“As many as they want,” Pedro said.
But Jorge shook his head. “I don’t believe it. They’d have to stick soldiers in every little town from Virginia to here. Even the Yankees don’t have that many soldiers…I hope.”
Pedro thought about it. “Mm, maybe you’re right. The war is over. The Yankees will want to go home, too.”
“Sure they will. Who wouldn’t?” Jorge said. “Being a soldier is no fun. You march around, that’s not so bad. But when you fight, most of the time you’re bored and uncomfortable, and the rest you’re scared to death.”
“And you can get hurt, too,” their mother said softly, and crossed herself again.
Jorge and Pedro had both been lucky, coming through the war with nothing worse than a few scratches. Their brother hadn’t. The roll of the dice, the turn of the card…Some guys had a shell burst ten feet away from them and didn’t get badly hurt. Some turned into hamburger. Who could say why? God, maybe. From everything Jorge had seen, He had a rugged sense of humor.
One of these days, he wanted to talk that over with Pedro—and with Miguel, too. Not here, though. Not now. Not with their mother listening. She believed, and she hadn’t seen so many reasons not to believe.
Well, all that could wait. It would have to, in fact. “How is the farm?” he asked his mother. He would be here for a long time. This was what counted now.
“Not so bad,” she answered, “but not so good, either. We all did everything we could. With so many men in the Army, though”—she spread her hands—“we couldn’t do everything we wanted to. The livestock is all right. The crops…Well, we didn’t go hungry, but we barely made enough to pay for the things we need and we can’t get from the land.”
“It’s about what you’d expect,” Pedro said. “If we work hard, we can bring it back to the way it was before the war—maybe better. If the Yankees let us, I mean.”
“I think maybe they will. They don’t care so much about us—we’re too far away,” Jorge said. “Virginia, Tennessee—they really hate the people there. And Georgia, too. I think they’ll come down on them harder and leave us alone unless somebody here does something stupid like try to rise up.”
Pedro didn’t say anything. Jorge realized that wasn’t necessarily good news. No, his brother hadn’t seen so much fighting as he had. Maybe Pedro was still ready for more. Jorge knew damn well he wasn’t. Bombers dropping loads on Baroyeca, without even any antiaircraft to shoot back? Believe it or not, the mere idea made him want to cross himself.
XV
People in the United States said Washington, D.C., had Confederate weather. Armstrong Grimes’ father, who was from Ohio, said so all the goddamn time. Armstrong had always believed it. Why not? His old man wouldn’t waste time and effort lying about anything so small.
But now Armstrong was stuck in southern Alabama in the middle of summer, and he was discovering that people in the USA didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. He’d already found that out about his father—what guy growing up doesn’t?—but discovering the same thing about the rest of the country came as a bit of a jolt.
Every day down here was like a bad day back home. It got hot. It got sticky. And it never let up. U.S. soldiers gulped salt tablets. When the sweaty patches under their arms dried out—which didn’t happen very often—they left salt stains on their uniforms. He itched constantly. Prickly heat, athlete’s foot, jock itch…You name it, Armstrong came down with it. He smeared all kinds of smelly goop on himself. Sometimes it helped. More often, it didn’t.
And there were bugs. They had mosquitoes down here that could have doubled as fighter-bombers. They had several flavors of ferocious flies. They had vicious little biting things the locals called no-see-’ems. They had chiggers. They had ticks. They had something called chinch bugs. The Army sprayed DDT on everything and everybody. It helped…some. You would have had to spray every square inch of the state to put down all the nasty biting things.
Local whites hated the men in green-gray who’d whipped their armies and made them stop killing Negroes. Bushwhackers shot at U.S. soldiers. You looked sideways at every junked motorcar by the side of the road. It could go boom and take half a squad with it.
The U.S. Army didn’t waste time fighting fair, not after the surrender. Every time a U.S. soldier got shot, ten—then twenty—Confederates faced the firing squad. The number for an auto bomb started at a hundred and also quickly doubled.
Armstrong hadn’t been on any firing squads while the war was going on. Now, with three stripes on his sleeve, he frequently commanded one. The first couple of times he did it, it made his stomach turn over. After that, it turned into routine, and he got used to it.
So did the soldiers who did the shooting. They went about their business at the same time as they argued about whether it did any good. “Just makes these motherfuckers hate us worse,” Squidface opined.
“They already hate us,” Armstrong said. “I don’t give a shit about that. I just don’t want ’em shooting at us.”
“If we don’t get the assholes who’re really doin’ it, what do we accomplish?” Squidface asked. “Shootin’ little old ladies gets old, you know?”
“We shoot enough little old ladies, the ones who’re left alive’ll make the trigger-happy guys knock it off,” Armstrong said.
“Good fuckin’ luck.” Squidface was not a believer.
Armstrong trotted out what he thought was the clincher: “’Sides, we kill all the whites down here, nobody’ll be left to go bushwhacking, right?”
“Shit, now you’re talkin’ like a Confederate nigger,” Squidface said. “We do that, won’t be anybody left alive down here.”
“Wouldn’t break my heart.” Armstrong wiped his face with his sleeve. The sleeve came away wet—big surprise. “Best thing they could do with this country is give it back to the possums and the gators.”
Squidface laughed, but he wouldn’t give up on the argument—what better way to kill time? He suggested a reason to leave some Confederates alive: “Nobody gets laid any more if we kill all the women. Some of the ones we grease are cute. That’s a waste of good pussy.”
“How come you haven’t come down venereal yet?” Armstrong asked.
“Same reason you haven’t, I bet,” Squidface answered. “I’m lucky. And when I figure maybe I won’t be lucky, I’m careful. The broads down here, they’re nothin’ but a bunch of whores.”
“They lost,” Armstrong said, which went a long way towards explaining things. He added, “A lot of ’em, their husbands or boyfriends aren’t coming back, either.”
He supposed he had been lucky. He’d got an education down here that was a hell of a lot more enjoyable than anything they’d tried to cram down his throat in high school. He hadn’t cared about English lit or medieval history or practical math. This—this was stuff he wanted to learn.
The one thing he was glad about was that none of the women who’d enlightened him had come before his firing squad. That would have been worse than embarrassing, and it might have landed him in trouble. Orders against what the brass called fraternization had gone out. Getting anyone to listen to them was another story.
“Far as I’m concerned, it’s the same now as it was when we were shooting at each other,” he said. “I just want to serve out my hitch, take off the goddamn uniform, go back home, and figure out what the hell to do with the rest of my life.”
“Want to hear somethin’ funny?” Squidface said.
“I’m all ears,” Armstrong answered.
“Me, I’m thinkin’ about turning into a lifer.”
“Jesus Christ! C’mon with me, buddy. I’m taking you to the aid station. You’re down with something worse than the clap. You’ve got softening of the brain, damned if you don’t.”
“Nah. I been thinkin’ about it,” Squidface said. “Thinkin’ hard, too. Say I go back to Civvy Street. What’s the best thing that can happen to me?”
“You get out of the Army,” Armst
rong answered at once.
“Yeah, and then what? Best thing I can see is, I spend the next forty years working in a factory, I find some broad, we have some kids and get old and fat together. Big fucking deal, pardon my French.”
That was, in broad outline, the future Armstrong saw for himself, too. It didn’t seem so bad—but, when Squidface laid it out, it didn’t seem so good, either. But when the other choice was staying in…“Would you rather get your balls shot off instead? I already got one Purple Heart. That’s about five too many.”
“It won’t be as bad now as it was,” Squidface said. “What I figure is, if I stay in, I can end up a top kick pretty goddamn fast. They’re gonna lose all kinds of senior noncoms—some of those sorry assholes are Great War retreads, and they ain’t gonna stick around. People’ll call me First Sergeant Giacopelli, not Squidface. I’ll get to tell lieutenants where to head in. Even captains won’t look at me like I’m dogshit on the bottom of their shoe. I’ll have more fruit salad on my chest than the mess hall has in cans.”
“You’re gonna do what you’re gonna do,” Armstrong said. “Don’t figure I can talk you out of it. Hell, I wish you luck, if it’s what you really want. But I’m not gonna go that route.”
“You’ll end up in an office somewhere, with a secretary to blow you if your wife won’t. You’re a smart guy,” Squidface said. “I’m just a sap from the wrong side of the tracks. Army’s the first place I ever got anything like a square deal.”
“If I’m so smart, what am I doing here?” Armstrong asked. Squidface laughed. Armstrong wished he hadn’t made the crack about secretaries. His own father had worked in a Washington office since time out of mind. Armstrong didn’t have any reason to think his old man was unfaithful, but now he’d wonder. That wasn’t so good.
Then somebody let out a yell, and Armstrong and Squidface both jumped up to see what was going on. The guy who yelled was a captain. Seeing Armstrong, he said, “Gather up your platoon, Grimes, and take ’em into Hugo. We’ve got trouble there.”
“Yes, sir,” Armstrong said, and then, “Can you tell me what kind of trouble, so they know what to look out for?”
“There’s a gal says a nigger raped her. He says she gave it up, and she only started yelling when somebody saw him leaving her house. All the white folks in town want to hang him up by the nuts. Before we got down here, they’d hang a coon for whistling at a white woman, let alone fucking her.”
“What are we supposed to do, exactly?” Armstrong asked.
“He’s in the town jail. Don’t let ’em haul him out and lynch him. We’re still figuring out what really happened—trying to, anyway. So that’s what’s going on. Go deal with it. Do whatever you have to do to hold the jail. White folks here have to know we’re the law in these parts nowadays. They aren’t. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” Armstrong replied—the only possible answer. Go deal with it, he thought. Right. Turning to Squidface, he said, “Let’s round ’em up.”
“Sure, Sarge.” Squidface said the only thing he could.
They tramped into Hugo in full combat gear, weapons loaded and ready. Finding the jail was the easiest thing in the world—it was the building with the mob in front of it. A squad of scared-looking U.S. soldiers in the jail looked as if they didn’t think they could hold the mob out if it attacked. They might well have been right, too.
“Break it up there!” Armstrong yelled from behind the crowd of irate Alabamans. “Go home!”
They whirled, almost as one. For a second, he wondered if they would charge his men. The sight of so many more soldiers in green-gray—and so many automatic weapons—seemed to give the locals pause. “We want the nigger!” one of them yelled. Then they all took up the cry: “We want the nigger!”
“Well, you aren’t gonna get him,” Armstrong said. “He’s ours to deal with, once we work out what really went on. You people go on home. First, last, and only warning: we start shooting, we don’t quit.”
“What he done to that white gal, just killin’s too good for him!” shouted a man with a gray mustache stained by tobacco juice. “We’re gonna—”
“You’re gonna shut the fuck up and go home right now, or you’re gonna end up dead,” Armstrong broke in. “Those are the only choices you got. We’ll deal with the colored guy, or maybe with the whore he was trickin’ with.” That caused fresh tumult. He silenced it by chambering a round. The harsh snick! cut through the crowd noise like a sharp knife through soft sausage. “Enough of this shit,” Armstrong said. “Beat it!”
He wondered if they would rush him in spite of everything. He also wondered if he and his buddies could shoot enough of them to break the rush before they got mobbed. Then, sullenly, the crowd dispersed. They were willing to kill to defend Confederate womanhood, but less enthusiastic about dying for it.
“Whew!” Armstrong said.
“Yeah.” Squidface nodded. “Ain’t you glad the war’s over?”
“Christ, we almost started it up again,” Armstrong said. “And you want to keep on doing crap like this? You gotta be out of your tree.”
“Hey, I won’t be bored, anyway,” Squidface made light of it, but he wasn’t about to change his mind. “Got a butt on you?”
“Sure.” Armstrong handed him a pack. “Wonder if that coon really did give her the old what-for?”
“Who cares?” Squidface paused to flick his Zippo, sucked in smoke, and went on, “Way I look at it is, all the shit these white Freedom Party assholes gave the spades, who gives a shit if they get some of their own back eight inches at a time?”
“Mm, you’ve got something there.” Armstrong lit a cigarette, too. “Besides, I bet she’s ugly.” He and Squidface both laughed. Their side had won. They could afford to.
Cassius had wondered about a lot of things in his life. Whether he would be famous never made the list. A Negro in the CSA had no chance at all of reaching that goal, so what point to wondering about it?
All he had to do, it turned out, was be a halfway decent shot. Knock one man over, and his own world turned upside down and inside out. No, he hadn’t expected that. He hadn’t even imagined it. None of which kept it from happening.
First, U.S. officers inside Madison grilled him. He told his story. There wasn’t much of a story to tell: “Soon as I seen it was Jake Featherston, I shot the son of a bitch. Shot him some more once he was down so’s he wouldn’t get up no mo’.”
“What’ll we do with him?” one officer asked another over Cassius’ head. They might as well have been talking about somebody in the next county.
“Hell, I don’t know,” the second Yankee answered. “If it was up to me, though, I’d put him up for a Congressional Medal of Honor.”
“Can’t,” the first officer said.
“Why the hell not?”
“He isn’t a U.S. citizen.”
“Oh.” The second officer laughed sheepishly. “Yeah. You’re right. But he just did more for us than a fuck of a lot of guys who are.”
One thing that happened because he’d shot Jake Featherston was that he didn’t have to go out on patrol any more. He didn’t have any more duties at all, in fact. He could eat as much as he wanted and sleep as late as he wanted. If they’d issued him a girl, he would have had the whole world by the short hairs. And if he’d asked, they probably would have. But he didn’t think of it, and no one suggested it, so he did without.
A few days later, a newsreel crew filmed him. He told them the same story he’d given the Army officers. One of them asked, “Did you feel you were taking revenge for all the Negroes Jake Featherston hurt?”
“He didn’t hurt ’em, suh—he done killed ’em,” Cassius answered. “My ma an’ my pa an’ my sister an’ Lord knows how many more. Can’t hardly get even for all that jus’ by killin’ one man. He needed killin’—don’t get me wrong. But it ain’t enough—not even close.”
“Why didn’t you get taken with the rest of your family?” asked the white man from the USA.
<
br /> “On account of I didn’t go to church on Sunday. That’s where they got grabbed.”
“Do you think God was saving you for something else?”
“Beats me,” Cassius answered. “Plenty of other times I could’ve got killed, too.”
“What are you going to do now?”
Cassius spread his hands. “Suh, I got no idea.”
Plenty of other people had ideas for him. Next thing he knew, he was on a train heading for the USA. He’d never ridden on the railroad before, and he would have gone hungry if one of the whites escorting him hadn’t taken him to the dining car. The food was good—better than U.S. Army chow. It didn’t measure up to what the Huntsman’s Lodge or his mother had made, but he didn’t figure anything ever would, not this side of heaven.
He took some satisfaction in seeing what the USA had done to the CSA—and the Carolinas had been a Confederate redoubt till late in the war. As he passed through Virginia, he saw what the United States had done where they weren’t fooling around. He saw white people living in the midst of the rubble. They were filthy and grubby and scrawny. He’d gone through that himself. He might have been sorry for them…if he’d seen more than a tiny handful of blacks living alongside them. Since he didn’t, he stifled whatever sympathy he would have felt.
Then he crossed into the USA. Another country! Not only that, a country where they just treated Negroes…not too well. His father had always been cynical about the United States. Compared to what Cassius had survived, though, being treated…not too well looked pretty goddamn good.
The United States didn’t look so good. The part he saw, the stretch between the Maryland-Virginia border and Philadelphia, looked almost as bomb-pocked and trampled as the land farther south had. He wondered how any part of this poor battered continent would ever climb back to its feet again.
He saw the edges of what the superbomb had done to Philadelphia. The edges were bad enough. What were things like at the center, where the bomb went off? Maybe not knowing was better.
In at the Death Page 53
