Return Engagement

by Harry Turtledove

  It all came down to dollars and cents for him–his dollars and cents. How his workers got by? If they got by? He didn't care about that. It wasn't his worry, or he didn't see it as such. Capitalist, Chester thought, but then, Now the wind's blowing in our direction.

  "I think we can work together," he said. "You're right about one thing: it's high time we tried." He put out his hand now. Harry T. Casson took it.

  ****

  FOR A long time, Cincinnatus Driver had thought of himself as a lucky man. He'd been in Covington, Kentucky, when it passed from the CSA to the USA at the start of the Great War. Escaping the Confederate States was a good start on luck all by itself for a black man.

  Then he'd got out of Kentucky. Escaping what had been the Confederate States was good luck for a black man, too. Negroes didn't have it easy in Des Moines, but they had it a lot easier. His son had graduated from high school–and married a Chinese girl. Achilles and Grace seemed happy enough, so he supposed that was luck . . . and he loved his grandchildren. Amanda, his daughter, was going to graduate, too. When Cincinnatus was a boy in Covington, any schooling for Negroes had been against the law.

  He'd built up a pretty fair trucking business in Des Moines. That wasn't luck. That was hard work, nothing else but. But his father and mother had stayed behind in Covington. His mother began to slip into her second childhood. When Al Smith agreed to the plebiscite in Kentucky, Cincinnatus knew he would have to get his folks up to Des Moines. The Confederates would win that vote, and he didn't want two people who were born as slaves to go back under the Stars and Bars, especially not with Jake Featherston running the CSA.

  And so he'd come back to Covington to help his father bring his mother out of Kentucky and back to Iowa . . . and his luck had run out. His mother, senile, had wandered away from home, as she was doing more and more often. He and his father went after her. Cincinnatus found her. He ran across the street to get her–and never saw the motorcar that hit him.

  Fractured leg. Fractured skull. Everybody said he was lucky to be alive. He wasn't sure he called it luck. He'd been laid up when the plebiscite went off. He'd been laid up during the grace period afterwards, when people who wanted to stay in the USA could cross the Ohio. By the time he could travel at all, the USA had sealed the border. Now he was trapped in the Confederate States with a war on. If this wasn't hell, you could see it from here.

  He still limped. A stick helped, but only so much. He got blinding headaches every now and again, or a little more often than every now and again. Worse than any of that were the reflexes he had to learn all over again, the things he'd put aside in almost twenty years in Iowa. There, he was a man among men–oh, not a man at the top of the heap, but a man nonetheless.

  Here, he was a nigger.

  Whenever he left Covington's colored district near the Licking River for any reason, he had to expect a cop to bear down on him and growl, "Let me see your passbook, boy." It didn't matter if the cop was only half his age. Negro males in the CSA went straight from boy to uncle. They were never misters, never men.

  The cop this particular day had a white mustache and a limp almost as bad as Cincinnatus'. He wouldn't be any good in the army chewing north through Ohio and Indiana. He also had a gray uniform, an enameled Freedom Party flag pinned next to his badge, and the sour look of a man who was feeling a couple too many from the night before. He could be mean just for the fun of being mean.

  "Here you are, suh," Cincinnatus said. His passbook looked official. It wasn't. Before he left Covington, he'd had connections with both the Red Negro underground and the Confederate diehards who'd resisted Kentucky's incorporation into the USA. He hadn't much wanted those connections, but he'd had them. Some of the Reds were still around–and still Red. False papers weren't too hard for them.

  The policeman looked at the photo in the passbook and compared it to Cincinnatus' face. That was all right. The photo really was his. "Go on," the cop said grudgingly, handing back the passbook. "Don't you get in no trouble, now."

  "Don't want no trouble, suh," Cincinnatus said, which was true. He put the passbook in his pocket, then gestured with his cane. "Couldn't get in no trouble even if I did want to."

  "I never yet knew a nigger who couldn't get in trouble if he wanted to," the policeman said. But then he walked on by, adding, "You get your ass back into your own part of town pretty damn quick, you hear?"

  "Oh, yes, suh," Cincinnatus said. "I hear you real good."

  Newsboys hawked papers, shouting of Confederate victories all along the border with the USA. By what Cincinnatus gathered from U.S. wireless stations, the headlines in the Confederate papers weren't lying too much, however badly he wished they were. Since the war started, tuning in to the wireless had become an iffy business. It was suddenly against the law to listen to U.S. stations. The Confederates tried to back that up by jamming a lot of them. The USA fought back in kind against Confederate broadcasts. What you mostly heard these days was faint but urgent gabbling through roaring waterfalls of static.

  With the cynicism black men learned early, Cincinnatus figured both sides would soon be lying just as hard as they could.

  Antiaircraft guns poked their snouts up from parks and vacant lots. Some had camouflage netting draped over them in case U.S. airplanes came over in the daytime. Others didn't bother, but just stood there in their bare deadliness. So far, U.S. bombers had paid a couple of brief calls on Covington by night. They'd cost people some sleep, but they hadn't hit anything worth hitting.

  Here was the grocery store he needed to visit. He had to wait a while to get noticed. The man behind the counter dealt with white customers till he didn't happen to have any in the store. Then he deigned to pay attention to Cincinnatus. "What do you want?" he asked. He didn't say, What can I do for you? the way he had for his white customers. Not many whites in the CSA thought about what they could do for Negroes.

  "I need a gallon of ketchup for the barbecue place," Cincinnatus answered.

  "Oh, you do, do you?" The white man paid some real attention to him for the first time. "Heinz or Del Monte?"

  "Del Monte, suh. It's the best." Cincinnatus knew he sounded like a wireless advertisement, but he couldn't help it.

  The clerk eyed him for a long moment. Then he said, "Hang on. I have to get it from the back room." He disappeared, returning a moment later with a carton that prominently featured the gold-bordered red Del Monte emblem. He set it on the counter. "Jug's inside. Thirty-six cents." Cincinnatus gave him a half-dollar, got his change, and stuck it in his pocket. The white man asked, "You carry that all right with the cane? You don't want to drop it, now."

  Cincinnatus believed him. "I'll be careful," he promised. He tucked the carton under his free arm, then left the grocery and made his slow way back toward the Negro district. The policeman who'd asked him for his passbook saw him again. Since he was walking east, the cop didn't trouble him any more. As long as you know your place and stay there, you're all right. The white man didn't say it, but he might as well have.

  Don't trip. Don't fall down. Cincinnatus was listening to what he himself wasn't saying as well as to what the cop wasn't. Got to pay for my passbook some kind o' way. I fall down, though, I pay too much.

  Even before he got back into the colored part of town, his nostrils twitched. The breeze was out of the east, and brought the sweet, spicy, mouth-watering smell of barbecue to his nostrils. First Apicius Wood and then his son, Lucullus, had presided over what locals had long insisted was the best barbecue place between the Carolinas and Kansas City. The Woods, over the years, had had just about as many white customers as black. Freedom Party stalwarts weren't ashamed to get Lucullus' barbecue sauce all over their faces as they gnawed on falling-off-the-bone tender pork or beef ribs. They might despise Lucullus Wood. Nobody but a maniacal vegetarian could despise those ribs.

  And the smell just got stronger and more tempting as Cincinnatus came closer. Walking inside was another jolt, because the Woods cooked indoors. I
t was like walking into hell, though Cincinnatus didn't think the sinners on the fire there would smell anywhere near so tasty. Carcasses spun on spits over pits of prime hickory wood. Back after the USA took Kentucky away from the CSA, Apicius had chosen his surname from that wood.

  Assistant cooks didn't just keep the spits and carcasses going round and round. They also used long-handled brushes to slather on the spicy sauce that made the barbecue something more than mere roast meat. Fat and juices and sauce dripped down onto the red-hot coals, where they hissed and popped and flamed.

  Coming in here on a dubious errand took Cincinnatus back in time. How often had he done that during and just after the Great War? Back then, he'd been whole and strong and young, so goddamn young. Now the years lay on his shoulders like sacks of cement. His body was healing, but it was a long way from healed. That fellow in the auto had almost done for him. But it had been his own fault, no one else's. He'd run out in the street, though he still didn't remember doing it, or actually getting hit. The pain when he came back to himself afterwards? That he remembered all too well.

  One of the cooks pointed with a basting brush. Cincinnatus nodded. He already knew the way back to the office that had been Apicius' and now belonged to Lucullus. He'd been going there longer than that pimply high-yellow kid had been alive. He set down the box and knocked on the door. There had been times when he barged in there without knocking. He'd got away with it, but he wondered how.

  "Yeah?" came the deep, gruff voice from the other side of the door. Cincinnatus opened it. Lucullus' scowl disappeared when he came in. "Oh. Sorry, friend. Thought you might be somebody else. Set yourself down. Here. Have some of this." He reached into his battered desk, pulled out a bottle, and offered it to Cincinnatus.

  "Thank you kindly." Before taking the bottle, Cincinnatus carefully lifted the Del Monte carton and set it on the desk. "This here's for you. Ofay who gave it to me said not to drop it."

  Lucullus Wood rumbled laughter. His father had been unabashedly fat. He was big and solid and heavy, but too hard for the word fat quite to fit him. He said, "I didn't aim to do that anyways. I know what's in there."

  "Suits me. Reckoned I better speak up, though, just in case." Now Cincinnatus picked up the bottle and tilted it back. The whiskey wasn't very good, but it was strong. It went down his throat hot and snarling. "Do Jesus!" he wheezed. "That hit the spot."

  "Good. Glad to hear it." Lucullus' Adam's apple worked as he took a formidable knock of hooch himself. He said, "Part of me's sorry you stuck here with your folks, Cincinnatus, but you got to answer me somethin', and answer it for true. Ain't it better to give them Confederate sons of bitches one right in the teeth than it is to sit up North somewheres and make like everything's fine?"

  Cincinnatus owed Lucullus for his passbook, so he didn't laugh in his face. He said, "Mebbe," and let it go at that. But he would have given anything he had, including his soul for the Devil to roast in a barbecue pit, to be back in Des Moines with his family again.

  ****

  HOT, HUMID summer weather was always a torment to Brigadier General Abner Dowling. An unkind soul had once said he was built like a rolltop desk. That held an unpleasant amount of truth. And now, after long years as General George Custer's adjutant, after an even longer stretch as occupation commander in Salt Lake City, after the infuriating humiliation of being kept in that position during the Pacific War against Japan, he finally had a combat command of his own.

  He had it, and he could feel it going wrong, feel the ground shifting under his feet as if he were stumbling into quicksand. When the fighting broke out, he'd worried that his headquarters in Columbus was too far behind what would be the front. Now he worried that it was too far forward. He also worried about holding on to Columbus, and if that wasn't bad news, he couldn't imagine what would be.

  Chillicothe was gone. Dowling hadn't expected to keep the former state capital forever. He hadn't expected to lose it in the first few days of fighting, either. He'd had several defense lines prepared between the Ohio and Chillicothe. He had only one between Chillicothe and Columbus. He was likely to lose the present state capital almost as fast as he'd lost the earlier one.

  Of course, how much good his defense lines had done him was very much an open question. The Confederates had pierced them, one after another, with what seemed effortless ease. A few local counterattacks had bothered the men in butternut, but nothing seemed to slow them down for long. They kept coming: barrels and airplanes to punch holes in U.S. positions, foot soldiers and artillery to follow up and take out whatever the faster-moving stuff had left behind. It was a simple formula, but it had worked again and again.

  The window in Dowling's office was open, to give a little relief from the heat. Masking tape crisscrossed the windowpane. If a bomb or a shell burst nearby, that would keep flying glass splinters from being quite so bad. The open window also let him hear a low rumble off to the south, a rumble like a distant thunderstorm. But it wasn't a thunderstorm, or not a natural one, anyhow. It was the noise of the approaching front.

  It was also only background noise. What he heard in the foreground was a horrible cacophony of military transport and raw panic. Trucks full of soldiers and barrels were trying to push south, to get into position to hold back the Confederate flood. They needed to move quickly, and they were having a hard time moving at all. The whole population of southern Ohio seemed to be fleeing north as fast as it could go.

  Dowling had trouble blaming the people running for their lives. If he were a farmer or a hardware-store owner and somebody started shooting off cannon and dropping bombs all around him, he would have got the hell out of there, too. But refugees were playing merry hell with troop movements. And Confederate fighters and light bombers had taken to tearing up refugee columns whenever they got the chance. That spread panic farther and wider than ever. It also coagulated road traffic even worse than simple flight could.

  A knock on the door interrupted Dowling's gloomy reflections. A lieutenant stuck his head into the office and said, "Excuse me, sir, but Colonel Morrell is here to confer with you."

  "Send him in," Dowling said. Morrell still wore a barrel man's coveralls. Grime and grease stains spotted them. Dowling heaved his bulk up out of the chair. "Good morning, Colonel. Good to see you."

  "I wish I were back at the front," Irving Morrell said. "We've got to do something about those bastards, got to slow them down some kind of way. Can you get me more barrels? That's what we need most of all, dammit."

  "I've been screaming into the telephone," Dowling answered. "They say they need them back East. They can't leave Washington and Philadelphia uncovered."

  Morrell's suggestion about what the U.S. War Department could do with Washington and Philadelphia was illegal, immoral, improbable, and incandescent. "Is the General Staff deaf, dumb, and blind?" he demanded. "We're liable to lose the war out here before those people wake up enough to take their heads out of their–"

  "I know," Dowling broke in, as soothingly as he could. "I'm doing my best to get them to listen to me, but. . . ." He spread pink, pudgy hands.

  "The Confederate attack is coming in on the line I predicted before the balloon went up," Morrell said bitterly. "Fat lot of good anticipation does if we haven't got the ways and means to meet it."

  "I've heard good things about the action you fought east of Chillicothe," Dowling said. "You did everything you could."

  "Yes? And so?" Morrell, Dowling rediscovered, had extraordinary eyes. A blue two shades lighter than the sky, they seemed to see farther than most men's. And, at the moment, they were remarkably cold. "They don't pay off for that, sir. They pay off for throwing the bastards back, and I didn't do it. I couldn't do it."

  "You've done more than anybody else has," Dowling said.

  "It's not enough." Nothing less than victory satisfied Irving Morrell. "If I'd had more to work with, I'd have done better. And if pigs had wings, we'd all carry umbrellas. If Featherston had held off a little longe
r, we'd have been in better shape. Every day would have helped us. Every–"

  He broke off then, because the air-raid sirens started to howl. Some of the wireless-ranging stations along the border had had to be destroyed to keep them from falling into Confederate hands. That cut down the warning time Columbus got. Dowling rose from his chair. "Shall we go to the basement?" he said.

  "I'd rather watch the show," Morrell said.

  "Let me put it another way: go to the basement, Colonel. That's an order," Dowling said. "The country would probably muddle along without me well enough. It really needs you."

  For a moment, he thought he would have a mutiny on his hands. Then Morrell nodded and flipped him as ironic a salute as he'd ever had. They went down to the basement together. Bombs were already falling by the time they got there. The noise was impressive.

  Safety, here, was a relative thing. They weren't risking splinter and blast damage, the way they would have if they'd stayed in Dowling's office. But a direct hit could bring down the whole building and entomb them here. Buried alive . . . except they wouldn't stay alive very long.

  Antiaircraft guns started hammering. Someone in the crowded cellar said, "I hope they knock a lot of those shitheads out of the sky."

  Dowling hoped the same thing. But antiaircraft fire, no matter how ferocious, couldn't stop bombers. All it could do, at best, was make raids expensive. The Confederates had already proved they didn't mind paying the bill.

  Bomb bursts walked closer to the building. After each one, the floor shook more under Dowling's feet. A captain a few feet away from him started screaming. Some men simply couldn't stand the strain. A scuffle followed. Finally, somebody clipped the captain, and he shut up.

  "Thank God," Dowling said. "A little more of that, and I'd've started howling like a damn banshee, too."