Walk in Hell (53 page)

Ben Carlton heard him. McSweeney outranked Carlton, but, as cook, the latter enjoyed a certain amount of license an ordinary private soldier, even a veteran, would not have had. “Rather be here than that damn Baja, California desert,” he declared, “and you can take that to church.”

McSweeney shook his head. He was big and tall and fair, with muscles like rocks, a chin and cheekbones that might have been hewn from granite, and pale eyes that looked through a man, not at him. He said, “A soldier’s purpose is fighting. If I am not fighting, I am not fulfilling my appointed purpose in life.” If he did not do that, his infinitely stern, infinitely just God would surely punish him for it in the days to come.

Carlton would not be silenced. “To hell with my appointed purpose, if the damn fool who appointed me to it gets his brains out o’ the latrine bucket. Sendin’ us down there with no support or nothin’, that was murder, and that’s all it was.” He stuck out his own chin, which was nowhere near so granitic as McSweeney’s. “Go ahead and tell me I’m wrong. I dare you.”

From most men, to most men, that would have been an invitation to fight. Gordon McSweeney reserved his wrath for the men on the other side, a fact for which his mates had had a good many occasions to be thankful. “God predestined our failure, for reasons of His own,” he said now.

Ben Carlton looked as if he had bitten into something that tasted bad—
something he cooked himself, then,
McSweeney thought. “Damn me to hell if I can see how God’s will had anything to do with poor Paul bleedin’ to death like a stuck pig way the devil out in the middle of the desert,” Carlton said.

McSweeney’s gaze fixed on him as if over the sights of a Springfield. “God will surely damn you to hell if you take His name in vain.” His expression softened, ever so slightly. “Paul Mantarakis, as I saw, was a brave man, for all that he was a papist.”

“He weren’t no Cath-
o
-lic,” Carlton said. “He was whatever Greeks are—orthosomething, he called it.”

“He carried with him a rosary of beads, which condemns him of itself. A pity, I admit, for he was a man of spirit.” McSweeney spoke with the assurance of one who knew himself to be a member of the elect and thus assured salvation.

Carlton gave it up. “There’s worse men than Paul as are still breathing in and out,” he said.

“Such is God’s will,” McSweeney answered. “Only a fool, and a blasphemous fool at that, would question it. Be assured: the unjust shall have their requital.”

He got left alone after that, which suited him well enough. Even in the crowded trenches of western Kentucky, he had been left alone a good deal. He knew why: a man of fixed purpose naturally confounded the greater number who had none, but drifted through life like floating leaves, going wherever the current chanced to take them. God anchored him, and anchored him firm.

That he used the time to make sure his flamethrower was in good working order also helped ensure his privacy. Few in the company seemed eager to associate, either in the field or away from the fighting, with anyone who carried such horror on his back. In the field, the enemy made flamethrower operators special targets, so McSweeney could see the sense in staying away from him, even if it filled him with scorn. Back here? He shrugged. If the men gave in to superstition, how could he stop them?

After evening mess call, the soldiers gossiped and smoked and gambled till lights out. McSweeney read the Book of Kings, an island of rectitude in the sea of sin all around. Then one of the men in his squad shouted “Goddammit!” after losing a poker hand he thought he should have won.

“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain, Hansen,” McSweeney said, glancing up from the small type of the Bible.

“Yes, Sergeant. Sorry, Sergeant,” Private Ulysses Hansen said hastily. He was not the smallest nor the weakest nor the least spirited man in the regiment, but his sergeant not only outranked him but also intimidated him. He kept his language circumspect thereafter.

In the morning, McSweeney inspected the persons and kits of his squad with his usual meticulous care. When he’d reported to Captain Schneider the infractions he’d found, the company commander raised an eyebrow and said, “Sergeant, can’t you learn to let some of that go? You gig men for things that aren’t worth noticing.”

“Sir, they are against regulations,” McSweeney answered stiffly.

“I understand that, Sergeant, but—” Schneider looked exasperated. For the life of him, Gordon McSweeney could not understand why. He stood at stolid attention, not showing his perplexity. Schneider was a brave soldier, and not altogether ungodly; he might perhaps have been numbered among the elect. After a pause to marshal his thoughts, he went on, “A smudged button or a speck of dust on a collar won’t cost us the war. These are real soldiers, remember, not West Point cadets.”

“Sir, I did not invent the infractions,” McSweeney said. “All I did was note them and report them to you.”

“You’d need a magnifying glass to note some of them,” Schneider said.

McSweeney shook his head. “No, sir, only my eyes.”

Schneider looked unhappier still. “Could you stand the kind of inspection you’re giving your men?”

“Sir, I hope so,” McSweeney answered. “If I fail, I deserve whatever punishment you care to inflict on me.”

Now the captain shook his head. “You don’t get it, Sergeant. I don’t want to punish you for small things. I don’t want you making your men hate you so much they won’t follow you, either.”

“Sir, they will follow me.” McSweeney spoke with a calm, absolute confidence. “Whatever else they may feel about me, they’re afraid of me.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Captain Schneider muttered, perhaps more to himself than to McSweeney. But he shook his head again. “That won’t do, I’m afraid. A U.S. noncom or officer whose men hate him or fear him ends up with a wound from a Springfield, not a Tredegar.”

Gordon McSweeney considered that. “Whoever would do such a thing would surely spend eternity in hell.”

“As may be,” Schneider said. “That’s not the point. The point is to keep your men from wanting to shoot you in the first place.”

“If they would only do that which is required of them, we would not have this problem,” McSweeney said.

Captain Schneider sighed. “Sergeant, have you ever, even once in your life, considered the wisdom of tempering justice with mercy?”

“No, sir,” McSweeney answered, honestly shocked.

“I believe you,” Schneider said. “The one thing—the only thing—I’ll give you is that you hold yourself to the same standards as everyone else. That time a couple of days ago when you reported yourself for not polishing the inside of your canteen cup—that was a first for me, I tell you. But what did I do about it?”

“Nothing, sir.” McSweeney’s voice reeked disapproval.

Captain Schneider either didn’t notice or pretended not to. “That’s right. That’s what I’m going to keep on doing when you bother me with tiny things, too. Sergeant, I order you not to report trivial infractions to me until and unless they constitute a clear and obvious danger to the discipline or safety of your squad. Do you understand me?”

“No, sir,” McSweeney said crisply.

“All right, then, Sergeant. I am going to leave you with two quotations from the Good Book, then. I want you to concentrate on the lessons in John 8:7 and Matthew 7:1.” With an abrupt about-face, Schneider stalked off.

Gordon McSweeney knew the Scriptures well. But those were not verses he was in the habit of studying, so he had to go and look them up.
He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her,
he read in John. The verse in Matthew was even shorter and more to the point, saying,
Judge not, that ye be not judged
.

He stared out the door through which Captain Schneider had departed. The captain, as far as he was concerned, had the letter without the spirit. If God chose to urge mercy, that was His affair. Could a man not so urged by the Lord afford such a luxury? McSweeney didn’t think so.

He was, in any case, by temperament more drawn to the Old Testament than to the New. The children of Israel, now, had been proper warriors. God had not urged them to mercy, but to glorify His name by smiting their foes. And their prophets and kings had obeyed, and had grown great by obeying. Against such a background, what did a couple of verses matter?

Jesus Christ hadn’t always been meek and mild, either. Hadn’t He driven the money-changers from the Temple? They hadn’t been doing anything so very wrong.
Trivial infractions,
Captain Schneider would have called their business, and thought Jesus should have left it alone.

McSweeney flipped back a few pages in the Book of Matthew and grunted in satisfaction. “Chapter 5, verse 29,” he murmured:
And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell
.

He looked at the men in his squad. None of them dared meet his eye. Would any have the nerve to shoot him under cover of battle? He shook his head. He didn’t believe it, not for a moment. Would they leave him in the lurch when he attacked? Maybe they would. His glance flicked to the flamethrower. Anyone who carried one of those infernal devices was on his own anyhow.

“Justice,” McSweeney said, and gave a sharp nod. Only the wicked feared justice, and with reason, for they deserved chastisement. Thus the United States would chastise their seceded brethren, and chastise as well the wicked foreigners who had made secession possible.

God wills it,
McSweeney thought, for all the world like a Crusader before the walls of Jerusalem. And Jerusalem would fall. He would make it fall, and break anyone and anything standing in the way.

Achilles smiled at Cincinnatus, a smile that showed one new tooth in a wide, wet mouth. The baby said something wordless but joyful. Cincinnatus smiled back. To Elizabeth, he said, “He’s in a happy mood this mornin’, ain’t he?”

His wife smiled back, wanly. “Why shouldn’t he be happy? He can sleep as long as he wants, an’ he can wake up whenever he please. An’ he’s still too little to know his ma can’t do likewise.”

“I heard him there in the middle of the night,” Cincinnatus said, digging into the ham and eggs Elizabeth had made. “He sounded happy then, too.”

“He
was
happy,” she said, rolling her eyes, which were still streaked with red. “He was so happy, he wanted to play. He didn’t want to go back to bed, not for nothin’ he didn’t. Did you?” She poked Achilles in the ribs. He thought that was the funniest thing in the world, and squealed laughter. When he did, his mother visibly melted. All the same, she said, “What I wanted to do was give him some laudanum, so he’d go back to sleep and I could, too.” She yawned. Achilles squealed again—everything was funny this morning.

No sooner had Cincinnatus shoveled the last fluffy scrambled egg into his mouth than someone knocked on the door. He grabbed for his mug of coffee and gulped it down while hurrying to let in his mother. “How’s my little grandbaby?” she asked.

Cincinnatus was still swallowing. From the kitchen, Elizabeth answered, “Mother Livia, he must be sleepin’ while you got him, on account of he sure don’t do none o’ that in the nighttime.”

“He jus’ like his father, then,” Cincinnatus’ mother said. She turned to him. “You was the wakinest child I ever did hear tell of.” Without taking a breath, she went on in a different tone of voice: “Looks like it’s fixin’ to storm out there, storm somethin’ fierce.”

“Does it?” Cincinnatus looked outside himself. His mother was right. Thick, dark clouds were boiling up in the northwest, over Ohio, and heading rapidly toward Covington. The air felt still and heavy and damp. He reached into the pocket of his dungarees and pulled out a nickel. “Gonna ride me the trolley down to the docks.”

“Gettin’ pretty la-de-da, ain’t you?” his mother said. “Trolley here, trolley there, like you got all the money is to have. Pretty soon you gwine buy youself a motorcar, ain’t that right?”

“Wish it was,” Cincinnatus said, and gave her a kiss as he hurried out the door. When the CSA had ruled Covington, a motorcar for a black man would have been out of the question, unless he wanted to be branded as uppity—and, perhaps, literally branded as well. Under the USA…maybe such a thing would be possible, if he got the money together. Maybe it wouldn’t, too.

The rain began just before he got to the trolley stop, which wasn’t particularly close to his house. One stop served the entire Negro district near the Licking River. He remembered the complaints he’d heard about routing the track even so close to his part of town.

When the trolley car rattled up, he threw his nickel into the fare box and sat down in the back. The Yankees hadn’t changed the rules about that sort of thing; they had rules of their own, not quite so strict as those of the Confederacy but not tempered by intimate acquaintance, either. He sighed. If your skin was dark, you had trouble finding a fair shake anywhere.

Lightning flashed. Thunder boomed. Rain started coming down in sheets. The trolley filled up in a hurry, as people who usually would have walked to work decided against it today. Whites started moving back into the Negro section. One by one, Cincinnatus and his fellow blacks gave up their seats and stood holding the overhead rail. None of them complained, not out loud. Men down from the USA ousted them as casually as did native Covingtonians.

Water sprayed up from the trolley’s wheels as it slid to a stop near the wharves. Cincinnatus and several other Negro men leaped down and ran for their places. The others were all roustabouts; they’d be drenched by the time the day was through. Cincinnatus didn’t expect to be much better off. For one thing, it was almost as wet inside the cab of a White truck as it was outside. For another, he’d be outside a good deal of the time, certainly while loading and unloading his snarling monster, and probably while fixing punctures as well.

“Morning, Cincinnatus,” Lieutenant Straubing said when he splashed into the warehouse that served as headquarters for the transportation unit. “Wet enough out there to suit you?”

“Sure enough is, suh,” Cincinnatus answered. As usual, his color seemed not to matter to Straubing. He still had trouble believing that could be true, but had seen no evidence to make him suppose it was an act, either.

The lieutenant looked troubled. “Cincinnatus, we have a problem, and I think we could use your help to solve it.”

“What kind of problem you talking about, sir?” the Negro asked, expecting it to be something to do with the bad weather and what it was doing to the schedule and to Kentucky’s miserable roads.

Lieutenant Straubing looked even less happy. “A sabotage problem, I’m afraid,” he answered. Just then, an enormous clap of thunder gave Cincinnatus an excuse for jumping, which was just as well, because he would have jumped with an excuse or without one. Straubing went on, “An unhealthy number of fires have broken out in areas we’ve served. Please be on the alert for anything that seems suspicious.”

“Yes, suh, I’ll do that,” Cincinnatus said, knowing everyone would be on the alert for
him
, a distinctly alarming notion.

Straubing said, “Damned if I can figure out who’s playing games with us, either. Maybe it’s the Reds”—he didn’t say anything about niggers, as most whites, U.S. or C.S., would have done—“or maybe it’s Confederate diehards. Whoever it is, he’ll pay when he gets caught.”

“Yes, suh,” Cincinnatus said again. “He deserve it.” He shut up after that, not wanting to draw the U.S. lieutenant’s attention to himself. Part of that, of course, was simple self-preservation. Part of it, too, was not wanting the one white man who’d ever treated him like a human being to be disappointed in him. If the United States had produced more men like Lieutenant Straubing, Cincinnatus never would have worked to harm them. As things were…

“I’m letting everyone know,” Straubing said. “If you’ve seen anything, if you
do
see anything, don’t be shy.”

“I won’t, suh.” Cincinnatus wondered if he could buy his own safety by betraying the Confederate underground. The trouble was, the only man whose whereabouts he knew for certain was Conroy. No, that was one trouble. The other was that, here in Covington, Confederates and Reds worked hand in hand. He’d betray Apicius and his sons along with the men who waved the Stars and Bars. Some things cost more than they were worth.

More drivers, white and black, came dripping into the shed. Straubing spoke to them all. Cincinnatus wondered how good an idea that was. Everyone would be eyeing everyone else now. And anyone who had a grudge against anyone else would likely seize the chance to have the occupation authorities put the other fellow through the wringer.

“Let’s move out,” the lieutenant said at last. “We’ve got a cargo of shells the artillery is waiting for.”

“Weather like this, they’re going to be waiting a while longer,” said one of the drivers, a white man Cincinnatus knew only as Herk.

Lieutenant Straubing was a born optimist. A man who treated blacks and whites the same way had to be a born optimist—
or a damn fool,
Cincinnatus thought darkly. Even the Yankee soldier did not contradict Herk. All he said was, “We’ve got to give it our best shot.”

Out they went. Cincinnatus was glad he hadn’t had to buck the heavy crates of shells into the bed of the White truck himself. He wondered when he’d get home again: not as in
at what time
, but as in
on what day
. The front kept moving south. That meant an ever-longer haul from Covington. If he was lucky, the roads would be terrible and not too crowded. If he wasn’t lucky, they’d be terrible and packed, and he might not get home for a week.

Right from the start, he had the feeling he wouldn’t be lucky. The truck’s acetylene headlamps didn’t want to light, and, once they finally did, hissed and sputtered as if about to explode. He had to crank the engine half a dozen times before it turned over. One of those fruitless tries, it jerked back on him, and he yanked his hand off the crank just in time to keep it from breaking his arm.

Unlike some, the truck had a windshield and a wiper for it. It thrashed over the glass like a spastic man’s arm, now two or three times quickly, now all but motionless. The idea was good. As far as Cincinnatus was concerned, it needed more work.

Even on the paved streets of Covington, the White seemed to bang unerringly into every pothole. Nor was Cincinnatus the only one with that complaint: a couple of trucks limped toward the curb with punctures. Changing an inner tube in the rain was not something he looked forward to with delight.

So thick were the clouds, it seemed more like twilight than advancing morning. Cincinnatus stuck close to the rear of the truck in front of him, and saw in his mirror the headlamps of the next White to the rear just behind him. He thought of elephants in a circus parade, each grasping the tail of the one in front with its trunk.

Paved road ended about twenty-five miles south of Covington. Before the war, it had ended at the city limits: Yankee engineers were pushing it on toward the front for reasons of their own. The difference between pavement and dirt was immediate and appalling. Muck flew up from the back tires of the White in front of Cincinnatus, coating his truck’s headlamps and splattering the windshield. The wiper blade smeared more than it removed.

Swearing, Cincinnatus slowed down. Spacing between trucks got wider as other drivers did the same thing. Then they came upon what had to be at least a division’s worth of infantry heading south along the road. Drivers in the lead trucks squeezed the bulbs on their horns for all they were worth. That was supposed to be the signal for the infantrymen to get out of the way. Even in good weather, the soldiers in green-gray didn’t take kindly to moving onto the shoulder. With the rain, they barely seemed to move at all. The Whites splattered them as readily as one another. Curses rang in Cincinnatus’ ears as he crawled past and through the marching men.

The trucks sped up again once they finally got beyond the head of the infantry column. A little farther along,
they
had to go onto the shoulder: a pair of bogged barrels plugged the road tight as a cork in a bottle. Cincinnatus hoped he’d reach the next fuel depot before his truck ran out of gas.

A noise like a gunshot made him jump in his seat. The truck slewed sideways. It wasn’t Confederates or Reds. “Puncture,” he said resignedly, and pulled off the road to fix it.

By the time he scrambled back into the cab of the truck, he was soaked from head to foot and all over mud. He felt as if he’d been wrestling somebody three times his size. He’d put a board under the jack before he tried using it. It had done its level best to sink into the ooze board and all. The ordeal was almost enough to make him wish he were back at the docks.

He shook his head. “I ain’t that stupid,” he said, gunning the engine to try to catch up with the rest of the convoy.

He did, too, soon enough; no one could make any sort of time through the mud. He managed to get more gasoline before he stopped dead. Putting everything together, the trip wasn’t so bad as he’d expected.
Only goes to show I don’t expect much,
he thought.

The raiders hit the convoy a little south of Berea. One moment, Cincinnatus was contentedly chugging along not far from the rear—other fellows who’d had to stop for one breakdown or another had fallen in behind him. The next, an explosion up ahead made him stamp on the brake. As the truck skidded to a stop, rifle and machine-gun fire rang out from the side of the road, stitching down the convoy toward him.

He had no gun. He carried nothing more lethal than a clasp knife. Without a moment’s hesitation, he dove out of the cab and away from the White as fast as he could go. That proved smart. Flames started licking up from under the hood in spite of the rain: a bullet or two must have smashed up the motor. Cincinnatus just watched those flames for a moment. Then, with a moan of fright, he crawled farther away from the truck, not to escape the bullets still flying, but to get away from the—

The flames spread rapidly. With a soft
whoomp
, the gas tank went up, setting the whole truck ablaze. A minute or so after that, the fire reached the artillery rounds in the bed. At first, a couple of them exploded individually. And then, with a great roar, the whole truckload went up.

Cincinnatus had been on his hands and knees. The blast knocked him facedown into the mud. Shell fragments and shrapnel balls slashed the air around him. Some of them fell hissing into puddles of rainwater close by.

As other trucks began exploding, he tried desperately to put more distance between himself and them. He heard screams from drivers who hadn’t been able to get away, and Rebel yells from the raiders still shooting up the convoy. The explosions, though, kept the raiders from coming after him.