Return Engagement (31 page)

He thought about going back to the flat to change trousers—thought about it and shook his head. He was already badly late. He supposed he could get another pair at the restaurant. Even if he couldn’t, those ruined knees would silently show the rich white customers a little about what being a black in the Confederate States of America was like.

“You sure it’s all right?” he asked the ambulance man. The fellow nodded impatiently. He made shooing motions. Scipio left. He discovered his own knees had got scraped when he hit the pavement. Walking hurt. But he was damned if he’d ask anybody to paint him with Merthiolate, not when there were so many people who were really injured.

Whites often stared at him when he walked to the Huntsman’s Lodge. A black man in a tuxedo in a Confederate town had to get used to jokes about penguins. Today, the stares were different. Scipio knew why: he was a singularly disheveled penguin. People asked him if he’d got caught in the bombing. He nodded over and over, unsurprised; they must have heard the blast for miles around.

He’d just put his hand out to open the side door to the restaurant when another blast shook Augusta. The sound came from back in the Terry—from the very direction in which he’d just come. “Do Jesus!” he said again. In his mind’s eye, he could imagine bombers setting timers in two motorcars parked not too far apart, not too close together. The first one would wreak havoc. Ambulances and fire engines would come rushing to repair the damage—and then the second bomb would go off and take out their crews. Scipio shivered. If he’d guessed right, someone had a really evil turn of mind.

Still shaking his head, he opened the door and went in. He almost ran into Jerry Dover, who’d come hurrying up to find out what the second blast was about. The restaurant manager gaped at him, then said, “Xerxes! You all right? When you didn’t show up for so long, I was afraid the bomb—the first bomb, I mean—got you.”

“I’s all right, yes, suh,” Scipio said. “Bomb damn near do get me.” He explained how being behind the buses had shielded him from the worst of the blast, finishing, “I he’ps de wounded till de ambulances gits dere. Now—” He spread his hands. His palms were scraped and bloody, too.

“Huh? What do you mean?” Jerry Dover hadn’t put the two explosions together. Scipio did some more explaining. Dover’s mouth tightened. Now that Scipio had pointed it out to him, he saw it, too. He made a fist and banged it against the side of his leg. “Son of a bitch.
Son
of a bitch! That’s . . . devilish, is what it is.”

“Yes, suh,” said Scipio, who would have had trouble coming up with a better word. “I don’t know it’s so, mind you, but I reckon dat what happen.”

“I reckon you’re right,” Dover said. “You’re damn lucky that ambulance man sent you away. If he’d asked you to stay instead . . .”

“Lawd!” That hadn’t occurred to Scipio. But his boss was right. If the man had asked him to stay, he would have, without hesitation. And then that bomb would have caught him, too.

Jerry Dover clapped him on the shoulder. “You sure you’re all right to work? You want to go home, I won’t say boo. Hell, I’ll pay you for the day. You went through a lot of shit there.”

“Dat right kind of you, Mistuh Dover.” Scipio meant it. His boss was actually treating him like a human being. The restaurant manager didn’t have to do that. Few bosses with black workers bothered these days. Why should they, when the Freedom Party and the war gave them a license to be as nasty as they pleased? After a moment, Scipio went on, “All de same to you, though, I sooner stay here. I hopes they keeps me real busy, too. Busier I is, less I gots to think about what done happen.”

“However you want. I ain’t gonna argue with you,” Dover said. “But you better rustle up another pair of pants from somewhere. The ones you got on don’t cut it.”

“Somebody let me borrow a pair, I reckon,” Scipio said.

The cook’s trousers he got didn’t really go with his jacket and shirt. But they were black. Anybody who saw the rest of the outfit would probably fill in what he expected to see. The pants didn’t fit all that well, either. They would do for a shift. He had that other pair back home. Now he’d have to go out and buy one more. Jerry Dover didn’t offer to cover that expense.

Customers talked about the bombing. A lot of them thought, as Scipio did, that it was foolish for Negroes to bomb their own kind. “I bet they’re in the damnyankees’ pay,” one man said. “They’re trying to disrupt our production.”

“Wait till we catch them,” said another white man, this one in a major’s uniform. “We’ll send them to—” But he broke off, noticing Scipio within earshot.

What was he going to say? Did he know about the camps? Did he think Scipio didn’t? Whatever it was, Scipio never found out, because the major did know how to keep his mouth shut.

None of the prosperous whites eating at the Huntsman’s Lodge thought to ask Scipio if he’d been anywhere near the bomb when it went off. He looked all right now, so it didn’t occur to them. No one here cared what he thought about it. He wasn’t a person to these people, as he was to Jerry Dover. He was only a waiter, and a colored waiter at that. His opinions about the day’s specials and the wine list might be worth hearing. Anything else? No.

That didn’t surprise Scipio. Normally, he hardly even noticed it. Today, he did. After what he’d been through, didn’t he deserve better? As far as the Confederate States were concerned, the answer was no.

A
ll Irving Morrell wanted to do was put together enough barrels to let him counterattack the Confederates in Ohio instead of defending all the time. If he could act instead of reacting . . . But he couldn’t. He didn’t know where all the barrels were going, but he had his dark suspicions: infantry commanders were probably snagging them as fast as they appeared, using them to bolster sagging regiments instead of going after the enemy. Why couldn’t they see barrels were better used as a sword than as a shield?

Fed up, Morrell finally took a ride in a command car to see Brigadier General Dowling. The ride proved more exciting than he wanted it to be. A low-flying Confederate fighter strafed the motorcar. Morrell shot back with the pintle-mounted machine gun. The stream of tracers he sent at the fighter made the pilot pull up and zoom away. The fellow hadn’t done much damage to the command car, but the flat tire from one of his bullets cost Morrell almost half an hour as he and the driver changed it.

“Good thing he didn’t take out both front tires, sir,” the driver said, tightening lug nuts. “We’ve only got the one spare, and a patch kit’s kind of fighting out of its weight against a slug.”

“Try not to attract any more Hound Dogs between here and General Dowling’s headquarters, then,” Morrell said.

“I’ll do my best, sir,” the driver promised.

Morrell got into Norwalk, Ohio, just as the sun was setting. Norwalk was the last town of any size south of Sandusky and Lake Erie. It had probably been pretty before the fighting started. Some of the houses still standing looked as if they dated back to before the War of Secession. With their porticoes and column-supported porches, they had an air of classical elegance.

Classical elegance had a tough time against bombs, though. A lot of houses probably as fine as any of the survivors were nothing but charred rubble. Here and there, people went through the wreckage, trying to salvage what they could. The sickly-sweet smell of decay warned that other people were part of the wreckage.

Dowling had his headquarters in one of those Classic Revival houses. He was shouting some thoroughly unclassical phrases into a field telephone when Morrell came to see him: “What the hell do you mean you can’t hold, Colonel? You have to hold, hold to the last man! And if you
are
the last man, grab a goddamn rifle and do something useful with it.” He hung up and glared at Morrell. “What the devil do
you
want?”

“Barrels,” Morrell answered. “As many as you can get your hands on. The Confederates are smashing us to pieces because they can always mass armor at the
Schwerpunkt.
I don’t have enough to stop them when they concentrate.”

“I’m giving you everything that’s coming into Ohio,” Dowling said.

“If that’s true, we’re in worse trouble than I thought,” Morrell said. “My guess was that infantry commanders were siphoning some of them off before I got my hands on them. If we’re not making enough new ones . . .”

“Production isn’t what it ought to be,” Dowling said. “Confederate bombers don’t have any trouble reaching Pontiac, Michigan, from Ohio, and they’ve hit the factories hard a couple of times. They’re also plastering the railroad lines. And”—his jowly features twisted into a frown—“there are reports of sabotage on the lines, too: switches left open when they should be closed, bombs planted under the tracks, charming things like that.”

Morrell used several variations on the theme Dowling had set on the telephone. The Confederates were doing everything they could with saboteurs this time around. That looked to be paying off, too. Anything that added to the disarray of U.S. forces in Ohio paid off for the CSA.

“I’m sorry, Colonel,” Dowling said. “Believe me, I’m sorry. We’re doing everything we can. Right now, it isn’t enough.”

“I’ve got an idea.” Morrell snapped his fingers. He pointed at the fat general. “Once the barrels come off the line in Michigan, let ’em
drive
here. It’ll cost us fuel, but fuel we’ve got. I’d like to see one of those Confederate bastards try to sabotage all the roads between Pontiac and here, by Jesus.”

Dowling scribbled a note to himself. He grunted when he finished. “There. I’ve written it down. I’d forget my own head these days if I didn’t write down where I kept it. That’s not a bad idea, actually. It’ll tear up the roads—they aren’t made for that kind of traffic—but—”

“Yes. But,” Morrell said. “The damned Confederates can already plaster Sandusky. But what they plaster, we can repair. If they break through again, if they reach the lake, they cut us in half. I saw this coming. That doesn’t make me any happier now that it’s here.”

If the Confederates broke through to Lake Erie, the War Department would probably put General Dowling out to pasture. Someone, after all, had to take the blame for failure. Morrell realized the War Department might put
him
out to pasture, too. That was the chance he took. They were asking him to make bricks without straw. They’d deliberately withheld the straw from him, withheld it for years. And now they could blame him for not having enough of it. Some people back in Philadelphia would leap at the chance.

“Sorry I haven’t got better news for you, Colonel,” Dowling said.

“So am I,” Morrell told him. “I think I’ve wasted my trip here. The way things are, we can’t afford to waste anything.”

Before Dowling could answer, the field telephone jangled again. Looking apprehensive, the general picked it up. “Dowling speaking—what now?” He listened for a few seconds. His face turned purple. “
What?
You idiot, how did you let them get through? . . . What do you mean, they fooled you? . . . Oh, for Christ’s sake! Well, you’d better try and stop them.” He hung up, then glowered at Morrell. “Goddamn Confederates got a couple of our damaged barrels running again and put them at the head of their column. Our men didn’t challenge till too late, and now they’re making us sorry.”

“Damn!” Morrell said. At the same time, he filed away the ploy in the back of his mind. Whoever’d thought it up was one sneaky son of a bitch. Morrell would have loved to return the favor. But the Confederates were advancing. His side wasn’t. The enemy had more access to knocked-out U.S. barrels then he did to C.S. machines. He saluted. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, I’m going to get back to the front.” As he left, General Dowling’s field telephone rang once more.

Out in front of the house, Morrell’s driver was smoking a cigarette, his hands cupped around it to hide the coal in the darkness. “Get what you wanted, sir?” he asked.

“No.” Morrell shook his head. “The commanding general tells me it’s unavailable. So we’ll just have to do the best we can without it.” He climbed into the command car. “Take me back to our encampment. Try not to run over anything on the way.”

“Do my best, sir,” the driver answered. Only the narrowest of slits let light escape from his headlamps. He might as well have done without for all the good it did. But if he showed enough to light the road, he invited attack from the air. Blackout was a serious business on both sides of the border.

Off they went. They’d just left Norwalk when Morrell heard bombers droning far overhead. The airplanes were coming up from the south and heading northwest. Morrell swore under his breath. If that didn’t mean Pontiac was about to get another pounding . . .

The driver almost took him straight into a Confederate position. They’d gone past there without any trouble on the way to Norwalk. Whatever Abner Dowling was yelling about on the field telephone must have happened in these parts. Morrell fired a few bursts from the machine gun at the Confederate pickets, who were at least as surprised to see him as he was to encounter them. They shot back wildly. Tracers lit the night. Bouncing along little country roads, the driver made his getaway.

“You know where you’re going?” Morrell asked after a while.

“Sure as hell hope so, sir,” the driver answered, which could have inspired more confidence. He added, “If those bastards have come farther than I thought, though, getting back to where we were at is liable to take some doing.”

“If they’ve come that far, the barrels won’t be where they were, either,” Morrell pointed out. The driver thought that over, then nodded. He was going much too fast for the meager light the headlamps threw. Morrell said not a word. Had he been behind the wheel, he would have driven the same way.

The next time they got challenged, Morrell couldn’t tell what sort of accent the sentry had. The driver zoomed past before he could exchange recognition signals. A couple of shots followed. Neither hit. Then the driver rounded a corner he noticed barely in time.

“That was one of ours,” Morrell said mildly.

“How do you know?” The driver paused. His brain started to work. “Oh—single shots. A Springfield. Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He paused again. “Wish to God I had one of those automatic rifles Featherston’s fuckers carry. That’s a hell of a nice piece.”