In at the Death (56 page)

“Oh, yeah?” Dover had never imagined his fate could rest on a black man’s—hell, on a black kid’s—word. “What’d he have to say?”

Before answering, Hendrickson shuffled papers, even though he had to know already. Dover wanted to clout him, but made himself sit tight. “He said you treated his old man pretty decent. Said you saved his whole family from a cleanout once. Is that a fact?”

“Yeah.” Dover didn’t want to make a big deal out of it now. He’d saved Scipio and his family—and several other colored workers and theirs—as much to keep the Huntsman’s Lodge going as for any other reason. But this U.S. soldier didn’t need to know that. “What about it?”

“Well, it means you aren’t real likely to be a hardcore Freedom Party man,” Hendrickson said. “Will you swear an oath to live peacefully in Georgia and not to cause trouble for the United States if we let you go?”

“Major, I have lived through two wars now. I have had enough trouble to last me the rest of my days,” Dover said. “Read me out your oath. I will swear to it, and I will live up to it.”

“Raise your right hand,” Hendrickson said. Dover did. The oath was what the U.S. soldier said it was. Dover repeated it, swore to it, and then signed a printed copy in triplicate. “Show one copy to U.S. military authorities on request,” Hendrickson told him. “We will give you the balance of your back pay and a train ticket to Augusta. You can wear your uniform, but take off your rank badges before you leave the camp. The C.S. Army is out of business.”

Kirby Smith Telford scowled at Dover as he packed a meager duffel and took the stars off his collar. Other POWs eyed him with varying mixtures of envy and hatred. He didn’t care. He was going home.

A
young captain looked at Cincinnatus from across a no-doubt-liberated card table that did duty for a desk. “You are Cincinnatus Driver,” he said.

“Yes, sir. I sure am,” Cincinnatus agreed.

“You have been serving as a civilian truck driver attached to the U.S. Army since the end of 1942,” the captain said.

“That’s right, too. Did the same thing in the las’ war,” Cincinnatus said.

“Yes—so your records indicate. According to your superiors, you always performed your duties well, in spite of your physical limitations.”

“Always done the best I could,” Cincinnatus answered. “I had to stick around when it got tight—couldn’t hardly run.”

“You’re probably eager to return to your family in, uh, Des Moines”—the captain had to check Cincinnatus’ papers before naming his home town—“now that we have achieved victory.”

Cincinnatus nodded. “Sure am. You know anybody who ain’t?”

To his surprise, the officer took the question seriously. “There are always some who are more comfortable in the Army. They don’t have to think for themselves here—they just have to do as they’re told. And they never have any doubts about who’s on their side and who isn’t.”

The young officer was probably right. No, he was bound to be right. “Hadn’t thought of it that way, sir,” Cincinnatus said. “But me, I’m a big boy. I can take care of myself, and I can make up my own mind. And if the government’s ready to muster me out, I’m real ready to go home.”

“That’s what you’re here to arrange,” the captain said. “I have your final pay warrant here, and I have a train ticket to get you home.”

“Ask you a favor, sir?”

“I don’t know. What is it?”

“Can you arrange my train route to take me through Covington, Kentucky? I was born and raised there, and I want to see if any of my people in the colored quarter came through in one piece.”

“It’s irregular. It’s an extra expense…” The officer in green-gray frowned, considering. “Let me talk to my superiors. You may have to stay in Alabama an extra day or two while we set things up—if they approve, that is.”

“I don’t mind,” Cincinnatus said. “Not even a little bit.”

He stayed an extra three days, in fact. The rest of the drivers in his unit headed for home long before he did. Hal Williamson shook his hand and said, “Good luck to you, buddy. Goddamn if I didn’t learn something from you.”

“What’s that?” Cincinnatus asked.

“Colored guys—you’re just like anybody else, only darker,” Hal answered.

Cincinnatus laughed. “Shit, I’ll take that. Good luck to you, too, man.”

He got the travel orders he wanted. Back in Confederate days, he would have had to ride in a separate car. No more. Some white passengers looked unhappy at sharing a row with him, but nobody said anything. That suited him well enough. He didn’t ask to be loved: only tolerated.

The Stars and Stripes flew over Covington. A blue X that stood for the C.S. battle flag showed up on walls all over town. So did the word
FREEDOM
! The CSA had lost the war, but not everybody had given up.

Buses were running. He took one east from the train station to the colored quarter by the Licking River, or what was left of it. He sat up near the front of the bus, the first time he’d been able to do that here regardless of whether Covington flew the Stars and Stripes or Stars and Bars.

Not all the fences and barbed wire that sealed off the colored quarter had come down yet. But ways through the stuff were open now. Cincinnatus got off the bus a couple of blocks from Lucullus Wood’s barbecue place. If anyone had come through what the Confederates did to their Negroes, he would have bet on the Red barbecue cook.

Houses and shops stood empty. Windows had broken panes; doors sagged open. Leaves drifted on lawns. Ice shivered up Cincinnatus’ spine. What was that fancy word people used when they talked about dinosaurs? This place was
extinct
.

A stray cat darted across the street and behind some untrimmed bushes. Cats could take care of themselves without people. Cincinnatus didn’t hear any barking dogs. He should have, if the colored quarter had any life left to it.

When he saw somebody else on the street, he jumped in surprise and alarm. It was an old white man in a cool linen suit, his white hair shining under his Panama hat. The white man seemed as startled to spot a Negro as Cincinnatus was to see him. Then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t. “I might have known it would be you,” he said. “You’re tougher to kill than a cockroach, aren’t you?”

“Go to hell, Bliss,” Cincinnatus said wearily. “Lucullus still alive?”

“His place looks as dead as the rest of this part of town,” Luther Bliss answered. The longtime head of the Kentucky State Police sighed. “I tried to get him out once they closed off the colored quarter, but I couldn’t do it. Don’t know what happened to him, but I’m afraid it’s nothing good. Damn shame.”

“They go and kill everybody?” Cincinnatus asked. “They really go an’ do that?”

“Just about,” Bliss said. “And you were in bed with ’em for a while. Doesn’t that make you proud?”

“Fuck off and die,” Cincinnatus said coldly. “I was never in bed with the goddamn Freedom Party, and you know it.”

Luther Bliss spat. “Maybe. I never knew anything about you for sure, though. That’s how come I never trusted you.”

Cincinnatus laughed in his face. “Don’t give me that shit. You never trusted your own grandma.”

“If you’d known the old bat, you wouldn’t’ve trusted her, either. She was an evil woman.” Nothing fazed Bliss. His mournful hound-dog eyes pierced Cincinnatus. “So you drove a truck, did you?”

“Keepin’ tabs on me?”

“Damn straight I was,” Bliss replied. “You deserve it. But things are all over now. The United States won, and if we kill enough Confederates to keep the rest quiet we’ll do all right.”

He waited. Cincinnatus laughed again. “What? You reckon I’m gonna argue with you? We better kill a lot of them bastards. Otherwise, they’ll be killin’ us too damn soon.”

“Well, we agree about something, anyway,” Luther Bliss said. “I hope to God I never see you again. You gave me too much to worry about—more than Lucullus, even. He was smarter than you, but I always knew where he stood. With you, I had to wonder.”

“You son of a bitch,” Cincinnatus said. “You kept me in jail for two years. Wasn’t for that Darrow ofay, you never woulda let me out.”

“I still say I was doing the USA a favor by keeping you in.” Nothing would ever make Bliss back up or admit he might have been wrong, either.

The two men warily sidled past each other. Cincinnatus went on toward the barbecue shack. He didn’t trust Bliss’ word about anything—he had to see with his own eyes. But the secret policeman wasn’t lying here. The place Lucullus had taken over from his father sat quiet and deserted. Oh, the building still stood, but piles of dead leaves and broken windows said no one had come here for a long time. Even the wonderful smell that had always wafted from the shack was gone. You could gain weight just from that smell. No more, dammit. Nothing in Covington would ever be the same.

Sighing, Cincinnatus walked on to the house his father and mother had shared till she passed away. He’d lived there himself, getting over his accident, helping to take care of her as she slid deeper into senility, and then simply trapped in Covington. The house was still standing, too. Cincinnatus supposed his father still owned it. Even with a shell hole in the front yard and a little shrapnel damage, it was bound to be worth something.

Who would want to buy a house in the colored district, though? How many Negroes would want to live here, even with Covington passed back to the USA? How many Negroes were left to live in Covington and all the other towns that had flown the Stars and Bars? Not enough. Nowhere close to enough. Would whites eventually settle in this part of town, too? Or would they tear everything down and try to pretend Negroes had never been a part of life south of the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio?

Cincinnatus couldn’t know which, but he sure knew which way he’d bet.

Sore and sad, he walked on through the almost-deserted quarter instead of heading back to the bus stop and the train ride on to his family. His feet knew where he was going better than his head did. Before long, he found himself in front of the Brass Monkey. He’d drowned a lot of sorrows in that bar while he was stuck here.

He almost jumped out of his shoes when a voice floated out through the door: “C’mon in! We’re open!”

“Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus walked inside. There was no electricity, so his eyes needed a little while to adjust to the dimness. A black man sat at the bar, nursing a whiskey. Another one stood behind it, fanning himself. It was the same bartender who’d been there before. “Didn’t reckon I’d see you alive,” Cincinnatus remarked.

“I could say the same thing about you,” the man answered. “When the
po
lice done took you away, I reckoned you was dead meat.”

“I was on a list,” Cincinnatus said.

“Figured you was. That’s why they took you away.”

“No, a different kind o’ list. They went an’ exchanged me an’ my pa fo’ a couple of Confederates who got stuck up in the USA.”

“Lucky,” the bartender observed.

“Yeah, I reckon,” Cincinnatus said. “How’d you get by?”

“Me? I was lucky a different kind o’ way.” The bartender fanned harder and didn’t go on.

The black man at the bar said, “Cambyses, he done the butternut bastards enough favors, they didn’t take him off to no camp.”

“Shut your mouth!” the bartender squawked indignantly.

“Shit, don’t make no difference now,” the other man said. “Me, I done the same damn thing. I ain’t what you call real proud o’ myself, but I ain’t dead, neither, an’ a hell of a lot o’ folks is.”

Cincinnatus had been about to buy himself a drink—he could have used one. Instead, he turned around and walked out. Had those two Negroes survived by ratting on their fellows? He’d always wondered about Cambyses, and he seemed to have been right to wonder. Had they bought their lives at too high a price?

They wouldn’t say so. As for Cincinnatus, he was mostly surprised the Confederates had let them live. Maybe the whites just hadn’t had time to kill them before Covington fell. How many Negroes down here had made the same Devil’s bargain to survive? He was heading back to Des Moines, back to the USA. He thanked God he wouldn’t have to find out.

W
ith a wheeze that said it might not get much farther, the train stopped at the little station in Baroyeca. Jorge Rodriguez wore his butternut uniform, shorn of his stripes and all Confederate insignia. It was all the clothing he had. He’d been living on the ration cans the Yankees gave him when they let him out of the POW camp. If he never ate anything that came from a tin can again, he wouldn’t be sorry. He was even sick of the famous deviled ham. Enough was enough, and then some.

Jorge was the only one who got off at Baroyeca. There on the platform stood his mother, his brother Pedro, and his sister Susana and two of her little children. Jorge hugged everybody and kissed everybody and slapped Pedro on the back. His older brother had been a POW much longer than he had.

“Do you know when Miguel is getting home?” Jorge asked.

Their other brother had been captured, too, and wounded as well. Pedro shook his head. “I haven’t heard anything. One of these days, that’s all.”

“Soon, God, please.” Their mother crossed herself.