Return Engagement (9 page)

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 longer, 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.”

Colonel Morrell nodded. “It really can be catching,” he remarked, and rubbed the knuckles of his right hand against his trouser leg. Had he been the one who’d laid out the captain? He’d been in the brawl, but Dowling hadn’t seen him land the punch.

The stick of bombs passed over the headquarters building. Dowling thought of the Angel of Death, and wondered if someone had slapped lamb’s blood on the doorframe at the entrance. The bursts diminished in force as they got farther away.

“Whew,” somebody said, which summed it up as well as anything else.

“Columbus is catching hell, though,” someone else said. “Too goddamn bad. This is a nice town.”

“Too goddamn bad is right,” Morrell said. “This is a town we’ve got to hold.” He plainly didn’t care whether Columbus was nice, dreary, or actively vile. All he cared about was Columbus as a military position.

After about half an hour, the all-clear sounded. Confederate air bases weren’t very far away. The bombers could loiter for a while if U.S. fighters didn’t rise to drive them off. That didn’t seem to have happened this time. Of course, the C.S. bombers would have had fighters of their own riding shotgun.

“Well,” Dowling said in what he hoped wasn’t black despair, “let’s see what they’ve done to us this time.”

He and Morrell and the rest of the officers and enlisted men climbed the stairs out of the basement. A corporal looked up and said, “Jesus God, but it’s good to see the sky again!” He crossed himself.

Dowling was more than happy to see the sky again, too, even if clouds and streamers of smoke and the contrails left by airplanes now departed still marred its blue perfection like burn scars on what would have been a beautiful face. A staff officer pointed to a tall pillar of smoke off to the west and said, “They’ve gone and pasted Camp Custer again, the sons of bitches.”

“No big surprise there,” Dowling said. The Confederates had been hitting the training facility every chance they got ever since the war broke out. It was, without a doubt, a legitimate military target. But they were also punishing civilian sectors of Columbus and other U.S. cities. In retaliation—President Smith said it was in retaliation—the United States were visiting the same sort of destruction on C.S. towns.

Colonel Morrell was thinking along the same lines. “Going to be a swell old war, isn’t it?” he said to nobody in particular.

The air-raid sirens started up again, not the usual shrill warble but one that got louder and softer, louder and softer, over and over again till back-teeth fillings started to ache. “What the hell?” Dowling said.

Everybody stared for five or ten seconds, trying to remember what that signal was supposed to mean. At last, a sergeant exclaimed, “It’s a goddamn gas alert!”

There was a new wrinkle. The Confederates hadn’t dropped that kind of death from the air before, at least not on Columbus. The soldiers dashed back into the building they’d so gratefully vacated moments before. Some of them found gas masks. Others had to take their chances without.

From behind his hot, heavy rubber monstrosity, Dowling said, “This is going to be hell on civilians. They don’t have anywhere near enough masks.” Even he could hear how muffled his voice was.

Morrell wore a mask, too. He did so self-consciously, as if he didn’t want to but knew he had to. He said, “The Confederates only need to drop a few gas bombs, too, to make us flabble all over the place. You can’t help taking gas seriously, and they get a big payback for a small investment.”

“So they do,” Dowling said morosely. “But I’ll tell you this, Colonel: they won’t be the only ones for long.”

III

W
hen it came to waiting tables at the Huntsman’s Lodge, summer was the worst season of the year. Scipio had to put on his tuxedo in the Terry—Augusta, Georgia’s, colored quarter—and then walk through the heat and humidity to the restaurant where he worked. The walk would also expose him to what passed for wit among the whites of Augusta. If he had a dime for every time he’d heard
penguin suit,
he could have retired tomorrow and been set for life.

He would have liked to retire. He was, these days, nearer seventy than sixty. But if he didn’t work, he wouldn’t eat. That made his choices simple. He would work till he dropped.

Bathsheba, his wife, had already left their small, cramped apartment to clean white folks’ houses. Scipio kissed his daughter and son and went out the door. They’d had a better flat before the white riots of 1934 burned down half the Terry. Not much had been rebuilt since. The way things were, they were lucky to have a place at all.

A couple of blocks from the apartment building, a long line of Negroes, almost all men, stood waiting for a bus. It pulled up just as Scipio walked by. Some of the blacks stared at him. Somebody said something to his friend that had
penguin suit
in it. Scipio kept walking. He shook his head. Real wit was hard to come by, whether from whites or blacks.

The placard on the bus that pulled up said war plant work. Scipio shook his head again. Negroes weren’t good enough to be Confederate citizens, weren’t good enough to be anything but the CSA’s whipping boys. But when the guns started going off . . .

When the guns started going off, the whites went to shoot them. But the soldiers went right on needing more guns and ammunition and airplanes and barrels. If the CSA took whites out of the line to make them, it wouldn’t have enough men in uniform left to face the USA’s greater numbers. That meant getting labor out of black men and white women.

Scipio wouldn’t have wanted to make the tools of war for a government that also used those tools to hold Negroes down. But none of the blacks getting on that war plant work bus seemed unhappy. They had jobs. They were making money. And if they were doing something Jake Featherston needed, Freedom Party stalwarts or guards were less likely to grab them and throw them in a camp. Those camps had a reputation that got more evil with each passing day.

Scipio didn’t believe all the rumors he’d heard about the camps. Some of them had to be scare stories, of the sort that had frightened him when he was a pickaninny. Nobody in his right mind could do some of the things rumor claimed. Confederate whites wanted to keep blacks down, yes. But killing them off made no sense. Who would do what whites called nigger work if there were no blacks to take care of it?

He imagined white women cleaning house for their rich sisters. And he imagined white men out in the cotton fields, picking cotton dawn to dusk under the hot, hot sun. It was pretty funny.

And then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t. One of the things the Freedom Party had done was put far more machinery in the fields than had ever been there before. A few men on those combines could do the work of dozens, maybe hundreds, with hand tools.
It’s almost as if they were working out ahead of time how they would get along without us.
That precisely formed sentence made Scipio nervous for two reasons. First, it had the unpleasant feel of truth, of seeing below the surface to the underlying reality. And second, it reminded him of the education Anne Colleton had forced on him when he was her butler at the Marshlands plantation. Again, she hadn’t given it to him for his benefit, but for her own. But that didn’t mean it hadn’t benefited him.

And now Anne Colleton was dead. He’d read that in the
Augusta Constitutionalist
with astonished disbelief. He hadn’t thought anything could kill her, could stop her, could turn her aside from a path she’d chosen. She’d always seemed as much a force of nature as a mere human being.

But even a force of nature, evidently, could get caught in a damnyankee air raid. For years, Scipio had lived in dread of her showing up at the Huntsman’s Lodge. And then one day she had, and sure as hell she’d recognized him. She wanted him dead. He knew that. But he’d managed to slither out from under her wrath, and now he didn’t have to worry about it any more.

Without looking at the people around him, he could tell the minute he left the Terry and entered the white part of Augusta. Buildings stopped having that bombed-out look. They started having new coats of paint. The streets stopped being minefields of potholes. The stripes between lanes were fresh and white. Hell, there
were
stripes between lanes. On most of the streets in the Terry, nobody’d ever bothered painting them.

A cop pointed his nightstick at Scipio. “Passbook,” he said importantly.

“Yes, suh.” Scipio could talk like an educated white man. If he didn’t—and most of the time he didn’t dare—he used the thick dialect of the Congaree River swampland where he’d been born.

The gray-uniformed policeman peered at the passbook through bifocals. “How the hell you say your name?” he demanded, frowning.

“It’s Xerxes, suh,” Scipio answered. He’d had the alias for a third of his life now. He took it more for granted than the name his mama gave him. After escaping the ruin of the Red Congaree Socialist Republic, keeping that real name would have been suicidally dangerous.

“Xerxes,” the cop repeated. He looked Scipio up and down. “Reckon you wait tables?”

“Yes, suh. Huntsman’s Lodge. Mistuh Dover, he vouch fo’ me.”

“All right. Get going. You’re too goddamn old to land in a whole lot of trouble anyways.”

Scipio wanted to do something right there to prove the policeman wrong. He didn’t, which went some way toward proving the man right. He did go on up the street to the Huntsman’s Lodge. Sometimes no one bothered him on the way. Sometimes he got endless harassment. Today, in the middle, was about par for the course.

He went into the kitchen and said hello to the cooks as soon as he got to the restaurant. If they were happy with you, your orders got done quickly. That meant you had a better chance for a good tip. If you got on their bad side, you took your chances.

Jerry Dover was going through the kitchens, too. The manager was making sure who was there and who wasn’t, and that they had enough supplies to cover the day’s likely orders. All the cooks except the head chef were black. Dover himself, of course, was white. A Negro manager would have been unimaginable anywhere in the CSA except a place that not only had exclusively colored workers but also an exclusively colored clientele.

“Afternoon, Xerxes,” Dover said.

“Afternoon, Mistuh Dover,” Scipio answered. “How you is?”

“Tolerable. I’m just about tolerable,” the manager said. He didn’t ask how Scipio was. He wouldn’t, unless he saw some obvious sign of trouble. As white men in the Confederate States went, he wasn’t bad in his dealings with blacks . . . but Confederate whites had a long way to go.

“People comin’ in like they ought to?” Scipio asked.

“Yeah. Doesn’t look like we’ll be shorthanded tonight,” Dover said. “But we may lose some fellas down the line, you know.”

“War plant work, you mean?” Scipio asked, and the other man nodded. Jerry Dover was thin and wiry and burned with energy. From the owners’ point of view, the Huntsman’s Lodge couldn’t have had a better manager. Scipio had to respect him, even if he didn’t always like him. He said, “I seen dat de las’ war.”

“Where’d you see it?” Dover asked. Scipio didn’t answer right away. After a moment, the white man waved the question aside. “Never mind. Forget I asked you that. It was a long time ago, and you weren’t here. Whatever you did, I don’t want to know about it.”

Thanks to Anne Colleton, he already knew more than Scipio wished he did. No help for that, though, not unless Scipio wanted to get out of Augusta altogether. The way police and stalwarts checked passbooks these days, that was neither easy nor safe.

Then Dover said something that rocked Scipio back on his heels: “This place is liable to be losing me down the line, too.”

“You, suh?” Scipio said. “Wouldn’t hardly be no Huntsman’s Lodge without you, suh.” The people who ate there might not understand that, but it was certainly true for those who worked there. “How come you go, suh? You don’t like it here no mo’?”

Dover smiled a crooked smile. “It ain’t that,” he said. “But if they conscript me, I got to wear the uniform.” He chuckled. “You imagine me trying to feed a division’s worth of soldiers all at once instead of worrying about whether the goddamn venison’s marinated long enough?”

“You do good, I reckon,” Scipio said, and he meant that, too. He didn’t think there was anything Jerry Dover couldn’t do when it came to handling food and the people who fixed it. But Dover was past forty. “They puts a uniform on
you
?”

The manager shrugged. “Never know. I wouldn’t be surprised. I was a kid when the last war came along. Didn’t see much action. But I saw how it sucked in more and more men the longer it went on. They were putting uniforms on fellows older than I am now. No reason they won’t do it again, not unless we win pretty goddamn quick.”

If he thought he would be conscripted, he didn’t think the Confederate States would win in a hurry. Scipio didn’t, either. He wouldn’t say so. A black man dumb enough to doubt out loud wouldn’t last long.

When he started waiting tables, he found, as he had before, that Augusta’s big shots had far fewer doubts about how things were going than Jerry Dover did. When they weren’t trying to impress the women with them with how magnificent they were, they blathered on about how degenerate the damnyankees had become and how they were surely riding for a fall. Anne Colleton had talked that way when the Great War broke out. She’d found she was wrong. These big-talking fools hadn’t learned anything in a generation.

They hadn’t even learned that black men had ears and brains. Had Scipio had a taste for blackmail, he could have indulged it to the fullest. He didn’t; he’d always been a cautious man. But what were the odds for Confederate victory if such damn fools could rise high in the CSA? Did the same hold true in the United States? He dared hope not, anyhow.

J
ake Featherston studied an immense map of Indiana and Ohio tacked to a wall of his office in the Gray House, the Confederate Presidential residence. Red pins showed his armies’ progress, blue pins the positions U.S. defenders still held. The President of the CSA nodded to himself. Things weren’t going exactly according to plan, but they were pretty close.

Someone knocked on the door. “Who is it?” Featherston rasped. His voice was harsh, his accent not well educated. He was an overseer’s son who’d been an artillery sergeant all through the Great War before joining the Freedom Party and starting his rise in the world.

The door opened. His secretary came in. “Mr. Goldman is here to see you, Mr. President,” she said.

“Thanks, Lulu. Send him right on in.” Jake spoke as softly to her as was in him to do. She’d stuck with him through bad times and good, even when it seemed as if the Freedom Party would go down the drain. And it might have, if she hadn’t helped hold things together.

Saul Goldman came into the office a moment later. The director of communications—a drab title for the Confederate master of propaganda—was short, and had lost his hair and grown pudgy in the nearly twenty years Featherston had known him. Jake himself remained lanky, rawboned, long-jawed, with cheekbones like knobs of granite. He’d lately had to start wearing reading glasses. Nobody ever photographed him with them on his nose, though.

“Good morning, Mr. President,” Goldman said.

“Morning, Saul,” Jake answered cordially. Goldman was another one who’d stayed loyal through thick and thin. There weren’t that many. Featherston gave back loyalty for loyalty. He repaid disloyalty, too. Oh, yes. No one who crossed him or the country could expect to be forgotten. He put on a smile. “What can I do for you today?”

The round little Jew shook his head. “No, sir. It’s what I can do for you.” He held out a neat rectangular package wrapped in plain brown paper and string. “This is the very first one off the press.”

“God
damn
!” Jake snatched the package with an eagerness he hadn’t known since Christmastime long before the last war. He tugged at the string. When it didn’t want to break, he reached into a trouser pocket on his butternut uniform and pulled out a little clasp knife. That made short work of the string, and he tore off the brown paper.

over open sights was stamped in gold on the front cover and spine of the leather-bound book he held. So was his name. He almost burst with pride. He’d started working on the book in Gray Eagle scratch pads during the Great War, and he’d kept fiddling with it ever since. Now he was finally letting the whole world see what made him tick, what made the Freedom Party tick.

“You understand, of course, that the rest of the print run won’t be so fancy,” Saul Goldman said. “They made this one up special, just for you.”

Featherston nodded. “Oh, hell, yes. But this here is mighty nice—
mighty
nice.” He opened the book at random and began to read: “, ‘The Confederate state must make up for what everyone else has neglected in this field. It must set race at the center of all life. It must take care to keep itself pure. Instead of annoying Negroes with teachings they are too stupid to understand, we would do better to instruct our whites that it is a deed pleasing to God to take pity on a poor little healthy white orphan child and give him a father and mother.” “ He nodded. “Well, we’ve gone a hell of a long way towards doing just that.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” the director of communications agreed.

Jake held the book in his hands. It was there. It was real. “Now folks will see why we’re doing what we’re doing. They’ll see all the things that need doing from here on out. They’ll see how much they need the Freedom Party to keep us going the way we ought to.”

“That’s the idea,” Goldman said. “And the book will sell lots and lots of copies. That will make you money, Mr. President.”