Return Engagement (27 page)

Fight them ourselves!
Mary thought. She didn’t say it out loud, though. She knew what she needed to do. She waited only on opportunity. But dragging Mort in, when he plainly didn’t want to be dragged in, wouldn’t have been fair to him and might have proved dangerous to her. One man—or one woman—going it alone: that was the safe way to do it.

Every now and again, she wished she could be part of a larger movement. Many people working together could harry the Yanks in a way a loner couldn’t. But a large operation could also go wrong in ways a small one couldn’t. She was willing to give her life for her country. She wasn’t willing to throw it away.

Mort said, “I may be wrong, but I do believe there’s fewer Frenchies in town lately. Maybe they’ve decided we aren’t going to start turning handsprings right here.”

Mary shook her head. “That’s not it. A lot of them are out guarding the railroad lines.”

Her husband gave her an odd look. “How do you know?”

Careful!
She couldn’t tell him the truth, which was that she’d driven around and looked. She’d taken care not to examine any one stretch more than once; she hadn’t done anything to rouse the least suspicion in any Quebecois corporal’s heart. She didn’t want to make Mort wonder, either, so she answered, “I heard somebody talking about it in Karamanlides’ general store.”

“Oh.” Mort relaxed, so she must have sounded as casual as she hoped she had. He went on, “Good luck to them if somebody does decide to sabotage the railroad. Too many miles of train tracks and not enough Frenchies.”

“Wouldn’t break my heart,” Mary said. Mort only smiled. He already knew how she felt about the Yanks. Saying she hoped somebody else did them a bad turn was safe enough. The only thing she couldn’t tell him—couldn’t tell anybody—was that she intended to do them a bad turn herself.

“Talk about hearing things,” Mort said. “Reminds me of what else I heard in the diner today. Wilf Rokeby’s retiring.”

“You’re kidding!” Mary exclaimed. “He’s been postmaster as long as I can remember.”

“He’s been postmaster as long as anybody can remember,” Mort agreed. “He’s been here since dirt. But he’s going to give it all up at the end of the year. Says he’s getting too old for all the standing and lifting he’s got to do.” He chuckled. “Says he’s had it with being polite to people all the time, too.”

“But him going! I can’t believe it,” Mary said. “And what will the post office be like without the smell of that hair oil he uses? It won’t be the same place.”

“I know,” Mort said. “We’ve got to do something nice for him when he does quit. The whole town, I mean. You said it: it’ll hardly be Rosenfeld without Wilf.”

“Good luck to him. I wonder what he’ll do when he’s not being polite to people all day long,” Mary said. Mort snorted at that.

Mary certainly did wonder what Wilf Rokeby would be doing. Rokeby knew things he shouldn’t. He hadn’t done anything with the knowledge. The proof was that Mary was still sitting at the supper table talking things over with Mort. If Rokeby had gone to the Yanks, she’d be in jail or shot like her brother.

But just because Wilf hadn’t talked didn’t mean he wouldn’t talk. When you were worried about your life, you couldn’t be too careful, could you? Mary suddenly understood why robbers often shot witnesses. Dead men told no tales. It sounded like something straight out of a bad film—which didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

I have to think about this.
Mary had been thinking about it for a while. Wilf Rokeby had been doing what the Yanks told him ever since they occupied Rosenfeld in 1914. That was a long time by now. He’d never shown any signs he was unhappy about cooperating with U.S. authorities. All he’d cared about was running the post office, and he hadn’t worried about for whom.

That didn’t mean he would go to the occupying authorities. But it didn’t mean he wouldn’t, either.
Can I take the chance? Do I dare take the chance?
The sky hadn’t fallen. It hadn’t, but it could.

Just then, the cat yowled and hissed. Alec yelled and started to cry. Mary stopped worrying about Wilf Rokeby. She ran into the front room to see what had happened. The cat crouched under the coffee table, eyes blazing. Alec clutched a scratched arm. He also clutched a small tuft of what looked like cat fur. Cause and effect weren’t hard to figure out.

“Don’t pull the kitty’s tail,” Mary said. “If you do, you can’t blame him for scratching.”

“I didn’t,” Alec said, but his heart wasn’t in it.

Mary whacked him on the backside, not too hard. “Don’t tell fibs, either.”

He looked amazed. She could read his thoughts.
How can she tell I’m lying?
She almost laughed out loud. Alec hadn’t had much practice yet.

T
here was a saloon not far from Cincinnatus Driver’s parents’ house in Covington. There were a lot of saloons in the colored district in Covington. Blacks had troubles aplenty there, and needed places to drown them. Had Cincinnatus been all in one piece, he wouldn’t have given the Brass Monkey the time of day. Since he was what he was, he spent a good deal of time there.

The inside of the Brass Monkey was dim, but not cool. A couple of ceiling fans spun lazily, as if to show they were doing their best. Next to one of them hung a strip of flypaper black with flies in every stage of desiccation. Sawdust lay in drifts on the floor. The place smelled of beer and cigars and stale piss.

“What can I get for you?” the barkeep asked when Cincinnatus gingerly perched on a bar stool.

“Bottle of beer,” Cincinnatus answered. He pulled a dime from his pocket and set it on the bar. It was a U.S. coin. The bartender took it without hesitation. Not only had Kentucky been part of the USA till a few months before, but the U.S. and C.S. dollars had officially been at par except during the Confederacy’s disastrous inflation after the Great War. A dime held the same amount of silver in both countries, though you could buy a little more with one in the United States.

“Here you go.” The barkeep took the beer out of the icebox behind him.

“Thank you kindly.” Cincinnatus didn’t bother with a glass. He took a sip from the bottle, then pressed it against his cheek. “Ah! That feels mighty good.”

“Oh, yeah. I know.” The barkeep fiddled with the white shirt and black bow tie that marked him for what he was. “Wish this here was looser. Feels like I’m cookin’ in my own juice.”

“I believe it.” Cincinnatus sipped again. Two old black men, one bald, the other white-haired, sat in a corner playing checkers. He nodded to them; he’d seen them around in Covington since he was a kid. One had a beer, the other a whiskey. They nodded back. He was as familiar to them, and his being away for close to twenty years meant very little.

A man about his own age sat on a stool at the far end of the bar. He had a whiskey in front of him. He knocked it back, his face working, and signaled to the bartender for another. “You sure, Menander?” the barkeep asked. “Somebody gonna have to carry you home?”

“Don’t you worry about me none,” Menander answered. “Just give me the damn whiskey, an’ I’ll give you the money. That’s how it goes, ain’t it?”

“Yeah. That’s how it goes.” The bartender sighed and gave him what he wanted. He gulped down the whiskey and set another quarter on the bar. The barkeep took it, but he sighed again. “Ain’t like you to get shit-faced like this. You should oughta leave it to them what does.”

“Ain’t I earned the right?” Menander came back. “Do Jesus, ain’t I earned the goddamn right?”

“Damfino.” The bartender ran his rag along the countertop before setting another whiskey there. “What happen, make you wanna git wide?”

“Didn’t they go an’ haul my brother off to one o’ them goddamn camps?” Menander said. “Ain’t I never gonna see him no more? Ain’t the world one fucked-up place? You bet your ass it is.”

That made Cincinnatus prick up his ears. He’d hated and feared the Freedom Party for those camps long before he got stuck in the CSA. He looked down the bar toward Menander. “What did your brother do, you don’t mind me asking?”

“Do?” The other man stared blearily back at him. “He didn’t do nothin’. What you need to do? Don’t you just got to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Don’t the ofays jus’ got to reckon,
We needs us another nigger
? Ain’t that how it goes?” Now he waved to the barkeep for support.

The bartender said, “I done heard all kinds o’ things.”

“I believe that,” Cincinnatus said.

He got a thin smile for a reward. “Yeah, a barkeep, he hear
all
kinds o’ things,” the bartender said. “But none o’ what I hear tell about them camp places is good. You go in, you don’t come out no more—not breathin’, anyways. Menander, he ain’t wrong about that there.”

Slowly, Cincinnatus nodded. “I heard the same,” he said, and also heard the trouble in his own voice. “I heard, they want to take you down to Louisiana, you’re just as well off lettin’ ’em kill you, on account of you ain’t gonna stay ’mong the living real long.”

Menander put his head down on the bar and started to weep. Did that mean his brother had gone to Louisiana? Or did it only mean he’d drunk himself maudlin? Cincinnatus didn’t have the heart to ask.

“We ought to do somethin’ about that,” he said instead.

He wasn’t even sure Menander heard him. The barkeep did. He asked, “What you got in mind?”

Cincinnatus started to tell him what he had in mind. He started to say that no black man should quietly let himself be arrested. He started to say that if every black man answered the door with a gun in his hand when police or Freedom Party stalwarts or guards came calling—not impossible, not with as many guns as there were floating around the CSA—the powers that be might start thinking twice before they arrested people quite so freely. If Negroes didn’t just submit, how many dead white men would the Freedom Party need before it got the message? Not many, not unless Cincinnatus missed his guess.

He started to tell the bartender all those things. He started to, but the words never passed his lips. Instead, after a thoughtful pull at his beer, he answered, “Well, now, I don’t rightly know. We
can’t
do a whole hell of a lot, don’t look like to me.”

The bartender polished the bar some more with his rag. It wasn’t especially clean. If there was any dirt on the bar, he was just spreading it around, not getting rid of it. His face was expressionless, but barkeeps weren’t supposed to show much of what they were thinking. Cincinnatus didn’t want to show much of what he was thinking, either. He didn’t like his own thoughts, which didn’t keep him from having them.

He’d never set eyes on the man behind the bar before coming back to Covington. Oh, maybe he had, but the man would have been a boy when the Drivers moved to Iowa. He didn’t
know
him. That was what counted. That . . . and he could see how useful Confederate authorities would find it to have a black bartender letting them know which Negroes were getting uppity, and how.

No, he didn’t know this fellow. Because he didn’t know him, he couldn’t trust him. Back when Kentucky belonged to the USA, Luther Bliss, the head of the Kentucky State Police (which might as well have been the Kentucky Secret Police), hadn’t worked him over too badly when he had him in his clutches. Whoever Bliss’ counterpart was now that Kentucky had gone back to the CSA, Cincinnatus didn’t think he would show such restraint.

At the far end of the bar, Menander raised his head. Tears streaked his cheeks. His face might have been one of those masks of tragedy you sometimes saw on theater curtains. “I tell you what we ought to do,” he said in a terrible voice. “We ought to kill us some o’ them white cocksuckers. We should ought to
kill
’em, I say. Reckon they leave us alone then, by Jesus.”

“Reckon they kills us, too,” the bartender said quietly.

“They killin’ us
now,
” Menander cried. “We gots to make ’em stop.”

The bartender got busy with the rag. It swished over the top of the bar. He watched it intently as he worked, but it didn’t seem to be enough to distract him from his thoughts. He tossed it into that secret space under the bar that could hold almost anything: a cleaning rag, a bottle of maraschino cherries, a smaller bottle of knockout drops, a blackjack, a sawed-off shotgun. The rag disappeared with a damp splat. He lit a cigarette and took a long, meditative drag.

Cincinnatus wondered if all the smoke would stay in the man’s lungs, but he blew out a blue cloud of it. Only after that did he say, “Menander, I know you is hurtin’, but you got to watch what you say and where you say it.”

He might have been a father warning his little boy to look both ways before he crossed the street. Like the little boy if he happened to be in a crabby mood, Menander wasn’t having any of it. “For Chrissake!” he burst out. “You tellin’ me some nigger here—some lousy nigger here—give me away to the motherfuckin’ Freedom Party?”

“I didn’t say that,” the bartender answered. “You done said that.”

“Some ofays sell their souls for a quarter,” Cincinnatus answered. Menander nodded eagerly at that. But then Cincinnatus went on, “How come you reckon niggers is any different?”

Back in Iowa,
nigger
was a term of abuse. Here in Kentucky, blacks used it casually among themselves to describe themselves. Some whites here used it as a casual descriptive term, too—some, but not all. In the mouth of a Freedom Party stalwart, it was ugly as could be. Despite the hot, muggy day, Cincinnatus shivered. In a stalwart’s mouth, the word had an evil rasp he’d never heard with any other.

Menander stared at him. “I don’t reckon any nigger’d be a dog low enough to sell out his own kind.”

Both Cincinnatus and the bartender laughed at him. So did both old men playing checkers in the corner. Menander’s eyes heated with drunken rage. “Calm yourself,” Cincinnatus told him. “I didn’t say niggers was worse’n white folks. That ain’t so. But if you reckon they’s better, you got a ways to go to prove it.”

“Don’t see no niggers goin’’round yellin,, ‘Freedom!’ “ Menander spat.

“Well, no,” Cincinnatus admitted, “but I figure you would if we was on top and the ofays was on the bottom. When the Reds rose up in the last war, what was they but Freedom Party men with different flags shoutin’ different slogans?”