Drive to the East

III

When Scipio was Anne Colleton’s butler, back in the days before and at the start of the Great War, he’d got an education less formal but more thorough than he would have had at most colleges. He knew the name for a group of people forced to live in a walled-off part of a town. They formed a ghetto.

The Terry had been Augusta, Georgia’s colored district for God only knew how long. Blacks lived there and nowhere else. Whites didn’t live there, no matter what. But it hadn’t been a ghetto. Negroes had worked all over Augusta, waiting tables, cleaning houses, cutting hair, and doing all sorts of backbreaking, low-paying jobs that were beneath whites’ dignity.

But the Terry was a ghetto now. Barbed wire surrounded it. Armed guards-police and Freedom Party stalwarts-patrolled the perimeter. The only people who got out were the ones who showed their passbooks at the gates and were approved. Reentering was controlled just as rigidly.

Even before the barbed wire went up, the authorities swept out-emptied-one big chunk of the Terry. Word was that the people removed had been resettled somewhere else. Scipio didn’t know of anybody who’d heard from any of them, though. His guess was that they’d gone to a camp. Negroes went into camps. He didn’t know of anybody who’d come out of one, either.

All he could do was live his life one day at a time, try to get through, try to get by. Every afternoon, he put on the tuxedo he wore to his job at the Huntsman’s Lodge and headed for the nearest gate.

He’d been waiting tables there for a long time. The cops and the stalwarts knew him. They’d known him long enough that most of them had even stopped teasing him about the penguin suit he wore-and for a white man, or even a black, to abandon that particular joke required a forbearance not far from the superhuman. Better still, they’d even known him long enough to let him back into the Terry when he got off work after the usual curfew hour for Negroes.

That he worked at the Huntsman’s Lodge in particular undoubtedly helped him and his fellow waiters and cooks and busboys acquire their immunity from the curfew. The place was the finest and fanciest restaurant in Augusta. It was where the town’s most important whites gathered-and of course they had to be well served. Of course.

As usual, Scipio arrived for his shift about twenty minutes early. Showing up early and showing up all the time no matter what were two of a restaurant worker’s chief virtues. Reliability counted for more than anything else he could think of.

He ducked into the staff entrance-customers had a much fancier one-and hung his ratty overcoat on a hook. He didn’t think he’d need it much longer. Spring came early to Augusta, and summer followed hard on its heels. In the subtropical heat and humidity of a Georgia summer, his wing collar and tailcoat became a torture and a torment.

“Hello, Xerxes.” That was Jerry Dover, the manager at the Huntsman’s Lodge. The sharp-faced white man made a pretty good boss.

“Good day to you, suh.” Scipio responded to his alias more readily than he would have to his own name. As Scipio, he was still a wanted man in South Carolina. He hadn’t thought the Red uprising during the Great War had a prayer of success, which hadn’t kept him from becoming a prominent and visible part of the short-lived Congaree Socialist Republic. As far as he knew, the others who could say that were long dead; his son Cassius was named for one of them.

He expected Jerry Dover to go on his way after the greeting. The manager ran himself ragged making sure the Huntsman’s Lodge stayed the best place in town. However much Dover’s bosses paid him, it wasn’t enough.

Instead, though, Dover said, “Grab yourself some grub and then come see me in my office. I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”

“I do dat, suh. What you need?”

“It’ll keep till then.” Jerry Dover did hurry off after that. Scipio scratched his head. Something was on Dover’s mind. The manager hadn’t seemed anxious or upset, so it probably wasn’t anything too dreadful.

You couldn’t get rich waiting tables. (If you were a Negro in the CSA, you were most unlikely to get rich any which way, but you sure wouldn’t by waiting tables.) The job had its perquisites, though. The meals the cooks fixed for themselves and the rest of the help weren’t so fancy as the ones they made for the paying customers, but they weren’t bad, and they were free. Scipio ate fried chicken and string beans and buttery mashed potatoes smothered in gravy, and washed them down with coffee with plenty of cream and sugar.

Thus fortified, he went to Jerry Dover’s office, tapped on the open door, and said, “What kin I do fo’ you, suh?”

“Come on in,” Dover told him. “Close that thing, will you?”

“Yes, suh.” As Scipio did, he began-oh, not to worry, but to wonder. What didn’t Jerry Dover want anybody else hearing? The restaurant business had few secrets-fewer, most of the time, than the people who believed they were keeping them imagined.

Jerry Dover pointed to the battered chair in front of his battered desk. “Sit down, sit down,” he said impatiently. “You don’t need to stand there looking down at my bald spot. I’ve got something I want you to take care of for me.”

“I do dat,” Scipio said, assuming it was something that had to do with the restaurant. “Ask you one mo’ time-what you need?”

“Something a little special,” Dover answered. Scipio still didn’t worry. Later, he realized he should have started right then. But he just sat there politely and waited. His mama had raised him to be polite, going on seventy years ago now, and Anne Colleton’s relentless training reinforced those early lessons. Dover went on, “I need you to take something to somebody down in Savannah for me.”

“Savannah, suh?” Automatic deference tempered even the horror Scipio felt. “Do Jesus, suh! How I gonna git to Savannah, things like they is now? I is lucky I kin git outa de Terry.”

“I’ll get you authorized to leave town. Don’t you fret about that,” Jerry Dover said, which only made Scipio more alarmed than ever.

“What is this thing?” he demanded. “You can’t go your ownself? You can’t put it in de mail, let de postman bring it?”

“No and no,” the manager answered. “If I go out of town, people will notice. Right now, I can’t afford to have anybody notice me leaving town. And the mail’s not as safe as it used to be. A lot of people are mighty snoopy these days.” He doubtless meant people who worked for the Freedom Party. He doubtless meant that, but he didn’t say it.

“You reckon nobody care about some raggedy-ass nigger?” Scipio said. Quite calmly, Jerry Dover nodded. His very coolness infuriated the black man. “Suh, this here ass o’ mine may be raggedy, but it be the onliest one I got.”

“Then you’ll be careful of it, won’t you… Scipio?”

There it was. He’d feared it was coming. Anne Colleton had known who he was, had known what his right name was. She’d eaten at the Huntsman’s Lodge-was it really less than a year earlier? — and recognized him. Naturally, she’d wanted him arrested, brought back to South Carolina, and shot. Jerry Dover had forestalled her. He’d shown her that a colored waiter named Xerxes had worked at the Lodge before the Great War. It was, of course, a different Xerxes, but she couldn’t prove that. Anne Colleton had always been a woman who got her own way. She couldn’t have liked being thwarted here.

Maybe she would have done something about it had she lived. Thanks to the U.S. raid on Charleston, she hadn’t. Scipio was free of her forever. But… She’d told Jerry Dover his right name. It was a gun in Dover’s hands no less than it had been in hers.

Dover opened a desk drawer and reached inside. What did he have in there? A pistol? Probably. What had Scipio’s face shown? What he was really thinking? A Negro in the CSA could do nothing more dangerous. Dover said, “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“I know what you talkin’ ’bout, yes, suh,” Scipio said. Then he let the accent he’d used only once or twice since the downfall of the Congaree Socialist Republic, the educated white man’s accent Anne Colleton had made him learn, come out: “I know exactly what you are talking about, and I wish to heaven that I didn’t.”

Jerry Dover’s eyes widened. “You are a sandbagging son of a bitch. How many times did you tell me you could only talk like a swamp nigger?”

“As many times as I needed to, to keep myself safe,” Scipio answered. Bitterly, he added, “But I see there is no safety anywhere. Now-suppose you eliminate the nonsense. What must I deliver, and to whom, and why?”

Accent was almost as important in the CSA as color. Scipio remained black. He couldn’t do anything about that. But his skin said he was one thing. Now, suddenly, his voice said he was something else. His voice proclaimed that he was not just a white man, but someone to be reckoned with: a lawyer, a judge, a Senator. Jerry Dover shook his head, trying to drive out the illusion. Plainly, he wasn’t having an easy time of it.

He had to gather himself before he answered, “You don’t need to know that. You don’t need to know why. The less you know, the better for everybody.”

“So you say,” Scipio replied.

“Yeah. I do. And I say something else, too: you don’t want to mess with me. Anything happens to me, I got stuff written down. You’ll wish you was dead by the time they get through with you-and with your family, too.”

Bathsheba, whom he’d loved since they met at a boarding house in the Terry. Cassius, who had reached the age when every boy-almost a man-was as much a rebel as the Red he’d been named for. Cassius’s older sister, Antoinette, old enough for a husband now-but in these mad times, how much sense did marrying make?

Scipio wasn’t the only one whose life Jerry Dover held in the hollow of his hand. Everything in the world that mattered to him-and if Dover made a fist…

“All right, Mr. Dover,” he said, still with those white men’s tones. They helped him mask his feelings, and his feelings needed masking just then. “I shall do what you require of me.”

“Figured you would,” the restaurant manager said complacently. “Talkin’ fancy like that may help you, too.”

But Scipio held up a hand. “I had not finished. I shall do what you require-but you will pay my wife my usual wages and tips while I am away, and-”

“Wait a minute,” Dover broke in. “You think you can dicker with me?”

“Yes,” Scipio answered. “I can bargain with you because I can read and write, too. You have a way to protect yourself against me. That knife cuts both ways, Mr. Dover. I shall do what you require, and I shall carefully note everything I have done, and I shall leave my notes in a safe place. I have those, and they have nothing to do with this restaurant.”

Dover glared at him. “I ought to turn you in now.”

“That is your privilege.” Scipio masked terror with a butler’s impenetrable calm. “But if you do, you will have to find someone else to do your service, someone on whom you do not have such a strong hold.” He waited. Jerry Dover went on scowling, scowling fearsomely. But Dover nodded in the end. He hadn’t intended to end up with a bargain-he’d intended just to impose his will, as whites usually intended and usually did with blacks-but he’d ended up with one after all.

Dr. Leonard O’Doull was a tall, thin man with a long jaw and a face as Irish as his name. He worked in a U.S. Army aid station a few hundred yards behind the line in Virginia. A few hundred yards, in this case, was enough to put him on the north side of the Rapidan when the front was on the south side, in the almost impenetrable second-growth country called the Wilderness. He didn’t like that. Getting wounded men back over the river meant delay, and delay, sometimes, meant a death that faster treatment could have stopped.

But there was no help for it. The U.S. bridgehead over the Rapidan was small and under constant assault by air, armor, and artillery. The Confederates were no worse about respecting the Red Cross than their counterparts in green-gray, but there was nowhere in the bridgehead itself that an aid station could hope to escape the evil chances of war.

First Sergeant Granville McDougald waxed philosophical when O’Doull complained: “We do what we can do, Doc, not what we want to do.”

“Yeah, Granny, I know.” O’Doull had an M.D. He’d had a civilian practice up in Riviere-du-Loup, in the Republic of Quebec, where he’d settled after a stint as an army surgeon there in the Great War. McDougald had been a medic in the last go-round, and ever since. O’Doull wasn’t at all sure which of them knew more about medicine. He went on, “Just ’cause I know it doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“Well, no,” McDougald allowed. “But there’s not a hell of a lot of point to flabbling about things you can’t help.”

O’Doull grunted. Like any doctor, he was an officer-he had a major’s oak leaves on his shoulder straps. Like any long-service noncom, McDougald had ways of subverting the privileges rank gave to officers. Being right most of the time was not the least of them.

Before O’Doull could do anything more than grunt, a flight of northbound shells roared by overhead. The sound put him in mind of a freight train rumbling down the track. Confederate artillery constantly tried to disrupt U.S. supply lines.

Disrupt supply lines. That was a nice, bloodless phrase. What the Confederates were really trying to do was blow up trucks and motorcars and trains, to turn the vehicles into fireballs and the men inside them into burnt, mangled, screaming lumps of flesh. That was what it boiled down to.

Granville McDougald also listened to the shells flying north. “Didn’t hear any gurgles that time,” he said.

“Happy day,” O’Doull answered. And it was a happy day… of sorts. Rounds filled with poison gas made a distinctive glugging noise on their way through the air. Mustard gas hardly ever killed quickly. But the blisters it raised on the skin could keep a man out of action for weeks. And the blisters it raised on the lungs could keep him an invalid for years, strangling him half an inch at a time and making all his remaining days a hell on earth.

Nerve agents, on the other hand… Get a whiff of those, or get even a little drop on your skin, and the world would go dark because your pupils contracted to tiny dots. Your lungs would lock up, and so would your heart, and so would your other muscles, too-but when your lungs and heart stopped working the rest of your muscles didn’t matter a whole hell of a lot.

Soldiers on both sides carried syringes full of atropine. Anyone who thought he was poisoned with a nerve agent was supposed to stab himself in the thigh and ram the plunger home. If he was right, the atropine would block the effects of the poison gas. If he was wrong, the antidote that would have saved him would poison him instead. That wasn’t usually fatal, they claimed.

All the same, it made for one hell of a war.

“You know,” O’Doull said meditatively, “twenty-five years ago I thought we’d hit bottom. I thought we were doing the worst things to each other that human beings could think of to do.” He laughed-in lieu of sobbing or screaming. “Only goes to show what I know, doesn’t it?”

“Well, I don’t suppose you were the only one with that idea,” McDougald said. “Kind of makes you wonder where we go from here, doesn’t it?”

“Tabernac!” O’Doull said, and Granny McDougald laughed at him. When he didn’t watch himself, he swore in Quebecois French. Why not? He’d spoken it every day for a quarter of a century. English was the rusty language for him. He was surprised it had come back as well as it had. He’d read it all through his time in Riviere-du-Loup, to keep up with medical literature. That had probably helped.

U.S. counterbattery fire answered the C.S. artillery. By the sound of things, the U.S. bombardment had plenty of poison gas in it. Intellectually, O’Doull understood why. The gas would either deny Confederate guns to their gunners or force the men to don masks and heavy, rubberized outfits that covered every inch of them. Those were unpleasant in cool weather. In the summer, there was some question whether gas or protection from it was more lethal.

As far as O’Doull was concerned, though, the intellect had little to do with gas. He loathed it, pure and simple. He’d never known a doctor or a medic who didn’t. How could anyone not loathe stuff made to incapacitate and torment?

People on both sides of the front seemed to have no trouble at all.

Savagely, O’Doull said, “I wish to God they’d test that shit”-he could swear in English, too-“on the people who invent it and the people who improve it and the people who make it. Then they’d be sure they’ve got it just right.”

“Works for me,” McDougald said. “Write up a memo and send it on to the Ordnance Bureau. See what they have to say about it.”

“I’ll be damned if I’m not tempted to,” O’Doull said. “What can they do? Court-martial me and throw me out of the Army? I’d thank ’em and go home, and they’d never see my ass again.”

“Do it,” McDougald urged. “I’ll sign it. They want to bust me down to private, I don’t care. I’d be doing the same thing with a lot of stripes or without any, and I won’t get rich on Army pay no matter what grade I’m in.”

Before O’Doull could say anything to that, a shout from outside the aid station brought him back to the real and immediate world of war: “Doc! Hey, Doc! You there? We got a casualty for you!”

“No, I’m not here, Eddie,” O’Doull yelled back. “I went to Los Angeles for the sun.”

“Funny, Doc. Funny like a crutch.” Eddie and another corpsman, a big, burly, taciturn fellow named Sam, carried a stretcher into the tent. Both medics wore smocks with Red Crosses fore and aft, Red Cross armbands, and Red Crosses painted on the fronts and backs of their helmets. Corpsmen on both sides sometimes got shot anyway.

The corporal on the stretcher wasn’t at death’s door. He was, in fact, swearing a blue streak. He had most of one trouser leg cut away, and a blood-soaked bandage on that thigh. His opinion of the Confederate who’d shot him wasn’t far from Sophocles’ of Oedipus.

“Round tore out a big old chunk of meat,” Eddie said. “Missed the femoral artery, though.”

“I guess it did,” Granville McDougald said. “He’d be holding up a lily if the artery got cut.”

O’Doull nodded. A man could bleed out in a hurry if anything happened to his femoral artery. “Let’s get him on the table,” O’Doull said. “I’ll do what I can to patch him up, but he’s going to be on the shelf for a while.” He spoke to the noncom: “You’ve got yourself a hometowner, buddy.”

“Oh, yeah, just what I fuckin’ need,” the corporal said as Eddie and Sam lifted him off the stretcher and onto the operating table. “Got a letter from my sis last week-my wife’s fuckin’ around with the fuckin’ milkman. I go back to fuckin’ St. Paul, I’ll beat the fuck out of her.”

A man of strong opinions but limited vocabulary, O’Doull thought. He nodded to McDougald: “Pass gas for me, Granny.” Before the corporal could editorialize about that, McDougald stuck an ether cone over his face. He got out another couple of blurry four-letter words, then went limp.

“Watch what the fuck you’re doin’ with the fuckin’ scalpel, Doc,” Eddie said.

“Everybody’s a funny man,” O’Doull said mournfully. Eddie wasn’t half so impassioned as the corporal. Of course, he hadn’t just stopped a bullet, either. O’Doull cut away still more of the trouser leg and the wound dressing, too. Had the corporal stopped the bullet, or had it just taken a bite out of him and kept on going? O’Doull would have bet the round was long gone, but he did some probing all the same. You never could tell.

“Anything?” McDougald asked.

“Doesn’t look like it,” O’Doull answered. “They can X-ray him when they get him back to the division hospital, but it sure as hell looks like a hometowner to me. I’m going to try to spread his skin over as much of the wound as it’ll cover, tie off some of the bigger bleeders, dust him with sulfa and bandage him up, and then send him on his merry way.”

“Make sure you don’t tie off the artery when you’re fooling around in there,” McDougald warned.

“I’ll be careful.” O’Doull knew some doctors would have got their noses out of joint at a warning from a mere medic. You wouldn’t make a mistake like that if you were paying attention to what you were doing. But you could if you got careless. Granny helped make sure O’Doull didn’t.

The wound wasn’t pretty after he got done with it, but he thought the corporal had a good prognosis. Whether the noncom’s wife had a good prognosis might be a different story. When O’Doull said as much, McDougald said, “This guy won’t enter the hundred-yard dash in the Olympics any time soon. Maybe she can outrun him.”

“Olympics. Right.” O’Doull turned to Eddie and Sam. “Take him back to division. Tell ’em to keep an eye on his blood pressure, give him plasma if it falls. I don’t think it will-he looks pretty good-but they should monitor it.”

“Right, Doc,” Eddie said. Sam nodded-a paragraph from him.

O’Doull let out a sigh after they carried the wounded corporal away. “Another miracle of modern medicine,” he said.

McDougald clucked at his sarcastic tone. “Hey, you did good, Doc. I think that guy’ll be fine, and he lost a lot of meat off the bone.”

“Only thing I did that a surgeon in the War of Secession couldn’t have was put sulfa powder on the wound,” O’Doull said. “That doesn’t make me feel special, believe me.”

“Leg wounds are what they are,” McDougald answered with a shrug. “Nobody in the War of Secession knew anything about X-rays or plasma, I’ll tell you that. And the old-timers couldn’t do anything about chest or belly wounds-they had to watch people die of shock and blood poisoning. We’ve got a real chance against them-well, some, anyhow.”

“Hot damn.” But O’Doull shook his head. “Sorry, Granny. I’m tired as hell.” He didn’t see that changing any time soon, either.

Honolulu was a nervous town these days. With the Japanese holding Midway and with their airplane carrier probing down from the northwest, all of the main Sandwich Islands were nervous these days. The United States had taken them from Britain at the start of the Great War, and it looked altogether too possible that they might change hands again in the not very indefinite future.

George Enos, Jr., understood exactly why the Sandwich Islands were nervous. His destroyer, the USS Townsend, was in dry dock at Pearl Harbor. Japanese carrier aircraft had pummeled her when she poked her nose up too close to Midway. There were no U.S. airplane carriers in the Pacific right now. Sending ships around the Horn wasn’t easy, fast, or efficient-and the fight in the North Atlantic was right at the USA’s front door. U.S. warships and what chunks of the German High Seas Fleet that could get out of the North Sea squared off there against the British, Confederate, and French Navies. The Sandwich Islands? The Sandwich Islands were a long way from anywhere.

The chief of George’s twin 40mm antiaircraft gun owned the rock-ribbed Republican name of Fremont Blaine Dalby. His politics matched his name, which made him a queer bird. The Republicans, to the left of the Democrats and the right of the Socialists, had won few elections since the 1880s.

“You coming into town with us, George?” he asked. The gun crew had got a twenty-four-hour liberty. The whole ship’s crew was getting liberty in rotation while repair teams set the destroyer to rights again.

“I dunno,” George said uncomfortably.

“I dunno.” Dalby mocked not only his indecision but his flat Boston accent, which sounded especially absurd in the petty officer’s falsetto. “Well, you better make up your mind pretty damn quick.”

“Yeah.” George didn’t mind going into Honolulu with his buddies. He didn’t mind drinking with them, even if he got blind drunk. Part of him, though, did mind the idea of standing in line at one of Honolulu’s countless brothels for a quick piece of ass. He was married and had a couple of boys, and he’d never fooled around on Connie. Of course, he’d never been so far from her, either, or had so little chance of seeing her any time soon. When he was out on a fishing run, he made up for lost time as soon as his boat got back to T Wharf. He wasn’t coming back to T Wharf, or even to Boston, maybe for years.

And Fremont Dalby knew exactly what ailed him. The gun-crew chief gave him an elbow in the ribs. “What she don’t know won’t hurt her,” he said.

“Yeah,” George said again. Connie was a long way away. His pals, the men he ate and slept with, the men he fought beside, were right here. He didn’t want them to think he was a wet blanket. And I don’t have to stand in line at a whorehouse, he told himself. That helped salve his conscience. He nodded. “Sure, I’ll come.”

“Oh, boy.” Dalby made as if to bow. “Thank you so much. Well, come on, then, if you’re coming.”

Along with the other ratings given liberty, the gun crew showed their paperwork before leaving the barracks and then headed for the nearest trolley stop. From the Pearl City stop, they rode east past Custer Field, one of the many airstrips on Oahu. Even as they passed, Wright fighters were landing and taking off. An air umbrella floated over Oahu at all times.

“I wish we’d had some of those guys up over our heads when the Japs jumped us,” George said.

“Would’ve been nice,” agreed Fritz Gustafson, the loader on the twin 40mm cannon. The rest of the men from the gun crew nodded.

“Technically, we were under air cover,” Dalby said. Several people, George Enos, Jr., among them, let out snorts, guffaws, hoots, and other expressions of derision and disbelief. Dalby held up his right hand, as if taking oath in court. “So help me, we were. Fighters could have flown up from here to the ship and got back.”

“Big fucking deal,” George said. Others expressed similar opinions, some even more colorfully.

“Yeah, I know,” Dalby said. “It would’ve taken ’em most of an hour to get there, the fight would’ve been over by the time they did, and they couldn’t’ve hung around anyway, not if they did want to get back. But we were under air cover, by God. That’s how the brass sees it.”

The way George saw it, the brass was full of idiots. He would have found formidable support for that view among ratings-and probably more than he would have imagined among officers as well. Flabbling about it would just have ruined the day, so he made himself keep quiet. The Sandwich Islands were too nice a place to waste time getting upset and fussing for no good reason.

It wasn’t too hot. It wasn’t too cold. From everything he’d heard, it never got too hot or too cold. The air was moist without being oppressively sticky, the way it got in Boston in the summertime. It could rain at any time of the day or night all year around, but it rarely rained hard. The hills north of Honolulu were impossibly green, the sky improbably blue, the Pacific bluer still.

“I don’t just want to be stationed here,” George said. “I want to live here.”

“In a little grass shack?” Dalby jeered.

“Why not?” George said. “You don’t need anything more than that.”

Civilians started getting on as the trolley stopped here and there. The sailors eyed them suspiciously. Some were Orientals, and how could you tell if the Japs were loyal to the USA? And quite a few of the whites, especially the older ones, spoke with British accents. They probably wouldn’t be sorry to see the United States booted out of Honolulu, either.

Well, too bad, George thought. It’s not going to happen. He hoped it wouldn’t, anyway. The place where the islands were vulnerable was their dependence on the mainland for food and fuel. If the Japanese could cut off supplies, holding them might not be easy no matter what the actual battle situation looked like.

Then the trolley got into Honolulu, and he stopped worrying about things like that. The city had a filigreed, before-the-Great-War feeling to it. Not a whole lot had been built during the American occupation. The hotels that had accommodated visitors before the new war shut down tourism were the ones that had accommodated them before 1914.

Even the red-light district had been there a long time. The saloons and tattoo parlors and “hotels” that greeted sailors and soldiers had the look of places that might have greeted their grandfathers. The lurid neon signs a lot of them sported seemed afterthoughts, not essentials.

“We need a few drinks,” Fremont Dalby declared, and nobody presumed to disagree with him. He swaggered into a dive called the Swizzle Stick. The rest of the gun crew followed.

Dalby ordered whiskey. Most of the other sailors followed suit. George and Fritz Gustafson got beers instead. “What do you want to go and do that for?” somebody asked. “Haven’t you got better things to do with your dick than piss through it?”

“It’s good for both,” Gustafson said, which quelled that in a hurry.

Some of the barmaids were white, others Oriental. They were all female, and wore low-cut white blouses and short black skirts. Seeing them reminded George how long it had been since he’d set eyes on a woman, let alone touched one. He stared down at his glass of beer. He didn’t want to be unfaithful to Connie-but he didn’t want to go without loving, either.

The facsimile of loving you could buy for money wasn’t as good as the real thing. You didn’t need to be an egghead to figure that out. It was a lot better than nothing, though. Was it enough better than nothing to make him decide to do it? That’s the question, he thought, and chewed on it as hard as Hamlet had grappled with To be or not to be.

He didn’t have to choose right away. They weren’t going anywhere for a while. Some of the sailors had already knocked back their whiskeys. They were waving their glasses for refills. George didn’t feel like drinking that fast. If he drank that fast, he’d get drunk. If he got drunk, he’d do something stupid. He could feel that coming like a rash. And if he did something stupid and he wasn’t lucky, he’d end up with a goddamn rash, too.

But his glass emptied, as if by magic. “You want another?” a slant-eyed, tawny-skinned barmaid asked. George found himself nodding. The next beer appeared in short order. It vanished in short order, too. So did the one after that, and the one after that. About then, George stopped counting them.

Fremont Dalby got to his feet. Considering how much he’d put down, that he could get to his feet proved he was made of stern stuff. “The time has come,” he declared, “and we’re damn well going to. Drink up, you bastards.”

George knew all the reasons he didn’t want to go to a brothel. He knew, all right, but he’d stopped caring. Connie was five thousand miles away-a lot farther if he had to sail it. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. Dalby’s words came back to him, handy as could be. Everybody who went to stand in one of those lines told himself the same thing. If he drank enough beforehand, he might even make himself believe it.

The line moved forward at a good clip. “They hustle guys in and out, don’t they?” George said. The rest of the gun crew laughed as if that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. George had to listen to himself before he realized what kind of joke he’d made. Then he laughed, too.

It cost three dollars, payable in advance. He didn’t even get to choose a girl. He got assigned a cubicle. He went to it and there she lay, already naked on the bed. She was plump, and had black hair; she might have been part Oriental. “Hurry up,” she said. “You only got five minutes.”

He wondered if he’d drunk too much to perform. He quickly discovered he hadn’t. And, speaking of quickly, it was over almost before it began. He didn’t need to worry about spending too much time in the nasty little room. That was it? he thought as he did up his pants. I got all hot and bothered about that? He had, too.

Whoever had designed the place knew his business. The exit funneled customers into a pro station. Taking care of prophylaxis against venereal disease-something new for George-proved nastier than the brief coupling had been enjoyable. When he said so to a pharmacist’s mate, the fellow shrugged and asked, “Would you rather have VD?”

“Couldn’t be worse than this,” George said.

“Shows what you know. Shows you never tried pissing through a dose of the clap, too.” The pharmacist’s mate jerked a thumb toward the door at the far end of the room. “I ain’t got time to argue with you. Go on, get the hell out of here.”

Out George went. The sordidness of what he’d just been through far outweighed the pleasure. The spasm of drunken guilt he felt didn’t help, either. If Connie ever finds out, she’ll murder me. I’ll have it coming, too.

Most of the other men from the gun crew were already out on the sidewalk. Some of them seemed as subdued as George. Not Fremont Dalby, though. “Twice!” he bragged.

Two times nothing is still nothing, George thought. Then he blinked. He’d never been anything special in school. He wouldn’t have bet he remembered how multiplying by zero worked, not in a million years. Things came back in the strangest ways.

There were times when Brigadier General Abner Dowling suspected he must have been a fire brigade in some past life. Not a member of a fire brigade, but a whole brigade all by himself. That was the only thing that could explain how many fires he’d put out in his long career in the U.S. Army.

More than ten years as adjutant to General George Armstrong Custer made a good start-or a bad one, depending on how you looked at things. Custer was the hero of the Great War, but no man was a hero to his adjutant, any more than he was to his valet. Dowling knew too well how vain, how stubborn, how petulant the old fool was… and how those qualities went a long way toward making him the man who, in spite of everything-including himself-made the decisions that ended up beating the Confederate States.

After the Army finally put Custer out to pasture-over his vehement and profane objections-what had Dowling’s reward been? Eagles on his shoulders, eagles and the post of commandant of Salt Lake City. Trying to hold the Mormons down was even more fun than trying to hold Custer down had been. Dowling had been in General Pershing’s office when a sniper assassinated Pershing. No one had ever caught the murderer-the Mormons took care of their own. And after that, Utah was Abner Dowling’s baby.

He’d kept the lid on. The permanently rebellious state had even seemed quiet enough to persuade President Al Smith, in his infinite wisdom, to lift military occupation and restore full civil rights to the inhabitants. When Dowling left, the War Department gave him stars on his shoulders. He was immodest enough to think he’d bloody well earned them, too.

And his reward for that? He’d been sent to Kentucky to hold down Freedom Party agitation. There’d been times when the Freedom Party maniacs made the Mormons seem a walk in the park by comparison. Then President Smith, infinitely wise again, agreed to Jake Featherston’s demands for a plebiscite. Afterwards, Dowling got to preside over the U.S. withdrawal over Kentucky and the Confederate reoccupation.

War, plainly, was right around the corner then. They’d put Dowling in Ohio, which turned out to be the Confederate Schwerpunkt. The U.S. War Department had always had trouble seeing west of the Appalachians. Dowling didn’t have enough barrels or airplanes to counter Confederate General Patton’s armored onslaught. He still thought he’d put up the best campaign he could, given what he had to work with.

Maybe the War Department even agreed with him. They recalled him from Ohio after it fell, but they didn’t quite-make him the scapegoat for that fall. After a spell in Philadelphia counting rubber bands and making sure everyone’s necktie was on straight, they’d put him back to work. Oh, he wasn’t an army commander anymore, but they did give him a corps under Major General Daniel MacArthur for the great U.S. counterstroke, the move against Richmond.

Forward to Richmond! was a rallying cry in the War of Secession. It didn’t work then. It didn’t work so well this time as the USA hoped, either. It was the obvious U.S. rejoinder to what the Confederates had done-obvious enough for Featherston’s men to have anticipated it. They hadn’t stopped the U.S. attack, but they’d slowed it to a crawl.

And Abner Dowling, commanding MacArthur’s right wing, had had to face a second armored attack from General Patton, this one aimed at his flank. Patton, plainly, had wanted to roll up the whole U.S. force facing him, but he hadn’t brought it off. He wouldn’t, either.

But was it any wonder Dowling felt the weight of the world on his broad shoulders?

Yes, those shoulders were broad. His belly was thick. He had a series of chins cascading down to his chest. He was, all things considered, built like a barrel. If he took to food to shield himself from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, well, it was a wonder he hadn’t taken to drink.

He sighed and stretched and yawned. He hated paperwork. He’d earned the right. He’d done too much of it for too many years, first for Custer and then on his own hook. The more rank he got, the more paperwork went with it. He’d got good at the bureaucratic infighting, too, the sort of quiet warfare that measured itself as much by things prevented as by those accomplished.

That thought made him look east toward Warrenton, where Daniel MacArthur had his headquarters. MacArthur had wanted to pull one out of General McClellan’s book from the War of Secession, land at the mouth of the James, and go after Richmond from the southeast. It could have been a good plan in 1862 had McClellan pursued it with energy-a word not often associated with his name. In 1942, against aircraft and the C.S. Navy, it would have been an invitation to suicide.

Well, it wouldn’t happen now. A quiet coded message from Dowling to the War Department had made sure of that. He’d got good at what he did, all right; MacArthur wasn’t sure even yet who’d put paid to the project he thought so wonderful. But Dowling remained convinced he’d prevented Western Union messenger boys from delivering a lot of Deeply Regrets telegrams in a campaign that wouldn’t have been worth them.

His own headquarters were in Washington, Virginia, a town with nothing to recommend it that he could see. U.S. soldiers walked through the place in groups of five or six or by squads; even traveling in pairs wasn’t enough to keep them from getting knocked over the head and having their throats cut. The locals kept chalking FREEDOM! and CSA! on light walls and painting the slogans on dark ones. There were rumors the local women of easy virtue deliberately didn’t get their VD treated so they could pass it on to U.S. soldiers. For once, the brass hadn’t started those rumors. The men had.

Dowling went outside. The sentries in front of the house he’d commandeered came to an attention so stiff, he could hear their backs creak. “As you were,” he told them, and they relaxed-a little. Relax too much in hostile territory and you’d relax yourself right into the grave. “Anything seem strange?” he asked them.

They looked at one another. At last, with unspoken common consensus, they shook their heads. “No, sir,” they chorused.

“All right. Good, in fact,” Dowling said. Enlisted men had a feel for such things that all the fancy reports from Intelligence often couldn’t match. They listened to what the locals said, and to what they didn’t. If they’d been in enemy territory for even a little while, they got good at adding two and two-and sometimes even at multiplying fractions.

Guns boomed off to the south and east. Corps headquarters was supposed to be out of artillery range of the front. So were divisional headquarters. Dowling had noticed, though, that the most effective divisions were the ones whose COs ignored that rule. The closer to actual fighting an officer got, the better the feel for it he came to have. Dowling did his best to apply that rule to himself as well as to the officers who served under him.

The guns boomed again, and then again. Dowling cocked his head to one side, studying the sound. After due consideration, he nodded. That was just the usual exchange between a couple of U.S. batteries and their Confederate counterparts. It was liable to smash up a few unlucky men on each side, but it wouldn’t change the way things turned out if it went on for the next million years. It was just part of the small change of war.

Somewhere overhead, airplanes droned by. Dowling wasn’t the only one who listened to the sound of their engines with a certain concentrated attention, or who glanced around to see where the nearest trench was in case he had to dash for cover. Not this time. One of the sentries delivered the verdict: “Ours.”

“Yeah.” Another man nodded. “Sounds like they’re going to drop some shit on Featherston’s head in Richmond.”

“Good,” Dowling said.

The sentries nodded again. “We nail him, we win big,” one of them said, and then, meditatively, “Asshole.”

“Chrissake, Jimmy,” hissed the soldier who’d spoken first. “You don’t say that in front of a general.”

Jimmy looked abashed-or rather, worried that he might get in trouble. “Don’t get yourself in an uproar about it, son,” Dowling said. “I guarantee you I have seen and worked with and worked for more people of the asshole persuasion than you can shake a stick at.”

“Like who, sir?” Jimmy asked eagerly.

Abner Dowling could have named names. The question was, could he stop once he got started? He was tempted to let all the resentment out at once, in a great torrent that would leave the sentries’ eyes bugging out of their heads. He wouldn’t get in trouble for that; a man with a silver star on each shoulder strap was allowed his little eccentricities. That was what they called them for generals, even if a lot of them would have landed lesser mortals in the stockade. But it took a hell of a lot to make the powers that be decide to jug a general.

So it wasn’t fear of consequences that kept Dowling’s mouth shut. It was more the fear of seeming like a four-year-old-a fat four-year-old with a white mustache-in the middle of a temper tantrum. Dowling remembered too many times when he’d had to calm General Custer down after one of his snits. What was distasteful in another man might also be distasteful in him.

He wagged a coy finger at Jimmy and the other soldiers. “That would be telling.” The men looked disappointed, but not too-he didn’t suppose they’d really expected him to spill the beans. He took out a pack of cigarettes and stuck one in his mouth. Then he held out the pack to the sentries. They accepted with quick grins and words of thanks. The Raleighs-spoil from a dead Confederate-bore Sir Walter’s face above an enormous, and enormously fancy, ruff.

“Damn, but these are good,” Jimmy said after his first drag. “Stuff we call tobacco nowadays tastes like an old cowflop.”

“A real old cowflop,” one of the other sentries added. “One that’s been out in the sun for a while and got all dried out.”

Dowling thought of burnt weeds and lawn trimmings when he smoked U.S.-made cigarettes. He blew out a cloud of smoke, then said, “You boys want to make me give up the habit.”

The sentries laughed. Jimmy said, “Don’t do that, sir. Only thing worse than lousy tobacco is no tobacco at all. Besides, when you’re smoking you can’t smell the goddamn war so much.”

You can’t smell the goddamn war so much. Dowling wouldn’t have put it that way, which didn’t mean the kid was wrong. Even here in Washington, well back of the line, you noted whiffs of that smell. Dowling didn’t know what all went into it. Among the pieces, though, were unburied corpses, unwashed men, and uncovered latrine trenches. Cordite and smoke were two other constants. The smell had a sharper note in this war, for exhaust fumes had largely ousted the barnyard aroma of horses.

And there was one other stink that never went away. It blew out of the War Department. With luck, it blew out of the War Department on the other side, too. And it usually did, for most wars went on for a long, long time. No, there was no escaping the all-invasive, all-pervasive reek of stupidity.

Hipolito Rodriguez had worn butternut in the Great War. The Confederate Conscription Bureau had pulled him off his farm in the state of Sonora, given him a uniform and a rifle and rather more English than he’d had before, and sent him out to fight. And fight he had, first in Georgia against the black rebels in one of the Socialist Republics they’d proclaimed there and then in west Texas against the damnyankees.

He had a son in butternut in this war, and two more bound to be conscripted before long. And he was back in uniform himself. He’d signed up as a member of the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades: men who weren’t fit for front-line service anymore but who could still help their country and free fitter men for the fight.

Now he found himself in Texas again, riding a bus across a prairie that seemed to stretch forever. He wore uniform again-of similar cut to the one he’d had before, but of gray rather than butternut cloth. The rest of the new camp guards wore identical clothes. Only two or three of them besides Rodriguez were from Sonora or Chihuahua. The rest came from all over the CSA.

Being in Texas was a mixed blessing for a man of Mexican blood. White Texans often weren’t shy about calling their fellow Confederate citizens greasers and dagos, sometimes with unprintable epithets in front of the names. But at least Confederates of Mexican blood were citizens.

In an odd way, Rodriguez thanked heaven for the Negroes who would fill the camp where he was to become a guard. If not for them, Mexicans would have been at the bottom of the hill, and everything would have flowed down onto them. As things were, most of the trouble went past them and came down on the mallates’ heads. That suited him fine.

The bus stopped once, in a dusty little town whose name-if it had a name-Rodriguez didn’t notice. The place had a Main Street with a filling station, a saloon that doubled as a diner, and a general store that doubled as a post office. It was even smaller than Baroyeca, the Sonoran town outside of which Rodriguez had a farm. It looked to be even poorer, too. Since Sonora and Chihuahua were and always had been the two poorest states in the CSA, that said frightening things about this place on the road to nowhere.

Along with everybody else, Rodriguez lined up to use the toilet at the filling station. It was dark and nasty and smelly. The proprietor stared at the camp guards as if they’d fallen from another world.

Some of them bought cigarettes and pipe tobacco at the general store. Rodriguez went into the saloon with others. The bartender must have been used to three customers a day. Having a dozen all at once made his eyes bug out of his head. Somebody ordered a ham sandwich. In an instant, all the men in gray uniforms were clamoring for ham sandwiches. The barkeeper worked like a man possessed, slicing bread, slicing ham, slicing pickles, slapping on mustard and mayonnaise. The bus driver leaned on his horn.

“Screw him,” one of the camp guards said. “He ain’t gonna take off without all of us.” As if to contradict him, the driver blew another long blast.

None of the guards paid any attention. They stayed right there, waiting for their sandwiches and slapping down quarters as they got them. When Rodriguez’s turn came, the man in the boiled shirt and the black bow tie-as much a uniform as his own gray one-gave him a funny look. His dark skin and black hair said one thing, while the outfit he had on said another. Rodriguez just waited. The man handed him the sandwich.

“Gracias,” Rodriguez said as he paid him. He spoke more Spanish than English, but his English was more than good enough for thank you. He wanted to make the Texan twitch, and he did.

When they’d all got their food and their tobacco, they deigned to reboard the bus. The driver muttered to himself. He did no more than mutter, though. Considering how badly he was outnumbered, that was smart of him.

Rodriguez sank down into his seat with a grunt of relief. Not long after his farmhouse got electricity, he’d almost electrocuted himself. He hadn’t been the same since-otherwise, he might have gone to the front himself, and not into the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades.

Away went the bus, rattling west down the imperfectly paved highway. “Reckon I’m gonna pawn my fuckin’ kidneys when we finally get where we’re goin’,” one of the men in gray said.

“You been fuckin’ with your kidneys, Jack, there’s some shit your pappy never learned you,” another one replied. Goatish laughter erupted. The rattletrap bus filled with cigarette smoke.

Towards evening, the bus came into Snyder. It looked like all the other Texas towns through which Rodriguez had passed on the way west: bigger than some, smaller than others. Then the bus rolled on a few miles farther. Somebody sitting up near the front who could see out through the big windscreen said, “Son of a bitch!” It was an expression of awe, not anger.

Other soft oaths, and a few not so soft, followed. Rodriguez, who was sitting somewhere near the middle, tried to peer past the men in front of him to find out what they were getting excited about. He didn’t have much luck. They were all shifting and moving, too.

The bus stopped. This was where they were going, whatever this was. The driver answered that, saying, “Welcome to Camp Determination. Everybody off.”

With a tired wheeze, the bus’ front door opened. One by one, the new camp guards filed out. Some of them gathered in front of the luggage bin, waiting for the driver to unlock it so they could get out their duffels. Others, Rodriguez among them, took a look at Camp Determination first. He decided the fellow who said son of a bitch had known just what he was talking about.

“I was eighteen years old and in the Army in the last war before I saw a town that size,” said one of the gray-haired men in gray uniforms.

“Si, me, too,” Rodriguez agreed. You could drop Baroyeca down in the middle of that camp, and it wouldn’t even make a splash.

Barbed wire surrounded an enormous square of Texas prairie. Machine guns poked their snouts out of guard towers outside the wire perimeter. Barracks halls built of bright yellow pine as yet unbleached by the sun and unstained by the rain and rusty nails rose in the middle distance. There were a lot of them, but the vast acreage inside the barbed wire had room for at least as many more.

Somebody else pointed in a different direction. “Holy Jesus!” the man said. “Will you look at all them trucks?”

There they sat, on an asphalted lot separated from the barracks by more barbed wire. Along with the rest of the guards, Hipolito Rodriguez had become very familiar with those trucks. They looked like ordinary Army machines, except that the rear compartment was enclosed in an iron box-an airtight iron box. Pipe the exhaust in there and people who got into the trucks didn’t come out again… not alive, anyhow.

“They’re gonna get rid of a hell of a lot o’ niggers in this place,” the man next to Rodriguez said. “Hell of a lot.”

“You want to shut your mouth about that, Roy,” somebody else told him. “We don’t talk about that shit. If we do it amongst ourselves, we’re liable to do it where the coons can hear us, and then we’ll have trouble.” He’d learned his lessons well; the Freedom Party guards who’d trained them at the much smaller camp near Fort Worth had rammed that home again and again. “Far as the niggers know, when they get on those trucks, they’re always going somewhere else.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Roy said impatiently. “Far as I know, they’re all goin’ to hell, and it damn well serves ’em right.”

“Come on, come on.” The bus driver sounded even more impatient than Roy did. “Y’all get your gear and get moving. I got to get moving myself, get the hell outa here and back towards where I live.”

Rodriguez found the gray canvas bag with his last name and first initial stenciled on it in black paint. He slung it over his shoulder and joined the column of guards thumping toward what looked like the main gate, at least on this side of the square. Extra guard towers watched over it. Anyone who tried attacking it without a barrel would get chopped to hamburger.

The camp was already manned. A couple of the men at the gate lowered the muzzles of their submachine guns toward the ground. “New fish,” one of them remarked.

“Don’t look so new to me.” His pal had the heartlessness of a man with all his hair and all his teeth.

“Sonny boy, I learned to mind my own business before you were a hard-on in your old man’s dungarees,” said a man from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigade.

“I believe you, Pops,” the guard answered. “Some people need as big a head start as they can get.” He didn’t smile when he said it.

Guards on duty and new arrivals glared at one another. Before anybody could get around to demanding papers and showing them-and before anybody could get around to tossing out more insults like grenades-a man with a deep voice spoke from inside the gate: “What’s going on here? Are these the new guards they’ve been promising us? About goddamn time, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

As soon as the men at the gate heard that voice, they became all business. As soon as Hipolito Rodriguez heard it, he had to look around to remind himself that he wasn’t in a trench somewhere even farther west in Texas, with damnyankee machine-gun bullets cracking by overhead and damnyankee shells screaming in.

Out through the gate came Jefferson Pinkard. He was older now, but so was Rodriguez. He had a good-sized belly and two or three chins and harsh lines on his face that hadn’t been there in 1917. Back when Rodriguez was training, he’d heard that a man named Pinkard was high in the camp hierarchy. He’d wondered if it was the man he’d known. He didn’t wonder anymore.

He took half a step out of line to draw Pinkard’s eye to him, then said, “How are you, Senor Jeff?”

Pinkard eyed him for a moment without recognition. Then the big man’s jaw dropped. “Hip Rodriguez, or I’m a son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, and thundered forward to fold Rodriguez into a bear hug. The two of them pounded each other on the back and cursed each other with the affection a lot of men can show no other way.

“Teacher’s pet,” said one of the guards who’d ridden on the bus with Rodriguez. But he made sure he sounded as if he was joking. If one of his comrades turned out to be a war buddy of the camp commandant’s, he didn’t want to seem to resent that, not if he knew which side his bread was buttered on.

When Pinkard let Rodriguez go, he said, “So you’re here to help us deal with the damn niggers, are you? Freedom!”

“Freedom!” Rodriguez echoed automatically. He was used to saying it in English now instead of going, ?Libertad! the way he had down in Baroyeca. “Si, Senor Jeff. That is why I have come.”

“Good,” Camp Determination’s commandant told him. “We’re gonna have us a hell of a lot of work to do, and we’re just about ready to do it.”

Since coming to Augusta near the end of the Great War, Scipio hadn’t gone far from his adopted home. For one thing, he hadn’t cared to go anywhere else; he’d made his life there, and hadn’t wanted to wander off. And, for another, travel restrictions on Negroes had started tightening up again even before the Freedom Party came to power. They’d got much worse since.

Just how much worse, he discovered in detail when he went to the train station to buy a ticket for Savannah. The line for whites was much longer than the one for blacks, but it moved much, much faster. Whites just bought tickets and went off to the platforms to board their trains. Blacks…

“Let me see your passbook, Uncle,” said the clerk behind the barred window. Scipio dutifully slid it over to him. The man made sure the picture matched Scipio’s face. “Xerxes,” he muttered, botching the alias the way most people did when they saw it in print. “What’s the purpose of your visit to Savannah, Uncle?”

“See my family there, suh,” Scipio said. He had no family in Savannah, but it was the safest reason to give.

The clerk grunted. “You got permission from your employer to be away from work?”

“Yes, suh.” Scipio produced a letter from Jerry Dover on Huntsman’s Lodge stationery authorizing him to be absent for one week.

Another grunt from the clerk. He jerked a thumb to the left. “Go on over there for search and baggage inspection.”

Scipio went “over there”: to a storeroom now adapted to another purpose. A railroad worker-a weathered fellow who couldn’t have been far from his own age-patted him down with almost obscene thoroughness. Two more white men of similar vintage pawed through his carpetbag.

“How come you do all dis?” Scipio asked the man who was groping him.

“So nobody sneaks a bomb on the train,” the white man answered matter-of-factly. “It’s happened a couple-three times. We’ve had to tighten up.” He turned to the men checking Scipio’s valise. “How’s it look?”

“He’s clean,” one of them said. “Bunch of junk, but it ain’t gonna go boom.”

Stung by that appraisal of his stuff, Scipio said, “Ask you one mo’ thing, suh?”

“Yeah?” The white man who’d searched him spoke with barely contained impatience. Why are you bothering me, nigger? lay at the bottom of it. But Scipio had sounded properly deferential, so the fellow let him go on.

“What you do when a lady come in here?”

“Oh.” The man laughed and gestured as if grasping a woman’s breasts from behind. Scipio nodded; that was what he’d meant. The frisker said, “We got a couple of gals who take care of that. Don’t you worry your head about it, Uncle. Just get on down to Platform Eight.”

“Thank you, suh.” Scipio picked up the carpetbag and headed for the platforms. The Confederate authorities-or maybe it was just the railroad employees-were shrewd. If they had white men groping black women, they would stir up trouble they didn’t need. They already stirred up a whole great storm of troubles; at best, life for Negroes in the CSA was one long affront. But it often wasn’t the sort of affront that made people flash into fury. Back in the days of slavery-the days into which Scipio had been born-white men did as they pleased with black women… and with black men who presumed to object. Resentment still simmered, ready to boil. The railroads didn’t turn up the heat under it.

The corridors were designed so that nobody could give Scipio anything while he was on the way from the inspection station to the platform. Some of the barriers were of new, unweathered wood. We’ve had to tighten up lately, the railroad man said. They seemed to have done a good job.

Several whites were already waiting on the platform. A couple of them sent Scipio suspicious glances. Do you have a bomb? Did you sneak it past the inspectors? Will you blow us up? For his part, he might have asked them, If you send colored folks into camps, why don’t they come out again?

He didn’t say anything, any more than they did. The questions hung in the air just the same. Despair pressed down heavily on Scipio. How were you supposed to make a country out of a place where two groups hated and feared each other, and where anybody could tell to which group anyone else belonged just by looking? The Confederate States of America had been working on that question for eighty years now, and hadn’t found an answer yet.

The Freedom Party thought it had. It said, If only one group is left, the problem goes away. The trouble was, the problem went away for only one group if you tried that solution. For the other, it got worse. No one in the Party seemed to lose any sleep over that.

More whites came onto the platform. So did a few more Negroes. The blacks all grouped themselves with Scipio, well away from the whites. Had they done anything else, they would have fallen into a category: uppity niggers. Nobody in his right mind wanted to fall into that category these days.

A little blond boy pointed up the tracks. “Here comes the train!” He squeaked with excitement.

It rumbled into the station. Departing passengers got off, got their luggage, and left the platform by a route different from the one Scipio had used to get there. He and the other Negroes automatically headed for the last two cars in the train. They wouldn’t sit with whites, either: they knew better. And if the cars in which they sat were shabbier than the ones whites got to use, that was unlikely to be a surprise.

Rattles and jolts announced the train’s departure. It rolled south and east, the tracks paralleling the Savannah River. When Scipio looked across the river, he saw South Carolina. He shook his head. Even after all these years, he wasn’t safe in the state where he’d been born. Then he shook his head again. He wasn’t safe in Georgia, either.

Cotton country and pine woods filled the landscape between Augusta and Savannah. Scipio saw several plantation houses falling into ruin. Marshlands had done the same thing. Raising cotton on plantations wasn’t nearly so practical when the colored workforce was liable to rise up against you.

People got on and off at the stops between the two cities. Scipio wouldn’t have bet that God Himself knew the names of hamlets like McBean Depot, Sardis, and Hershman.

And, when the train was coming out of the pine woods surrounding Savannah, it rolled through a suburb called Yamacraw that seemed to be the more southerly town’s Terry. Negroes did what they could to get by in a country that wanted their labor but otherwise wished they didn’t exist. Drugstores in white neighborhoods sold aspirins and merthiolate and calamine lotion-respectable products that actually worked. Scipio saw a sign in Yamacraw advertising Vang-Vang Oil, Lucky Mojoe Drops of Love, and Mojoe Incense. He grimaced, ashamed of his own folk. Here were the ignorant preying on the even more ignorant.

As soon as he got on the east side of Broad Street, things changed. The houses, most of them of brick, looked as if they sprang from the eighteenth century. Live oaks with beards of moss hanging from their branches grew on expansive lawns. That moss declared that Savannah, its climate moderated by the Atlantic only fifteen miles away, was a land that hardly knew what winter was.

“Savannah!” the conductor barked, hurrying through the colored cars as the train pulled into the station. “This here’s Savannah!” He didn’t quite come out and snap, Now get the hell off my train, you lousy coons! He didn’t, no, but he might as well have.

Scipio grabbed his carpetbag and descended. As at Augusta, the exit to the station kept him from having anything to do with boarding passengers. He gave the system grudging respect. That it should be necessary was a judgment on the Confederate States, but it did what it was designed to do.

Once he got out of the station, he stopped and looked at the sun, orienting himself. Forsyth Park was east and south of him. He walked towards it, wondering if a policeman would demand to see his papers. Sure enough, he hadn’t gone more than a block before it happened. He displayed his passbook, his train ticket, and the letter from Jerry Dover authorizing him to be away from the Huntsman’s Lodge. The cop looked them over, frowned, and then grudgingly nodded and gave them back. “You keep your nose clean, you hear?” he said.

“Yes, suh. I do dat, suh,” Scipio said. His Congaree River accent had marked him as a stranger in Augusta. It did so doubly here; from what little he’d heard of it, Savannah Negroes used a dialect almost incomprehensible to anyone who hadn’t grown up speaking it.

Forsyth Park was laid out like a formal French garden, with a rosette of paths going through it. With spring in the air, squirrels frisked through the trees. Pigeons plodded the paths, hoping for handouts. Flowering dogwood, wisteria, and azaleas brightened the greenery.

Scipio had to find the Albert Sidney Johnston monument. The Confederate general, killed at Pittsburg Landing, was something of a martyr, with statues and plaques commemorating him all over the CSA. In this one, he looked distinctly Christlike. Scipio fought the urge to retch.

He sat down on a wrought-iron bench not far from the statue. One of those importunate pigeons came up and eyed him expectantly. When he ignored it, he half expected it to crap on his shoes in revenge, but it didn’t. It just strutted away, head bobbing. You’ll get yours, it might have said, and it might have been right.

A squirrel overhead chittered at him. He ignored it, too. He had no certain notion how long he’d have to wait here, so he tried to look as if he were comfortable, as if he belonged. Several white women and a few old men passed with no more than casual glances, so he must have succeeded. Very few white men between the ages of twenty and fifty were on the streets. If they weren’t at the front, they were in the factories or on the farms.

“How do I get to Broad Street from here?” asked a woman with brown hair going gray.

“Ma’am, you goes west a few blocks, an’ there you is,” Scipio answered.

“Oh, dear. I was all turned around,” the woman said. “I’m afraid I have no sense of direction, no sense of direction at all.”

The code phrases were the ones Scipio had been waiting for. He hadn’t expected a woman to say them. He wondered why not. Jerry Dover hadn’t said anything about that one way or the other. A woman could do this as well as a man-maybe better, if she was less conspicuous. Scipio took a small envelope out of the hip pocket of his trousers. As casually as he could, he set it on the bench and looked in the other direction.

When he turned his head again, the envelope was gone. The woman was on her way toward Broad Street. No one else could have paid any attention to, or even seen, the brief encounter in the park. Scipio wasn’t sure what he’d just done. Had he given the Confederate States a boost or a knee in the groin? He had no way of knowing, but he had his hopes.