Drive to the East sa-2 Read online

  Yossel Reisen opened another letter. “Who’s this one from?” Armstrong asked, having already gone through his meager mail.

  “My Uncle David.”

  “Which one’s he again?” Armstrong asked-Yossel had a lot of relatives.

  “The one who lost a leg in the last war,” Reisen answered. “He’s a right-wing Democrat now. It drives Aunt Flora nuts.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Armstrong nodded. Yes, his own father was inordinately proud of the wound that made him walk with a cane. Yossel’s uncle David overtrumped Dad’s wound in a big way. Come to that, Yossel’s father had got killed before he was even born. Sure as hell, some people had had a tougher time of it than Merle Grimes, even if he wouldn’t admit it this side of the rack. Armstrong asked, “What’s he got to say?”

  “He’s talking about the auto bombs in New York City,” Yossel answered, not looking up from the letter. “He says there were four of them-one on Wall Street, one in the Lower East Side where I grew up, and two in Times Square.”

  “Two?” Armstrong said.

  “Two,” Yossel repeated, his face grim. “One to make a mess, and then another one that went off fifteen minutes later, after the cops and the firemen showed up.”

  “Oh.” Armstrong grimaced. “That’s a dirty trick. Confederate Connie hasn’t talked about anything like that.”

  “Probably doesn’t want to give the shvartzers in the CSA ideas if they’re listening to her,” Yossel said. Armstrong nodded; that made pretty good sense. Yossel went on, “Waste of time, I bet. If the Mormons can figure it out, you’ve got to figure the shvartzers can, too.”

  “Bet you’re right. It’s a goddamn lousy war, that’s all I’ve got to say. Poison gas and blowing the other guy’s cities to hell and gone and both sides with maniacs blowing their own cities to hell and gone… Some fun,” Armstrong said. “And these fucking Mormons won’t quit till the last one’s dead-and his ghost’ll haunt us.”

  As if on cue, somebody shouted, “Incoming!” Armstrong threw himself flat even before he heard the shriek of the incoming round. It was a terrifying wail. The Mormons had something homemade and nasty. Artillerymen called it a spigot mortar. Most soldiers called the projectiles-each about the size of a wastebasket with fins-screaming meemies.

  When they hit, they made a roar like the end of the world. They were stuffed with explosives and scrap iron, to the point where they were almost flying auto bombs themselves. The only drawback they had that Armstrong could see was that, like most of the Mormons’ improvised weapons, they couldn’t reach very far. But when they did get home…

  Blast picked him up and slammed him down again, as if a professional wrestler-or possibly God-had thrown him to the canvas. He tasted blood. When he brought a hand up to his face, he found his nose was bleeding, too. He felt his ears, but they seemed all right. After he spat, his mouth seemed better. His nose went on dripping blood down his face and, as he straightened, onto the front of his tunic. That was all right, or not too bad. Anything more and he would have worried about what the screaming meemie had done to his insides.

  Instead, he worried about what the horrible thing had done to other people. The corporal who’d brought the mail forward was torn to pieces. If not for the sack, Armstrong wouldn’t have recognized him. Poor bastard wasn’t even a front-line soldier. Wrong place, wrong time, and he’d make another closed-casket funeral.

  Shouts of, “Corpsman!” rose from half a dozen places. There weren’t enough medics close by to see to everybody at once. Armstrong bandaged wounds and tied off one tourniquet and gave morphine shots with the syrettes in the soldiers’ first-aid kits: all the things he’d learned how to do since he got thrown into battle the summer before.

  Yossel Reisen was doing the same sorts of things. He also had a bloody nose, and he’d put a bandage on the back of his own left hand. More blood soaked through it. “There’s a Purple Heart for you,” Armstrong said.

  Reisen told him where he could put the Purple Heart, and suggest that he not close the pin that held it on a uniform.

  Armstrong gave back a ghastly grin. “Same to you, buddy, only sideways,” he said. They both laughed. It wasn’t funny-nothing within some considerable distance of where a screaming meemie went off was funny-but it kept them both going and it kept them from shrieking. Sometimes men who’d been through too much would come to pieces in the field. Armstrong had seen that a few times. It was even less lovely than what shell fragments could do. They only ruined a man’s body. When his soul went through the meat grinder…

  Belatedly, U.S. field guns started shelling the place from which the screaming meemie had come. Odds were neither the men who’d launched it nor the tube from which it started its deadly flight were there anymore.

  “Bastards.” Even Armstrong wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the Mormons on the other side of the line or the gunners on his own. It fit both much too well.

  * * *

  “Need to talk to you for a minute in my office, Xerxes,” Jerry Dover said when Scipio walked into the Huntsman’s Lodge.

  Scipio was already sweating from the walk to work in formalwear under the hot Augusta sun. When his boss told him something like that, he started sweating all over again. But he said the only thing he could: “Be right theah, suh.” Maybe-he dared hope-this had to do with restaurant business. Even if it didn’t, though, he remained at the white man’s beck and call.

  Dover’s office was as crowded and as filled with lists of things to do as ever. The restaurant manager worked hard. Scipio never would have presumed to think otherwise. The ashtray on the desk was full of butts, a couple of them still smoldering.

  Dover paused to light yet another cigarette, sucked in smoke, blew it out, and eyed Scipio. “What’s your address, over in the Terry?” he asked.

  That wasn’t what Scipio had expected. “Same one you got on all my papers, suh,” he answered. “I ain’t moved or nothin’.”

  “For true?” Jerry Dover said. “No bullshit? No getting cute and cagey?”

  “Cross my heart an’ hope to die, Mistuh Dover.” Scipio made the gesture. “How come you needs to make sure o’ dat?”

  His boss didn’t answer, not right away. He smoked the cigarette down to a little dog-end in quick, savage puffs, then stubbed it out and lit a new one. When he did speak, he went off on a tangent: “I don’t reckon your wife and your young ’uns have ever seen the inside of this place.”

  “No, suh, they ain’t never,” Scipio agreed, wondering what the hell Dover was going on about. The restaurant-by which he naturally thought of the part the customers never saw-was crowded enough with the people who had to be there: cooks, waiters, busboys, dishwashers. Others would have fit in as well as feathers on a frog. The manager had to know that better than he did.

  No matter what Jerry Dover knew, he said, “Why don’t you bring ’em by tomorrow night when you come in for your shift? They get bored, they can spend some time here in the office.”

  “Suh, my missus, she clean white folks’ houses. She already be at work when I comes in here,” Scipio said.

  Dover frowned. “Maybe you tell her to take the day off tomorrow so she can come in with you.”

  “People she work fo’ ain’t gwine like dat,” Scipio predicted dolefully. Blacks in the CSA never had been able to risk antagonizing whites. With things the way they were now, even imagining such a thing was suicidal.

  The second cigarette disappeared as fast as the first one had. Dover lit a third. He blew a stream of smoke up at the ceiling. “Scipio,” he said softly, “this is important.”

  Scipio froze, there in the rickety chair across the desk from the restaurant manager. Jerry Dover used that name to remind Scipio who had the power here.

  By why he would want to use that power for this purpose baffled the Negro. Sending him down to Savannah made sense. This? This seemed mere whim. A man who expended power on a whim was a fool.

  In the tones of an educated white man, Scipio sai
d, “Perhaps you will be good enough to tell me why you require my family’s presence, sir?”

  Dover’s eyes widened. He laughed out loud. “Goddamn!” he said. “She told me you could do that, but I plumb forgot. That’s fucking amazing. You ought to go on the wireless instead of some of those muttonheads they’ve got.”

  “As may be, sir,” Scipio answered, and Jerry Dover laughed again. The black man added, “You still have not answered my question.” He dared hope Dover would. Skin color was the most important thing in the CSA; no doubt about it. But accent ran color a close second. If he sounded like an educated white man, the presumption that he was what he sounded like ran deep.

  But not deep enough, not here. Dover set the live cigarette in the ashtray, steepled his fingertips on the desk, and looked at Scipio over them. “It would be a good idea if you got ’em here,” was all he said. His own way of speaking didn’t come close to matching Scipio’s. By his nervous chuckle, he knew it, too.

  Scipio wanted to ask, A good idea how? Why? He wanted to, but he didn’t. He’d pushed the white man as far as Dover was willing to go. Returning to the Congaree dialect that was his natural speech, Scipio said, “Reckon I do it, den.”

  “Good,” Dover said. “I knew you were a smart fellow. If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t have wasted my time banging my gums at you in the first place. Now get your ass out there and go to work.”

  “Yes, suh,” Scipio said, relieved to be back on familiar ground.

  When his shift ended, policemen let him through the barbed-wire perimeter surrounding the Terry. They knew him. He had a dispensation to be out after curfew. He made it back to his block of flats without getting knocked over the head.

  Then he had his next hurdle: persuading Bathsheba not to do what she usually did. “Why for he want us there?” she demanded.

  “Dunno,” Scipio answered. “But he want it bad enough to use my fo’-true name.”

  “Did he?” That made Bathsheba sit up and take notice. Worry in her voice, she asked, “You reckon he do somethin’ nasty if we don’t come?”

  “Dunno,” Scipio said again, more unhappily than ever. “But I reckons y’all better do it.”

  Bathsheba sighed heavily. “Miz Kent, she ain’t gonna be real happy with me. Miz Bagwell neither. But we come.”

  When his children got up the next morning, they were even more bemused than his wife was. “Somethin’ bad liable to happen, Pa,” Cassius said. His hands bunched into fists. “Can we fight back?” He was more like the hunter and guerrilla for whom he’d been named than he had any business being.

  “Odds is bad,” was all Scipio said. That gave his son very little to react against.

  “Don’t know that I ever wants to go into the ofay part of Augusta no more,” Antoinette said. “They hates us there.”

  “They hates we here, too,” Scipio answered. “You should oughta come, though. I don’t reckon Mistuh Dover playin’ games.” That wasn’t quite true. But he didn’t know what kind of game the manager was playing, and he couldn’t afford not to play along.

  His wife and children dressed in their Sunday best for the unusual excursion. Since he was in his own formalwear, the family looked as if they were bound for a fancy wedding or a banquet. When they got to the barbed-wire perimeter, the cops and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards stared at them. There seemed to be more whites manning the perimeter than usual. Or is it just my nerves? Scipio wondered-nervously.

  The policeman who checked passbooks had sent Scipio through any number of times. He raised an eyebrow to see the black man’s family accompanying him, but didn’t say anything about it. He was, within the limits of his job and his race, a decent fellow. A stalwart came up to talk to him. Scipio wondered if they would yell at him to halt and send Bathsheba and the children back. They didn’t, though.

  When Scipio got to the Huntsman’s Lodge, he found that Aurelius also had his wife-a plump, dignified, gray-haired woman named Delilah-with him. Something was going on. He still didn’t know what, and wished he did.

  They all got suppers of the sorts the cooks turned out for the waiters. Two or three other waiters and cooks-all of them men who’d worked at the Lodge for a while, and all of them also men who lived not far from Scipio and his family-also had family members with them.

  Jerry Dover hovered over the Huntsman’s Lodge’s uncommon customers. He was fox-quick, fox-clever, and also, Scipio judged, fox-wary. “Thank y’all for being here today,” he said. “I’ve worked with your husbands and fathers for years, and I’ve never met y’all before. Hope I do again before too long.”

  He was saying something between the lines. But not even Scipio, who knew he was doing it, could make out the words behind the words. He wanted to scratch his head. Instead, he had to go out and work his shift as if everything were normal.

  It only seemed to last forever. In fact, it went as smoothly as most of the shifts he put in. He pocketed a few nice tips and got stiffed once, by a lieutenant-colonel with his left arm in a sling. Scipio hoped the next Yankee who shot him took better aim.

  When he left the dining room after the Lodge closed, he found his family on the ragged edge of mutiny. “If I was any more bored, I’d be dead,” Cassius snarled.

  “Thanks for bringin’ ’em by, Xerxes,” Jerry Dover said-now he used the alias that seemed to fit Scipio better than his real name these days. “Glad you could do it.”

  “Uh-huh,” Scipio said, still puzzled about what was going on. Something, yes-but what? He nodded to Bathsheba, who was yawning. “Let’s go.”

  The streets of the white part of Augusta were quiet and peaceful. When they got back to the fence around the Terry, another cop who knew Scipio let them through without any trouble about being out after curfew. He laughed as he opened a barbed-wire gate much like the one that would keep livestock in a pen. “You ain’t hardly gonna know the place,” he said. The rest of the goons at the gate thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

  Only little by little did Scipio and his family discover what they meant. At first, he just thought things seemed too quiet. Curfew or no curfew, there was usually a lot of furtive life on the dark streets of the Terry. A lot of it was dangerous life, but it was life. Tonight, no.

  Tonight… Cassius figured it out first, from the number of doors standing open that shouldn’t have. “Do Jesus!” he exclaimed, his voice echoing in the empty street. “They done had another cleanout!”

  As soon as he pointed it out, it was obvious he was right. The northern part of the Terry had been scooped up and sent off to camps-or somewhere-months before. As far as Scipio knew, nobody’d come back, either. Now the heart had been ripped out of the colored part of Augusta. And all in one day, Scipio thought dazedly. All in half a day, in fact. How long had they been planning this, to bring it off with such practiced efficiency? And where had they got the practice?

  Bathsheba squeezed his hand, hard. “If it wasn’t fo’ Jerry Dover, they’d’ve got us, too,” she whispered.

  And that was as true as what Cassius had said. Somehow, Dover had known ahead of time. He’d done what he could-or what he’d wanted to do. Now Scipio owed him not just one life but four. He thanked the God he mostly didn’t believe in for the debt. And he wondered how Jerry Dover would want it repaid.

  For there would be a price. There was always a price. Scipio knew that in his bones, in his belly, in his balls. For a Negro in the CSA, there was always a price.

  After his mother died, Cincinnatus Driver had watched his father like a hawk. He knew the stories about old, long-married couples where, when one spouse died, the other followed soon after, as if finding life alone not worth living.

  But Seneca Driver seemed as well as ever. If anything, he seemed better than he had for some time. His shoulders came up; his back straightened. “I is free of a burden,” he said once. “That weren’t your mama we laid in the ground. Your mama was gone a long time ago. What we buried, that there was just the husk.”
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  Cincinnatus nodded. “I saw that, Pa. I saw that real plain and clear. Wasn’t sure you could.”

  “Oh, I seen it,” his father said. “Couldn’t do nothin’ about it, but I seen it.”

  If that last sentence wasn’t a summary of Negroes’ troubles in the Confederate States, Cincinnatus had never heard one. And the government and the Freedom Party had always moved more carefully in Kentucky than rumor said they did farther south. Kentucky had spent a generation in the USA. Negroes here knew what it meant to be citizens, not just downtrodden residents. Even some whites here were… less hostile than they might have been.

  That meant the barbed-wire perimeter that went up around Covington’s colored district came as a special shock. Cincinnatus had heard that such things had happened elsewhere. He didn’t think they could here. Finding he was wrong rocked him. Finding he was wrong also trapped him. The perimeter included the bank of the Licking River, and included motorboats with machine guns on the river to make sure nobody tried cutting the wire there.

  The first place Cincinnatus went when he found out what was going on was, inevitably, Lucullus Wood’s barbecue shack. He found the plump proprietor in a worse state of shock than he was. “They told me they wasn’t gonna do this,” Lucullus said. “They told me. They fuckin’ lied.” He sounded as dazed as a man staggering out of a train wreck.

  Seeing Lucullus struck all in a heap discomfited Cincinnatus worse than the barbed wire itself. “What you gonna do about it?” he demanded. “What can you do about it?”

  “Do Jesus! I dunno,” Lucullus answered. “They done ruined me when they done this.” Odds were he had that right. Almost as many whites as blacks had come to his place. No more. That perimeter would keep people out as well as keeping them in.