, “What about youse guys?”
Several of the men in Hairston’s squad passed the sergeant their tobacco pouches. He went forward by himself and exchanged a few low-voiced words with the U.S. soldiers. When he came back, he didn’t have the tobacco any more, but he was carrying the jug.
The Yanks withdrew. They were pretty quiet, but not quiet enough to have kept star shells from going up on the Roanoke front and machine guns and mortars from chasing them back to their lines. Things were different out here. “Is that what I think it is, there in the jug?” Bartlett asked, pointing.
“Sure as hell is,” Hairston answered. “Hard to get popskull around these parts. All sorts of Indians here in Sequoyah, and they all got chiefs that hate the stuff. So what we do is, we swap smokes for it with the damnyankees: tobacco they got is so bad, it’s a cryin’ shame.”