Drive to the East Read online

  “Yeah.” The kid was pushing the gravy-smeared meat around with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. “This is pretty lousy, isn’t it?” He eyed Martin’s heavily striped sleeve. “Have you, uh, been in the Army all along?”

  By the way he said it, he might have meant since the War of Secession, or possibly since the War of the Roses. Chester laughed and shook his head. “Nope. I got out in 1917”—undoubtedly before the private was born—“and went on with my life.”

  “Oh.” The youngster digested that, which had to be easier than digesting the Swiss steak. He risked another question: “How come you came back? They conscripted me. I had to go. But you must’ve had it made.”

  “Well, not quite,” Martin said. “I was doing all right, but I wasn’t rich or anything. But I didn’t want to see Jake Featherston kicking us in the slats, and so here I am.”

  “Uh-huh.” The private seemed surprised anybody who didn’t have to would put on the uniform. Maybe he was what was wrong with the USA, part of the reason the country was having so much trouble with the CSA. On the other hand, maybe he just had a good deal of common sense.

  Chester wondered how the Chicago-bound train would go to avoid both the Mormon uprising and the chance of bumping into Confederate raiders. It headed east through Kingman and Flagstaff, New Mexico, and on to Santa Fe, where it turned north for a run through the mountains to Denver. It got hung up there for two days, though, at a little Colorado town called Salida. Somebody said Salida meant exit in Spanish, but there was no exit from the place till damaged track up ahead was repaired. Avalanche? Sabotage? No one seemed to want to say, which left Chester suspecting the worst.

  He dug a greatcoat out of his duffel and used it to stay warm. Sleeping in his seat was anything but delightful. Everybody grumbled. Nobody could do anything but grumble. Misery might not have loved company, but had a lot of it.

  Once they got going again, they made pretty good time till they came to Chicago. The Confederates had done what they could to bomb the railroad yards. Given the accuracy of night bombing, that meant the whole city had caught hell. But the crawl at which the train proceeded showed the enemy had hurt the tracks and the stations to which they led.

  Following signs that said MILITARY PASSENGERS for the transfer to Milwaukee, Chester stood in line for twenty minutes and then presented his voucher to a bored-looking corporal who eyed it and said, “You’re late.”

  “My whole goddamn train is late. So sue me,” Chester said. The corporal looked up, wondering who could be so cavalier about this business. Seeing a man with a lot more stripes than he owned instead of a scared young private, he kept his mouth shut. Chester went on, “I knew I was late before I got here. Now I want to know how to get where I’m going.”

  “I’ll fix it, Sergeant,” the corporal promised, and he did. If he took it out on some luckless kid later on, Chester didn’t find out about that.

  From Chicago to Milwaukee was a short hop, like the one from Toledo to Cleveland. Naturally, whatever eastbound transport they’d planned from Milwaukee was also obsolete. Another noncom did some more fixing. An hour and a half later, Martin found himself taking off in a twenty-two-seat Boeing transport, bound for Buffalo: the first airplane ride of his life.

  He didn’t like it. It was bumpy—worse than bumpy, in fact. Several people were airsick, and not all of them got all of it in their sacks. There was a snowstorm over Buffalo. The pilot talked about going on to Syracuse or Rochester. He also talked about how much—or rather, how little—fuel he had. The kid next to Chester worked his rosary beads hard.

  They did put down in Buffalo, snowstorm or not. The transport almost skidded off the end of the runway, but it didn’t quite. The rosary beads got another workout during and after that. “Give ’em some for me, too,” Chester said when the airplane finally decided it did intend to stop. The only thing that could have made the landing more fun would have been Hound Dogs shooting up the transport while it came in.

  He wondered if the Army would try to fly him down to Virginia. If they did, he might have found out more about Confederate fighters than he ever wanted to know. But he got on another train again instead. And he got delayed again, twice: once from bombed-out rails and once from what they actually admitted was sabotage.

  Somebody in the car said, “Christ, I hope we’re doing the same thing to the Confederates.”

  “If we weren’t, we would’ve lost the goddamn war by now, I expect,” somebody else replied. Chester suspected that was true. He also suspected the United States were using Negro rebels to do a lot of their dirty work down there. He knew they’d done that in the last war; he’d led a Negro Red through U.S. lines to get whatever he needed in the way of arms and ammunition. Blacks now had even less reason to love the CSA than they’d had then.

  “You’re late,” a sergeant growled at him when he finally got where he was going.

  “That’s right,” Chester said. “I’m damn lucky I’m here at all.” The other sergeant stared at him. He stared back. He’d had three years of guff the last war. Enough, by God, was enough.

  ****

  Cincinnatus Driver sat in the Brass Monkey soaking up a bottle of beer. The Brass Monkey wasn’t the best saloon in Covington, Kentucky. It wasn’t even the best saloon in the colored part of Covington. But it was the closest one to the house where he lived with his father and his senile mother. He walked with a cane and had a permanent limp. Close counted.

  A couple of old black men sat in a corner playing checkers. They were regulars, and then some. As far as Cincinnatus could tell, they damn near—damn near—lived at the Brass Monkey. They’d nurse a beer all day long as they shoved black and red wooden disks back and forth. Every so often, they would stick their heads up and join in some conversation or other. More often, though, they stayed in their own little world. Maybe they were smart. The one outside looked none too appetizing to any Negro in the Confederate States of America.

  Talk in the saloon reflected that. A middle-aged man named Diogenes blew cigarette smoke up at the ceiling, smiled, and said, “Shoulda got outa here when the gettin’ was good. Too damn late now.”

  “Do Jesus, yes!” another man said, and knocked back his shot. He set a quarter on the bar for another one. “We is nothin’ but the remnants—the stupid remnants, I should oughta say. Remnants.” He repeated the fancy word with an odd, somber relish.

  He wasn’t wrong. After Kentucky voted to return to the CSA in early 1941, a lot of blacks voted with their feet, heading across the Ohio to states that remained in the USA. Cincinnatus had intended to do that with his father and mother. He’d been sure ahead of time how the plebiscite would go. If he hadn’t stepped in front of a car searching for his mother after she wandered off . . .

  Diogenes savagely stubbed out his cigarette. “God damn Al Smith to hell and gone. Reckon he fryin’ down there now, lousy, stinkin’ son of a bitch.”

  Several men nodded, Cincinnatus among them. Al Smith hadn’t had to give Jake Featherston that plebiscite. He hadn’t had to, but he’d done it. Cincinnatus wasn’t sorry he was dead, not even a little bit.

  The bartender ran a rag over the smooth top of the bar. The rag was none too clean, but neither was the bar. Cincinnatus couldn’t tell what, if anything, went on behind that expressionless face. Nodding while somebody else cursed Al Smith had probably been safe enough. He wouldn’t have cursed Smith himself, not where people he didn’t know could hear. Even if everybody here was black, that was asking for trouble. Anybody—anybody at all—could be an agent or a provocateur.

  And sometimes trouble came without asking. The doors to the Brass Monkey flew open. In stormed half a dozen Freedom Party guards, all in what looked like C.S. Army uniforms, but in gray cloth rather than butternut. They all had submachine guns and mean looks on their faces. When the one with a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve said, “Don’t nobody move!” the saloon suddenly became a still life.

  The white men fanned out. They weren’t quite sol
diers, but they knew how to take charge of a situation. The three-striper (he wasn’t officially a sergeant; the Freedom Party guards had their own silly-sounding names for ranks) barked, “Let’s see your passbooks, niggers!”

  No black in the CSA could go anywhere or do anything without showing the book first. It proved he was who he was and that he had the government’s permission to be where he was and do what he was doing. Cincinnatus dug his out of the back pocket of his dungarees. He handed it to the gray-uniformed white man who held out his hand. The guard checked to make sure his photo matched his face, then checked his name against a list.

  “Hey, Clint!” he exclaimed. “Here’s one we’re looking for!”

  Clint was the noncom in charge of the squad. He pointed his submachine gun at Cincinnatus, then gestured with the weapon. “Over here, nigger! Move nice and slow and easy, or that spook back of the bar’s gonna have to clean you off the floor.”

  Cincinnatus couldn’t move any way but slowly. The noncom was careful not to let him get close enough to lash out with his cane. He hadn’t planned to anyhow. He might knock the gun out of the man’s hand, but then what? He wasn’t likely to shoot all the Freedom Party guards before one of them filled him full of holes. He couldn’t run, either, not with his ruined leg. He was stuck.

  They hauled him away in a paddy wagon. He felt some small relief when they took him to a police station, not a Freedom Party meeting hall. The police still stood for law, no matter how twisted. The Party was a law unto itself, and beyond anyone else’s reach.

  And a police captain rather than a Freedom Party guard questioned him. “You know a man named Luther Bliss?” the cop demanded.

  That told Cincinnatus which way the wind was blowing. “I sure do, an’ I wish to Jesus I didn’t,” he answered.

  “Oh, yeah? How come?” The policeman exuded skepticism.

  “On account of he lured me down here and threw me in jail back in the Twenties,” Cincinnatus said, which was nothing but the truth. He didn’t like and didn’t trust Luther Bliss. He never had and never would. The U.S. secret policeman and secret agent with the hunting-hound eyes was too singlemindedly devoted to what he did.

  His reply seemed to take the policeman by surprise. “How come?” the cop repeated. “He reckon you was a Red nigger?”

  “Hell, no.” Cincinnatus sounded as scornful as a black man in a Confederate police station dared. Before his interrogator could get angry, he explained why: “Reds didn’t bother Luther Bliss none back then. They weren’t out to overthrow the USA. Bliss was afraid I was too cozy with Confederate diehards.”

  “Nigger, we can look all this shit up. If you’re lyin’, you’re dyin’,” the cop growled.

  “Why you reckon I’m telling you this stuff? I want you to look it up,” Cincinnatus said. “Then you see I ain’t done nothin’ to hurt the CSA.” The one didn’t follow from the other, but he hoped with all his heart that the policeman wouldn’t see that.

  His attitude did confuse the white man, anyhow. He sounded a little less hostile when he asked, “You seen Bliss since?”

  That was a dangerous question, because the answer was yes. Since Luther Bliss was one of the worst enemies the Confederates had in Kentucky, Cincinnatus would be suspected for not reporting that he’d spotted him. Cautiously, he said, “I done heard tell he was in town, but I ain’t set eyes on him. Don’t want to set eyes on him, neither.” The last sentence, at least, was true.

  If the Confederates asked the right questions of the right people, they could show the rest was a lie. The cop pointed a warning finger at Cincinnatus. “Don’t you go nowhere. I’m gonna check up on what you just told me. What happens next depends on whether you were tryin’ to blow smoke up my ass. You got me?”

  “Oh, yes, suh. I surely do,” Cincinnatus said. “An’ I ain’t goin’ nowhere.” He almost laughed at the policeman. If the fellow thought he could just waltz out of the station, that didn’t say much for how alert the Covington police usually were.

  He sat there in the little interrogation room and worried. After a while, he needed to use the toilet—the Jax he’d drunk was taking his revenge. He stuck his head out the door and asked another cop if he could. He was afraid the white man would say no, if only to pile more discomfort and indignity on him. But the cop took him down the hall, let him do his business, and then led him back.

  Cincinnatus had almost started to doze when his interrogator came back. “Well, looks like you weren’t lying about your run-in with Bliss,” he said grudgingly. He pointed an accusing finger at Cincinnatus. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d been living in Iowa? Why the hell didn’t you get your black ass back there when you had the chance? What have you been doin’ here since you came back?” He seemed sure Cincinnatus’ answer would have to be something incriminating.

  “Suh, I been takin’ care o’ my mama, an’ my pa’s been taking care o’ me.” Cincinnatus explained how he’d returned to Kentucky to get his parents out, and what had gone wrong. He finished, “You don’t believe that, go check the hospital.”

  “I seen you walk. I know you’re screwed up some kind of way,” the cop said.

  “Do Jesus! That is the truth!” Cincinnatus said.

  “I know what we ought to do with you,” the policeman told him. “We ought to send you over the damn border. If the Yankees want you, they’re welcome to you. Sounds like all you want to do is get the hell out, and take your ma and pa with you. The longer you stay here, the more likely you are to get in trouble.”

  Hope flowered in Cincinnatus. He needed a moment to recognize it; he hadn’t felt it for a long time. He said, “Suh, you do that for me, I get down on my knees to thank you. You want me to kiss your foot to thank you, I do that. I was laid up when I could have taken my folks out of here. By the time I could get around even a little bit, the border with the USA was closed.”

  “I’ll see what we can cook up,” the policeman said. “We deal with the damnyankees every now and then under flag of truce. If they want to let you cross the border, we’ll let you go.”

  “Suh, when them guards grabbed me, I reckoned I was a dead man,” Cincinnatus said, which was also nothing but the truth. “But you are a Christian gentleman, an’ I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  “Don’t get yourself all hot and bothered yet,” the police captain said. “These things don’t move fast. When we’ve got to talk to the Yankees or they’ve got to talk to us, though, you’re on the list. For now, go on home and stay out of trouble.”

  “Yes, suh. God bless you, suh!” Cincinnatus had dished out a lot of insincere flattery to white men in his time. He didn’t know any Negroes in the CSA—or, for that matter, in the USA—who hadn’t. It was part of life for blacks in both countries. Here, though, he meant every word of what he said. This Confederate cop hadn’t had to do anything for him. Cincinnatus had expected the man to do things to him. Maybe the policeman thought he would turn subversive if he stayed in the CSA. (Fortunately, the man didn’t know he’d already turned subversive.) Whatever his reasons, he wanted Cincinnatus out of the CSA and back in the USA. Since Cincinnatus wanted the same thing . . .

  Since he wanted the same thing, he didn’t even complain about the long walk home. It didn’t hurt as much as it might have, either. When he got there, he found his father almost frantic. “What you doin’ here?” Seneca Driver exclaimed, eyes almost bugging out of his head in disbelief. “Some damnfool nigger done tol’ me them Freedom Party goons grab you.”

  “They did, Pa,” Cincinnatus answered, and his father’s eyes got bigger yet. He went on, “An’ then they let me go.” He told what had happened at the station.

  “You believe this here policeman?” His father didn’t sound as if he did.

  But Cincinnatus nodded. “Uh-huh. I believe him, on account of he didn’t have no reason to lie to me. I was there. He had me. He coulda done whatever he pleased. Who’s gonna say boo if a cop roughs up a nigger? Who’s gonna say boo if a cop kills
a nigger, even? Nobody, an’ you know it as well as I do.”

  The older man thought it over. He screwed up his face in what was almost a parody of cogitation. “He don’t mean nothin’ good by it,” he said at last. He wouldn’t believe a Confederate cop could be decent, and Cincinnatus had a hard time blaming him.

  Cincinnatus had a trump card, though. “I’m here,” he said, and his father couldn’t very well quarrel with that.

  ****

  Congresswoman Flora Blackford clicked on the wireless set in her Philadelphia office. She usually left it off, turning it on at the hour and half hour to get what news she could. She had little—no, she had no—use for the music and advertising drivel that came out of the speaker most of the time.

  Some people were saying television—wireless with moving pictures—was the next big thing. The war had put it on hold, and might have derailed it altogether. Flora wasn’t sure she was sorry. The idea of having to watch advertisements as well as listen to them turned her stomach.

  She wasn’t listening to news now, though, or not directly. She looked at the clock on the wall. It was a quarter to five. What were they waiting for? The announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, live from New York City and newly escaped from the Confederate States of America, we are proud to present . . . Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces!”

  Out of the wireless poured music the likes of which was almost unknown in the United States. Negroes in the Confederate States had been oppressed for hundreds of years, and had no hope of anything else, anything better. They poured their wish for a different life—and a jaunty defiance of the life they were forced to live—into their music. Those sly rhythms and strange syncopations had no parallel in the USA. Satchmo might almost have been playing his trumpet in Portuguese rather than English.

  And yet, a great singer could make an audience feel what he felt even in a foreign language—would opera have been so popular if that weren’t true? Satchmo had the same gift. Nobody in the United States played his kind of music. But joy and despair and anger came through just the same.