Walk in Hell (43 page)

“Great—carload—lots.” The reporter scribbled furiously. “Oh, that’s good, sir, that’s very good. They’ll like that—it’ll probably get a headline.”

“Do you think so?” All of a sudden, the general commanding First Army was sweetness and light once more. Even Dowling thought it was a pretty good line, and he was not inclined to give his commander much credit for such things.

The reporter asked a couple of more questions. Custer, having succeeded with one joke, tried some others, all of which fell flat. They fell so flat, in fact, that the reporter put away his notebook, picked up his camera, and departed faster than he might otherwise have done.

Custer, as usual, was oblivious to such subtleties. Puffing out his flabby chest, he turned to Dowling and said, “I think that went very well.”

Of course you do,
his adjutant thought.
It was publicity
. It was, as usual, hard to go wrong with an answer of, “Yes, sir.”

“And now back to headquarters. I want to prepare the orders for our next attack against the Rebs’ positions.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said again. Custer was taking a more active interest in the campaign these days, partly, Dowling supposed, because Libbie was still with him and partly because, like a child with new Christmas toys, he was playing with the barrels to find out what all they could do.

When he got back to the building doing duty for headquarters these days—a whitewashed clapboard structure with the legend
GENERAL STORE
:
CAMP HILL SIMES
,
PROP
.—orders got delayed for a while. Someone had brought in a wicker basket full of ripe, red strawberries and a bowl of whipped cream. Custer dug in with gusto, pinkish juice dribbling down his chin and bits of clotted cream getting stuck in the peroxided splendor of his mustache. Since Major Dowling wasn’t shy about enjoying the bounty either, he refrained from even mental criticism of the general.

“Where did we come by these?” Custer asked after he’d eaten his fill.

“Little town called Portland, sir,” said Captain Theodore Heissig, one of the staff officers. “Just south of the Tennessee line. They grow ’em in bunches.”

“No, no,” Custer said. “Bananas grow in bunches.” Unlike the man with the notebook and camera, the staff officers were obliged to find all his jokes funny, or to act as if they did. Dowling bared his teeth in what bore at least some resemblance to a grin.

Once the strawberries were all disposed of, Custer walked over to the map and examined it with less satisfaction than he might have shown, considering the amount of progress First Army had made since the Confederate States were distracted by their own internal turmoil, and especially since barrels had begun to make trenches something less than impregnable. “We need more help from the Navy,” he grumbled. “How long have they been stuck just past this miserable Clarksville place? Weeks, seems like.”

“Sir, they’re saying they need Army help to go farther,” Captain Heissig said.

“Balderdash!” Custer boomed, a fine, bouncing exclamation that sprayed little bits of cream onto the map.

“Sir, I don’t think it is,” Abner Dowling said, gingerly trying, as he so often had to do, to lead Custer back toward some vague connection to military reality. “The Rebs have mined the Cumberland heavily, and they’ve got big artillery south of the river zeroed on the minefields. The Navy’s lost too many monitors to be very eager to push hard any more.”

“Then what the devil good are they?” Custer demanded. “If they can’t get where we need them, they might as well not be there at all.” That conveniently ignored several facts, some small, some immense, but Custer had always been good at ignoring facts he didn’t like. He rounded on the luckless Captain Heissig. “I want you to arrange cooperation on our terms, Captain, and I want you to do it by this afternoon.”

“I’ll do my best, sir,” the young captain said.

“You’ll do it, Captain, or this time next week you’ll be chasing redskins and bandits through the parts of the Sonoran desert we were supposed to have pacified a year and a half ago,” Custer said. He meant it, too, as the luckless Captain Heissig had to know; his staff had the highest turnover of any commander of an army’s.

There were times—a lot of times—when commanding a battalion in the Sonoran desert would have looked very good to Dowling. But Custer, worse luck, didn’t threaten to ship him out. He just used him as a whipping boy. Dowling sent poor Captain Heissig a sympathetic glance. Misery loved company.

Cincinnatus’ nostrils dilated as he approached the Kentucky Smoke House. When the wind was right, you could smell the barbecue all over Covington. Even when the wind was wrong, as if was tonight, the irresistibly savory smell made spit flood into people’s mouths for miles around.

And when you walked into Apicius’ barbecue place, you felt certain you were going to starve to death before you got your pork or your beef, smothered in the hot, spicy sauce that made the Smoke House famous and spun on a spit over a hickory fire. Even if you weren’t coming in for the food, as Cincinnatus wasn’t, you wanted some—you wanted that splendid sauce all down your shirtfront, was what you wanted.

Blacks ate at the Kentucky Smoke House. So did Covington’s whites, unwilling to let their colored brethren have such a good thing to themselves. And so did Yankee soldiers and administrators. A man who kept his ears open there would surely learn a lot.

Lucullus, Apicius’ son, was turning the spit in the main room. The carcass of a pig went round and round above the firepit. However much his mouth watered, Cincinnatus ignored the prospect of barbecued pork. That Lucullus was working the spit meant Apicius had to be in one of the back rooms, and Apicius was the man he’d come to see.

But when he headed for the back rooms, Felix, Apicius’ other son, stood in front of him to bar the way. “Pa’s already in there talkin’ with somebody,” he said. “Be a good idea if you see him later.”

“Who’s he talkin’ to that I ain’t supposed to know nothin’ about?” Cincinnatus answered scornfully. “Be a good idea if I see him
now
. I been drivin’ all over creation the whole day long. I don’t got to do none o’ this, you know. I could go home to my wife and my little boy. Don’t get to see them often enough, way things are. I’m goin’in.”

Felix was a couple of years younger than Lucullus. He hadn’t quite got his full growth, and he hadn’t quite acquired the arrogance that would have let him tell a grown man no and get away with it. He looked toward Lucullus for support, but Lucullus kept basting that pig with a long-handled brush. When Cincinnatus took a step forward, Felix scowled but moved aside. Cincinnatus knew which back room Apicius was likely to use—why not? He’d been in there himself, often enough.

The fat Negro barbecue cook looked up in startlement when the door opened. So did the man with whom he’d been bent in intent conversation. All at once, Cincinnatus wished he’d paid attention to Felix. The man with whom Apicius had been talking was Tom Kennedy.

“I’m gonna have to give my boy a good kick in the slack o’ his britches,” Apicius said, and then, to Cincinnatus this time, “Well, come in and shut that thing behind you, ’fore people out front start payin’more heed to what’s goin’on in here than they should ought to.” To Kennedy, he said, “Sorry, Mister Tom. Didn’t ’spect we’d get interrupted.”

“Could be worse,” Kennedy said. “Cincinnatus and me, we’ve known each other for a long time and we’ve done a deal of work together. You know about that, I suppose.”

His tone was—
cautious
was the word on which Cincinnatus finally settled. Cincinnatus had put firebombs into U.S. supply dumps over much of central Kentucky. He’d gone right on doing that after Conroy’s general store burned down. He didn’t like doing it, but he thought it would be wise. The Confederate underground hadn’t troubled him, so he supposed he’d made the right choice. Buildings did sometimes burn down without firebombs, after all, or seem as if they did. There had, in fact, been a fire in a livery stable down the block from the general store a couple of nights later.

“Well, all right, you’re here,” Apicius said roughly. He slid down on the bench he was occupying to give Cincinnatus room to sit beside him. “What you got to say that won’t keep for nothin’?”

But Cincinnatus didn’t say anything, not right away. He kept an eye on Tom Kennedy. Kennedy had used Apicius and his sons to help spread Confederate propaganda in occupied Kentucky. Cincinnatus didn’t know whether Kennedy knew Apicius headed a Red cell in Covington. Till he found out, he wasn’t going to say anything to let Kennedy in on the secret. The war between the Reds and the Confederate government was liable to continue, here in this land neither of those two sides controlled.

Kennedy said, “I was just telling Apicius here about what I told you months ago would come true—more rights for Negroes in the CSA on account of the war and on account of the goddamn uprising.”

“You did tell me about that, Mr. Kennedy—that’s a fact,” Cincinnatus said. “I own I didn’t reckon you knew what you was talking about, but it do look like you did.”

“Got to get through the Congress before it’s real, and the Congress don’t move what anybody’d call real quick,” Apicius observed.

“I think Congress will move quicker here than you figure,” Kennedy said. “You read the papers—”

Apicius shook his head. “Felix does, and Lucullus. Not me. All I knows is how to cook meat till it fall off the bone into yo’ mouth.”

And how to sandbag,
Cincinnatus thought. Maybe Apicius was illiterate. If he was, he had the remarkable memory people who couldn’t read and write often developed; details never slipped his mind.

The display of ignorance didn’t impress Kennedy, either. “You know what’s going on,” he corrected himself impatiently. “You know the Confederate States need all the help they can get against the USA, and you know that if that means giving Negroes more, they’ll do it.”

“Reckon I do know that,” the cook said. “Question is, do I care? The CSA is a pack o’ capitalists and oppressors, an’ de USA is a pack o’ capitalists and oppressors, too. Why the devil does we care what the devil happens to one pack o’ capitalists and imperialists or the other?”

Cincinnatus knew he was staring. Apicius chuckled. Tom Kennedy chuckled, too, a little self-consciously. They both started to talk at the same time. With a wave of the sort he’d probably learned as a boy back in slavery days, the black man deferred to the white. Kennedy said, “When you’re underground, things are different. Down in Mississippi, I’d hang Apicius from the first branch—well, the first really big branch—I could find…if he didn’t bushwhack me first. Up here, we both worry about the USA more than we do about each other.” He nodded to Cincinnatus. “I know who I’m working with. And I know who’s working with me, too.”

Was that a warning about Conroy’s store? What else could it be? But if Kennedy had drawn his own conclusions about that…Cincinnatus wondered why he was still breathing, in that case.

Apicius said, “That don’t mean what I said beforehand don’t hold. You got to remember that, Mister Tom. Most of the black folks who think about politics at all, we is Marxists. We is oppressed so bad, what else can we be? The war you got, it’s an imperialist war. Why shouldn’t we sit by and let the capitalists shoot each other full of holes?” Cincinnatus wondered how long the cook had been a Red, to talk that way if he couldn’t read the words.

Kennedy answered, “Because whoever’s left on top is going to lick the tar out of you if you do. You aren’t strong enough to go it alone. You’ve seen that. If you couldn’t lick the CSA when we had one hand and half of the other one tied behind our backs, you’ll never do it. You can’t fight, not well enough. You have to deal.”

“Who says we didn’t lick the CSA?” Apicius asked quietly. “The U.S. soldiers, they down in Tennessee these days. You think you ever gonna see soldiers in butternut back on the Ohio? Don’t hold your breath, Mister Tom.”

“The Yankees can put soldiers on every railroad track and streetcorner in this state. That doesn’t mean they can run it.” Kennedy would have been more impressive if he hadn’t sounded as if he were whistling in the dark.

“It don’t matter nohow,” Apicius said. “In the long run, Mister Tom, it don’t matter
a
-tall. The revolution gonna come in the CSA, and the revolution gonna come in the USA. Not all the soldiers in the world can stop it, on account of it’s the way things gonna work out everywhere in the world. You kin fight it an’ go under, or you kin be progressive an’ make yourself part of the risin’ power o’ the proletariat.”

“If the Yankees weren’t holding us both down—” Kennedy said. Apicius nodded, his heavy-jowled face calm and certain. Cincinnatus had seen that look before, most often on the faces of preachers convinced of their own righteousness than anywhere else.

He wondered if Apicius really knew what he was talking about. If the united workers of the world were so strong—“If the workers are so strong,” he said, more thinking aloud than intending to criticize, “why didn’t they all say two years ago they didn’t want to go out and kill each other, instead of lining up and cheering and waving their flags?”