In at the Death Read online

  Sunset found Armstrong and his men several miles farther south than they had been at daybreak. He camped in an empty sharecropper village. He’d seen a lot of those here. This was supposed to be the Black Belt, the heart of Alabama Negro life. But the heart had been ripped out of the state.

  Or so he thought, till a sentry said, “Sarge, we got niggers comin’ in—maybe half a dozen.”

  “Fuck me,” Armstrong said. That didn’t happen every day. “Well, go on, Snake—bring ’em in. We can spare the rations for ’em.”

  “Right,” Snake said—he had a rearing rattler tattooed on his left forearm. He came back a few minutes later with two skinny black men, an even skinnier woman, and three kids who were nothing but skin and bones…and, in the firelight, eyeballs and teeth.

  The soldiers gave them food, which got their immediate undivided attention. After the Negroes had eaten enough to blunt the edge of their hunger, Armstrong asked, “How’d you people stay alive?”

  “We hid. We stole,” one of the men answered. His accent was so thick, Armstrong could hardly follow him.

  “Now we is free again,” the woman said. “Now we kin live again.”

  “Long as they’s sojers here. Long as they’s Yankees here,” the second man said. “Reckon the white folks here’d get rid of us pretty damn quick if they seen a chance.”

  Armstrong reckoned the Negro was right. Not many white Confederates seemed unhappy about what had happened to the blacks who’d lived alongside them. The only thing the whites were unhappy about was losing the war.

  “What is we gonna do?” the first man asked, as if a kid sergeant from Washington, D.C., had answers for him.

  “Hang around with soldiers as much as you can. We won’t screw you,” Armstrong said, although he knew some of the guys in the platoon liked Negroes no better than most Confederates did. And some of the guys would want to screw the woman. Yeah, she was skinny as a strand of spaghetti. Yeah, she was homely. Yeah, she might have VD. If she stayed around very long, somebody would make a pass at her. And trouble would follow, sure as night followed day.

  They can hang around with soldiers, Armstrong decided, but they won’t hang around with my platoon. I’ll send ’em to the rear, let somebody else worry about ’em. He nodded to himself. That definitely sounded like a plan.

  And when he put it to the Negroes, they didn’t squawk a bit. “Rear sounds mighty good,” the first man said. “We done seen us enough fightin’ to las’ us fo’ always.” All the other blacks solemnly nodded.

  Come to that, Armstrong had seen enough fighting to last him for always, too. Maybe, he thought hopefully, I won’t have to see much more.

  There was a poem about the way the world ended. Jorge Rodriguez hadn’t had as much schooling as his folks wished he would have. When you grew up on a farm in Sonora, you didn’t get a whole lot of schooling. But he remembered that poem—something about not with a bang but a whimper.

  He knew why it came to mind now, too. He was thinking that the fellow who’d written that poem didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

  Buckingham, Virginia, wasn’t a whole lot more than a wide spot in the road. It didn’t even have a gas station, though it did boast a couple of hotels that dated back to before the War of Secession. It lay west and a little south of Richmond, and Jorge’s outfit had orders to hold it in spite of everything the damnyankees could do.

  The indomitable Hugo Blackledge had charge of the company—all the new officers were either casualties or missing in action. Jorge led one platoon, Gabe Medwick another. Blackledge looked around at Buckingham. “We’ll dig in,” he said. “We’ll fight as long as we can, and then we’ll pull back and fight somewhere else. This chickenshit hole in the ground ain’t worth dyin’ for, and that’s the God’s truth.”

  “That’s not what the high command told us.” Medwick sounded worried.

  “They ain’t gonna kill us for moving back after we fight,” Jorge assured him. “They’re too fucked up for that. But I think the sergeant, he’s right. We make a big stand here, the damnyankees blow us up for sure.” His wave encompassed the country town. “And for what, amigo? For what?”

  Gabe had no answer for that. Nobody who’d done any fighting would have. Buckingham would have fallen a while ago if the main Yankee thrust from Richmond hadn’t gone southeast, through Petersburg toward Hampton Roads. But the United States had enough men to push west, too…and the Confederacy, by all the signs, didn’t have enough men to stop them.

  Still, if you weren’t going to surrender you had to try. Somebody’s rear-guard action up ahead gave the company a couple of hours to entrench and to eat whatever rations and foraged food they happened to have on them. A command car towing an antiaircraft gun came through town. Sergeant Blackledge flagged it down. “Got any armor-piercing rounds?” he asked.

  “A few,” one of the gunners answered.

  “Good,” Blackledge said. “Stay here. You’ll have a better chance to use ’em than you would have wherever the hell you were going.” He didn’t quite aim his automatic rifle at the command car, but he looked ready to. Jorge was one of the men who stood ready to back his play.

  The gunner didn’t need long to figure out what was what. “You talked us into it,” he said after a barely perceptible pause. “Show us where to set up.”

  He and his crew had just positioned the gun when U.S. 105s started landing on Buckingham. The first few fell short, but the rest came down right in the middle of town. Huddling in a foxhole, Jorge knew what that meant: the Yankees had a forward artillery observer hidden in the trees somewhere, and he was wirelessing the fall of the shot back to the batteries that were firing. Killing him would have been nice, but who could guess where he lurked?

  Fighter-bombers worked Buckingham over next. They dropped bombs. They fired rockets. And they dropped fish-shaped pods of jellied gasoline, as if the town were under attack by flamethrowers from the sky. Some burned men screamed. Some, Jorge feared, never got the chance. One of the fine hotels from before the days of the War of Secession went up in flames. It had lasted for a century, but no longer.

  After the damnyankees softened up the town, infantry and armor came forward. Why do things the hard way when you could take it easy? That was what the U.S. officer in charge must have thought, anyhow.

  But nothing turned out to be easy for the men in green-gray. That antiaircraft gun knocked out two barrels in quick succession. The others pulled back in a hurry. Machine-gun and automatic-weapons fire sent U.S. foot soldiers diving for cover. The Confederates in Buckingham raised a defiant cheer.

  If they’d had barrels of their own, if they’d had air support, if they’d had more ground-pounders, they could have driven the enemy back toward the James. If they’d had all those things here, they also would have had them lots of other places. The war would have looked very different.

  Since they didn’t have any reinforcements, they had to wait for the U.S. forces to regroup and take another crack at Buckingham. “Pull back into the woods south of town!” Sergeant Blackledge called. “We’ll let them beat on the place while it’s empty, then move back into our old holes and give ’em a surprise.”

  Smoke from the burning buildings in Buckingham helped screen the withdrawal from Yankee observers. And Blackledge knew just what was coming. More shells, more bombs, more rockets, and more napalm descended on Buckingham. Jorge crossed himself. He was glad to crouch half a mile away from all that destruction.

  As soon as the last fighter-bombers roared off to the north, Sergeant Blackledge yelled, “C’mon! Hustle up! We gotta get back to our places before the enemy infantry starts moving up!”

  Trotting forward, Jorge saw that the antiaircraft gun wouldn’t stop any barrels this time around. It lay upside down, the tires on the gun carriage all burnt and melted and stinking. How many stovepipes did the company have? He swore under his breath. The cannon could kill from much farther away than one of those rockets.

  At least
no jellied gasoline smoldered in his foxhole. He slid down into it and waited for the push that was bound to come. He felt more resigned than afraid. He wondered why. Probably because he’d been in lots of other bad spots. What was one more? My grave, it could be.

  Not far away, Gabe Medwick was praying. His version of the Lord’s Prayer had words a little different from Jorge’s. Protestant, the Sonoran thought condescendingly. But both versions meant the same thing, so how much did the words really matter?

  “Hang in there, boys,” Hugo Blackledge said. “We been screwin’ so long with a limber dick, why the fuck can’t we row the damn boat with a rope?” In spite of himself, Jorge laughed. Sometimes obscenity wasn’t so far from prayer.

  Here came the damnyankees again. They were more cautious this time—they didn’t want another bloody nose. The Confederates in Buckingham held their fire till the enemy soldiers and fighting vehicles got very close. Then they all opened up at once. Howls of dismay from the U.S. soldiers said they’d hoped it would be easy this time. No matter what they hoped, it wasn’t.

  A lancehead riding a shaft of fire, a stovepipe rocket incinerated a green-gray barrel. But other U.S. machines sensibly stayed out of stovepipe range. They raked Buckingham with high-explosive rounds and machine-gun bullets. That let Yankee infantry grab a toehold on the north side of town—not enough Confederates could put their heads up to stop the enemy.

  And the Yankees pushed forward to either side of Buckingham, too. There weren’t enough men in butternut to hold them back. “Hey, Sarge!” Jorge called urgently. “We done what we could do here, sí?”

  “Bet your ass.” Blackledge raised his voice to a formidable roar: “Back! Back, goddammit! We’ll make another stand at the next town south, wherever the fuck it is!”

  Disengaging under fire wasn’t easy, either. A less experienced outfit might not have been able to bring it off so neatly. But Jorge had plenty of practice making a getaway from overwhelming U.S. strength. So did his buddies. They left the wounded behind for the Yankees to take care of. That gave the hurt soldiers a better chance than they would have had if they got dragged along. The men in green-gray mostly fought fair.

  The ground rose south of Buckingham. No roads led south, only tracks and game trails. The soldiers trudged past a couple of farms carved out of the forest. A woman in homespun stared at them from a cornfield. Was that a pipe in her mouth? Damned if it wasn’t. Jorge hoped the Yankees wouldn’t shell her farm trying to kill the retreating C.S. soldiers.

  On he went. Armor wouldn’t have an easy time coming after him, anyhow. Artillery started probing for the Confederates. Suddenly, Jorge hated the trees. Air bursts were deadly, and the only thing you could do to protect yourself was dig in with a roof over your head. Any hanging branch might touch off a shell and rain fragments down on you.

  A hundred yards away from him, Gabe Medwick fell with a wail, clutching his arm. “No!” Jorge yelled, and rushed over to his friend. When he got there, he saw Gabe had a leg wound, too. With the best will in the world, the kid from Alabama couldn’t go on.

  “Hurts,” Gabe got out through clenched teeth.

  “I bet it does.” Jorge clumsily injected him with morphine, then bandaged the wounds. The leg wasn’t too bad. The arm…Jorge hoped Gabe would keep it, but it looked pretty chewed up. “The Yankees, they take care of you,” Jorge said, feeling helpless.

  “Don’t want nothin’ to do with no damnyankees.” Gabe sounded like a petulant child.

  “Here.” Jorge gave him his canteen and some rations. “You sit tight and yell for them when they get close. Buena suerte, amigo.” He hurried away, not knowing what else to say.

  Before long, Jorge got to pick up a canteen from a man an air burst had shredded. There were worse things than getting wounded. The flies were just starting to gather on one of those things.

  Jorge stumbled up to the top of the line of hills and then down the other side. The company, what was left of it, was hopelessly scattered. Through a break in the trees, Jorge caught a glimpse of a town down below. “That place is where we’re going!” Hugo Blackledge yelled. “We’ll form up there and figure out what the hell to do next.”

  What could they do? Jorge had no idea. But he had a target now, somewhere to go. As he picked his way through thicker stands of timber, the town disappeared, but he could always find it again. It looked bigger than Buckingham, not that that was saying much.

  When he drew closer, he got a glimpse of armor in the town. He’d wondered when he would see more of it. Hell, he’d wondered if the Confederates had any armor left in central Virginia. There were already soldiers in the streets, too. Maybe the CSA could throw one more rally together. Even after you thought your side had done everything it could, it kept surprising you.

  The first few men from the company, Jorge among them, had come out onto open ground within a quarter of a mile of the town when Sergeant Blackledge let out a theatrical wail of despair: “They’re Yankees!”

  And they were. They even had some sort of portable PA system. “Surrender!” somebody blared. “Surrender or die! First, last, and only warning! There is no escape!”

  There wasn’t, either. The barrels and the automatic weapons ahead could tear the dismayed Confederates to pieces. They’d lost their last race with the enemy. Blackledge set down his automatic rifle and walked into captivity with his hands and his head high.

  If he can do it, so can I, Jorge thought. He laid his weapon on the ground and walked toward the waiting U.S. soldiers. One of them pointed into the town. “Line up by the courthouse,” he said, not unkindly. “Some trucks’ll take you off to prison camp.”

  “All right.” Jorge pointed back the way he’d come. “We left wounded in the woods. My buddy’s there.”

  “We’ll get ’em—don’t flabble about it. You move along now.”

  Dully, Jorge obeyed. The men with whom he’d endured so much tramped through the late-afternoon stillness in the little town of Appomattox—a sign on the courthouse gave him the name of the place—toward the end of the war.

  Things were quiet outside of Birmingham, and inside, too. Cincinnatus Driver approved of that. After all the shells that had flown back and forth, a truce was holding now. A U.S. officer had gone into Birmingham to confer with C.S. General Patton.

  None of the drivers, of course, knew what the U.S. officer would tell the surrounded general. That didn’t stop them from guessing. “If he don’t quit, I bet we drop a superbomb on him,” Cincinnatus said.

  “Sounds good to me,” Hal Williamson said. Several other men nodded. Williamson went on, “All the trouble Patton’s caused, we ought to drop a bomb on the fucker anyway.”

  More nods, Cincinnatus’ among them. “I wonder when he’ll come out,” the Negro said. The officer, a major, had gone in not far from their encampment. If he came out the same way, maybe he would tell them what was what. You could hope so, anyway.

  “How long d’you think he’ll give Patton?” somebody asked.

  “I wouldn’t give him long,” Williamson said. “If it’s surrender or get one of those bombs in the kisser, what does he need to figure out?”

  Cincinnatus lit a cigarette. Not even tobacco smoke soothed him much. He wanted to know what was going on there inside the battered heart of the Confederate industrial town.

  So did the other drivers. “That Patton’s a stubborn bastard,” one of them said. “What if he doesn’t give in?”

  “His funeral, in that case,” Cincinnatus said, and then, “Couldn’t happen to a nicer fella…. Well, it could happen to Jake Featherston, but I reckon that’s comin’, too.”

  Williamson pointed into the ruin that was Birmingham. “Here comes our guy,” he said. “And look! He’s got one of those butternut bastards with him.”

  Sure enough, two men came out of the city, each of them carrying a large flag of truce. The C.S. officer looked clean and neat despite the disaster that had befallen the place he was defending. He also looked as unhap
py as if he were burying his only son. That told Cincinnatus most of what he needed to know.

  “They givin’ up, suh?” he called to the U.S. officer, the rising lilt in his voice saying he already had a good notion of the answer.

  All the drivers burst into cheers when the major nodded. “They sure are,” he answered, “or it looks that way, anyhow. We’ve still got a few little things to iron out—that’s why Captain Monroe is with me.”

  The Confederate started to give the men standing near the big green-gray trucks a polite nod. Then he saw Cincinnatus among them. “You have those damned black terrorists here?” he demanded of the officer in green-gray.

  “I ain’t a guerrilla.” Cincinnatus spoke for himself. “I don’t blame those folks for risin’ up—don’t get me wrong—but I ain’t one of them. I’m a citizen of the USA, and proud of it, too.”

  “That’s telling him!” Hal Williamson said.

  Captain Monroe looked even more mournful than he had before. The U.S. major, whose name Cincinnatus still didn’t know, grinned from ear to ear. “You asked, Captain,” he said. “Now you know.”

  “It’s still wrong,” Monroe said stubbornly. “Niggers got no business fighting.”

  “You call me nigger again, you ofay asshole, you ain’t gonna last to dicker your goddamn surrender,” Cincinnatus said. Captain Monroe’s jaw dropped all the way to his chest. He couldn’t have been more astonished if an Army mule had cussed him out.

  “Somebody doesn’t seem to agree with you,” the U.S. major observed. “And since he’s here, maybe he’s got a point, you know?”

  Monroe shook his head. Cincinnatus hadn’t expected anything different. Speaking of Army mules…When it came to the Confederates’ views of Negroes, they could have given the beasts mulishness lessons.

  As the two officers went back to confer with U.S. higher-ups, Hal Williamson thumped Cincinnatus on the back. “That butternut bastard can’t make nasty cracks about you!”