Walk in Hell (22 page)

Here came Lieutenant Kennan.
Goddamn pipsqueak,
Cincinnatus thought. If he ever got the chance, he knew he could snap Kennan in two like a stale cracker. But Kennan had the weight of the U.S. Army behind him. Now he fixed Cincinnatus with his customary glare. “You, boy!” he snapped.

“Yes, suh?” Cincinnatus said warily. Kennan sounded more filled with bile than usual, which was saying something.

“Don’t I remember you bragging once upon a time that you could drive a truck?”

“Don’t know about braggin’, suh, but I can drive a truck,” Cincinnatus said. “Been doin’it for a while before the war started.”
Before the war started
. Here it was barely sunup, and that phrase had already crossed his mind several times. It was going to be a dividing line for his life, for everybody’s life, for a long time to come.

Lieutenant Kennan looked as if every word he was about to say tasted bad. “You see that line of trucks over yonder? You get your ass over there, ask for Lieutenant Straubing, and tell him you’re the nigger I was talking about.”

“Yes, suh,” Cincinnatus said. Were the Yanks finally getting smart? If they were, they’d taken their own sweet time about it. Better late than never? Cincinnatus wouldn’t have bet on that, not till he saw for certain. “If I’m drivin’ a truck, suh, what do they pay me?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Kennan said, as if washing his hands of Cincinnatus. “You take it up with Lieutenant Straubing. You’re his baby now.” No, he didn’t want to have anything to do with Cincinnatus. He rounded on the rest of the men in the labor gang. “What are you coons doing, standing around gaping like a bunch of gorillas?
Get
your nigger asses moving!”

Cincinnatus had all he could do not to spring over to the trucks to which Kennan had directed him. Nobody, he told himself, could be a worse boss than the one he was escaping. But then, after a moment, he shook his head. Since the war began, he’d learned you couldn’t tell about things like that.

A sentry near the trucks wore one of the helmets that made U.S. soldiers look as if they had kettles on their heads. He carried a Springfield with a long bayonet, which he pointed at Cincinnatus. “State your business,” he snapped, with a clear undertone of
it had better be good
.

“Lieutenant Kennan back there, suh”—he pointed toward the wharf where his old gang, under Kennan’s loud and profane direction, was beginning to unload a barge—“he tol’ me to come see Lieutenant, uh, Straubing here.”

For a moment, he wondered if there’d be no Lieutenant Straubing, and if Kennan, for reasons of his own (maybe connected with Cincinnatus’ dealings with one underground or another, maybe only with Kennan’s loathing for blacks) had sent him here to get in trouble, or perhaps to get shot.

But the sentry, though he didn’t lower the rifle, did nod. “Stay right here,” he said, as if Cincinnatus were likely to be going anywhere with that bayonet aimed at his brisket. Then he raised his voice: “Hey, Lieutenant! Colored fellow here to see you!”

Colored fellow
. It was just a description. Cincinnatus, not used to being just described, heard it with some incredulity. Out from around the row of trucks came an ordinary-looking white man with silver first-lieutenant’s bars on the shoulder straps of his U.S. uniform. “Hello,” he said to Cincinnatus. “You the man Eddie was telling me about last night?” Seeing Cincinnatus’ frown, he added, “Lieutenant Kennan, I mean?”

“Oh. Yes, suh.” Cincinnatus had labored for Kennan for well over a year without learning, or wanting to learn, his Christian name.

“He says you can drive a truck,” Straubing said. He waited for Cincinnatus to agree, then went on, “How long have you been doing that?”

“Couple-three years before the war started,” Cincinnatus answered. “Haven’t had the chance to do it since.”

Lieutenant Straubing cocked his head to one side. “You don’t hardly look old enough to have been driving that long.” For a moment, Cincinnatus thought he was calling him a liar. Then he realized Straubing meant he had a young-looking face. “Come on,” the lieutenant said, and walked him past the sentry. He halted in front of one of the big, green-gray White trucks. “Think you can drive this baby?”

“Reckon I can,” Cincinnatus said. The White was a monster, a good deal larger than the delivery truck he’d driven for Tom Kennedy. But it was still a truck. A crank was still a crank, a gearshift still a gearshift.

“All right. Show me. The key’s in it.” Lieutenant Straubing scrambled up into the truck, sliding over to the passenger’s half of the front seat.

Cincinnatus had no trouble starting the truck. It was a bare-bones military model, without even a windscreen, which surprised him when he climbed in behind the wheel, but he didn’t let it worry him. He didn’t ask Straubing about pay, either, not right then. That he wasn’t hauling heavy crates was plenty to keep him happy for the moment.

“Pull out of the line and take me on a spin through town. Be back here in, oh, twenty minutes or so,” Lieutenant Straubing told him over the growl of the motor.

“Yes, suh,” Cincinnatus said. He put the truck in gear and got moving. Every once in a while, he sneaked a glance over at the soldier beside him. He wanted to scratch his head, but didn’t. Something in the way Straubing dealt with him was peculiar, but he had trouble putting his finger on it.

They didn’t get back to the parked trucks in twenty minutes. They had a blowout not five minutes after getting on the road. Cincinnatus fixed it. Straubing helped, not the least bit fussy about getting mud and grease on his hands or on his uniform. “All right, where were we?” he said when the two of them got back onto the rather hard seat.

Cincinnatus didn’t answer. He didn’t feel he had to answer, even though a white man had just spoken to him. When he realized that, he realized what was funny about how the U.S. soldier was treating him: as one man would treat another, regardless of whether he was white and Cincinnatus black. No wonder Cincinnatus had taken so long to figure that out: as best he could remember, he’d never run into anything like it before.

Some white men hated Negroes, plain and simple. He’d met a good many of those before having the imperfect delight of busting his hump for Lieutenant Kennan for so long. But that kind of out-and-out hatred wasn’t the most common response he’d had from whites over the years. More treated him as they would have treated a mule: they gave him orders when they needed him and made as if he were invisible when they didn’t.

He’d even had white men grateful to him: Tom Kennedy’s image rose up in his mind. After he’d hidden his former boss and kept U.S. soldiers from finding him, Kennedy had been nice as you please. But it had been a condescending sort of niceness, even then: a lord being kind to a serf who by some accident of fate had been in position to do him a good turn.

He didn’t feel any of that from Lieutenant Straubing. The way Straubing was acting, they might both have been white—or, for that matter, they might both have been black. He’d never run into that from Confederate white men. He hadn’t run into it from Yankees, either, not till now. He didn’t know how to react to it.

Straubing suddenly spoke up: “You can go on back now, Cincinnatus. I’m sold—you can drive a truck. Better than I can, wouldn’t be surprised.” As Cincinnatus turned back toward the riverfront, the lieutenant went on, “Dollar and a half a day suit you?”

“It’s what I’m makin’ now, most days,” Cincinnatus answered, “but yes, suh, it suits. Work’ll be easier.”

“I thought longshoreman’s rate was a dollar a day,” Straubing said with a small frown. Then he laughed—at himself. “And I’m a dimwit. I think half the reason Kennan sent you over to me is that you were ruining his accounts, getting the extra half-dollar so often. The other half, unless I’m wrong, is that you were getting the extra half-dollar so often, you were ruining his notions of what colored people are like. He probably hasn’t figured that half out for himself yet. Tell you what—I won’t tell him if you don’t.”

Now Cincinnatus did stare at him. He almost ran down a horse and buggy before he started paying attention to the road again. Never in all his born days had he heard—or expected to hear—one white man discussing another’s attitude toward Negroes, and discussing it in tones that made it obvious he thought Lieutenant Kennan was a damn fool.

“You’re changing jobs—you ought to do better for yourself,” Straubing said. “Hmm. Can you read and write?”

Cincinnatus looked at Lieutenant Straubing. One rule of survival for blacks in the Confederacy had always been,
Never let the white man find out how much you know
. Without that rule, the Red underground would never have had the chance to pull off its rebellion—not that the rebellion looked as if it would succeed, worse luck. He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Yes, suh.”

“Good,” the U.S. lieutenant said. “In that case, my accounts’ll stand paying you a buck six bits. How does that sound?”

Before the war—that phrase again—$1.75 a day had been white man’s wages, and not the worst white man’s wages. It was a good deal more than Tom Kennedy had been paying him. “You got yourself a driver, Lieutenant,” Cincinnatus said.

“Good,” Lieutenant Straubing answered. “Glad to hear it. I can use people who know what they’re doing.”

Cincinnatus expected him to go on,
I don’t care if they’re white or black
. He’d heard that before, every now and then. Most of the time, it was a thumping lie: that you needed to say it proved it was a lie. But Straubing didn’t say it. By everything Cincinnatus could see, he took it for granted.

After Cincinnatus had parked the truck, Straubing led him into a dockside building and spoke to a clerk there. The clerk took down Cincinnatus’ name and where he lived and who his family were. Then he swore him to loyalty to the United States. Cincinnatus was already sworn to loyalty to the Confederate underground and to the Negro Marxist underground. He took the oath without hesitation—after so many, what was one more?

The clerk slid papers across the desk at him. “Make your mark here to show all this information is correct and complete. Lieutenant, you’ll witness it for him.”

Cincinnatus took the pen. He looked at the clerk. He signed his name in a fine, round hand. The clerk stared at him. “Good thing you know your letters,” Lieutenant Straubing said. “It’ll make you a hell of a lot more useful.”

Tom Kennedy had known he could read and write, too. Kennedy had also used that to his advantage. But with him, there had always been something of the flavor of a man using a high-school horse. It wasn’t there with Straubing. Cincinnatus’ear for such things was keen. Had it been there, he would have heard it.

Before long, blacks from the wharves were loading crates into the back of Cincinnatus’ truck. They weren’t from his labor gang, but he knew several of them even so. They looked at him from the corners of their eyes. Nobody said anything, not with white men all around: most of the other truck drivers were white, for instance. Cincinnatus waited to see how that would go.

The trucks rumbled out of Covington before nine o’clock. The front was between Lexington and Richmond, Kentucky: about a four-hour trip. A little more than halfway there, they rolled past the Corinth Monument, which commemorated Braxton Bragg’s victory in late 1862 that had brought Kentucky into the Confederacy. Bragg’s statue was gone from its pedestal these days, and the pedestal itself plastered over with fresh, crisp three-eagles posters. The USA aimed to keep as much of Kentucky as it had seized.

Laborers, mostly black but some white, unloaded the trucks. Some of what those had brought would go to the front in small wagons, some on muleback or on man’s back. Cincinnatus ate his dinner out of the dinner pail, then drove the truck back to Covington. Everyone took him for granted. He still had trouble knowing what to make of that.

He got back into Covington with his headlamps on. Straubing paid off the drivers himself. Some got $1.50, some $1.75, some two dollars even. One of the two-dollar men was black. Nobody raised a fuss.

Money jingling in his pocket, Cincinnatus headed for home with more news for Elizabeth than he could shake a stick at. He went past Conroy’s general store, as he always did when coming home from the riverfront. Conroy had a paper stuck in the bottom left-hand corner of his window. That meant he and Tom Kennedy wanted to see Cincinnatus.

“Well, I’ll be damned if I want to see them,” Cincinnatus muttered. “Paper? What paper? I didn’t see no paper.” He walked right past the general store.

Three eagles glared out at Flora Hamburger from every other wall as she walked to the Socialist Party offices. She glared right back at them. She was sick to death of wartime propaganda. What worried her most was that the Democrats were getting better at what she’d thought of as a Socialist specialty.

Other posters (some with text in Yiddish as well as English; the government didn’t miss a trick) exhorted people to buy the latest series of Victory Bonds, to use less coal than their legal ration (which was, most of the time, not big enough as it was), to take the train as little as they could (which also saved coal), to turn back glass bottles and tin cans, to give waste grease to the War Department through their local butcher shop, to…she lost track of everything. Anyone who tried to do all the things the posters urged him to do would go mad in short order.