Return Engagement (54 page)

Of course, Dover was good with people generally, whites as well as Negroes.
We
are
people, dammit,
Scipio thought. The Freedom Party had a different opinion.

Dover said, “You be careful on the way home, you hear? Don’t want your missus and your young ones grieving on account of some bastard who’s out prowling after curfew.”

“I’s always careful,” Scipio said, and meant it. “But I thanks you fo’ de thought.”

He went out into the black, black night. Augusta had never been bombed, but remained blacked out. Scipio supposed that made sense. Better safe than sorry was a pretty good rule.

The weather was cooler and less muggy than it had been. As fall came on, the dreadful sticky heat of summer became only a memory. It wasn’t cold enough to put all the mosquitoes to sleep for the winter, though. Scipio suspected he’d get home to his apartment with a new bite or two. He couldn’t hear the mosquitoes buzzing any more unless they flew right past his ears. Those nasty whines had driven him crazy when he was younger. He didn’t miss hearing them now—except that they would have warned him the flying pests were around.

An auto slid past, going hardly faster than Scipio was. Masking tape reduced its headlights to slits. They cast a pallid glow that reached about as far as a man could spit. At least the driver here didn’t have the delusion he could do more than he really could. Accidents were up even though fewer motorcars were on the road. That meant one thing and one thing only: people were driving like a bunch of damn fools.

As usual, Scipio had no trouble telling when he got to the Terry, even though he could hardly see a hand in front of his face. As soon as the sidewalk started crumbling under his feet, he knew he’d come to the colored part of town.

He skirted the shortest way home, which took him past what had been the bus stop for war workers. It remained a sea of rubble. Repairs got done slowly in the Terry—when they got done at all. Some of the buildings white mobs had burned in the pogroms after the Freedom Party took over remained ruins after seven years.

He’d almost died then. Two different auto bombs had almost killed him. He’d lived through the bloody rise and even bloodier fall of the Congaree Socialist Republic. He’d outlived Anne Colleton, and he never would have bet anything on that.
After what I’ve been through, maybe I’ll go on forever,
he thought.

A bat flittered past, not a foot in front of him. It was out of sight almost before he realized it had been there. He wondered if the war had brought hardship to bats. Without street lights to lure insects, wouldn’t they have to work harder to get enough to eat? Strange to imagine that one man’s decision in Richmond might affect little furry animals hundreds of miles away.

“Hold it right there!” The harsh, rasping voice came out of an alley not ten feet away. “Don’t even breathe funny, or it’ll be the last thing you ever do.”

Scipio froze. Even as he did it, he wondered if it was the worst thing he could do, not the best. If he ran, he might lose himself in the darkness. Of course, if he ran, he might also give the owner of that voice the excuse to blast him to hamburger with a charge of buckshot. He’d made his choice. Now he had to see what came of it.

“All right, nigger. Suppose you tell me what the fuck you’re doin’ out after curfew.”

He’d
thought
that was a white policeman there, not a black robber. He would have been more likely to run from a man of his own color. “Suh, I works at de Huntsman’s Lodge,” he answered. “Dey don’t let me off till midnight. I goes home at all, I gots to go after curfew.”

“Likely tell,” the white man said. “Who’s your boss, damn you? Make it snappy!”

“Jerry Dover, suh,” Scipio said quickly. “Mebbe he still dere. I ain’t left but fifteen minutes ago. He tell you who I is.”

Footsteps crunching on gravel, thumping on cement. A dark, shadowy shape looming up in front of Scipio. The silhouette of the juice-squeezer hat the other man wore said he really was a policeman. He leaned forward to peer closely at Scipio. “Holy Jesus, you’re in a goddamn penguin suit!”

“I gots to wear it,” Scipio said wearily. “It’s my uniform, like.”

“Get the fuck outa here,” the cop said. “Nobody’s gonna be dumb enough to go plantin’ bombs or nothin’ in a lousy penguin suit.”

“I thanks you kindly, suh,” Scipio said. If the policeman had been in a nasty mood, he could have run him in for being out after curfew. Scipio thought Jerry Dover or the higher-ups at the restaurant would have made sure he didn’t spend much time in jail, but any time in jail was too much.

“A penguin suit,” the cop said one more time—another dime Scipio didn’t have. “Shit, the boys at the station’ll bust a gut when I tell ’em about this one.”

With a resigned chuckle and a dip of his head to show he was a properly respectful—a properly servile—Negro, Scipio made his way deeper into the Terry. He peered carefully up and down every street and alley he came to before crossing it. How much good that would do, with so many inky shadows for robbers to hide in, he didn’t know. But it was all he could do.

When he came to a couple of the places where he was most likely to find trouble—or it was most likely to find him—he wished he had that foul-mouthed policeman at his side. He shook his head, ashamed and embarrassed at wanting a white man’s protection against his own people. Ashamed and embarrassed or not, though, he did. The Terry was a more dangerous place these days than it had been a few years before. Sharecroppers and farm workers forced from fields when tractors and harvesters took their jobs away had poured into Confederate cities, looking for whatever they could find. When they could find nothing else—which was all too often— they preyed on their fellow Negroes. And Reds sheltered here, too. They weren’t above robbery (from the highest motives, of course) to keep their cause alive.

He got through the worst parts safely. His last bad moment was opening the fortified door to his building. If somebody came up while he was doing that . . . But nobody did. He quickly shut the door behind him, locked the lock, and used the dead bolt. Then he breathed a sigh of relief.
Made it through another night,
he thought.

As the fear dropped away, he realized how tired he was. The climb up the stairs to his flat felt as if he were going up a mountain. He’d had that happen before, too. He didn’t know what he could do about it. If he didn’t work at the Huntsman’s Lodge, he’d be waiting tables somewhere else. And if he couldn’t do it anywhere, what would he be doing then? Prowling the alleys, looking for someone unwary to knock over the head?

Scipio laughed, not that it was funny. He might make the
Constitutionalist
if he tried it. What would the headline be? Augusta’s oldest strongarm man? Augusta’s dumbest strongarm man? Oldest
and
dumbest? That would probably do the job.

He trudged down the hall and opened his front door. A light was burning inside. Blackout curtains made sure it didn’t leak out. Here as in other colored districts throughout the CSA, blackout wardens and cops were likelier to shoot through lighted windows than to bother with a warning and a fine.

As usual, he got out of his tuxedo with nothing but relief. Putting on his nightshirt felt good, where even that much in the way of clothes had been a sore trial in the hot weather not long before. Bathsheba murmured sleepily when he lay down beside her. “How’d it go?” she asked.

“Not too bad,” he answered automatically. But then he remembered that wasn’t quite true. “Got my pay docked ten dollars, though.” He couldn’t hide that from his wife—better to let her know right away, then.

The news got her attention, no matter how sleepy she was. “Ten dollars!” she said. “What you do?”

“Didn’t do nothin’. Everybody git docked,” Scipio said. “De gummint fine de niggers here fo’ de auto bombs.”

“Ain’t fair. Ain’t right,” Bathsheba said. “Gummint don’t fine no ofays when
they
do somethin’ bad.”

“I ain’t sayin’ you wrong,” Scipio replied. “But what kin we do ’bout it?” The answer to that for Negroes in the CSA had always been
not much.

J
onathan Moss led his squadron of Wright fighters out over Lake Erie. They were looking for trouble. They would probably find it, too. Just in case they couldn’t on their own, they had help. The wireless set sounded in Moss’ earphones: “Red-27 leader, this is Mud Hen Base. Do you copy?”

“Go ahead, Mud Hen Base,” Moss said. “I read you five by five.” Mud Hen Base was the Y-ranging station back in Toledo. For reasons known only to God, the Toledo football team was called the Mud Hens. They didn’t play in one of the top leagues, so maybe Confederate wireless men monitoring the conversation—and there were bound to be some—wouldn’t figure out where the fellow on the other end of the circuit was for a while.

And maybe the stork brings babies and tucks them under cabbage leaves, too,
Moss thought.

“We have bogies on the lake. Range about seventy, bearing oh-seven-five. I say again, range about seventy, bearing oh-seven-five.”

“Roger that,” Moss said, and repeated it back. “We’ll have a look. Out.” He checked a small map, then got on the circuit with the rest of the airplanes he led. After passing on what he’d got from the Y-ranging station, he added, “Sounds like they’re somewhere out east of Point Pelee Island. Let’s see if we can’t catch ’em.”

Point Pelee Island lay north of Sandusky. Before the Great War, it had belonged to the province of Ontario. It had been fortified to hell and gone, too; reducing it had cost most of a division. Technically, Moss supposed it still belonged to Ontario. That didn’t matter now, though—it was under U.S. management.

When the island came into sight, he led the squadron north around it. Some of the U.S. antiaircraft down there opened up on the fighters anyway. “Knock it off, you stupid sons of bitches!” Moss shouted in the cockpit. The gunners, of course, paid no attention to him. They probably wouldn’t have even if he’d been on the wireless with them—how could they be sure he wasn’t a Confederate who could put on a Yankee accent?

U.S. guns had already shot at Moss quite often enough to last him several lifetimes. They hadn’t hit him yet. He knew of pilots who weren’t so lucky. He also knew of pilots who hadn’t come home because their own side shot them down.

Nobody got hit here. Someone—Moss couldn’t tell who—spoke in his earphones: “I’d like to go down there and strafe those assholes.” That had occurred to him, too.

Once past the danger, he peered east. He also looked down to the surface of the lake every now and again. The Confederates would be out hunting freighters. With the rail lines and railroads through Ohio cut, the United States had to do what they could to move things back and forth between East and West. And the Confederates had to do what they could to try to stop the USA.

He hoped he’d find Mules buzzing along in search of ships to dive on. The CSA’s Asskickers were formidable if you were underneath them. To a fighter pilot, they might have had shoot me down! painted on their gull wings. They couldn’t run fast enough to get away, and they couldn’t shoot back well enough to defend themselves.

“There they are—eleven o’ clock!” The shout crackled with excitement.

Moss peered a little farther north than he’d been looking. He spotted the sun flashing off cockpit glass, too. “Well, let’s go see what we’ve got,” he said. “Stick with your wingmen, keep an eye on your buddies, and good hunting.”

His own wingman these days was a stolid squarehead named Martin Rolvaag. He came on the circuit to say, “They don’t look like Mules, sir.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Moss answered. “Razorbacks, unless I miss my guess.” The medium bombers couldn’t outrun Wrights, either, but they carried more machine guns than Mules did, and had to be approached with caution. And . . . “They’ve got Hound Dogs escorting them.”

“They’ve seen us,” Rolvaag said.

Sure enough, the Confederate fighters peeled away from the Razorbacks and sped toward the U.S. airplanes. Their numbers more or less matched those he had. So did their performance. They were a little more nimble, while the Wrights climbed and dove a little better.

Moss didn’t want to fight the Hound Dogs. He wanted to punish the Razorbacks. Knocking them out of the sky was the point of the exercise. They could sink the ships the United States had to have. Confederate fighters could shoot up ships, but couldn’t send them to the bottom.

But if Moss wanted the Razorbacks, he had to go through the Hound Dogs. The C.S. fighter pilots understood what was what as well as their U.S. counterparts. They were there to make sure the bombers got through.

Elements—lead pilots and their wingmen—were supposed to hold together. So were flights—pairs of elements. And so were squadrons—four flights. In practice, damn near everything went to hell in combat. Lead pilots and wingmen did stick together when they could; you didn’t want to be naked and alone out there. Past that, you did what you could and what you had to and worried about it later.

Head-on passes made you pucker. You and the other guy were zooming at each other at seven hundred miles an hour. That didn’t leave much time to shoot. And if you both chose to climb or dive at the same instant . . . The sky was a big place, but not big enough to let two airplanes occupy the same small part of it at the same time.

The Hound Dog coming at Moss started shooting too soon. You couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn from half a mile out. That told Moss he was flying against somebody without a whole lot of experience. Anybody who’d done this for a while knew you had to get in close to do damage. Moss waited till the Hound Dog—painted in blobs of brown and green not much different from those on his Wright 27—all but filled the windshield before thumbing the firing button.

He missed anyway. The Hound Dog roared past him and was gone. He swore, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Watch my back, Marty,” he called to his wingman. “Let’s go after the bombers.”

“Will do.” Nothing fazed Rolvaag. That went a long way toward making him a good pilot all by itself. If he didn’t quite have a duelist’s reflexes and a duelist’s arrogance . . . That went a long way toward making him a good pilot but not a great one.