Drive to the East (58 page)

Cincinnatus wondered how the Freedom Party would look at that marriage. Who was miscegenating with whom? He didn’t have to worry about that here. He didn’t have to worry about all kinds of things here, things that would have been matters of life and death in the Confederate States. He could look at a white woman without fearing he might get lynched. He didn’t much want to—he’d always been happy with Elizabeth—but he could. He could testify in court on equal terms with whites—and with Chinese, for that matter. And . . .

“You’re a U.S. citizen, Pa,” he said suddenly. “Once you’ve lived in Iowa long enough to be a resident, you can vote.”

His father was less delighted than he’d expected. “Done did that once in Kentucky,” Seneca Driver replied. “There was that plebiscite thing, remember? I done voted, but they went ahead an’ gave her back to the CSA anyways.” He plainly thought that, since he’d voted, things should have gone the way he wanted them. Cincinnatus wished the world worked like that.

Elizabeth came out of the kitchen and into the front room. “You two hungry?” she asked. “Got some fried chicken in the icebox I can bring you.” She thought Cincinnatus and his father were nothing but skin and bones. Since they’d eaten too much of their own cooking down in Covington, she might have been right.

“I would like that. Thank you kindly,” Seneca said. Cincinnatus nodded, but he was less happy than his father sounded. To Seneca Driver, his son’s family seemed rich. Compared to anything the older man had had in Kentucky, they were. But Cincinnatus knew money didn’t grow on trees, and neither did chickens. Elizabeth had done cooking and cleaning to make ends meet while he was stuck in Covington. Achilles had helped out, too. All the same . . .

Cincinnatus knew his hauling business was dead. His wife had sold the Ford truck he’d been so proud of. He didn’t blame her for that; if she couldn’t pay the rent, the landlord would have thrown her out onto the street. But he didn’t have enough money to buy another one. He wasn’t going to be his own boss anymore. He would have to work for somebody else, and he hadn’t done that since the end of the Great War. He hated the idea, but he didn’t know what he could do about it.

Were there jobs for a middle-aged black man with a bad leg and a none too good shoulder? There, for once, Cincinnatus wasn’t so worried. With the war sucking able-bodied men out of the workforce, there were jobs for all the people who wanted them. He’d seen how many factories and shops had
NOW HIRING
signs out where folks could see them. Women were doing jobs that had been a man’s preserve before the war. He figured he could find something.

Elizabeth came back with a drumstick for his father, a thigh for him, and two more glasses of beer. “You holler if you want anything else,” she said. She swung her hips as she walked off. In some ways, Cincinnatus was glad to discover, he wasn’t crippled at all. His homecoming had been everything he hoped it would be along those lines.

“Sure is good,” his father said, taking a big bite out of the chicken leg and washing it down with a sip of Mr. Chang’s homebrew. “They always said folks in the USA had it good. I see they was right.”

All he had to do was enjoy it. He didn’t have to worry about where it came from. For the past couple of years, Elizabeth had done that. Cincinnatus was sure she’d done a lot of worrying, too. But she’d managed. Now that Cincinnatus was finally home, the worrying fell on his shoulders again.

He’d hoped the government would help him out. No such luck. To those people, he’d been in Kentucky on his own affairs, and never mind that the plebiscite and its aftermath were what had stuck him there.

Amanda came into the apartment. She’d found work at a fabric plant, and her paycheck was helping with the bills now, too. She smiled at Cincinnatus and Seneca. “Hello, Dad! Hello, Grandpa!” she said, and kissed them both on the cheek. She’d always got on better with Cincinnatus than Achilles had. There was none of that young goat bumping up against old goat rivalry that sometimes soured things between Cincinnatus and his son.

“How are you, sweetheart?” he asked her.

She made a face. “Tired. Long shift.”

Seneca laughed. “Welcome to the world, dear heart. You better git used to it, on account o’ it gonna be like dat till God call you to heaven.”

“I suppose.” Amanda sighed. “I wish I could have gone on to college. I’d be able to get a really good job with a college degree.”

“Lawd!” The mere idea startled Cincinnatus’ father. “A child o’ my child in college? That woulda been somethin’, all right.”

“Even if you had started college, hon, reckon you would’ve gone to work anyways with things like they were,” Cincinnatus said. “Sometimes you just can’t help doin’ what you got to do.”

“I suppose,” his daughter said again. She went into the kitchen to say hello to Elizabeth. When she came back, she had a glass of beer in her hand.

Cincinnatus raised an eyebrow when she sipped from it. “When did you start drinking beer?” he asked.

“I knew you were going to say that!” Amanda stuck out her tongue at him. “I
knew
it! I started about a year ago. I needed a while to get used to it, but I like it now.”

Cincinnatus smiled, remembering how sour beer had tasted to him the first few times he tasted it. “All right, sweetheart,” he said mildly. “I ain’t gonna flabble about it. You’re big enough. You can drink beer if you want to. But when I went away, you didn’t.” He didn’t want to get upset about anything, not here, not now. He was so glad to see his daughter, he wouldn’t worry about anything past that.

She looked relieved. “I was afraid you’d get all upset, say it wasn’t ladylike or something.”

“Not me.” He shook his head. “How could I do that when your mama’s been drinkin’ beer a whole lot longer’n you’ve been alive?”

“You could have,” Amanda said darkly. “Some people think what’s fine for older folks isn’t so fine for younger ones.”

So there,
Cincinnatus thought. “Yeah, some people do that,” he admitted. “But I ain’t one of them.” He listened to the way his words sounded compared to those of the people around him. After so many years in Iowa, he’d seemed more than half a Yankee whenever he opened his mouth in Covington. But Amanda and Achilles had taken on much more of the flat Midwestern accent of Des Moines than he had. Next to them, he sounded like . . . a Negro who’d just escaped from the Confederate States.
Well, I damn well am.

“When I was jus’ a li’l pickaninny—this here was back in slavery days—my pa give me my first sip o’ beer,” his father said in an accent far thicker and less educated than his own. He screwed up his face at the memory. “I axed him, ‘Am I pizened?’ An’ he tol’ me no, an’ he was right, but I done pizened myself with beer a time or two since. Yes, suh, a time or two.”

“Oh, yeah.” Cincinnatus remembered times when he’d poisoned himself, too, some of them not so long ago. He wondered how the Brass Monkey and the dedicated drinkers—and checker-players—who made it a home away from home were doing. Already, the time when he was stuck in Covington was starting to seem like a bad dream. He remembered waking up in the hospital. If only that were a bad dream! The pain in his leg and shoulder and the headaches he still sometimes got reminded him it was all too real.

He still didn’t remember the motorcar hitting him. The doctors had told him he never would. They seemed to be right. From what they said, lots of folks didn’t remember what happened when they had a bad accident. If his were any worse, they would have planted him with a lily on his chest.

“Glad you’re home, Dad,” Amanda said.
Dad.
There it was again. Down in Covington, she would surely have called him
Pa.
She had called him
Pa
for years. When had she changed to this Yankee usage? Whenever it was, he hadn’t particularly noticed—till he went away and came back and got his nose rubbed in it.

“I’m glad I’m home, too,” Cincinnatus said. When you got right down to it, he didn’t much care what she called him. As long as she could call him anything and he was there to hear it, nothing else mattered.

He thought about the Brass Monkey again, and about Lucullus Wood’s barbecue place, and about his father and mother’s house, now empty and, for all he knew, standing open to the wind and the rain. And he thought about the barbed wire and the guards around Covington’s colored quarter. Autumn was coming to Des Moines, but winter lived in his heart when he remembered that barbed wire.

A
llegheny. Monongahela. Beautiful names for rivers. Even Ohio wasn’t a bad name for a river. When you put the three of them together, though, they added up to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh hadn’t been beautiful for a long time. The way things looked to Tom Colleton, it would never be beautiful again.

The damnyankees were not going to give up this town without a fight. They poured men into it to battle block by block, house by house. Crossing a street could be and often was worth a man’s life. Barrels came in and knocked houses flat and machine-gunned the men who fled from the ruins. Then some damnyankee they hadn’t machine-gunned threw a Featherston Fizz through an open hatch and turned a barrel into an iron coffin for the men inside. And
then
a counterattack went in and threw the Confederates back six blocks.

Somebody not far away started banging on a shell casing with a wrench or a hammer or whatever he had handy. “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Tom said, and grabbed for his gas mask. The weather seemed to have broken; it wasn’t so hot and sticky as it had been. But the gas mask was never any fun. If U.S. artillery was throwing in nerve gas, he’d have to put on the full rubber suit. He’d be sweating rivers in that even in a blizzard.

Confederate shells crashed down on the factories and steel mills ahead. The bursts sent up smoke that joined the horrid stuff belching from the tall stacks. Air in Pittsburgh was already poisonous even without phosgene and mustard gas and the nerve agents. They called the thick brown eye-stinging mix smog, jamming together smoke and fog. What they got was more noxious than the made-up word suggested, though.

Tom wouldn’t have wanted to work in one of those places with shells bursting all around. But the factories kept operating till they burned or till the Confederates overran them. Trucks and trains took steel and metalware of all kinds east. Barges took them up the Allegheny, too. Confederate artillery and dive bombers made the Yankees pay a heavy price for what came out of the mills and factories. Some of it got through, though, and they must have thought that was worthwhile.

Barrels painted butternut ground forward. Telling streets from blocks of houses wasn’t so easy anymore. Confederate-occupied Pittsburgh was nothing but a rubble field these days. The whole town would look like that by the time Tom’s countrymen finished driving out the damnyankees . . . if they ever did.

A machine gun fired at the barrels from the cover of a ruined clothing store. Bullets clanged off the snorting machines’ armor. Tom didn’t know why machine gunners banged away at barrels; they couldn’t hurt them. Bang away they did, though. He wasn’t sorry. The more bullets they aimed at the barrels, the fewer they’d shoot at his foot soldiers, whom they really could hurt.

Traversing turrets had a ponderous grace. Three swung together, till their big guns bore on that malevolently winking eye of fire. The cannons spoke together, too. More of the battered shop fell in on itself. But the machine gun opened up again, like a small boy yelling,
Nyah! Nyah! You missed me!
when bigger kids chucked rocks at him. The crew had nerve.

All they got for their courage was another volley, and then another. After that, the gun stayed quiet. Had the barrels put it out of action, or was it playing possum? Tom hoped his men wouldn’t find out the hard way.

And then, for a moment, he forgot all about the machine gun, something an infantry officer hardly ever did. But a round from a U.S. barrel he hadn’t seen slammed into the side of one of the butternut behemoths. The Confederate barrel started to burn. Hatches popped open. Men dashed for cover. The U.S. barrel was smart. It didn’t machine-gun them and reveal its position. It just waited.

The other two C.S. barrels turned in the general direction from which that enemy round had come. If the U.S. barrel was one of the old models, their sloped front armor would defeat its gun even at point-blank range. But it wasn’t. It was one of the new ones with the big, homely turret that housed a bigger, nastier cannon. And when that gun roared again, another Confederate barrel died. This time, several soldiers pointed toward the muzzle flash. By the time the last C.S. barrel in the neighborhood brought its gun to bear, though, the damnyankee machine had pulled back. Tom Colleton got glimpses of it as it retreated, but only glimpses. The butternut barrel didn’t have a clear shot at it, and held fire.

He sent men forward to keep the enemy from bringing barrels into that spot again. He was only half surprised when the machine gun in the ruined store opened up again. His men were quick to take cover, too. He didn’t think the machine gun got any of them. He hoped not, anyway.

The Confederate barrel sent several more rounds into the haberdashery. The machine gun stayed quiet. Ever so cautious, soldiers in butternut inched closer. One of them tossed in a grenade and went in after it. Tom wished he had a man with a flamethrower handy. The last fellow who’d carried one had got incinerated along with his rig a few days earlier, though. No replacement for him had come forward yet.

Not enough replacements of any kind were coming forward. Little by little, the regiment was melting away. Tom didn’t know what to do about that, except hope it got pulled out of the line for rest and refit before too long. However much he hoped, he didn’t expect that would happen soon. The Confederates needed Pittsburgh. They’d already put just about everybody available up at the front.

After a minute or so, the soldier came out of the wreckage with his thumb up. There was one damnyankee machine gun that wouldn’t murder anybody else. Now—how many hundreds, how many thousands, more waited in Pittsburgh? The answer was too depressing to think about, so Tom didn’t.