Walk in Hell (41 page)

“I never left home till they conscripted me,” Jeff went on after a while. “Way things look here, I ain’t never going to leave again once the war’s over, neither.” He sighed. “Birmingham, now, Birmingham is green all the time. Even in winter, most of the grass stays green. Does it ever even get green here?”

“I don’t know why you complain so much,
amigo,
” Hip Rodriguez said from the seat behind him. “This land here, this is better than what I was farming.”

“Better?” Pinkard awkwardly turned around to stare at the little Sonoran. “How in blazes could this be better than anything?”

“It is very easy.” As Rodriguez made his points, he ticked them off on his fingers. “It is good flat land, not mountains like where I come from. It has not so much
calor
—heat. It gets more water—you can see.”

“Maybe you can see,” Pinkard said stubbornly. “Looks dry as the desert the Israelites walked through to me.”

Rodriguez laughed in his face. “You do not know what a desert is, if you call this a desert.” Only two things kept Jeff from starting a fight then and there. One was that he was in the Army, so he’d get in trouble. The other was that he really didn’t know what a desert was like. Next to Alabama land, what they had here was pretty appalling. He tried to picture in his mind the kind of land that would make west Texas look good.

Mountains he could imagine. But land that was hotter and drier than this? If this wasn’t hell, that would have to be.

The train chugged to a stop outside a little town called Post. To Jeff Pinkard’s jaundiced eye, the town, as they rolled through it, seemed as sunbaked and defeated as the country surrounding it. The wooden buildings hadn’t been painted or whitewashed for years, and most of the timber was more nearly gray than brown or yellow. Even the bricks seemed faded from their proper, bright oranges.

When Pinkard, grunting and sweating under the weight of his kit, came out of the car in which he’d been ensconced so long and so uncomfortably, he heard artillery off in the distance. When he’d been fighting the Negroes of the Black Belt Socialist Republic, that had been an encouraging sound: his side had the guns, and the enemy didn’t. It wasn’t going to be like that here.

Captain Connolly addressed the formed-up company: “We are going to stop the damnyankees, men. Not only are we going to stop them, we are going to throw them back into New Mexico where they belong.” That got a few yips and cheers from the men, but not many. It was too hot. They were too tired.

Connolly went on, “This isn’t going to be the kind of fighting they have on the other side of the Mississippi. Too many miles for that, and not enough men filling them. If we dig trenches, they go around, and the same the other way. Not a lot of railroads around here, either. Nobody can keep big armies supplied away from the tracks. So we’re going to drive the Yankees back toward Lubbock, and we are going to have detachments out to make sure they don’t get around us while we’re doing it. That last is what the particular task of this company will be. Any questions?”

Nobody said anything. The captain didn’t even give the order to march. He just started marching, and the men followed: not only the company, but a couple of regiments’ worth. Pinkard and his companions were somewhere in the middle of the column. The dust was of a slightly redder shade than the butternut of his uniform. It got in his nose. It got in his eyes. It got in his mouth, so his teeth crunched whenever they came together.

He wasn’t sure whether this had been a road before the war started. It was a road now, a road defined by marching men and by the ruts of wagons and those of motor trucks. It led to a bridge over a river that didn’t look wide or deep enough to need bridging.

“If that poor thing was in Alabama,” he said to Stinky Salley, “they’d ship it back to its mama, on account of it’s too little to show itself in public.”

“We’re not in Alabama any more,” Salley replied with his usual annoying precision. “Or maybe you hadn’t noticed.”

“Oh, put a sock in it, Stinky,” Pinkard answered, too weary even to threaten doing any of the drastic things Salley so richly deserved. The captain came by just then, making sure everybody in the company—less a couple of men who’d passed out, overcome by the heat—was in good shape. Jeff called to him: “Sir, what river is this?”

“Unless the map they gave me is a liar—and God knows it’s possible, way the hell out here—this is the Double Mountain fork of the Brazos,” Connolly answered. Answering the next question before Pinkard could ask it, he went on, “From what they say, it’s supposed to have a lot more water in it in the wintertime.”

“Couldn’t hardly have much less,” Pinkard said.

The bridge, when he got to it, looked to have been there a while; it wasn’t a recent erection by the Confederate Army Engineering Corps. That argued the road had been there a while, too. He wondered where it ended up going. As far as he could tell, it was a road to nowhere.

They camped a little north of the Double Mountain fork. Try as he would, Jeff couldn’t see the mountains that were supposed to have given the fork its name. The ground was a little higher up ahead, but so what? He supposed that, in these parts, anything high enough to serve as a watershed got reckoned a mountain.

Night fell. It didn’t get any cooler, not so far as Pinkard could tell. He ambled over to a chow wagon. The Negro cook was serving up stale bread, tinned beef, and coffee. “Reckon I’d do just about anything for some of Emily’s fried chicken right about now,” he said mournfully, examining the unappetizing supper.

“Hey, soldier, you’ve got food,” said Sergeant Albert Cross, a veteran with the ribbon for the Purple Heart above his left breast pocket. “Believe me, time’ll come when you’re glad you’ve got anything. Ever carve a steak off a mule three days gone?”

He didn’t sound as if he was joking. He didn’t look as if he was joking, either. Sergeants seemed to have had their sense of humor surgically removed when they were children. Pinkard ate what was set before him. He unrolled his blanket and lay down on top of it. The next thing he knew, the sun was shining in his face.

The force of which he was a part resumed their march not long after sunrise. “We’ll take that high ground,” Stinky Salley declared in his best impression of the Secretary of War, “and then we’ll defend it from the damnyankees when they show up.”

From ahead, tiny in the distance, came the crackle of rifle fire. “Deploy from column into line by the left flank—move!” Captain Connolly shouted. The soldiers moved: awkwardly, because they hadn’t had enough training in such maneuvers before they got thrown into action against the Red rebels.

Out ahead, through the dust of the march, Pinkard saw men on horseback blazing away at the advancing Confederates.
Yankee cavalry,
he realized. As Connolly had said, the land was wide hereabouts. Cavalry had room to maneuver, as it didn’t farther east.

He didn’t see the field artillery with the horsemen, not even after it started shelling him. He heard a whistle in the air, and then a crash somewhere close by. A moment later, he heard screams. Another whistle, another crash. More screams.

“Get down!” Sergeant Cross screamed. Jeff was already on his belly, wondering how the Negroes in Georgia had fought on without guns to give as they received. At Cross’ order, he and his comrades started shooting at the U.S. cavalrymen. “Nothing to worry about—just a skirmish,” the sergeant said. Pinkard supposed he was right, and found the prospect of a big battle even less appealing than supper the night before.

Paul Mantarakis looked around. Most of what he saw was mountains baking under a savage sun. The rest was waterless valley full of boulders and cactus and nothing any man in his right mind could possibly want to own, let alone want it badly enough to take it away from the poor fools unfortunate enough to be in possession of it at the moment.

When he said that out loud, Gordon McSweeney’s big, fair head went up and down in agreement. “Amen,” the Scotsman said. “The Empire of Mexico is welcome to it, for all of me.”

“You ought to take another couple of salt tablets, Gordon,” Paul said. “You look like a lobster that’s been in the pot too long.”

For once, he was thankful for his swarthiness. Even here in Baja, California, all he did was go from brown to browner. Back in the normal world of the USA he dimly remembered, the whiter you were, the more breaks you got. Here, all you got was sunburn and heatstroke.

Captain Wyatt tramped past them. He wasn’t cooked quite so badly as McSweeney, but he was suffering, too. He said, “If we take this miserable stretch of land away from the Mexicans, we’ll be able to keep an eye on the Confederate Pacific coast—if the Rebs have any Pacific coast left once the war is done.”

“That’d be fine, sir,” Mantarakis said. “But once we’ve got bases here, how do we keep them supplied? No railroads except the one we built ourself. No roads, either, not unless you call what we’re on a road.”

“This isn’t just a road, Sergeant,” Captain Wyatt said. “This is damn near
the
road.” He paused to swig from his canteen. The water it held, if it was anything like what Paul had, was bloodwarm and stale. Wyatt went on, “We cut across the peninsula here to Santa Rosalía, and then we can look across the Gulf of California at the Rebs in Guaymas.”

“A shame and a disgrace that the Rebs still
are
in Guaymas,” Gordon McSweeney observed.

“Well, you’re right about that, Lord knows,” Captain Wyatt said. “But they are, and, from everything I’ve heard, it’s not much easier fighting over in Sonora than it is here.” He made a sour face. “And, of course, we’re starved for everything here, because we’re so far west. The war on the other side of the Mississippi is the big top; we’re just the sideshow.”

Something glinted for a moment, high on the side of the conical mountain ahead. Mantarakis pointed to it, saying, “Sir, I think the Mexicans—or maybe it’s the Rebs; who knows?—have an observation post way the hell up there.”

“Up on the slope of the Volcano of the Three Virgins, you mean?” Wyatt said. Paul nodded. The captain shrugged. “I would, sure as the devil, if I were in their shoes. I didn’t see anything. Show me again where you think it’s at.” After Mantarakis pointed, the captain nodded. “A little bit above that crag there?” He shouted for a runner, gave the fellow the location Mantarakis had spotted, and told him, “Pass it on to the field artillery. Maybe a howitzer can reach him from here. If that’s no good, we’ll just have to get used to them keeping an eye on everything we’re doing.”

Mantarakis said, “Haven’t seen much in the way of real fighting since we got down here. Not that I miss it,” he added hastily, “but are these Mexicans any good?”

“They won’t be as good as the Mormons were,” Ben Carlton put in. “’Course, nobody’s going to be as good as the Mormons were, unless I miss my guess. But if they were all that bad, we’d’ve already licked ’em.”

“Something to that,” Captain Wyatt agreed. “But we’ve been fighting the terrain as much as the Empire of Mexico, and there are some Rebs, too, helping their pals. But if you ask me—”

Paul didn’t ask the company commander. He didn’t have a chance to ask the company commander. A whistle in the air made him throw himself to the ground without consciously thinking he needed to do that. A shell burst, maybe fifty yards away.

He had his entrenching tool out and was busy digging himself a foxhole before the second shell came down. “Where are they coming from?” somebody shouted. “Don’t see any flash or anything.”

“Got to be a trench mortar,” Paul yelled back. “They must have put a couple of them on these hills, figured they’d drop some bombs on us. Trouble is, we don’t have any trenches.” He felt naked trying to fight without one, too.

“I’ll lay odds you’re right, Sergeant,” Captain Wyatt said. “The Mexicans don’t have any money to speak of; they can’t afford real artillery. In a place like this, though, what they’ve got is plenty good.”

It was, in Paul Mantarakis’ opinion, better than plenty good. Shells or bombs or whatever they were kept falling on the Americans. The ground, under a few inches of sandy dust, was hard as a sergeant’s heart (that Paul thought such things proved he’d come up through the ranks). He couldn’t get the foxhole deep enough to suit him.

And then somebody shouted, “Here come the bastards!” Resentfully, he threw down the entrenching tool and set his rifle against his shoulder. The enemy wasn’t playing fair. How was he supposed to kill them without getting hurt himself if they wouldn’t let him dig in properly?

Trench mortars up on the hilltops might have been Mexicans. Like any American, he thought of Mexico as backwards and corrupt and bankrupt; if the Emperor had been able to pay his bills, he wouldn’t have had to sell Chihuahua and Sonora to the CSA. And when the United States had fought Mexico, back before the War of Secession, they’d actually won. So Paul, in spite of what Captain Wyatt had said, expected any soldiers bold enough to charge to be Confederates propping up their allies.

But he was wrong. These men wore a khaki lighter than Confederate issue, so light it was almost yellow. In this terrain, it gave better protection than green-gray. They wore widebrimmed straw hats, too, not felts or steel derbies. And their shouts yipped like coyotes’ howls; they weren’t the cougar screams the Rebs used for battle cries.

Mantarakis fired, one of the first who did. Several Mexicans went down. He didn’t think they were all hit; they were taking cover, too. A bullet kicked dust into his face. He shivered despite the heat. A miss was as good as a mile, or so they said, but what did they really know, whoever
they
were?

Fire was coming at the Americans from the front and from both flanks. That wasn’t good. That was how you got shot to pieces. That was also probably why, after most of two years of war, the Americans hadn’t got to Santa Rosalía yet.

“Let’s get moving,” Mantarakis shouted to his squad. “We stay here, they’re going to chop us to bits.” Not without a pang of regret, he quit the unsatisfactory foxhole he’d dug and headed off to the right to see if he couldn’t do something about the flanking fire coming from that direction. His men followed him. He’d known of officers who found out too late they were moving all by themselves. Most of them hadn’t come back from moves like that.

Rifle bullets buzzed past him, clipped branches from the chaparral through which he ran, and made dust spurt up again and again. He noted all that only peripherally. What he did note, with glad relief, was that the Mexicans hadn’t brought any machine guns forward with them. Maybe machine guns were like proper artillery: too expensive for them to afford. He fervently hoped so.

He dove behind a sun-wizened bush, snapped off a couple of rounds to make the enemy keep their heads down, and then got moving again. He came cautiously around a yellow boulder that might have been there since the beginning of time—and almost ran into a Mexican soldier doing the same thing.

They stared at each other. The Mexican had two cartridge bandoliers crisscrossed over his chest, which made him look like a bandit. His bristly mustache and the black stubble on his chin only added to the impression.

Paul saw the Mexican very distinctly, as if a sculptor had carved him and the entire scene behind him into a sharp-edged simulation of reality. The man seemed to raise his rifle with dreamlike slowness, though Paul’s swung to bear on him no more swiftly.

They both fired at essentially the same instant. Time speeded up then. The Mexican let out a startled grunt and reeled away, blood coming from a small hole in the front of his uniform and a huge gaping exit wound about where his left kidney was—or had been.

With that hole in him, he was surely a dead man. He didn’t know it yet, though. He still held his rifle, and tried to aim it at Paul. Mantarakis discovered his left leg didn’t want to hold him.
I can’t have been shot,
he thought—
I don’t feel anything
. Falling heavily onto his side kept him from getting shot again, for the Mexican’s bullet cracked through the place where he’d been.

Then he fired once more, and the enemy soldier’s head exploded in red ruin. Paul tried to get up and discovered he couldn’t. He looked down at himself. Red was soaking through the dust on the inside of his trouser leg. Seeing his own blood flooding out of him made him understand he really had been hit. It also made the wound start to hurt. He clamped his teeth together hard against a scream.

“Sergeant’s down!” somebody shouted, off to one side of him. He did an awkward, three-limbed crawl back behind the shelter of that boulder. Then he detached his bayonet and cut the trouser leg with it before fumbling for the wound dressing in a pouch on his belt.

His hands didn’t want to do what he told them. He’d barely managed to shove the bandage against the hole in his leg when a couple of U.S. soldiers grabbed him. “Got to get you out of here, Sarge,” one of them said.

“Got to get us all the hell out of here,” the other added. “Damn Mexicans got us pinned down good.”

“We’ll lick ’em,” Paul said vaguely. His voice sounded very far away, as if he were listening to himself along a tunnel. He wasn’t hot any more, either. A long time ago, hadn’t they bled people who had fevers? He tried to laugh, though no sound came out. Sure as sure, he wouldn’t have any fever now.

One of the men supporting him grunted just as the Mexican had and crumpled to the ground. A few paces farther on, the other soldier said, “Can you help any, Sarge? We’d move faster if you could do something with your good leg.” Getting no reply, he spoke again, louder: “Sarge?”

He stooped, letting his burden down behind another of the strangely shaped rocks that dotted the valley. When he got up again, he ran on alone.

Anne Colleton felt trapped. Living as the only white person at what had been—and what she was fiercely determined would again be—Marshlands plantation with the remnants of her field hands was only part of the problem, though she made a point of carrying a small revolver in her handbag and preferred not to go far from the Tredegar rifle when she could help it. You couldn’t tell any more, not these days.

That was part of the problem. The Red uprising had shattered patterns of obedience two hundred years old. The field hands still did as she told them. The fields were beginning to look as if she might have some kind of crop this year, no matter how late it had been started. But she couldn’t use the Negroes as she had before. She’d taken their compliance for granted. No more. Now they worked in exchange for her keeping the Confederate authorities from troubling them for whatever they might have done during the rebellion. It was far more nearly a bargain between equals than the previous arrangement had been.

But only part of her feeling of isolation was spiritual. The rest was physical, and perfectly real. She’d made trips into St. Matthews and into Columbia, trying to get the powers that be to repair the telephone and telegraph lines that connected her to the wider world. She’d had promises that they would be up two weeks after her return to the plantation. She’d had a lot more promises since. What she didn’t have were telephone and telegraph lines.

“God damn those lying bastards to hell,” she snarled, staring out along the path, out toward the road, out toward the whole wide world where anything at all might be happening—but if it was happening, how could she find out about it? She’d prided herself on her modernity, but the life she was living had more to do with the eighteenth century than the twentieth.

Beside her, Julia stirred. “Don’ fret yourself none, Miss Anne,” she said. Her hands rested on the broad shelf of her belly. Before long, she would have that baby. If she knew who the father was, she hadn’t said so.

Anne ground her teeth. Julia would have been ideally suited to the eighteenth century, or to the fourteenth century, for that matter. She let things happen to her. When they did, she cast around for the easiest way to set them right and chose that.

“Better to be actor than acted upon,” Anne said, more to herself than to her serving woman. She’d always believed that, though she’d had scant experience of being acted upon till the Red revolution cast her into the hands of the military. Having gained the experience, she was convinced she’d been right to loathe it.

She looked over toward the ruins of the Marshlands mansion. The cottage in which she was living now had belonged to Cassius the hunter. From what she’d heard, he’d had a high place in the Negroes’Congaree Socialist Republic. He’d been a Red right under her nose, and she’d never suspected. That ate at her, too. She hated being wrong.

Even more galling was having been wrong about Scipio, who was also supposed to have been a revolutionary leader.
I gave him everything,
she thought:
education, fine clothes, the same food I ate—and this is the thanks he gave me in return?
He’d vanished when the revolt collapsed. Maybe he was dead. If he wasn’t, and she found him, she swore she’d make him wish he were.