“A Jonah?” Dalby swelled up like a puffer fish. “What do you mean, a Jonah?”
“What I said,” Gustafson answered. “Named for Republicans. Phooey! Bunch of goddamn losers.”
“Could be worse,” George said helpfully. “His mama could have called him Lincoln.”
Dalby gave him a more venomous look than the one he’d sent Gustafson. He and the loader had been together for a long time. They’d probably been needling each other just as long, too. George was still a new kid on the block. He was showing some nerve by joining in.
Before Dalby could call him on it, if he was going to, the klaxons began to hoot. Feet clanged on metal decks. George started to laugh. He was already at his battle station. The only thing he did was button up his shirt and roll down his sleeves. Orders were to cover as much of yourself as you could when combat was close. That could be uncomfortable in warm weather, but it could also be a lifesaver. Flash burns from exploding ordnance often killed even when shrapnel didn’t turn a man to butcher’s work.
The Townsend’s engines took on a deeper note. The destroyer sped up and started zigzagging. The men on the gun crew looked at one another. They all said the same thing at the same time: “Uh-oh.”
When the klaxons stopped, it wasn’t to sound the all-clear. An officer’s voice came over the speakers: “Now hear this. We’ve picked up airplanes heading this way from the northwest. They are unlikely to be friendly. That is all.”
“Unlikely to be fucking friendly.” Fremont Dalby spat. “Yeah.”
With Midway gone, the USA had no bases northwest of where the Townsend steamed. However many Japanese carriers were up there, they had the best of both worlds. They could launch their airplanes at American ships while staying out of range of retaliation from Oahu or Kauai. They might lose fighters or bombers. They wouldn’t expose themselves to danger.
Y-ranging gear had a range far beyond that of the Mark One eyeball. It gave the gun crews fifteen or twenty minutes to get as ready for the onslaught as they could. Everyone started toward the northwest. Somebody opened up on a particularly majestic goony bird. The shells screamed past it. The goony bird altered course not a bit.
But then shouts rang out up and down the Townsend. Those dark specks weren’t birds, goony or otherwise. They were enemy airplanes.
The Townsend’s five-inch guns could fight both ships and airplanes. They opened up first. The blast from them was like the end of the world. George felt it as much as he heard it. Black puffs of smoke appeared among the incoming Japs. None of them tumbled out of the sky, not yet. They didn’t even break formation. The Pacific War had proved Japanese pilots knew their stuff. Nothing that had happened in this one made anybody want to change his mind.
“Let’s get ’em!” Dalby shouted. The twin 40mm guns started hammering away. George fed shells as fast as he could. Fritz Gustafson might have been a mechanism designed for nothing but loading. The rest of the crew swung the guns toward their targets.
Flame spurted from the gun barrels. Shell casings leaped from the breeches. George passed more ammo. The noise of the twin antiaircraft guns was terrific, but not so overwhelming as the roar of the dual-purpose five-inchers not far away. They kept shooting, too, adding bass notes to the cacophony.
Bombs burst in the sea, much too close to the Townsend’s flank. George remembered destroyers were built for speed, and sacrificed all armor plate to get it. He could have done without the thought. Great plumes of white water flew up. Some of it splashed him. He wondered what flying fragments from the casing were doing to the hull. Nothing good.
A fighter streaked for the Townsend, machine guns blazing. Tracers from several guns converged on it. It blew up in midair; the remains splashed into the Pacific. “Scratch one Jap!” George yelled in delight, even if he was far from sure his gun had put the fatal round into the enemy fighter.
But plenty of Japanese airplanes were left unscratched. A dive bomber screamed down on the Townsend. Fritz Gustafson swiveled the antiaircraft gun with desperate haste to bring it to bear on the bomber. Tracers swung toward the hurtling plane, swung into it, and left it a smoking, flaming ruin that crashed into the sea—but not before it loosed the bomb.
George watched it fall. He felt the Townsend heel sharply—but not sharply enough. The bomb struck home at the destroyer’s stern. It struck home . . . but it didn’t burst.
“Thank you, Jesus!” George said. He’d nominally turned Catholic to marry Connie, but he didn’t feel it. That was too bad. Crossing himself and really meaning it would have felt good just then.
“Fuck me.” Fremont Dalby sounded as reverent as George did, even if he’d chosen different words. “A dud!” Those were beautiful words, too.
Gustafson shook his head. “I bet it isn’t. I bet they put an armor-piercing fuse on it, and it didn’t hit anything tough enough to make it go off. It would have raised all kinds of hell on a cruiser or a battlewagon.”
“Fuck me,” Dalby said again, this time much less happily. “I bet you’re right. That means we’ve got a real son of a bitch in there somewhere.”
“It’ll go off if somebody sneezes on it, too, most likely.” Gustafson spoke with a certain somber satisfaction.
Another dive bomber stooped on the destroyer. One of the Townsend’s five-inch guns got this one. When that kind of shell struck home, the enemy airplane turned into a fireball. The dive bomber behind it flew past the edge of the fireball, so close that George hoped it would go up in flames, too. It didn’t. It released its bomb and zoomed away only a few feet above the waves.
Maybe evading the fireball had spoiled the pilot’s aim, because the bomb went into the Pacific, not into the Townsend. It also failed to explode, which suggested all the dive bombers bore badly fused bombs. George expended some more hope on that.
Even if it was so, the Townsend wasn’t out of the woods yet. More bombs rained down from the level bombers high overhead. None had hit yet, but they kept kicking up great spouts of water when they splashed into the sea. Nothing was wrong with their fuses. And fighters buzzed around the destroyer like so many malevolent wasps. They strafed the deck again and again. Someone on the Townsend shot down another one, but cries for medics said the fighters’ machine guns were doing damage, too.
After what seemed forever but was by the clock eighteen minutes, the Japanese airplanes flew back in the direction from which they’d come. Fritz Gustafson nodded to George. “Well, rookie, you’re a veteran now,” he said.
George looked around. There were bullet holes and dents much too close for comfort. Blood streaked the deck at the next 40mm mount. That could have been me, he thought, and started to shake.
Gustafson slapped him on the back. “All right to get the jimjams now,” the loader said. “You did good when it counted.”
“We all did good when it counted,” Dalby said. “Damn Japs didn’t buy anything cheap today.”
“Unless that bomb goes off,” Gustafson said. Dalby gave him the finger.
Men from the damage-control party brought the bomb up on deck in a canvas sling. Ever so gently, they lowered it over the side. All the sailors watching cheered as it disappeared into the depths of the Pacific.
“Still here,” George breathed. He hardly dared believe it. If that carrier decided to send more airplanes after the Townsend, it might not last. Nothing seemed better, though, than taking the enemy’s best shot—and coming through.
Scipio didn’t like going through the Terry any more. He especially didn’t like going through the northern part, the part that had been emptied out by police and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards. Scavengers prowled it, pawing through what the inhabitants had had to leave behind when they were sent elsewhere. A lot of the houses and apartments there weren’t uninhabited any more. They had no electricity, water, or gas, but the people in them didn’t seem to care. For some, they turned into homes. For others, they were no more than robbers’ dens.
Every time Scipio got into the white par
t of Augusta, he breathed a sigh of relief. That felt cruelly ironic. Whites were doing horrible things to blacks all over the CSA. No one could deny it. But a white man wouldn’t murder him on the street for the fun of it or for whatever he had in his pockets. A black man might. He hated that knowledge, which didn’t mean he didn’t have it.
He grumbled about it during the waiters’ hasty supper at the Huntsman’s Lodge. Now that Aurelius was also working there, he had someone to talk to, someone who’d been through a lot of the things he had. Two gray heads, he thought.
“Ain’t nothin’ to be done about it,” Aurelius said. “Things is what they is. Ain’t for the likes of us to change ’em. We just got to git through ’em.”
“I knows it,” Scipio said. “Don’t mean I likes it.”
“Tell you what the difference is, ‘tween niggers and ofays,” Aurelius said.
“Go on,” Scipio urged him. “Say your say, so’s I kin tell you what a damn fool you is.” He smiled to show he didn’t intend to be taken seriously.
Aurelius ignored the gibe altogether, which showed how seriously he took it. Before he went on, though, he looked around to make sure neither Jerry Dover nor any other white was in earshot. That was serious business. Satisfied, he said, “Difference is, when niggers kill whites, they does it one at a time. When the ofays decide they gonna kill niggers, they does it by city blocks an’ by carloads. If I was forty years younger . . .” He didn’t finish that.
What would you do? But Scipio didn’t wonder for long. What could the other man have meant but that he would pick up a gun and use it against the whites? Scipio said, “We tries dat, we loses. They gots more guns, an’ they gots bigger guns, too. Done seen dat in de las’ war.”
“Yeah.” Aurelius didn’t deny it. He couldn’t very well; it was self-evident truth. But he did say, “We don’t try it, we loses, too. Can’t very well turn the other cheek when the ofay jus’ hit you there soon as you do.”
Scipio grunted. That also held more truth than he wished it did. Before he could say anything, Jerry Dover stuck his head into the room and said, “Eat up, people. We’ve got customers coming in, and the floor has to be covered.” He disappeared again.
The floor has to be covered whether you’re done eating or not, he meant. Waiters and busboys could eat, as long as they did it in a way that didn’t interfere with their work. If it came to a choice between work and food, work always won.
Gulping down a last bite of chicken breast cooked with brandy, Scipio went out onto the floor. He stood straighter. He walked with dignity. He put on some of the airs he’d shown as Anne Colleton’s butler at Marshlands. Assuming all of them would have been laying it on too thick, but customers here expected a certain amount of well-trained servility. Giving them what they wanted put a little extra money in his pocket.
As he took orders and recommended specials, he thought about Marshlands, now a ruined ghost of its former self. Anne Colleton dead . . . That still amazed him. One of her brothers had died—bravely—at the very start of the black revolt in 1915. The other one, as far as Scipio knew, was still alive.
After the war, Tom Colleton had turned out to be more dangerous and more capable than he’d expected. The white man had crushed what was left of the Congaree Socialist Republic. Till then, Scipio hadn’t thought of him as anything but a lightweight. It only went to show, you never could tell.
That was probably true for almost all white men. Scipio laughed, not that it was funny. Whites in the CSA probably said the same thing about blacks. No, they certainly said the same thing about blacks. Hadn’t he overheard them often enough, at Marshlands and here at the Huntsman’s Lodge and plenty of places between the one and the other whenever they didn’t think blacks could listen?
Of course, when whites talked among themselves, they often didn’t pay enough attention to whether blacks were in earshot. Why should they, when blacks were hewers of wood and drawers of water? Blacks talking about whites? That was a different story. Blacks had known for hundreds of years that a white man overhearing them could spell disaster or death.
A white man at one of Scipio’s tables waved to him. “Hey, uncle, come on over here!” the man called.
“What you need, suh?” Scipio asked, obsequious as usual.
“How long do they need to do up a steak in the kitchen? Have they all died in there? Of old age, maybe?” He was playing to the rest of the whites at the table. His friends or business associates or whatever they were laughed at what passed for his wit.
“It come soon, suh. Dey needs a little extra time, git it well-done de way you wants it.”
“Oh. All right. Thanks, uncle. Make sure you bring it out the minute they get it finished.” The white man, mollified, forgot about Scipio, even though he was still standing right there.
“Yes, suh. I do dat.” Scipio could have laughed in the man’s face. He could have, but he didn’t. It wouldn’t have been polite. But he knew the kitchen was glad to get well-done orders. They let it dispose of meat too nasty to serve before searing it thoroughly enough to destroy all the flavor. They also let it get rid of meat too tough to be worth eating; once cooked well-done, almost all meat was too tough to be worth eating. If the customer couldn’t tell the difference—and the customer never could—the kitchen only smiled.
After Scipio brought that dinner and the rest of the food to that table, he got a better tip than he’d expected. He thought that was pretty funny, too. No matter what he thought, his face never showed a thing.
It had looked like rain when he came to work, but the clouds had blown through by the time he left the restaurant. A big yellow moon hung in the sky; its mellow light went a long way toward making up for the street lamps that shone no more. Farther north, they would have called it a bombers’ moon, but no bombers had come to Augusta.
Scipio and Aurelius walked along side by side. Scipio was glad to have company on the way back to the Terry. Neither of them said much. They just walked in companionable silence, both of them puffing on cigarettes. Then, about a block and a half from the edge of the colored part of town, Aurelius stopped. So did Scipio, half a step later. Aurelius pointed ahead. “Somethin’ goin’on up there, Xerxes.”
“I sees it.” Scipio squinted. The moonlight wasn’t enough to let him make out what it was. It seemed as if it ought to be that bright, but it wasn’t. Moonlight had a way of letting you down when you needed it most. Suddenly, absurdly, Scipio remembered a girl from more than fifty years before, not long after he was manumitted. She’d seemed pretty enough by moonlight. Come the day . . . Come the day, he wondered what he’d been thinking the night before. He hadn’t been thinking the night before, which was exactly the point.
Aurelius had similar doubts. “Reckon we ought to find out what it is?” he asked.
“Can’t stay here,” Scipio said. “The buckra find we here in de mornin’, we gwine wish we was dead.”
“Uh-huh.” Aurelius took a couple of steps forward, then stopped again. “We go on, maybe we be dead.”
“We gots to go on,” Scipio said. “They catches we in de white folks’ part o’ town, we be dead then, too. Either that or they puts we in jail, and only one place a nigger go from jail dese days—to one o’ dem camps.”
Aurelius plainly wanted to argue. No matter what he wanted to do, he couldn’t. With dragging feet, he and Scipio approached. “Halt! Who goes there?” a white man barked at them, and then, “Advance and be recognized.”
Even more hesitantly, the two Negroes obeyed. As Scipio drew near, he saw that uniformed white men were surrounding the Terry with barbed wire. There were gateways; he and Aurelius were coming up to one. Trying to keep his voice from shaking, he asked, “What you do?”
“Too many troublemakers getting in and out,” the white man answered briskly. “High time we kept a closer eye on things, by God. And what the hell are you coons doing out after curfew anyways?”
“We works at the Huntsman’s Lodge, suh. Dey closes late,” S
cipio answered.
“Yeah? If that’s so, you’ll have fancy dress on under those topcoats. Let’s have a look,” the white—a Freedom Party stalwart—said. Scipio and Aurelius hastily unbuttoned their coats to display the tuxedos beneath.
“I know them two niggers, Jerry,” an Augusta cop told the stalwart. “They are what they say they are. They don’t give anybody trouble.” He pointed at Scipio and Aurelius with his nightstick. “Ain’t that right, boys?”
“Yes, suh!” the waiters chorused.
“Any nigger’ll give trouble if he gets the chance.” Jerry spoke with great conviction. But then he shrugged. “All right—have it your way, Rusty. Pass on, you two.”
“Yes, suh!” Scipio and Aurelius said again. The gates were barbed wire, too, strung on wooden frames instead of fastened to metal posts. Scipio doubted the barrier would stop all unsupervised traffic between the Terry and the outside, but it was bound to slow that traffic to a trickle.
Once they got on their own side of the barbed wire, he and Aurelius let out identical exhalations: half sigh, half groan. “Do Jesus!” Scipio said. “We is caged in.”
“Sure enough,” Aurelius agreed. “They kin feed us through the bars—if they want to. An’ if they want to, they kin poke us through the bars, too.”
“Or they kin take we out an’ git rid o’ we if they wants to.” Scipio paused. “But why dey bodder? Dey done made de whole Terry a camp.”
Aurelius’ jaw worked, as if he were literally chewing on that. “We’re in trouble,” he said in a low voice. “All the niggers in Augusta is in trouble.”
“In Augusta?” Scipio’s fears reached wider than that. “You reckon dis here the onliest place in the country where dey runs up de barbed wire?”
Now Aurelius was the one who whispered, “Do Jesus!” That bright, cheerful moon showed how wide his eyes went. “You suppose they doin’ this everywhere?”
Settling Accounts Return Engagement: Book One of the Settling Accounts Trilogy Page 71
