American Front (39 page)

Cassius nodded strong agreement. “Dat man be alive today, he
wid
we. He want ev’body equal. Only way to do dat, make de revolution. Cain’t do it no ways else. Git de ’pressors off we, we do swell. Whole country do swell.”

He and his revolutionary cohorts all nodded, like the preacher and the congregation in church on Sunday morning. Scipio made sure he nodded, too. If you didn’t pay attention to the preacher, he gave you a hard time later. If you didn’t pay attention to Cassius, he gave you a funeral.

Now he said, “Miss Anne, she talk wid any new strange white folks? They after our scent like hounds. We got to watch sharp.”

“Nobody new I see,” Scipio answered truthfully. Then he asked, “How they after we?” From the moment he’d first set eyes on the deadly words of
The Communist Manifesto
, he’d known what sort of game he was playing and what its likely outcome would be, but he didn’t like Cassius reminding him of it.

The hunter—the Red—said, “They done cotched a few o’ we: Army niggers get careless, talk too much where de white folks hear. Sometimes you catch one, he know de name o’ ’nudder one, and
he
know
two
more names—”

That picture was clearer than any Marcel Duchamp had ever painted. Scipio wanted to get up and run somewhere far away from Marshlands. As Anne Colleton’s butler, he had a passbook that gave him more legal freedom of movement than any other Negro on the plantation. He wasn’t very much afraid of the patrollers’ catching up to him. But if he tried to disappear, it was all too likely Cassius’ revolutionaries would hunt him down and dispose of him. He imagined Red cells in every group of blacks in the Confederacy. What one knew, all would know; whom one wanted dead, all would work to kill…

Cassius said, “De day don’ wait much longer. De revolution happen, an’ de revolution happen
soon
. We rise up, we get what dey hol’ back from we fo’ so long. De white folks want de cotton, let de white folks grow de cotton an’ grub it out o’ de groun’. Dey don’t sploit us no mo’, never again.”

Scipio did keep his mouth shut, though that meant biting down on the inside of his lip till he tasted blood. The white folks weren’t going to sit around peaceable and quiet when the rebellion started. He’d tried saying that a few times, but nobody wanted to listen to him.

He wondered if he could get into the Empire of Mexico some kind of way, and never, ever come back.

Marching with a hangover was not Paul Mantarakis’ idea of fun. It did, however, beat the stuffing out of going into a front-line trench to be shot at and shelled. He’d be doing that soon enough—much too soon to suit him. Any time between the current moment and forever would have been much too soon to suit him.

A couple of men away from Mantarakis, Gordon McSweeney tramped along singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” McSweeney had a big bass voice and couldn’t have carried a tune in a washtub. His booming false notes made Mantarakis’ headache worse.

You couldn’t just tell him to put a sock in it, though, however much you wanted to. If you did, you’d find yourself facing a couple of hundred pounds of angry, fanatical Scotsman. Guile was called for.

Even hung over, guile Mantarakis had. “That was a good leave, wasn’t it, Gordon?” he said.

Addressed directly, McSweeney felt obliged to answer, which meant he stopped singing: the point to the exercise in guile. “Indeed, a good leave,” he said seriously—he was always serious, except when he was furious. “I prayed harder, I think, than I ever have before.”

“Dice weren’t going your way, eh?” Mantarakis knew that was a mistake, but couldn’t resist. The idea of praying in a town like Dixon, Kentucky, after it had become a U.S. Army leave center tickled his sense of the absurd.

“I do not gamble,” McSweeney said indignantly. “I do not poison my body and my spirit with spirituous liquors, and I do not consort with loose, vile, immoral women.”

Sergeant Peterquist was marching along a couple of men over on McSweeney’s other side. Grinning, he said, “Sort of takes a lot of the point out of going on leave, doesn’t it?”

“I will not be mocked,” McSweeney said, about as close as he dared come to telling his sergeant to go to hell. He was bigger than Peterquist, and meaner, too, but Mantarakis would have bet on the noncom if they ever tangled. Peterquist was a sneaky bastard. He would have made a pretty fair Greek, Paul thought, meaning it as a compliment.

Ignoring McSweeney, the sergeant asked Mantarakis, “You go to a house with white girls or colored?”

“Colored,” Mantarakis answered. “It was cheaper. And you go to any place like that, white or colored, you ain’t lookin’ for anything special, just to get the lead out of your pencil. Had a little more money to drink with.”

McSweeney started singing his hymn again, louder than ever, so he wouldn’t have to listen to his comrades’ lewd conversation. Peterquist looked at Mantarakis. They both grinned ruefully. Maybe neither of them made a good Greek—they should have been able to figure out what the effect of talking about going to a whorehouse would have on the pious McSweeney. But when you were coming out of Dixon, what was on your mind (unless you were pious) was all the different ways you’d had a good time.

The countryside looked as if hell had been there, but had gone away on vacation. Like every inch of Kentucky in U.S. hands, it had been fought over, but that had been the fall and winter before. New grass was beginning to spring up, hiding the worst scars of the fighting.

Even the town of Beulah, Kentucky, eight or nine miles north of the front, didn’t look too bad. It had also been in U.S. hands, and out of Confederate artillery range, most of that time, though the Rebel offensive coming up out of the south meant long-range guns bore on it again. Still, it seemed resigned to the prospect of flying the Stars and Stripes for the first time in a couple of generations, and a good many buildings damaged when it was captured had been repaired since.

South of Beulah, though, you were back in the war, no two ways about it. Mantarakis trudged past wagon parks city blocks on a side, and horse corrals alongside them full of animals chewing on hay and oats. Every so often, his regiment had to get off the dirt road onto the verge to let a convoy of trucks rumble past, carrying supplies up to the line, or to make way for an ambulance, red cross prominently displayed on a white background, transporting wounded men back toward Beulah.

There were munitions dumps scattered here and there across the landscape, too, shells standing on the ground as if they were the dragon’s teeth Cadmus had sown to raise a crop of soldiers. But they didn’t raise men; they razed them. When the pun occurred to Mantarakis, he tried to explain it to the men marching with him, and got only blank looks for his trouble.

The Rebel offensive had been halted just south of Dawson Springs. There, hell hadn’t gone on vacation. The Confederates might not have managed to take the town, but they’d shelled it into ruin. So many of the buildings were either burnt or wrecked, so many craters pocked the ground, it was hard to tell where exactly the roads had run before Dawson Springs made war’s acquaintance.

Just past Dawson Springs, Mantarakis heard a buzzing in the air. His head swiveled rapidly till he spotted the aeroplane coming north. It skimmed along low to the ground, paralleling the road down which he was marching. For a moment, that made him think it was an American aeroplane returning from the front. Then he spied the Confederate battle flags painted on the fabric under each wing.

The pilot must have seen the regiment before Paul noticed him. He brought the aeroplane down even lower, right down to treetop height. That gave the observer a perfect chance to rake the column of U.S. soldiers with his machine gun.

Men screamed and fell and ran every which way. A few, cooler-headed than the rest, stood in place and fired back at the Rebel aeroplane with their Springfields. Mantarakis admired their sangfroid without trying to imitate it. He was utterly unashamed to dive into a muddy ditch by the side of the road. Bullets kicked up dirt not far away.

Ignoring the rifle fire, the aeroplane wheeled through a turn and came back south down the other side of the road, raking the regiment all over again. Then, pilot and observer no doubt laughing to each other about shooting fish in a barrel, it streaked away for home, going flat out now.

Mantarakis got out of the ditch. He was filthy and wet, as if he’d been in the trenches for a month instead of away from them. Muddy water dripped from the brim of his cap, his nose, his chin, his elbows, his belt buckle.

Gordon McSweeney stood like a rock in the middle of the roadway, still firing after the Confederate aeroplane although, by now, his chances of hitting it were slim indeed. Officers and noncoms shouted and blew whistles, trying to get the regiment back into marching order.

A familiar voice was missing. There lay Sergeant Peterquist, not moving. Blood soaked the damp, hard-packed dirt of the roadway. A bullet had torn through his neck and almost torn off his head. “
Kyrie eleison
,” Mantarakis murmured, and made the sign of the cross.

“Popery—damned popery,” McSweeney said above him.

“Oh, shut up, Gordon,” Mantarakis said, as if to a pushy five-year-old. The really funny thing was that the Orthodox Church reckoned the pope every bit as much a heretic as any Scotch Presbyterian did.

“You’ll do his soul no good with your mummeries,” McSweeney insisted.

Paul paid no attention to him. If Peterquist was dead, somebody would have to do his job. Mantarakis looked around for Corporal Stankiewicz, and didn’t see him. Maybe he’d been wounded and dragged off, maybe he was still hiding, maybe…Maybe none of that mattered. What did matter was that he wasn’t here.

Even if he wasn’t, the job, again, needed doing. Mantarakis shouted for his section to form up around him, and then, as an afterthought, to get the dead and wounded off to the side of the road. A lot of people were shouting, but not many of the shouts were as purposeful as his. Because he sounded like someone who knew what he was doing, men listened to him.

Lieutenant Hinshaw had his whole scattered platoon to reassemble. By the time he got around to the section Sergeant Peterquist had led, it was ready to get moving again, which was more than a lot of the column could say.

“Good work,” Hinshaw said, looking over the assembled men and the casualties moved out of the line of march (Stankiewicz was among them: shot in the arm on the Rebel aeroplane’s second pass). Then he noticed the absence of noncoms. “Who pulled you people together like this?”

Nobody said anything for half a minute or so. Mantarakis shuffled his feet and looked down at the bloodstained dirt; he didn’t want to get a name for blowing his own horn. Then Gordon McSweeney said, “It was the little Greek, sir.”

“Mantarakis?” Most of the time, Paul was in trouble when the lieutenant called his name. But Hinshaw nodded and said, “If you do the work, you should have the rank to go with it. You’re a corporal, starting now.”

Mantarakis saluted. “Thank you, sir.” That meant more pay, not that you were ever going to get rich, not in this man’s Army. It also meant more duties, but that was how things went. You got a little, you gave a little. Or, in the Army, you got a little and, odds were, you gave a lot.

The pillar of black, greasy smoke rose high into the sky northwest of Okmulgee, Sequoyah, maybe higher, for all Stephen Ramsay knew, than an aeroplane could fly. The fires at the base of that pillar didn’t crackle, didn’t hiss, didn’t roar—they bellowed, like a herd of oxen in eternal agony. Even from miles away, as he was now, it was the biggest noise around. It was the biggest sight around, too: an ugly red carbuncle lighting up a whole corner of the horizon.

Captain Lincoln looked at the vast, leaping, hellish flames with somber satisfaction. “We’ve denied that oil field to the enemy,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Ramsay said. “Anybody tries to put out those fires, he’s gonna be a long time doin’ it.”

“Less than you’d think, Sergeant, less than you’d think,” Lincoln said. “Put a charge of dynamite in the right place and
whump!
—out it goes. But even if the damnyankees do that, they won’t be drawing any crude oil or gas from those wells for a long time, which was the point of the exercise.”

“They sure won’t, sir.” Ramsay sighed and patted his horse’s neck with a gloved hand. “Who would’ve thought the damnyankees could push us back like this? We don’t do
some
fightin’ back, they’re gonna run us out of Sequoyah altogether, push us into Texas an’ Arkansas.”

“Too damn many of ’em.” Lincoln spat down into the dirt. “We’re liable to have to fall back through Okmulgee, and the chief of the Creek Nation will pitch a fit if we do.”

“Yeah, well, if he doesn’t like it, he’s just going to have to go peddle his papers,” Ramsay said. “Either that or pull some men out from under his war bonnet.”

Lincoln sighed. The war had worn on him—not just the fighting, but the dickering, too. Ramsay hadn’t figured dickering would be a part of war—if you had a gun, you could tell the other guy what to do, couldn’t you?—but it was. The captain said, “We aren’t like the USA. One of the reasons we fought the War of Secession was to keep the national government from telling the states what they had to do.”

“Makes us a hell of a lot freer than the damnyankees,” Ramsay said, it being an article of faith in the CSA that living in the USA was at most a short step better than living under the tyranny of the czars. These days, of course, Russia was an ally, so nobody said much about the czars, but the principle remained the same.

“Yeah, it does,” Lincoln said with another sigh. “But it means sometimes we have to go through a whole lot of arguing to get through something the Yanks could deal with by giving a couple of orders. And here in Sequoyah, you may have noticed, it’s even more complicated than it is anyplace else.”

“Now that you mention it, sir, I have noticed that,” Ramsay admitted, drawing a wan smile from the captain.

Sequoyah, by itself, was a Confederate state. But within its borders lay five separate nations, those of the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles, the Five Civilized Tribes. They kept their local autonomy and guarded it with zeal; the governor of Sequoyah sometimes had more trouble getting their chiefs to cooperate with him than President Wilson did with the governors of the Confederate states. And, since a lot of the state’s petroleum and oil lay under land that belonged to the Indian nations, they had enough money on their own to keep the state government coming to them hat in hand.