Walk in Hell

“Damned if I know,” Kimball answered. “But this is New York City, after all. They would have been in port, and some half-smart son of a bitch probably said, ‘Well, we’ve got ’em right close by. Let’s use ’em to make sure nobody gets frisky while we’re pulling our boat back into the water.’ It’s only a guess, mind you, but I’ll lay it’s a good one.”

“Bet you’re right, sir,” Brearley said.

Kimball didn’t care whether he was right or not. Why didn’t matter. What mattered, and there in front of him was the juiciest what this side of a fox sauntering into an unguarded henhouse. At his orders, the Bonefish pulled away from the fishing boats she’d been following and slid through the water toward the battleships.

They didn’t have a clue the boat was on the same planet, let alone closing toward eight hundred yards. They weren’t keeping anything like a proper antisubmersible watch, not here so close to home. All four of his forward tubes already had fish in them. He’d known from the beginning he would have to shoot fast and run.

“Five-degree spread,” he ordered. “I’m going to give two targets two fish apiece. I can’t get a clean shot at the third one. Are we ready, gentlemen?” He knew how keyed-up he was-he hadn’t called his crew a pack of bastards or anything of the sort. “Fire one! And two! And three! And four!”

Compressed air hissed as the fish leaped away. They ran straight and true. A bare instant before they reached their targets, one of the battleships began showing more smoke, as if trying to get away.

The explosions from at least two hits echoed inside the Bonefish. Whoops and cheers from the men drowned them out. “Right full rudder to course 130, Tom,” Kimball said exultantly. “Let’s get the hell out of here. If we don’t hit a mine, we’re all a pack of goddamn heroes-I think I nailed both those sons of bitches.”

And if we do hit a mine, it’s still a good trade for the C.S. Navy, he thought. But that had nothing to do with the price of beer. He’d done what he’d come to do; he’d done more than he’d thought he would be able to manage. Up till then, he hadn’t cared what would happen afterwards. Now, all at once, he very much wanted to live, so he could give the damnyankees’ balls another good kick somewhere further down the line.

If the hiring clerk at the cotton mill in Greenville, South Carolina, had been any more bored, he would have fallen out of his chair. “Name?” he asked, and yawned enormously.

“Jeroboam,” Scipio answered. After his meeting with Anne Colleton, he didn’t dare keep the false name he’d borne before, any more than he’d dared stay in Columbia.

“Jero-” That got the clerk’s attention: it made him unhappy. “You able to spell it for me, nigger?” Scipio did, without any trouble. The clerk drummed his fingers up and down on the desktop. “You read and write? Sounds like it.”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio answered. He’d decided he didn’t need to lie about that. It wasn’t against the law, and wasn’t even that uncommon.

“Cipher, too?” the clerk asked. He yawned again, and scratched his cheek, just below the edge of the patch covering his left eye socket, a patch that explained why a white man in his twenties wasn’t at the front.

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said again, and cautiously added, “Some, I do.”

But the clerk just nodded and wrote something down on the form he was completing. For a moment, he almost approached briskness: “You got a passbook you can show me, Jeroboam?”

“No, suh,” Scipio said resignedly.

“Too bad,” the clerk said. “That’s gonna cost you.” Scipio had been sure it was going to cost him; now he wanted to find out just how much. He had more money now than when he’d come to Columbia; he figured he could get by till this petty crook was through shaking him down. But, to his amazement, the clerk went on, “These last couple weeks, we’ve been paying twenty-dollar hiring bonuses to bucks with their papers all in order, on account of they stay with us longer and we want to keep ’em in the plant.”

“Ain’t got no papers,” Scipio repeated, doing his best to hide how surprised he was. “Been a busy time, dese pas’ couple years.”

“Nigger, you don’t know the half of it,” the clerk said. Considering what all Scipio had been through, the clerk didn’t know what he was talking about. But then he scratched by the eye patch again, so he knew some things Scipio didn’t, too. He asked, “How old are you?”

“I’se fo’ty-fo’-I think,” Scipio answered.

“All right.” The clerk wrote that down, too. “Even if you took your black ass down to the recruiting station, they wouldn’t stick you in butternut, so we ain’t real likely to lose you anyhow, ain’t that right?”

“I reckon not,” Scipio said. All of a sudden, things made more sense. “You losin’ a lot o’ de hands to de war, suh?”

“Too damn many,” the clerk said. “Always knew niggers was crazy. You got to be crazy if you want the chance of gettin’ shot and next to no money while you’re doin’ it.” He scratched by the patch yet again. “I been through all that, and I purely don’t see the point to it.”

“Me neither, suh,” Scipio said. But he did, though he wouldn’t say so to a white man. The clerk had gone to war along with his peers, masters of what they surveyed. If Negroes put on butternut, they hoped to gain some measure of the equality the clerk took for granted.

“Well, that’s as may be,” the one-eyed white man said. “Pay is two dollars an’ fifty cents a day. You start tomorrow mornin’, half past seven. You make sure you’re here on time.”

“Yes, suh. I do dat, suh.” Scipio had expected warnings far more dire. That this one was so mild told him how badly the mill needed workers. So did their attitude toward his papers, or lack of same. The clerk called him nigger in every other sentence, but the clerk had undoubtedly called every black he saw a nigger from the day he learned how to talk. He did it more to identify than to demean.

Scipio went looking for a room at a boardinghouse, and found one not far from the cotton mill. The manager of the building, a skinny, wizened Negro who called himself Aurelius, said, “We’s right glad to have you, Jeroboam, and that’s a fac’. Lots o’ folks is leavin’ here fo’ to join the Army. Up from the Congaree country, is you?”

“Dat right,” Scipio said. Aurelius’ accent was different from his, closer to the way the white folks of Greenville spoke than to the Low Country dialect Scipio had learned on the Marshlands plantation.

Aurelius scratched his head. His hair had more gray in it than Scipio’s. “You know somethin’, Jeroboam?” he said. “If I thought they’d let me tote a rifle, I’d join the Army my own self. Reckon I wouldn’t mind votin’ an’ all them other things the white folks is givin’ to niggers who goes to war for ’em.”

“Maybe,” was all Scipio said. Having fought against the Confederate government, having the blood of a Confederate officer on his hands, he didn’t think he wanted to put on butternut himself, even had he been young enough for recruiters to want him.

His room was bigger and cleaner and cost less than the one in Columbia. Being just a mill town rather than the state capital, Greenville didn’t have to put on airs. The work Scipio got was marginally easier than what he’d been doing before. Instead of hauling crates of shell casings from one place to another, he loaded bolts of coarse butternut-dyed cloth onto pallets so someone else could haul them off to the cutting rooms.

Two days after he got the job, the young Negro who had been hauling those pallets quit. Another young black took his place. This one lasted a week. A third Negro held the position two days. All three of them resigned to put on that butternut cloth once it had been made into uniforms.

Scipio saw his first black man in Confederate uniform a little more than a week after he came to Greenville. Three big, tough-looking Negroes in butternut came down Park Avenue side by side. They swaggered along as if they owned the sidewalk. Blacks of all ages and both sexes stared at them as if they’d fallen from the moon. Scipio was one of those who stared. He wondered if any of the brand-new soldiers had worn the red armband of the Congaree Socialist Republic the winter before.

As the uniformed Negroes strode along the avenue, sighs rose up from every woman around. If the men in butternut were out for a good time, their problem would be picking and choosing, not finding.

That much, though, Scipio could have guessed beforehand. He found watching whites far more interesting. They stared at the Negroes in uniform, too. Their attitude was more nearly astonishment and uncertainty than delight. Their legislators had passed the bill authorizing Negro soldiers. Now that they were confronted with the reality, they didn’t know what to make of it.

A white captain, perhaps home on leave, came out of a shop on Park Avenue. The three Negroes snapped to attention and gave him salutes so precise, they might have been machined. The captain stopped and looked the