Return Engagement (22 page)

“Buy something nice for your missus with the money,” Jerry Dover said. “Sidney figures if his new girl thinks he’s one tough guy, she’s more likely to suck him off. Haven’t you seen that before?”

Damnfool buckra,
Scipio thought. But he couldn’t say that. A white could make cracks about another white. He could even do that in a black’s hearing. But for a black to make cracks about a white, even with another white who’d just made a crack about the same man, broke the rules. Scipio didn’t consciously understand that. For him, it was water to a fish. But a fish without water would die. A black who broke the rules of the CSA would die, too.

He got through the rest of the night. When he left the restaurant, he went into a world of darkness. Blackout regulations had reached Augusta, though the next U.S. airplane the city saw would be its first. Scipio went south toward the Terry with reasonable confidence. The colored part of town had never had street lights to black out. That made Scipio more used to getting along without them than most whites were.

Every so often, an auto would chug by, its headlights reduced to slits by tape or by hastily manufactured blinkers that fit over them. The muted lamps gave just enough light to keep a driver from going up on the sidewalk—as long as he didn’t go too fast. The
Constitutionalist
seemed to report more nighttime smash-ups every day.

Lights or no lights, Scipio knew when he got to the Terry. No more motorcars. The pavement under his feet turned bumpy and hole-pocked. The stink of privies filled his nostrils. There even seemed to be more mosquitoes. He wouldn’t have been surprised. Public-health men were likely to spray oil on puddles in the white part of town first and worry about the Terry later, if at all. If some Negroes came down sick, well, so what? They were only Negroes.

He tried to walk quietly in the Terry. Lately, lots of hungry black sharecroppers had come into Augusta from the nearby cotton farms and cornfields. Tractors and harvesters and combines had stolen their livelihood. Here in the Terry, they weren’t fussy about what they did to eat, or to whom they did it.

Some of them would sneak out and prey on whites. But that was risky, and deadly dangerous if they got caught. Most preyed on their own kind instead. The police were much less likely to go after blacks who robbed other blacks. Blacks who stole from other blacks got easier treatment even when the police did catch them.

Scipio scowled, there in the midnight gloom.
The white folks reckon we’re worthless,
he thought bitterly.
Is it any wonder a lot of us reckon we’re worthless, too?
That was perhaps the most bitter pill blacks in the CSA had to swallow. Too often, they judged themselves the way their social superiors and former masters judged them.

But how can we help it?
Scipio wondered. Whites in the CSA had always dominated the printed word. Now they had charge of the wireless and the cinema, too. They made Negroes see themselves as they saw them. Was it any wonder skin-lightening creams and hair-straightening pomades made money for druggists all over the Confederacy?

Some of the pomades worked, after a fashion. A lot of them, Scipio had heard, were mostly lye, and lye would shift damn near anything. What it did to your scalp while it straightened your hair was liable to be something else again. But then, some people judged a pomade’s quality by how much it hurt. As far as Scipio knew, all the skin-lightening creams were nothing but grease and perfume. None of them was good for more than separating a sucker from his—or more likely her—hard-earned dollars.

His own hair, though cut short, remained nappy. His skin—he looked down at the backs of his hands—was dark, dark brown. But would he have found Bathsheba so attractive if she’d been his own color and not a rather light-skinned mulatto? He was damned if he knew.

After a few paces, he shook his head in a mixture of guilt and self-disgust. He
did
know. He just didn’t want to admit it to himself. Whites had shaped his tastes, too, so that he judged Negro women’s attractiveness by how closely they approached their white sisters’ looks.

There were black men who’d been warped more than he had, who craved the genuine article, not the approximation. Things seldom ended well for the few who tried to satisfy their cravings. In the right circumstances, white male Confederates might put up with some surprising things from blacks. They never put up with that, not when they found out about it.

When he heard footsteps coming up an alley, he shrank back into the deeper shadow of a fence and did his best to stop breathing. One . . . two . . . three young black men crossed the street in front of him. They had no idea he was there. Starlight glittered off the foot-long knife the biggest one carried.

“Slim pickin’s tonight,” the trailing man grumbled.

“We gits somebody,” the one with the knife said. “We gits somebody, all right. Oh, hell, yes.” On down the alley they padded, beasts of prey on the prowl.

Scipio waited till he couldn’t hear their footfalls any more. Then he waited a little longer. Their ears were younger than his, and likely to be keener. The three didn’t come running back toward him when he crossed the alley, so he’d waited long enough.

He hated them. He despised them. But next to the Freedom Party stalwarts—and especially next to the better disciplined Freedom Party guards—what were they? Stray dogs next to a pride of lions. And the Freedom Party men were always hungry for blood.

He got to his apartment building without incident. The front door was locked. Up till a little while before, it hadn’t been. Then a woman got robbed and stabbed in the lobby. That changed the manager’s mind about what was needed to make the building stay livable. Scipio went in quickly, and locked the door behind him again.

Climbing the stairs to his flat was always the hardest part of the day. There seemed to be a thousand of them. He’d been on his feet forever at the Huntsman’s Lodge—it felt that way, anyhow. His bones creaked. He carried the weight of all his years on his shoulders.

I was born a slave,
he thought; he’d been a boy when the Confederate States manumitted their Negroes in the 1880s.
Am I anything but a slave nowadays?
Most of the time, he had no use for the Red rhetoric that had powered the Negro uprisings during the Great War. He’d thought them doomed to fail, and he’d been bloodily proved right. But when he ached, when he panted, when the world was too much with him, Marx and revolution held a wild temptation.
Like cheap booze for a drunk,
he thought wearily,
except revolutions make people do even stupider things.

The apartment was dark. It still smelled of the ham hocks and greens his family had eaten for supper. His children’s snores, and Bathsheba’s, floated through the night. He sighed with pleasure as he undid his cravat and freed his neck from the high, tight, hot wing collar that had imprisoned him for so long.

Bathsheba stirred when he walked into their bedroom to finish undressing. “How’d it go?” she asked sleepily.

“Tolerable,” he answered. “Sorry I bother you.”

“Ain’t no bother,” his wife said. “Don’t hardly see each other when we’s both awake.”

She wasn’t wrong. He hung his clothes on the chair by the bed. He could wear the trousers and jacket another day. The shirt had to go to the laundry. He’d put on his older one tomorrow. If Jerry Dover grumbled, he wouldn’t do any more than grumble.

Scipio asked, “How
you
is?” He let his cotton nightshirt fall down over his head.

Around a yawn, Bathsheba answered, “Tolerable, like you say.” She yawned again. “Miz Finley, she tip me half a dollar—more’n I usually gits. But she make me listen to her go on and on about the war while I work. Ain’t hardly worth it.”

“No, I reckons not,” Scipio said. “Could be worse, though. Buckra at the restaurant, he go on about de niggers to his lady friend—only she ain’t no lady. He talk like I’s nothin’ but a brick in de wall.”

“You mean you ain’t?” Bathsheba said. Scipio laughed, not that it was really funny. If you didn’t laugh, you’d scream, and that was—he supposed—worse. His wife went on, “Why don’t you come to bed now, you ol’ brick, you?” Laughing again, Scipio did.

C
onnie Enos clung to George. “I don’t want you to go down to T Wharf,” she said, tears in her voice.

For how many years had Boston fishermen’s wives been saying that to the men they loved? It took on special urgency when George was going out again after coming home aboard the shot-up
Sweet Sue.
He had no really good answer for Connie, and gave the only one he could: “We got to eat, sweetie. Going to sea is the only thing I know how to do. We were lucky when the company paid us off for the last run. I don’t suppose they would have if the
Globe
hadn’t raised a stink.”

He hadn’t expected the company to pay off even with the stink. But next to the cost of repairing the boat, giving the surviving crewmen what they would have got after an average trip was small change. There were times when George understood why so many people voted Socialist, though he was a Democrat himself.

“Do you think the company will pay me blood money after the goddamn limeys sink your boat? Do you think I’d want it if they did?” Connie, born McGillicuddy, hardly ever swore, but made an exception for the British.

George shrugged helplessly. “Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place,” he said, knowing he was lying. Lightning hit wherever something tall stuck up, and hit again and again. But the
Sweet Sue
wasn’t an especially remarkable boat. She’d been unlucky once. Why would she be again?
Because there’s a war on,
he told himself, and wished he hadn’t.

“Why don’t you get a job in a war plant?” Connie demanded. “They’re hiring every warm body they can get their hands on.”

“I know they are.” George tried to leave it at that.

Connie wouldn’t let him. “Well, then, why don’t you? War work pays better than going to sea, and you’d be home with your family. You’d be able to watch your kids grow up. They wouldn’t be strangers to you. What’s so bad about that?”

Nothing was bad about any of it. George’s father would have been a stranger to him even if his destroyer hadn’t been torpedoed at—after—the end of the Great War. Fishermen
were
strangers to their families, those who had families. That was part of what went into their being fishermen.

George knew that, felt that, but had no idea how to say it. The best he could manage was, “That isn’t what I want to do.”

His wife exhaled angrily. She put her hands on her hips, something she did only when truly provoked. She played her trump card: “And what about me? Do you want to end up being a stranger to your own wife?”

Wearily, George shook his head. He said, “Connie, I’m a fisherman. This is what I do. It’s all I ever wanted to do. You knew that when you married me. Your old man’s been going to sea longer than I’ve been alive. You know what it’s like.”

“Yeah, I know what it’s like. Wondering when you’re coming home. Wondering
if
you’re coming home, especially now with the war. Wondering if you’ll bring back any money. Wondering why I married you when all I’ve got is a shack job every two weeks or a month. You call that a marriage? You call that a
life
?” She burst into tears.

“Oh, for God’s sake.” George didn’t know what to do with explosions like that. Connie had them every so often. If he’d accused her of acting Irish, she would have hit the ceiling and him, not necessarily in that order. He said, “Look, I’ve got to go. The boat’s not gonna wait forever. This is what I do. This is what I
am.
” That came as close to what he really meant as anything he could put into words.

It wasn’t close enough. He could see that in Connie’s blazing eyes. Shaking his head, he turned away, slung his duffel over his shoulder, and started down the hall to the stairs. Connie slammed the door behind him. Three people stuck their heads out of their apartments to see if a bomb had hit the building. George gave them a sickly smile and kept walking.

T Wharf was a relief. T Wharf was home, in many ways much more than the apartment was. This was where he wanted to be. This was where his friends were. This was where his world was, with the smells of fish and the sea and tobacco smoke and diesel fuel and exhaust, with the gulls skrawking overhead and the first officers cursing the company buyers in half a dozen languages when the prices were low, with the rumble of carts full of fish and ice, with the waving, sinuous tails of optimistic cats, with the scaly tails of the rats that weren’t supposed to be there but hadn’t got the news, with . . . with
everything.
He started smiling. He couldn’t help it.

The
Sweet Sue
had a fresh coat of paint. She had new glass. You could hardly see the holes the bullets had made in her—but George knew. Oh, yes. He knew. He’d never be able to go into the galley again without thinking of the Cookie dead on the floor, his pipe beside him. They’d have a new Cookie now, and it wouldn’t be the same.

On the other hand . . . There was Johnny O’Shea, leaning over the rail heaving his guts out. He drank like a fish whenever he was ashore, and caught fish when he went to sea. He wasn’t seasick now, just getting rid of his last bender. He did that whenever he came aboard. Once he dried out, he’d be fine. Till he did, he’d go through hell.

I don’t do that,
George thought.
I never will—well, only once in a while. So what does Connie want from me, anyway?

“Welcome back, George,” Captain Albert called from his station at the bow.

“Thanks, Skipper,” George said.

“Wasn’t sure the little woman’d let you come out again.”

“Well, she did.” George didn’t want anybody thinking he was henpecked. He went below, tossed the duffel bag in one of the tiny, dark cabins below the skipper’s station, and stretched out on the bunk. When he got out of it, he almost banged his head on the planks not nearly far enough above it. He’d get used to this cramped womb again before long. He always did.