Return Engagement (66 page)

Had he ever heard a white man say something like that before? Maybe, but not for a long time. Since the Freedom Party took over? He wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t.

And the cop didn’t lie. Nothing happened to him when he went by however many white men stood out there in the rain. No colored night runners tried to redistribute the wealth, either. The Negroes had enough sense to stay in where it was dry. Scipio had already unlocked the front door to his apartment building before he started wondering why the police didn’t. He shrugged. They’d let him alone. If they got rid of some of the predators who preyed more on their own kind than on whites, he wouldn’t shed many tears.

He slipped into bed without waking Bathsheba. He was awakened an hour or so later himself, though, by harsh barks that effortlessly pierced the patter of the rain on the windows. Bathsheba woke, too. “Do Jesus!” she said. “What’s that?”

“Guns,” Scipio answered, and told her of the policemen in the Terry. He finished, “Reckon some o’ dem terrorists an’ transients don’t fancy gettin’ cleaned out.”

“How fussy the
po
lice gonna be, figurin’ out who is one o’ them bad folks and who ain’t?” his wife asked.

Scipio hadn’t thought about that. How often
were
cops fussy when they dealt with blacks? Not very. But he said, “Dey didn’t run me in.”

Bathsheba laughed. “Oh, you is real dangerous, you is.”

That infuriated Scipio. He brought up the educated white man’s voice he hardly ever used: “Once upon a time, more than a few people believed I was.”

“Oh.” Bathsheba laughed again, this time nervously. “I done forgot about that.”

He returned to the dialect of the Congaree to say, “Somewhere in South Carolina is folks who don’t never forget.” Anne Colleton hadn’t forgotten. She might have kept after him if the Yankees’ bombers hadn’t put an end to her career. She couldn’t be the only one in that part of the state who refused to give up the hunt, either.

More gunfire split the night. In spite of it, Scipio yawned. By now, he knew more about gunfire than he’d ever wanted to learn. This wasn’t getting any closer. As long as it stayed away, he wouldn’t get too excited about it. Gunfire or no gunfire, he fell asleep.

When he woke, watery sunshine was trying to get through the blackout curtains. Bathsheba had gone off to clean white men’s houses. Scipio put on dungarees and an undershirt and went out to fix breakfast for himself.

His son was in there washing everyone else’s breakfast dishes. Cassius liked that no better than any other thirteen-year-old boy would have, but he did it when his turn came up. He looked back over his shoulder at Scipio. “Noisy in the nighttime,” he said.

“Sure enough was,” Scipio agreed.

“You know what was goin’on?” By the eager bounce in Cassius’ voice, he wished he’d been a part of it, whatever it was. Scipio had named him for the Red rebel who’d led the Congaree Socialist Republic to its brief rise and bloody fall. This Cassius didn’t know to whom he owed the name, but he seemed to want to live up to it.

He also seemed surprised when Scipio nodded and said, “Cops goin’after riffraff in de Terry. You don’ want to mess wid no
po
lice. Buckra gots mo’ guns’n we. You always gots to, ‘member dat. You ain’t right if you is shot.” Maybe, just maybe, he could make his son believe it. So many didn’t or wouldn’t, though, and had to find out for themselves. Whites never tired of teaching the lesson, either.

“What do the ofays call riffraff?” Cassius asked.

“Dunno,” Scipio admitted. “Dey reckon I weren’t las’ night, though. Dey lets me go on pas’ ’em to git here. I finds out when I goes to work.”

Cassius’ expression said being passed like that was cause for shame, not pride. But he didn’t push it, which proved he had some sense, anyhow. Then, as if to show he didn’t have much, he said, “I could go out now an’ take a look.”

“You could stay here, too, and you gwine stay here,” Scipio said. “Mebbe still trouble out dere. We already gots enough troubles. Don’t need to go lookin’ for mo’.”

“Nothin’ happen to me.” Cassius was sure as could be.

“I say you stay here. You hear me?” Scipio sounded as firm and fatherly as he could. Cassius was getting to the age where they butted heads. Scipio knew that sort of thing happened. But he didn’t want his son disobeying him here. The way things were in the CSA these days, this was a matter of life and death. Scipio hated clichés. He hated them all the more when they were literally true.

Some of his urgency must have got through to his son, for Cassius nodded. “I hear you, Pa.”

“Good. Dat’s good. You is a good boy.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Scipio hoped they wouldn’t make things worse. They might have with him when he was Cassius’ age.

When it was time to head for the Huntsman’s Lodge, Scipio put on his boiled shirt and black bow tie, his tuxedo jacket and satin-striped trousers. Not trusting the weather, he carried his raincoat and umbrella. But it was clear and sunny outside. The rain had washed the mugginess out of the air. It was the kind of crisp, cool fall day Augusta didn’t get very often. Scipio savored the breeze against his cheek. The only thing he missed was the sharp smell of burning leaves, but after last night’s downpour a man would have to drench them in gasoline to get them to burn.

As he usually did, he skirted the bus stop where the auto bombs had gone off. He hadn’t gone much farther toward the white part of town when he stopped in astonishment. By the way things looked, the Augusta police hadn’t just been after transients and terrorists in their raid the night before. Doors hung open in house after house, tenement after tenement. Not a shop near there was doing business. A stray dog whined and ran up to Scipio, looking for reassurance on the empty, quiet street.

Scipio had none, not for the dog, not for himself. The breeze swung one of those open doors on squeaky hinges. The small, shrill noise made the black man start violently. “Do Jesus!” he said, and wished he had even a fraction of his wife’s faith. “The buckra done clean out dis whole part o’ de Terry.”

He hurried up into white Augusta as if fleeing ghosts. And so he might have been, for there were no living souls to flee in that part of the colored district. No one in the white part of town seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. The newsboys hawking the
Augusta Constitutionalist
shouted about the fighting in Virginia, not what had happened here. Scipio bought a copy anyhow. The story had to go in the paper somewhere . . . didn’t it?

He found what he was looking for buried near the bottom of page four. It didn’t say much: just that the Augusta police had cleaned out some criminals in the Terry.
In the course of the investigation, more than a few Negroes were discovered not to possess papers authorizing them to dwell in our fair city,
the reporter wrote.
They have been removed for resettlement. Some minor resistance was encountered, but soon overcome.

Anyone who’d listened to the gunplay the night before would have known the resistance was more than minor. And anyone who’d walked through that part of the Terry could see the cops had cleared out everybody, not just people without the right stamps in their passbooks. But how many white men were likely to do that? And how many were likely to give a damn if they did?

When Scipio got to the Huntsman’s Lodge, he wasn’t surprised to find Jerry Dover in a state. “We’re missing a waiter, a cook, and a busboy!” Dover exclaimed. “No word, no nothing. They just aren’t here. Three at once! That’s crazy.”

“Reckon this here gots somethin’ to do wid it.” Scipio showed him the
Constitutionalist.

“Well, shit!” Dover said. “How the hell am I supposed to run a restaurant? Got to get on the phone, get those boys back where they belong.” Off he went, to use what pull he and the Huntsman’s Lodge had. Because he was doing that, Scipio hardly even minded the
boys.
But Dover returned with a fearsome scowl on his face. Pull or no pull, he’d plainly had no luck.

Aurelius nodded to Scipio when they bumped into each other in the kitchen. “I was afraid I wasn’t gonna see you no more, Xerxes,” the other waiter said.

“I been afeared o’ the same thing ’bout you,” Scipio answered. They clasped hands.
Still here,
Scipio thought.
We’re both still here. But for how much longer, if they start cleaning out whole chunks of the Terry at a time?

“
T
he Star-Spangled Banner” blared from the wireless set in Chester Martin’s living room. The announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States!”

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” Al Smith said. It was nine o’clock back East, but only six here in Los Angeles—evening in the autumn, yes, but just barely, especially since summer time stayed in force all year around now that the war was on. The President continued, “Some of the things I have to tell you are less pleasant than I wish they were, but this has never been a country that lived in fear of bad news. Unlike our enemies, we don’t need to lie every time we open our mouths to keep our people in the fight.”

At the kitchen table, Carl wrestled with arithmetic homework. To him, that was more important than anything the President had to say. Who was to say he didn’t have the right attitude, either? Chester lit a cigarette and held out the pack to Rita. She shook her head. He set the pack on the little table by the sofa.

“Things in Virginia haven’t gone as well as we wish they would have,” Smith said. “If they had, we’d be in Richmond by now. But we have moved down from the Rappahannock to the Rapidan, and we haven’t given up. We still hold the initiative.”

Chester blew out a plume of smoke. He’d heard officers talk that way on the Roanoke front in the last war. Add
things haven’t gone as well as we wish
and
we haven’t given up
together, and what did you get? The answer was easier to figure out than Carl’s arithmetic problems. What you got was simple—a hell of a lot of dead soldiers.

“I’m not claiming any great victories down there,” the President continued. “But we’ve hurt the Confederate States, and we aim to go right on hurting them. I said when we declared war that they might have started this fight, but we were going to finish it. I said it, and I meant it, and I still mean it.” The jaunty New York rasp in his voice made him sound all the more determined.

He paused and coughed. “There’s something else you need to know about, something I wish I didn’t have to tell you. It says a lot about the people we’re at war with, and what it says isn’t very pretty. You may have heard this before, but it’s the truth, and not the garbage Jake Featherston puts out with that label on it. Those Freedom Party maniacs and butchers really are massacring Negroes. There’s no doubt about it, and they’re doing more of it, and worse, than even the Confederates have ever before.

“We know this is true because we have photographs that prove it. Some were taken by Negroes who escaped or who came upon piles of bodies before they were buried. Others were taken by Confederate murderers who were proud of what they did. I know that seems incredible, but it’s the truth, too.”

Chester looked over at Rita. She was also looking his way. Almost at the same time, they both shrugged. Not many Negroes lived in Los Angeles. Come to that, not many Negroes lived anywhere in the USA. Dealing with the ones who’d fled Kentucky when it returned to the CSA had stirred enough hard feelings. He might have been listening to a report about a flood in China. It was too bad, certainly, but it didn’t affect him much.

The President tried hard to persuade him that it did: “We can’t let people who do these terrible things beat us. Who knows where they would stop? Who knows if they would stop anywhere? We must show them that no one in the world will tolerate even for a moment the crimes against humanity they are committing. We have to stop them. We have to, and with your help and God’s we will. Thank you, and good night.”

“That was the President of the United States, Al Smith,” the announcer said, as if anyone could have imagined it was, say, the mayor of St. Paul. “We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.” Music came out of the speaker.

“He’s done better,” Rita said.

“He sure has,” Chester agreed. “It was like he was saying things weren’t going so well in Virginia, so he’d give us something else to get all hot and bothered about. Except I don’t think very many people will start flabbling about this.”

“Why should we?” his wife said. “It’s going on in another country—and when was the last time you saw a Negro around here, anyway?”

“I don’t know. I was trying to think of that myself while he was talking,” Chester said. “I couldn’t—not right away, anyhow.”

“I think there was a colored woman at the grocery store a few weeks ago,” Rita said. “But she wasn’t buying much. She looked like she was just passing through, not like she really lived around here.”

“Once during the last war, I passed a Negro through our lines,” Chester said. “I expect he was one of the blacks who rose up against the Confederates a little later on. Served ’em right, the way they treated Negroes even back then.”

His wife nodded. “I suppose so. But when the colored people down there keep on fighting against the government, why would anybody think the government would want to give ’em a kiss?”

“Beats me,” Chester said. “The Confederates treat their Negroes like dirt, so the Negroes raise Cain, and that makes the Confederates treat ’em worse. Of course, the Freedom Party would treat ’em bad no matter how they behave—I know that. It’s a mess, yeah. But is it really our mess? I don’t think so.”

Rita nodded again. “That’s a better way to put it. It’s terrible, like you say, but it isn’t really anybody’s fault. It’s . . . one of those things that happen.”

Carl looked up from his homework. “Can I have a snack?” The President might have been talking about the cost of cauliflower for all the attention he’d paid to the speech.

“How much have you done?” Rita asked—Carl had been known not to pay too much attention to the homework, too.