Drive to the East (36 page)

“Thanks,” Jake said. “Uranium! Who would’ve thunk it?” He would have bet money Henderson V. FitzBelmont was a nut. He would have bet big—and he would have lost his shirt.

S
cipio felt like a ghost, rattling around in a nearly empty part of the Terry. His family wasn’t the only one in the area to have survived the cleanout, but there weren’t many. A few others had got advance warning, but only a few—the ones that had good connections with white folks one way or another.

Nobody knew where the people who’d been evacuated had gone—or rather, had been taken. They’d just . . . vanished. No cards, no letters, no photographs came back to Augusta. Maybe the deportees who could write didn’t have the chance. Maybe the C.S. authorities weren’t letting them. Or maybe they were simply dead.

For the handful who remained, life got harder. The authorities shut off electricity and gas in the depopulated areas. The water still ran. Maybe that was only an absentminded mistake, or maybe the people who ran Augusta kept it on so they could put out fires if they had to. Scipio had nobody he could ask.

He did ask Jerry Dover where the deportees went. The white man looked him in the eye and said, “I have no idea.”

“Could you find out, suh?” Scipio asked. “It do weigh on my mind.”

The manager of the Huntsman’s Lodge shook his head. “No, I’m not about to ask. Some answers are dangerous. Hell, some
questions
are dangerous. Do I have to draw you a picture?”

“No, suh,” Scipio answered unhappily. “Don’t reckon you do.”

“All right, then.” Dover hesitated before adding, “Sometimes finding out is worse than wondering. You know what I mean?”

Had the white man not told him to bring his family when he came to work that one night,
they
would have found out. Scipio didn’t think the answer would have made them happy. They might yet learn from the inside out, and so might he. He didn’t want to.

Dover lit a cigarette, then held the pack out to Scipio, who couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a white man do even such a simple favor for a black. “I thanks you kindly,” Scipio said. He had matches of his own. He didn’t need to lean close to Dover to get a light from his cigarette; his boss might have taken that as an undue familiarity.

“Everything’s gonna be . . .” Dover stopped and shook his head. “Shit, I don’t know whether everything’s gonna be all right. You got to do the best you can, that’s all.”

“Yeah.” Scipio smoked with short, savage puffs. “Don’t mean no offense, suh, but you got an easier time sayin’ dat than I does doin’ it.”

“Maybe. But maybe I don’t, too,” Dover said. Scipio felt a rush of scorn the likes of which he’d never known. What kind of trouble could the restaurant manager have that came within miles of a Negro’s? But then Dover went on, “Looks like they may pull me into the Army after all. More and more people are putting on the uniform these days.”

“Oh.” Scipio didn’t find anything to say to that. Horrible things happened to Negroes in the CSA, yes. But horrible things could happen to anybody in the Army, too. The one difference Scipio could see was that Dover’s family wasn’t in danger if he went into the service. Then a fresh worry surfaced: “You puts on de uniform, suh, who take over here?”

“Well, I don’t exactly know.” Dover didn’t sound comfortable with the answer.

“Whoever he be, he give a damn about colored folks?”

“Well, I don’t exactly know that, either.”

“Do Jesus!” Scipio stubbed out the butt in the pressed-glass ashtray on the manager’s desk. The deceased cigarette had plenty of company. “He one o’
dat
kind o’ buckra, we is all dead soon.”

“I do know that,” Dover said. “Other thing I know is, I can’t do thing one about it. If they call me up . . .” He shrugged. “I can talk to my own bosses till I’m blue in the face, but they don’t have to listento me.”

Scipio sometimes had trouble remembering that Jerry Dover
had
bosses. But he didn’t own the Huntsman’s Lodge; he just ran the place. He was good at what he did; if he hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have kept his job for as long as he had. As long as he stayed in Augusta, he had no place to move up from the Huntsman’s Lodge. He would have to go to Atlanta, or maybe even to New Orleans, to do better.

Now he said, “Go on. Go to work. Get your ass in gear.”

Not having anything else he could do, Scipio obeyed. Despite his worries, he got through the shift. When he went back to the Terry, he had no trouble passing through the barriers around the colored part of town. Cops and stalwarts knew who he was.

Getting back to work the next day, he found his boss in a terrible temper—not because he’d been called up but because two dishwashers weren’t there when they were supposed to be. That was a normal sort of restaurant crisis, and Dover handled it in the normal way: he hired the first two warm bodies off the street that he could.

Neither of them spoke much English. They were Mexicans—not Confederate citizens from Chihuahua or Sonora, but men out of the Empire of Mexico up in the CSA looking for work. Now they’d found some, and they went at it harder than anyone Scipio had seen in a long time. They wanted to keep it.

At first, thinking of the restaurant and nothing more, Scipio was pleased to see their eagerness. He didn’t blame Jerry Dover for telling the black men they’d replaced not to bother coming back to work. The look on the Negroes’ faces was something to see, but the color of those faces didn’t win the men much extra sympathy from Scipio. If you didn’t, if you couldn’t, show up, you were asking for whatever happened to you. Showing up on time all the damn time counted for more than just about anything else in the restaurant business.

That was at first. Then, coming up to the Huntsman’s Lodge a couple of days later, Scipio walked past a barbershop. All the barbers in there had been Negroes; he couldn’t imagine a white Confederate demeaning himself by cutting another man’s hair. But now the barber at the fourth chair, though he wore a white shirt and black bow tie like the other three—a uniform not far removed from a bartender’s—did not look like them. He had straight black hair, red-brown skin, and prominent cheekbones. He was, in short, as Mexican as the two new dishwashers.

Ice ran through Scipio, not when he noticed the new barber but when he realized what the fellow meant, which didn’t happen for another half a block. “Do Jesus!” he said, and stopped so abruptly, the white man behind him almost walked up his back.

“Watch what you’re doing, Uncle,” the ofay said irritably.

“I is powerful sorry, suh,” Scipio replied. The white man walked around him. Scipio stayed right where he was, trying to tell himself he was wrong and having no luck at all. He wasn’t sorry. He was afraid, and the longer he stood there the more frightened he got.

For twenty years and more, Jake Featherston had been screaming his head off about getting rid of the Negroes in the Confederate States. Scipio had had trouble taking the Freedom Party seriously, not because he didn’t think it hated blacks—oh, no, not because of that!—but because he didn’t see how the CSA could get along without them. Who would cut hair? Who would wash dishes? Who would do the field labor that still needed doing despite the swarm of new tractors and harvesters and combines that had poured out of Confederate factories?

Whites? Not likely! Being a white in the Confederacy meant being above such labor, and above the people who did it.

But whites felt themselves superior to Mexicans: not to the same degree as they did toward Negroes, but enough. And the work blacks did in the CSA couldn’t have looked too bad to people who had no work of their own. Which meant . . .

If workers from the Empire of Mexico came north to do the jobs Negroes had been doing in the CSA, the Freedom Party and Jake Featherston might be able to have their cake and eat it, too.

Scipio wasn’t at his best at work that day. He was far enough from his best to make Jerry Dover snap, “What the hell’s the matter with you, Xerxes?”

“Jus’ thinkin’ ’bout José an’ Manuel, Mistuh Dover,” he answered.

“They aren’t your worry. They’re mine. If they keep on like they’ve started, they’re no worry at all, and you can take that to the bank. You just keep your mind on what you’re supposed to be doing, that’s all. Everything will be fine if you do.”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said. But
yes, suh
wasn’t what he meant. José and Manuel—and that barber in the fourth chair—were the thin end of the wedge. If Jake Featherston banged the other end, what would happen? Nothing good.

The restaurant manager eyed him. “You wondering if we can find some damn greaser to do
your
job? Tell you one thing: the worse you do it, the better the chances are.”

That came unpleasantly close to what Scipio
was
thinking. Say what you would about Dover, he was nobody’s fool. “Ain’t jus’ me I is worried about,” Scipio muttered.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dover asked.

“More Mexicans they is, mo’ trouble fo’ niggers,” Scipio answered.

“Oh.” Dover thought about it for a little while, then shrugged. “I can’t do anything about that, you know. The only thing I care about is keeping this place going, and I’ll handle that till they stick a uniform on me and drag me out of here.”

He’d done everything a decent man could—more than most decent men would have. Scipio had to remind himself of that. “Yes, suh,” the black man said dully.

“Hang in there,” Dover said. “That’s all you can do right this minute. That’s all anybody can do right this minute.”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said again, even more dully than before. But then, in spite of himself, his fear and rage overflowed. He let them all out in one sarcastic word: “Freedom!”

Jerry Dover’s eyes got very wide. He looked around to see if anyone else could have heard the rallying cry that, here, was anything but. Evidently satisfied no one else had, he wagged a finger at Scipio, for all the world like a mother scolding a little boy who had just shouted a dirty word without even knowing what it meant. “You’ve got to watch your mouth there, Xerxes.”

“Yes, suh. I knows dat.” Scipio was genuinely contrite. He knew what kind of danger he’d put himself in.

Dover went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “You’ve got a nice family. I saw them. You want to leave them without their pa?”

“No, suh.” Again, Scipio meant it. Still clucking, the restaurant manager let it go and let him alone. He’d told the truth, all right. Here, though, how much did the truth matter? His family, like any black family, was all too likely to be torn to bits regardless of what he wanted.

C
hester Martin couldn’t have been more bored if the Confederates had shot him. As a matter of fact, they
had
shot him, or rather, ripped up his leg with a shell fragment. Everybody kept assuring him he would get better. He believed it. He did feel better than he had right after he was wounded. Thanks to sulfa powder and pills and shots, the wound didn’t get badly infected. A little redness, a little soreness on top of the normal pain from getting torn open, and that was it.

Everybody kept telling him he’d get back to duty pretty soon, too. He also believed that. People kept saying it as if it were good news. For the life of him, he couldn’t understand why.
Hey, Chester! The Confederates’ll get another chance to maim you or kill you before too long. Ain’t that great?
Maybe he was prejudiced, but it didn’t seem great to him.

Meanwhile, he lay on a cot with the iron frame painted Army green-gray. Once a day, he got exercise and physical therapy. The rest of the time, he just lay there. The Army gave him better rations in the hospital than it had while he was in the field. That struck him as fundamentally unfair, but then, so did a lot of other things about the Army.

He also got his pay here. Money in his pocket let him sit in on a poker game whenever he felt like it. The only trouble was, he didn’t feel like it very often. Sometimes he sat in even when he didn’t much feel like it. It was something to do, a way to make time go by.

Because he didn’t much care whether he won or lost, he had a terrific poker face. “Nobody can tell what you’re thinking,” one of the other guys in the game grumbled.

“Me? I gave up thinking for Lent,” Chester said. Everybody sitting around the table laughed. And he had been joking . . . up to a point.

He’d just come back from his exercise one day when a ward orderly stuck his head into the room and said, “You’ve got a visitor, Martin.”

“Yeah, now tell me another one,” Chester said. “I’m not bad enough off to need the padre for last rites or anything, and who else is gonna want to have anything to do with me?”

The orderly didn’t answer. He just ducked back out of sight. Rita walked into the room. “You idiot,” she told him, and burst into tears.

Chester gaped at his wife. “What are you doing here?” he squeaked.

She pulled a tiny linen handkerchief out of her purse and dabbed at her eyes. “When I found out you got wounded, I asked the War Department where you were,” she answered. “They told me, and so I got on a train—got on a bunch of trains, really—and here I am. Carl’s with Sue and Otis till I get back.”

“All right,” Chester said dazedly. His sister and brother-in-law would do fine with his son. “Jesus, sweetie, it’s good to see you.”

Rita gave him a look laced with vitriol. “If you like seeing me, why did you go put that stupid uniform on again? You could have stayed in L.A. and seen me every day.”

He sighed. “It seemed like a good idea when I did it.” How many follies got perpetrated because they seemed a good idea at the time? Was there any way to count them? Chester didn’t think so.

By the way Rita drummed her fingers against the painted iron of the bedstead, she didn’t, either. “They told me you weren’t hurt bad enough for them to discharge you from the Army,” she said. “That means the Confederates will have to shoot you at least one more time before I get you back, doesn’t it?”

“I . . . hadn’t thought of it like that,” Chester said, which was true.

“No? Maybe you should have.” Rita could be devastating when she felt like it. “How many pieces of you will be missing when you finally do come home?”