Walk in Hell

Chihuahuans and Cubans-Cubans without black blood in them, anyhow-had a curious place in the CSA: better off than Negroes, but not really part of the larger society, either, cut off from it by swarthiness, language, and religion. But a Sonoran with a weapon in his hand was not something to take lightly. Stinky Salley kept quiet after that-he made a point of keeping quiet after that.

Instead of making cornmeal into little loaves, Rodriguez wet his share and shaped it into patties he fried in lard and wrapped around his tinned rations. Pinkard and a couple of other soldiers in the squad were doing that, too; beans and beef went down easier and tastier. Pinkard took a bite out of his-tortilla, Hip called a cornmeal patty-then said in a low voice, “You shut him up sharp.”

Rodriguez shrugged. “If you step on a scorpion when he is small, he don’t get no bigger.”

“Yeah.” Jeff’s eyes slid to Stinky Salley. The ex-clerk still didn’t look as if he knew what had hit him. That, Pinkard thought, wasn’t so good. Stinky’d done well enough against U.S. soldiers, out at a distance. But when Rodriguez delivered his warning, he’d folded up. In a way, it was just Stinky’s problem. But in another way, it warned of a weakness in the squad, and that was everybody’s problem.

Off in the distance, a rifle barked. Pinkard’s head came up, as a watchdog’s would do at the sound of someone walking past his house. Another shot followed, also a long way off. Then silence. He relaxed.

Rodriguez swigged from his canteen and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He’d already put the bayonet away, having made his point with it. “You know what?” he said to Pinkard. “I miss my esposa. How you say esposa, Jeff? My woman, my-”

“Your wife?” Pinkard said.

“Si, my wife.” Rodriguez pronounced the word with care. “I go to sleep in the night, I see my wife in a sueno.” Not knowing or not caring that wasn’t English, he went on, “When I wake up, all I see is soldados feos-ugly soldiers.” Sueno was something like dream, Jeff realized. Hip Rodriguez sighed. “I do better, I stay to sleep.” He glanced over toward Pinkard. “You got a wife, yes, Jeff?”

“Yeah. I wish I was home with her, too.” Pinkard was amazed at how little he’d thought of Emily since he got his notice from the Conscription Bureau and reported for duty. Now that she flooded into his mind, he understood why he’d done his best to block the memories-they hurt too much, when set alongside the squalid reality of the life he was living.

Fleas and lice and fear and mutilation and stinks and-He turned away from the campfire, a scowl on his face. If he weren’t here, if he hadn’t got that damned buff-colored envelope, he could have been in Emily’s arms right now, making the bedsprings creak, her breath warm and moist on the skin of his neck, her voice urging him on to things he hadn’t imagined he could do or else rising to a cry of joy that must have made Bedford Cunningham and all his other neighbors jealous. Dear God, she loved to do it!

Courteous as a cat, more courteous than most curious Confederates would have been, Hip Rodriguez left him alone with his thoughts. For a few seconds, Jeff was glad of that. And then, all at once, he wasn’t.

Back before the government put him in butternut and stuck a rifle in his hands, he’d matched Emily stroke for stroke, given her everything she’d wanted in the way of loving. Now he wasn’t there any more. She’d grown used to making love all the time. Would she be looking for a substitute?

He shivered, regardless of how hot and muggy the evening was. In his imagination, he could see her thrashing on the bed with-whom? The face on the male form riding her didn’t matter. It wasn’t his own. That was enough, and bad enough.

His fists bunched. This is all moonshine, he told himself fiercely. He’d never had any reason to believe Emily would want to be unfaithful to him. If ever two people loved each other, Emily and he were those two. But he’d never been away from her before. And she didn’t just love him. She loved love, and he knew it. Moonshine, dammit, moonshine.

When he hadn’t said anything for some little while, Rodriguez quietly asked, “You are lonely, amigo?”

“You bet I am,” Pinkard said. “Ain’t you?”

“I am lonely for my esposa, my wife. I am lonely for my farm. I am lonely for my village, where I go to drink in the cantina. I am lonely for my proper food. I am lonely for my lengua, where I can talk and I don’t got to think before I say every word. I am lonely for not being nowhere near these yanquis who try of killing me. Si, I am lonely.”

Jeff hadn’t thought of it like that. Even though the filthy picture in his imagination wouldn’t go away, he said, “Sounds like I got it easy next to you, maybe.”

“Life is hard.” Rodriguez shrugged. “And after life is done, then you die.” He shrugged again. “What can anyone do?”

It was a good question. It was, when Pinkard thought about it, a very good question. If there were any better questions out there, he had no idea what they might be. “You do the best you can, is all,” he answered slowly, and then looked around at the hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere he was currently inhabiting. “If this here is the best I can do, I been doin’ somethin’ wrong up till now.”

“I also think this very thing,” Rodriguez said with a smile. “Then I think what they do to my compadres who do not come into the Army when it is their time. Beside that, this is muy bueno.”

“Yeah, you try and dodge conscription, they land on you with both feet.” Pinkard yawned. Exhaustion was landing on him with both feet. He spread his blanket under him-too hot to roll himself in it-and smeared his face and hands with camphor-smelling goo that was supposed to hold the mosquitoes and other bugs at bay. As far as he could see, it didn’t do much good, but he was happier with it in his nostrils than with what he smelled like after God only knew how long since his last bath.

The next morning, Captain Connolly got the company moving before sunup. The promised drive on Lubbock hadn’t happened. Nobody was saying much about that, but nobody was very happy with it, either. Trying to build a front to keep the damnyankees from moving deeper into Texas wasn’t the same as throwing them out of the state when they had no business there.

What can anyone do? Hip Rodriguez’s question echoed in Jeff’s mind. So did his own answer. You do the best you can, is all. If the best the CSA could do was keep the USA from pushing deeper into Texas, the war wasn’t going the way everybody’d figured it would when it started.

The Yankees were extending their line northward, too. Texas, Jeff thought wearily as he tramped through it, had nothing but room. The invaders kept hoping they could get around the Confederates’ flank, and the job for the boys in butternut was convincing them they couldn’t.

A brisk little fire fight developed, both sides banging away at each other from little foxholes they scraped into the hard earth as soon as the bullets started flying. Neither U.S. nor C.S. forces were there in any great numbers; it was almost like a game, though nobody wanted to be removed from the board.

“Hold ’em, boys,” Captain Connolly yelled. “Help’s on the way.” Firing at a muzzle flash, Jeff figured the Yankees’ commander was probably shouting the same thing. One of them would prove a liar. After a moment, Jeff realized they both might prove liars.

But Captain Connolly had the right of it. A battery of three-inch howitzers came galloping up behind the thin Confederate line and started hurling shrapnel shells at the equally thin Yankee line. The U.S. soldiers, without artillery of their own and not dug in to withstand a bombardment, sullenly drew back across the prairie. The Confederates advanced-not too far, not too fast, lest they run into more than they could handle.

“We licked ’em,” Jeff said, and Hip Rodriguez nodded. Pinkard took off his helmet to scratch his head. Victory was supposed to be glorious. He didn’t feel anything like glory. He was alive, and nobody’d shot him. He fumbled for tobacco and a scrap of paper in which to wrap it. Right now, alive and unshot would do.

Barracks swelled Tucson, New Mexico, far beyond its natural size. In one of those barracks, Sergeant Gordon McSweeney sat on a cot wishing he were someplace, anyplace, else. “I want to get back to the field,” he murmured, more than half to himself.

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.”