And close counted in…? Horseshoes and hand grenades, was the soldiers’ joke. Knight disappeared off the face of the earth after that. Potter supposed he’d died in one camp or another. Or maybe he just got summarily killed and dumped in the James. Any which way, he was gone.
“Can we get away?” somebody asked.
“Believe it,” Jake Featherston said instantly. “If you believe it, you can do it. That’s what life’s all about. Believe it hard enough, work for it with everything you’ve got, and you’ll get it. Look at me.”
He was right—and he was wrong. He’d climbed from nowhere to the top of the heap in the CSA. He’d run the country for ten years. And now the Confederate States of America—are getting it, all right, Clarence Potter thought. Nice to know I can still make stupid jokes at a time like this.
Off in the distance, like the roar of faraway lions, he heard the rumble of truck motors. They neared far faster than lions would have, and they were likely to be far more dangerous. “Hit the dirt!” Potter sang out.
The Confederate dignitaries scrambled off to the side of the road and hid behind bushes and in ditches. It would have been funny if it weren’t so grim. This was what the Confederate States of America had come down to: a dozen or so frightened men hiding so the damnyankees wouldn’t catch them.
One after another, the heavy trucks pounded past. Exhaust stank in Potter’s nostrils. He got a glimpse of soldiers in green-gray in the rear compartments and heard a couple of windswept snatches of bad language in U.S. accents. Then, after a few seconds that were among the longest of his life, the last deuce-and-a-half was gone.
“God damn them, they’ll find Willard, and that’ll spill the shit in the soup,” Jake Featherston said. Potter wouldn’t have put it the same way, which didn’t mean he disagreed with the President. Jake went on, “We got to make it to a town quick, grab us some autos, and get the fuck out of here.” That also seemed like good advice.
“Let’s get moving,” the pilot said. He was younger than just about everybody else there—and also the man the Yankees were least likely to shoot out of hand if things went wrong.
Move they did. Fifteen minutes later, they all hid and flattened out as more trucks growled up the road. These machines had an ambulance with them, which likely meant the Yankees had indeed found the head of the C.S. General Staff. Would they rough Willard up? Would he keep quiet if they did? Next episode of the serial, Potter thought.
He began to pant. His feet started hurting—he was wearing dress shoes, not marching boots. The sky lightened in the east. “Where the hell’s that town?” somebody said, voice numb with fatigue. “Feels like we’ve been going down this goddamn road forever.”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Potter said. He was definitely getting a blister on his left heel. If it worsened, he wouldn’t be able to keep up. The damnyankees would catch him—and, he suspected, that would be that in short order.
Featherston pointed. “Sign up ahead.” Half an hour earlier, they wouldn’t have seen it till they were right on top of it.
Potter, with his weak eyes, would have been one of the last men to be able to read it. Somebody called out the name of the town on the sign and said it was a mile and a half off, so he didn’t have to.
“Where the hell are we?” Ferd Koenig demanded—the name meant as little to him as it did to Potter.
“Smack in the middle of Georgia,” Jake answered confidently. Did he carry a map of the CSA in his mind detailed enough to include a nowhere of a place like this one? Potter wouldn’t have been surprised. Jake knew all kinds of strange things, and remembered almost everything he heard. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was, he’d come up with too many wrong answers from what he knew—or maybe, if you went and aimed the CSA at the USA, there weren’t any right ones.
Cassius yawned. He hadn’t been on patrol all that long, but the antiaircraft fire woke him up ahead of when he would have had to crawl out of the sack anyway. He wondered what the hell was going on. The Confederates hadn’t sent any airplanes over Madison for quite a while.
He yawned again and shook his head. For all he knew, somebody’d got a wild hair up his ass and started shooting at a Yankee airplane, or maybe at something imaginary. You never could tell with something like that.
“Anything goin’ on?” he asked Gracchus when he replaced the other Negro at the north end of town.
“More guns an’ tracers an’ shit than you can shake a stick at,” the older man replied.
“I knew that,” Cassius said. “Got me up early. See a real airplane, though?”
“Not me,” Gracchus said. “Somethin’ funny goin’ on, though. They wouldn’t’ve sent out so many sojers in trucks if there wasn’t.”
“Soldiers?” Cassius echoed. Gracchus nodded. “Huh,” Cassius said. “Bet you’re right, then. They got somethin’, all right, or they think they do.”
“I know what I’s gonna get me.” Gracchus yawned till his jaw seemed ready to fall off. “Gonna get me some shut-eye, is what. You kin march around the nex’ few hours an’ earn your vittles. I’s gone.” He patted Cassius on the back and headed off toward the Negro guerrillas’—the Negro auxiliaries’, now—camp.
All mine, Cassius thought, and then, Hot damn. By now, the whites in Madison were pretty well cowed. They hadn’t given any real trouble for several weeks.
That thought had hardly crossed his mind when he heard somebody’s voice in the distance, floating through the clear, quiet early morning air. He started to bark out a challenge—it was still before the Yankees’ curfew lifted. Then he looked north along the highway that led down from Athens. Damned if at least a dozen ofays weren’t heading his way.
The rosy light of dawn showed them well enough. Cassius didn’t think they could see him: he stood in the deep shadow of some roadside pines. He scurried behind one of them. Challenging that many men when he was by himself didn’t seem like a good idea. Maybe they were Yankees, in which case a challenge would be pointless. If they weren’t, they were trouble. That many Confederates wouldn’t be running around together at daybreak unless they were trouble.
He waited and watched as they got closer. He almost relaxed—they were in uniform, and who but U.S. soldiers would be in uniform around here? But then he saw that the uniforms were gray and butternut, not green-gray. He wanted to scratch his head, but he stood very still instead. Whoever these people were, he didn’t want them spotting him. One of them carried a better rifle than his, and almost all of them had holsters on their belts.
“Come on, goddammit,” a rangy, middle-aged man up near the front of the pack said loudly. “We’re almost there.”
That voice…Cassius knew it instantly. Anyone in the CSA would have. Anyone black in the CSA would have reacted as he did. The Tredegar leaped to his shoulder. He could almost fire over open sights—the range couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards. He’d never aimed so carefully in all his life. Take a breath. Let it out. Press the trigger—don’t squeeze.
“Get us some motorcars, and—” the rangy man went on as the rifle roared and bucked against Cassius’ shoulder. The bullet caught the fellow right in the middle of the chest. He got his left foot off the ground for one more step, but he never finished it. He crumpled and fell instead.
Cassius worked the bolt and fired again, as fast as he could. Jake Featherston jerked before his face hit the asphalt. While he was lying there, Cassius put another bullet into him. This one made red bits spurt from his head. Cassius chambered one more round. When you were shooting a snake, you didn’t know for sure what it took to kill him.
One of the men in butternut knelt by the President of the CSA. The just-risen sun shone from his spectacles and their steel frames. He leaned toward Jake Featherston. Cassius could easily have shot him, too, but waited instead to see what happened next. The bespectacled man started to feel for Featherston’s wrist, then shook his head, as if to say, What’s the use? When he rose, he seemed suddenly old
.
The rest of the Confederates might have turned to wax melting in the sun, too. When Cassius saw they slumped and sagged, he began to believe Jake Featherston was dead—began to believe he’d killed him. Were the tears in his eyes joy or sorrow or both at once? Afterwards, he never knew.
“Y’all surrender!” he shouted blurrily, and fired another shot over the Confederates’ heads.
As if on cue, Gracchus ran up the road from Madison. Four or five white men in green-gray pounded after the Negro. One by one, the Confederates standing in the roadway raised their hands above their heads. The officer with the automatic Tredegar carefully set it on the tarmac before he lifted his.
Only then did Cassius step out from behind the tree. Gracchus skidded to a stop beside him. “Who is them ofay shitheads?” the guerrilla chief panted.
“Dunno. Big-ass ol’ Confederates, that’s all I kin tell you,” Cassius said. “But I just shot me Jake motherfucking Featherston. That’s him on the ground there, an’ he’s dead as shoe leather.”
“No,” Gracchus whispered. The U.S. soldiers heard Cassius, too. They stared north toward the knot of Confederates and the corpse in the road. Then they stared at Cassius.
“Kid, I’d give my left nut to do what you just done,” one of them said.
“My right nut,” said another.
“Do you know how famous you just got?” a third one added.
“It doesn’t matter,” Cassius said. “He killed my whole family, the son of a bitch. Shooting’s too good for him, but it’s all I could do. I heard his voice, and I knew who it was, and then—bang!”
Gracchus set a hand on his shoulder. “You got that, anyways. Rest of us, we don’t got nothin’. He done kilt all our famblies. But you kilt him? You really an’ truly did?” His voice was soft with wonder.
“I sure did.” Cassius sounded amazed, too, even to himself. “Now I want to see him dead.”
He walked forward, his rifle still at the ready in case any of the men ahead tried something. He had only one round left in the clip, but he wasn’t too worried about that, not with Gracchus and those U.S. soldiers to back him up.
Flies were already starting to buzz above the blood pooling around the corpse in the roadway. Cassius stirred the body with his foot. Jake Featherston’s lean, hungry face stared sightlessly up to the sky. A fly landed on his cheek. It crawled over to the rill of blood that ran from the corner of his open mouth and began to feed.
“Well, you did it. You just sank the Confederate States of America.” The officer with glasses talked like a Yankee. But he wore a C.S. uniform with, Cassius saw, a general’s wreathed stars on his collar. He took off his spectacles and wiped his eyes with his tunic sleeve. “Jake Featherston was a son of a bitch, but he was a great son of a bitch—and you killed him.”
He looked as if he wanted to say more. Telling off somebody with a Tredegar was never a good idea, though.
Another man, a heavy fellow in a gray Party uniform, figured that out, too. He said, “Who would’ve reckoned a…colored kid could do in the President?” The pause meant he’d almost said nigger, or more likely goddamn nigger, but he swallowed anything like that before it got out.
“Who the hell are you people, anyway?” one of the U.S. soldiers—a sergeant—demanded.
“Ferdinand Koenig, Attorney General, CSA,” the heavy man answered. Cassius almost shot him, too. Koenig ran the camps. He was Jake Featherston’s enforcer. But shooting anybody with his hands up wasn’t so easy.
“Clarence Potter, brigadier general, CSA,” said the man with glasses.
“Christ!” the sergeant in green-gray said. “You’re on our list! You’re the asshole who blew up Philly!”
“You know that?” Potter blinked, then actually bowed. “Always an honor to be recognized,” he said. Cassius found himself surprised into admiration. Potter had style, in a cold-blooded way.
The other Confederates gave their names and ranks. The only one Cassius had heard of was Saul Goldman, whom he thought of as the Confederacy’s chief liar. But the rest were all big shots, too, except for a young captain with a pilot’s wings on the right breast pocket of his tunic.
“Do Jesus!” Gracchus said. “There here’s ’bout what’s left o’ the Confederate gummint, ain’t it?”
“Where’s what’s-his-name? The Vice President?” The U.S. sergeant snapped his fingers. “Partridge in a pear tree—him?”
Even with their cause in ruins and themselves in captivity, several of the Confederates smiled at that. A couple of them even laughed. “The Vice President isn’t with us,” General Potter said. “If you look under a flat rock, you’ll find a lizard or a salamander or something. It’s bound to be just as smart as Don.”
“Jesus, Potter, show a little respect,” Ferd Koenig said. “He’s President now, wherever he is.”
“Only proves we’re screwed, if you ask me,” Potter said calmly.
Three command cars rumbled up from Madison: probably called by wireless. Their machine guns added to the U.S. firepower. A photographer jumped out of one of them. “Godalmightydamn,” he said, aiming his camera at the corpse in the road. “That really is the motherfucker, ain’t it?” He took several pictures, then looked up. “Who punched his ticket for him?”
Gracchus gave Cassius a little shove. “This fella right here.”
A flashbulb went off in Cassius’ face. He saw green and purple spots. “Way to go, sonny. You just turned famous, know that? What’s your name, anyway?”
“Cassius,” he answered. Now two people, both white, had thrown fame in his face. “I’m Cassius. I don’t care nothin’ about famous. Only thing I care about is, that bastard’s dead an’ gone.”
“You may not care about famous, buddy, but famous is gonna care about you,” the photographer predicted. “Bet your ass it will. You’re gonna be the most famous smoke in the whole goddamn US of A.”
Smoke wasn’t exactly an endearment, but Cassius was too dazed to get very upset about it. More command cars and a halftrack came up the road. Some of the people who got out were soldiers. Others were reporters. When they found out Cassius had shot Jake Featherston, they all tried to interview him at once. They shouted so many questions, he couldn’t make sense of any of them.
Some of the reporters started grilling the captured Confederates, too. The prisoners didn’t want to talk, which seemed to upset the gentlemen of the press.
Cassius kept looking at the body every so often. I did that, he told himself. I really did.
“Don’t pay these mouthy fools no mind,” Gracchus advised him. “You don’t got to say nothin’ to ’em if you don’t care to. You done somethin’ instead.”
It wasn’t enough. If Cassius could have killed Jake Featherston five million or six million or eight million times, it might have come close to being enough. But he’d done all he could do. He made himself nod. “Yeah,” he said.
Not far outside of Pineville, North Carolina, Irving Morrell stood up in the cupola of his barrel for what he hoped was the last time in the war. Sweat ran down his face. He was glad to escape the iron oven in which he’d ridden north. The cease-fire continued to hold. With a little luck, it would soon turn into something more like a real peace.
A monument of piled stone, two or three times as tall as a man, marked the place where James Polk had been born. Since Polk was President of the United States before they split into two countries, this seemed a good place for the representatives of those two countries to meet.
Close to the monument stood what could only have been a Negro sharecropper’s cabin. It was empty now, windows broken, door hanging half open. If meeting at Polk’s birthplace symbolized something, that deserted cabin meant something else altogether. Where were the blacks who’d called it home? Anywhere on this earth? Morrell doubted it.
The sergeant in charge of another U.S. barrel peered up the road toward Charlotte with field glasses. He waved to Morrell. “Here they come, sir!”
“Thanks,”
Morrell said.
A moment later, his own Mark One eyeball picked up the approaching autos. As they got closer, he saw that the Confederates were scrupulously abiding by the terms of the cease-fire agreement. All three motorcars were unarmed. The first flew a large white flag from its wireless aerial. So did the third. The middle auto had two aerials. One flew the Stars and Bars, the other the flag of the President of the Confederate States.
Morrell’s barrel was flying the Stars and Stripes from its antenna. That guided the Confederates to the proper machine. He could have blown them to hell and gone. Even now, when they were giving up, the temptation was very real. Instead, he climbed down from the barrel as the Confederate motorcars stopped under his guns.
A Confederate officer—a general, Morrell saw—got out of the lead motorcar. He walked up to Morrell and saluted stiffly. “Good day, sir,” he said. “I recognize you from many photographs. My name is Northcote, Cyril Northcote. After the, ah, recent unfortunate events, I have the dubious privilege of being the senior General Staff officer not in captivity.”
Morrell returned the salute. “Pleased to meet you, General Northcote.”
“Meaning no disrespect to you, sir, but I’m afraid I can’t say the same,” Northcote answered bleakly.
“Well, General, under the circumstances, I don’t see how I can take offense at that,” Morrell said.
“Yes. Under the circumstances.” Northcote spoke as if each word pained him. The door to the middle C.S. motorcar opened. A young-looking blond man in a sharp gray civilian suit came out. General Northcote waved to him and he came forward, his perfectly shined shoes flashing in the bright sun. Machinelike, Northcote said, “General Morrell, it is my duty to present to you the President of the CSA, Mr. Don Partridge. Mr. President, this is U.S. General Irving Morrell.”
In at the Death Page 47
