Drive to the East (26 page)

But not deep enough, not here. Dover set the live cigarette in the ashtray, steepled his fingertips on the desk, and looked at Scipio over them. “It would be a good idea if you got ’em here,” was all he said. His own way of speaking didn’t come close to matching Scipio’s. By his nervous chuckle, he knew it, too.

Scipio wanted to ask,
A good idea how? Why?
He wanted to, but he didn’t. He’d pushed the white man as far as Dover was willing to go. Returning to the Congaree dialect that was his natural speech, Scipio said, “Reckon I do it, den.”

“Good,” Dover said. “I knew you were a smart fellow. If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t have wasted my time banging my gums at you in the first place. Now get your ass out there and go to work.”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said, relieved to be back on familiar ground.

When his shift ended, policemen let him through the barbed-wire perimeter surrounding the Terry. They knew him. He had a dispensation to be out after curfew. He made it back to his block of flats without getting knocked over the head.

Then he had his next hurdle: persuading Bathsheba not to do what she usually did. “Why for he want us there?” she demanded.

“Dunno,” Scipio answered. “But he want it bad enough to use my fo’-true name.”

“
Did
he?” That made Bathsheba sit up and take notice. Worry in her voice, she asked, “You reckon he do somethin’ nasty if we don’t come?”

“Dunno,” Scipio said again, more unhappily than ever. “But I reckons y’all better do it.”

Bathsheba sighed heavily. “Miz Kent, she ain’t gonna be real happy with me. Miz Bagwell neither. But we come.”

When his children got up the next morning, they were even more bemused than his wife was. “Somethin’ bad liable to happen, Pa,” Cassius said. His hands bunched into fists. “Can we fight back?” He was more like the hunter and guerrilla for whom he’d been named than he had any business being.

“Odds is bad,” was all Scipio said. That gave his son very little to react against.

“Don’t know that I ever wants to go into the ofay part of Augusta no more,” Antoinette said. “They hates us there.”

“They hates we here, too,” Scipio answered. “You should oughta come, though. I don’t reckon Mistuh Dover playin’ games.” That wasn’t quite true. But he didn’t know what kind of game the manager was playing, and he couldn’t afford not to play along.

His wife and children dressed in their Sunday best for the unusual excursion. Since he was in his own formalwear, the family looked as if they were bound for a fancy wedding or a banquet. When they got to the barbed-wire perimeter, the cops and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards stared at them. There seemed to be more whites manning the perimeter than usual.
Or is it just my nerves?
Scipio wondered—nervously.

The policeman who checked passbooks had sent Scipio through any number of times. He raised an eyebrow to see the black man’s family accompanying him, but didn’t say anything about it. He was, within the limits of his job and his race, a decent fellow. A stalwart came up to talk to him. Scipio wondered if they would yell at him to halt and send Bathsheba and the children back. They didn’t, though.

When Scipio got to the Huntsman’s Lodge, he found that Aurelius also had his wife—a plump, dignified, gray-haired woman named Delilah—with him.
Something
was going on. He still didn’t know what, and wished he did.

They all got suppers of the sorts the cooks turned out for the waiters. Two or three other waiters and cooks—all of them men who’d worked at the Lodge for a while, and all of them also men who lived not far from Scipio and his family—also had family members with them.

Jerry Dover hovered over the Huntsman’s Lodge’s uncommon customers. He was fox-quick, fox-clever, and also, Scipio judged, fox-wary. “Thank y’all for being here today,” he said. “I’ve worked with your husbands and fathers for years, and I’ve never met y’all before. Hope I do again before too long.”

He was saying something between the lines. But not even Scipio, who knew he was doing it, could make out the words behind the words. He wanted to scratch his head. Instead, he had to go out and work his shift as if everything were normal.

It only seemed to last forever. In fact, it went as smoothly as most of the shifts he put in. He pocketed a few nice tips and got stiffed once, by a lieutenant-colonel with his left arm in a sling. Scipio hoped the next Yankee who shot him took better aim.

When he left the dining room after the Lodge closed, he found his family on the ragged edge of mutiny. “If I was any more bored, I’d be dead,” Cassius snarled.

“Thanks for bringin’ ’em by, Xerxes,” Jerry Dover said—now he used the alias that seemed to fit Scipio better than his real name these days. “Glad you could do it.”

“Uh-huh,” Scipio said, still puzzled about what was going on. Something, yes—but what? He nodded to Bathsheba, who was yawning. “Let’s go.”

The streets of the white part of Augusta were quiet and peaceful. When they got back to the fence around the Terry, another cop who knew Scipio let them through without any trouble about being out after curfew. He laughed as he opened a barbed-wire gate much like the one that would keep livestock in a pen. “You ain’t hardly gonna know the place,” he said. The rest of the goons at the gate thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

Only little by little did Scipio and his family discover what they meant. At first, he just thought things seemed too quiet. Curfew or no curfew, there was usually a lot of furtive life on the dark streets of the Terry. A lot of it was dangerous life, but it was life. Tonight, no.

Tonight . . . Cassius figured it out first, from the number of doors standing open that shouldn’t have. “Do Jesus!” he exclaimed, his voice echoing in the empty street. “They done had another cleanout!”

As soon as he pointed it out, it was obvious he was right. The northern part of the Terry had been scooped up and sent off to camps—or somewhere—months before. As far as Scipio knew, nobody’d come back, either. Now the heart had been ripped out of the colored part of Augusta.
And all in one day,
Scipio thought dazedly.
All in half a day, in fact.
How long had they been planning this, to bring it off with such practiced efficiency? And where had they got the practice?

Bathsheba squeezed his hand, hard. “If it wasn’t fo’ Jerry Dover, they’d’ve got us, too,” she whispered.

And that was as true as what Cassius had said. Somehow, Dover had known ahead of time. He’d done what he could—or what he’d wanted to do. Now Scipio owed him not just one life but four. He thanked the God he mostly didn’t believe in for the debt. And he wondered how Jerry Dover would want it repaid.

For there would be a price. There was always a price. Scipio knew that in his bones, in his belly, in his balls. For a Negro in the CSA, there was
always
a price.

A
fter his mother died, Cincinnatus Driver had watched his father like a hawk. He knew the stories about old, long-married couples where, when one spouse died, the other followed soon after, as if finding life alone not worth living.

But Seneca Driver seemed as well as ever. If anything, he seemed better than he had for some time. His shoulders came up; his back straightened. “I is free of a burden,” he said once. “That weren’t your mama we laid in the ground. Your mama was gone a long time ago. What we buried, that there was just the husk.”

Cincinnatus nodded. “I saw that, Pa. I saw that real plain and clear. Wasn’t sure you could.”

“Oh, I seen it,” his father said. “Couldn’t do nothin’ about it, but I seen it.”

If that last sentence wasn’t a summary of Negroes’ troubles in the Confederate States, Cincinnatus had never heard one. And the government and the Freedom Party had always moved more carefully in Kentucky than rumor said they did farther south. Kentucky had spent a generation in the USA. Negroes here knew what it meant to be citizens, not just downtrodden residents. Even some whites here were . . . less hostile than they might have been.

That meant the barbed-wire perimeter that went up around Covington’s colored district came as a special shock. Cincinnatus had heard that such things had happened elsewhere. He didn’t think they could here. Finding he was wrong rocked him. Finding he was wrong also trapped him. The perimeter included the bank of the Licking River, and included motorboats with machine guns on the river to make sure nobody tried cutting the wire there.

The first place Cincinnatus went when he found out what was going on was, inevitably, Lucullus Wood’s barbecue shack. He found the plump proprietor in a worse state of shock than he was. “They told me they wasn’t gonna do this,” Lucullus said. “They
told
me. They fuckin’ lied.” He sounded as dazed as a man staggering out of a train wreck.

Seeing Lucullus struck all in a heap discomfited Cincinnatus worse than the barbed wire itself. “What you gonna do about it?” he demanded. “What
can
you do about it?”

“Do Jesus! I dunno,” Lucullus answered. “They done ruined me when they done this.” Odds were he had that right. Almost as many whites as blacks had come to his place. No more. That perimeter would keep people out as well as keeping them in.

“You can still get word through.” That was a statement, not a question. Cincinnatus refused to believe anything different.

“What if I kin?” Lucullus didn’t deny it. He just spread his hands, pale palms up. “Ain’t gonna do me a hell of a lot of good. Who’s gonna pay any mind to a nigger all shut up like he was in jail? They gonna haul us off to them camps nobody never comes out of.”

That had a chilling feel of probability to Cincinnatus. Even so, he gave Lucullus the best answer he could: “What about Luther Bliss?” He hated the man, hated and feared him, but Bliss’ remained a name to conjure with. He hoped hearing it would at least snap Lucullus out of his funk and make him start thinking straight again.

And it worked. Lucullus very visibly gathered himself. “Mebbe,” he said. “But only mebbe, dammit. Freedom Party fellas is hunting Bliss right now like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Hell I wouldn’t,” Cincinnatus said. “If they know he’s around, they’ll want him dead. He’s too dangerous for them to leave him breathin’. Ain’t that all the more reason for you to git back in touch with him?”

“Mebbe,” Lucullus said again. “What kin he do, though? They gots
po
lice an’ them damn stalwarts all around. Anytime they wants to come in an’ start gettin’ rid of us . . .”

“We got guns.
You
got guns. You ain’t gonna tell me you ain’t got guns, ’cause I know you lie if you do,” Cincinnatus said. “They come in like that, they be sorry.”

“Oh, yeah.” Lucullus’ jowls wobbled as he nodded. “They be sorry. But we be sorrier. Any kind o’ fight like that, we loses. Guns we got is enough to make them fuckers think twice. Ain’t enough to stop ’em. Cain’t be, and you got to know that, too. They uses barrels, we ain’t got nothin’ ’cept Featherston Fizzes against ’em. They sends in Asskickers to bomb us flat, we ain’t even got that. We kin hurt ’em. They kin fuckin’
kill
us, an’ I reckon they is lookin’ fo’ the excuse to do it.”

Cincinnatus grunted. Lucullus had to be right. Against the massed power of the CSA, the local Negroes would lose. And the Confederate authorities might well be looking for an excuse to move in and wipe them out. Which meant . . . “You got to git hold o’ Bliss,” Cincinnatus said again.

“What good it do me?” Lucullus asked sourly. “I done told you—”

“Yeah, you told me. But so what?” Cincinnatus said, and Lucullus stared at him. The barbecue cook usually dominated between them. Not now. Cincinnatus went on, “We’re all shut up in here. Bad things start happenin’ out past the wire, how could we have much to do with ’em? But you kin get hold of Luther Bliss, and that son of a bitch got other ofays who’ll do what he tell ’em to.”

Lucullus kept right on staring, but now in a new way. “Mebbe,” he said once more. This time, he didn’t seem to mean,
You’re crazy.
Even so, he warned, “Luther Bliss don’t care nothin’ about niggers just ’cause they’s niggers.”

“Shit, I know that. Luther Bliss hates everybody under the sun,” Cincinnatus said, startling a laugh out of Lucullus. “But the people Luther Bliss hates most are Freedom Party men and the Confederates who run things. We hate them people, too, so we’s handy for him.”

“Well, yeah, but the people he hates next most is Reds,” Lucullus said. “You got to remember, that don’t help me none.”

“You got any better ideas?” Cincinnatus demanded, and then, “You got any ideas at all?”

Lucullus glared at him. If anything, that relieved Cincinnatus, who didn’t like seeing the younger man paralyzed. Cincinnatus would have done almost anything to get Lucullus’ wits working again; enraging him seemed a small price to pay. Lucullus said, “I kin git hold o’ him. He kin do dat shit, no doubt about it. But how much good it gonna do
us
?”

“What do you mean?” Cincinnatus asked.

“They got the wire around us. We is in here. Whatever they wants to do with us—whatever they wants to do
to
us—they got us where they wants us. How we get out? How we get away?”

Cincinnatus laughed at him. “They gonna let us out. They gonna let a lot of us out, anyways.” Lucullus’ jaw dropped. Cincinnatus drove the point home: “Who’s gonna do their nigger work for ’em if they don’t? Long as they need that, we ain’t cooped up in here all the time.”

“You hope we ain’t,” Lucullus said, but a little spirit came back into his voice.

“Talk to Luther Bliss,” Cincinnatus repeated. “Hell, they let me out for anything,
I’ll
talk to him.”

“Like he listen to you,” Lucullus said scornfully. “You ain’t got no guns. You ain’t got no people who kin do stuff. I tells you somethin’—you git outa the barbed wire, you try an’ get your black ass back to the USA. Ain’t far—jus’ over de river.”

“Might as well be over the moon right now,” Cincinnatus said with a bitter laugh. “Confederate soldiers holdin’ that part of Ohio. By what I hear, they’re worse on colored folks than the Freedom Party boys are here. They reckon they’re United States colored folks, an’ so they got to be the enemy.” Cincinnatus thought that was a pretty good bet, too. He added, “ ’Sides, I ain’t leavin’ without my pa.”