Drive to the East (50 page)

“He’p me!” Scipio burst out. “You gots to he’p me. Git me outa here.”

“How? Where?” the restaurant manager demanded. “You reckon I got some magic carpet that’ll fly you to Mexico or the USA? If you do, give me some of whatever you’re drinking, on account of I want to get goofy, too.”

Scipio looked wildly around him. The walls of Dover’s office seemed to be closing in. Except it wasn’t the office alone. . . . “You know somethin’, Mistuh Dover?” he said. “This whole country—this whole goddamn country—ain’t nothing but a prison camp fo’ black folks.”

“Yeah, well, I can’t do nothin’ about that, neither,” Jerry Dover said. “All I can do is run this place here. And if you aren’t out there waiting tables in five minutes, I start having trouble doing that.”

“No, suh,” Scipio said, and Dover blinked; whites in the CSA seldom met outright refusal from Negroes. Scipio went on, “Reckon you do more’n dat. Reckon you never woulda sent me to Savannah, you didn’t do more’n dat.” He still didn’t know why the white man had sent him there. He didn’t care, either. That he’d gone gave him a weapon. “You got to he’p me. You got to he’p my chilluns.”

“I already have,” Dover said quietly. Scipio grimaced. That was true. Dover went on, “You want me to do more than I can do. You want me to do more than anybody can do. I can’t make you turn white. That’s what you really want out of me, isn’t it?”

He made Scipio grimace again. Even when times were relatively good for blacks in the CSA, skin lighteners and hair straighteners—a lot of them, especially the lighteners, only quack nostrums—sold briskly. The worse times got, the better they sold, too. These days, anyone who could possibly pass for white was doing it. Scipio’s own skin was far too dark even to let him think about it. Bathsheba was lighter, but not light enough. Neither were Antoinette and Cassius. They were all irredeemably marked as what they were.

“Damn you, Mistuh Dover,” Scipio said dully.

“I’m sorry. Hell, I
am
sorry. I didn’t want things to turn out like this,” Jerry Dover said. “I’m no goddamn Freedom Party goon. You know that. But I can’t stick my neck out too far, either, not unless I want it chopped.”

Scipio tried to hate him. Try as he would, he couldn’t. Dover wasn’t as big a man as he might have been. But plenty were smaller, too, and not all of them were white. Dover didn’t even use his advantage in color and class to order Scipio out of his office. He just waited. Scipio could tell no hope was to be had here. He left by himself.

Taking orders in the restaurant, bringing them back to the kitchen, and carrying food out again felt strangely surreal. The prosperous white men and their sleek companions treated him as they always would have: like a servant. They talked as if he weren’t there. Had he been a U.S. spy, he could have learned some interesting things about railroad repairs and industrial bottlenecks. He could have picked up some pointers on barrel deployment from an officer trying—the wrong way, in Scipio’s view—to impress a really beautiful brunette.

He kept waiting to hear word about the Terry, about yet another cleanout. He’d been doing that ever since the night when the Angel of Death, thanks to Jerry Dover, passed over his family and him. But the whites in the Huntsman’s Lodge never talked about things like that. Maybe they didn’t want to think about them while they were eating venison or duck in orange sauce and drinking fancy French wine. Or maybe they weren’t quite so oblivious to the colored staff as they let on.

It was probably some of each. Scipio wouldn’t have wanted to think about sending people off to camps while he was enjoying a fine meal, either. And, while whites in the CSA often pretended to ignore Negroes, they knew they couldn’t really afford to do it very often. They would pay, and pay high, if they did.

He got through the evening. He clocked out of the Huntsman’s Lodge and walked through Augusta’s dark, silent streets—the city remained under blackout even if no Yankee bombers had ever appeared overhead—toward the Terry. It was like going back to jail—with the barbed wire all around, just like that.

“Halt!” called one of the policemen and stalwarts at the gate. “Advance and be recognized. Slow and easy, or you never get another chance.”

They were jumpy tonight. Scipio didn’t like that; it was too likely a harbinger of trouble. “Ain’t nobody but me,” he said. What would the ruffians have done if he’d used his white man’s voice with them? Shot him, probably, for not being what they expected.

As things were, they laughed. “It’s the old spook in the boiled shirt,” one of them said. The gate creaked as they opened it. “Go on through.” They didn’t even ask for his passbook. Whatever the shape of the trouble they were flabbling about, it wasn’t his.

The Terry’s streets were even quieter than those of the white part of Augusta. Scipio imagined he heard ghosts moaning along them, but it was only the breeze . . . or was it? With more than half the Negroes scooped out of the place and carried off to a fate unknown but unlikely to be good, ghosts were bound to be wandering the streets where so many real people no longer went.

His apartment was dark. Bathsheba had got a couple of kerosene lamps after the electricity was cut off, but kerosene was hard to come by these days, too. They used it only when they had to. He navigated with the confidence of a man who knew where everything was whether he could see it or not. His wife had left his nightshirt out for him on a chair by the bed. He sighed with relief at escaping the tuxedo. Sleep dissolved night terrors.

Breakfast was bread and jam. Cassius and Antoinette were already up when Scipio rose. His son said, “Pa, we got to fight the ofays. We don’t fight ’em, reckon they go an’ kill us all.”

“We do fight de buckra, reckon dey kills all o’ we anyways,” Scipio answered.

“Leastways we gets to hit back,” Cassius said.

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;/He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
Having watched the brutal collapse of the Congaree Socialist Republic, Scipio knew black uprisings against whites in the CSA had no hope. He looked around. Was there hope anywhere else in the Terry? Not that he could see. All he said was, “Be careful, son. Be careful as you kin.”

Cassius’ face lit with a terrible joy, the joy of a man who had nothing left to lose.

M
idnight was the traditional time for the knock on the door. Had the police come then, Cincinnatus Driver would have greeted them with the bolt-action Tredegar he’d hidden under a floorboard in the front room. But they caught up with him in the middle of the afternoon and found him on the street, armed only with a cane.

There were four of them. Three were older than Cincinnatus. The fourth, who must have been a cadet or a pup or whatever they called it, couldn’t have been above sixteen. But he carried a .45, while the regular cops sported two submachine guns and a shotgun. They didn’t come into the colored part of Covington without being ready for trouble.

They started to walk on past Cincinnatus. Then one of the geezers—he wore a bushy mustache that had been red once but was almost all white now—paused and said, “You’re Cincinnatus Driver, ain’t you?”

Cincinnatus thought hard about denying it. But if he did, they’d ask him for his passbook, and that would prove he’d lied. The truth seemed a better bet. “Yes, suh,” he said, and waited to see what happened next.

“He’s on the list!” the cadet exclaimed, his voice breaking.

“He sure as hell is,” the cop with the mustache agreed. Cincinnatus didn’t like the sound of that. As usual in the CSA, what a Negro liked or didn’t like didn’t matter. The cop gestured with his submachine gun. “You’re gonna come along with us.”

“What for?” Cincinnatus yelped. “I ain’t done nothin’!” He didn’t think he had done anything they could prove. Hadn’t they grabbed him once and let him go?

The white-mustached cop chuckled. “Buddy, if I had a dime for every asshole I nabbed who hadn’t done anything, I could’ve quit workin’ a hell of a long time ago. Now you can come along quiet-like or you can come along some other way. But you’re gonna come. So what’ll it be?”

One cane against all that firepower made ridiculous odds. And the policemen were pros. The old-timers didn’t come close enough to let Cincinnatus lash out even if he’d been crazy enough to do it. When the kid started to, one of them pulled him back and explained how he’d almost been a damn fool. “I’ll come quiet,” Cincinnatus said.

“Smart fellow,” the mustachioed cop said. He turned to the cadet. “He’s smarter’n you are, Newt. How’s that make you feel?” By the look on Newt’s face, it made him want to cry.

A blue jay scolded Cincinnatus and the policemen for having the nerve to walk under the oak tree where it perched. A little kid playing in his front yard stared at them, eyes enormous in his dark face. So did a drunk draped over a front porch. Cincinnatus happened to know the drunk reported to Lucullus Wood. He feared that wouldn’t help him.

When the gate closed behind him and he passed out of the barbed-wire perimeter around the colored quarter, that small latch click had a dreadfully final sound. A police car waited just beyond the gate. The policeman with the mustache took Cincinnatus’ cane away when he got into the back seat, then got in beside him. “I’ll give it back when we get to the station,” he said in the tones of a man just doing his job. “Don’t want you trying anything silly, though.”

“Know how to get what you want, I reckon,” Cincinnatus said. The cop laughed.

When they got to the station, they didn’t tell Cincinnatus what he was charged with. He feared that was a bad sign. They stuck him in a cell by himself. None of the other cells close by had anybody in it, so he had no one to talk to. He feared that was a bad sign, too.

But they let him keep the cane. Maybe they knew how much trouble he had getting around without it. Police, though, weren’t in the habit of showing white prisoners consideration, let alone blacks. Sitting on the edge of the cot—the only place he could sit except for the concrete floor—he scratched his head.

A guard who must have been called back from retirement brought him supper on a tray: two cheese sandwiches on coarse, brownish bread and a big cup of water. Cincinnatus shoved the empty tray and cup out into the hall and went back to the cot.

The guard nodded when he came back to pick up the tray. “You know the drill, all right. Reckon you been in the joint before.”

“Not for anything I did,” Cincinnatus said.

“Likely tell. That’s what they all say.” Bending made the guard swear under his breath: “Goddamn rheumatism.”

Cincinnatus had never expected to sympathize with a screw. But he had aches and pains, too. Whatever his thoughts, the guard never knew them. The white man would have taken sympathy as weakness. Show weakness in a place like this and you were . . . even worse off than you were already, which wasn’t good.

He waited for them to come and start squeezing him for whatever they thought he knew. No matter what they did, he couldn’t tell them much about Luther Bliss. He had no idea where the U.S. secret policeman was staying, or even if he was still in Covington. If they started asking him about Lucullus, though . . . He could do Lucullus a lot of harm. He didn’t want to, but he knew the best will in the world wouldn’t always stand up against enough pain.

They left him in there. They fed him. The food was a long way from good, but he didn’t go hungry. They took out the honey bucket twice a day. It was just . . . jail. It didn’t feel as if they were softening him up for anything drastic. They could easily have done much worse.

Maybe they thought they were lulling him. He didn’t mind. He would take whatever he could get. Boredom wasn’t much, but it beat the hell out of brutality. If he yawned, if he paced—well, so what? He could have bled. He could have spat out teeth. He’d heard of things they could do with a motorcar battery and some wires that made his stomach turn over. Compared to any of that, boredom was a walk in the park on a sunny spring day.

It had to end. And when it did, it was even worse than he’d feared. Police didn’t come for him. Instead, the man at the head of three guards who carried submachine guns was a jackbooted Confederate major with a face like a clenched fist. “You’re Cincinnatus Driver?” he barked.

“Yes, suh,” Cincinnatus admitted apprehensively.

“Damnfool notion, letting niggers have last names,” the officer muttered. Cincinnatus kept his mouth shut. It wouldn’t do him any good—he was all too sure of that—but it wouldn’t harm him, either. Anything he said might have. The major glowered at him. The man’s mouth got even tighter. Cincinnatus hadn’t thought it could. One of the guards had a key. He opened the cell door. “Come on,” the major said. “Get out. Get moving.”

Cincinnatus obeyed—what choice did he have? “Where you takin’ me?” he asked. They couldn’t get too angry at him for wanting to know.

That didn’t mean they would tell him. “Shut up,” the major said. “You’re coming along with me.” He looked as if he would sooner have scraped Cincinnatus off the soles of those highly polished boots than had anything more personal to do with him. Cincinnatus wasn’t all that eager to have anything to do with the major, either. The white man, however, had a choice. As usual, Cincinnatus got none.

They marched him down the corridor to the front desk. The Confederate officer signed whatever paperwork he had to sign to take Cincinnatus farther than that. Then he and two of the guards took Cincinnatus out of the city jail altogether (the third one, the one with the key, stayed behind). They bundled him into a motorcar and took him up to the docks on the Ohio. Another auto pulled up beside his. To his surprise, his father got out of that one. Seneca Driver had his own contingent of guards. “What’s goin’ on, Son?” he asked.

“Beats me,” Cincinnatus answered.

“Shut up, both of you,” the major said. “Into the boat.” He pointed. It was a smallish motorboat with, at the moment, a Red Cross flag draped across what had to be a machine-gun mount up near the bow. Awkwardly, Cincinnatus obeyed. Then he helped his father into the boat, though the older man was probably sprier than he was.