Breakthroughs

ask him.”

Without apparently moving a muscle, Sturtevant made his face into a mask of contempt. “I don’t need to ask him. I already know what he knows.” By the tiniest twitch of an eyebrow, he got across how little he thought that was.

“Well, then, shouldn’t we-?” George began.

“I don’t reckon we’ve got to worry about it, on account of it ain’t gonna matter worth a hill of beans anyway.” Sturtevant waved out across the Atlantic. “Look. The Rebs won’t bother keeping a boat around these parts that much longer anyway, because the shipping route they were guarding went to hell and gone when Dom Pedro finally figured out which side his bread was buttered on.”

As if to underscore his words, a flotilla of U.S. cruisers steamed past, heading south. They looked enormous alongside the destroyers that cruised to either side of them, protecting them from submarines as sheepdogs protected their flocks from wolves. Battleships were yet another size up; to George, who was used to going to sea aboard fishing boats, they resembled nothing so much as floating cities.

He said, “Haven’t seen so many of our freighters passing through these parts lately, especially northbound.”

“Probably won’t, either,” Sturtevant answered. “They’ll come down from the USA to supply our warships, yeah, but for a lot of things they won’t have to head back to the States any more. They can load up in one of the Brazilian ports-hell of a lot quicker trip that way.”

“Son of a bitch, you’re right.” Enos shook his head, disgusted with himself. “I should have thought of that.”

“Hey, nobody can think of everything.” Sturtevant glanced over at Lieutenant Crowder again. Crowder, still chattering away with the other officer, tapped his forefinger against his own chest, so he was talking about his favorite subject: himself. The veteran petty officer rolled his eyes. “Jesus Christ, some people can’t think of anything.”

Enos snorted. “I’m not going to argue with you about that.” He made himself cheer up, almost as if a superior officer had given him an order. “And odds are you’re right about the other, too. Once the fellows with the high foreheads back in Philadelphia figure it out, too, they’ll probably call us back to port.”

Carl Sturtevant laughed in his face. “You fisherman, you! It’d be cheaper to do things that way-sure it would. But do you think the Navy gives a fart in a hurricane about cheap? In a pig’s ass they do, especially during a war. We don’t go home till the whole Quadruple Entente’s waving white flags at us-and maybe we don’t go home then, either. Maybe we go around the Horn and teach the Japs they picked the wrong side.” He eyed Enos. “You ever been on the other side of the Equator before?”

“You know damn well I haven’t,” Enos said. “This is further south than I ever figured I’d come before the war started.”

“Just a damn polliwog.” Sturtevant shook his head and clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Well, old Father Neptune will settle your hash.”

Enos had heard about those rituals from sailing men who’d gone through them, some in the Navy, some as merchant seamen. They’d shave his head or put him in a dress or maybe both at once, and he and the rest of the polliwogs on the Ericsson would have to do whatever Father Neptune told them. Something in the way Sturtevant’s eyes gleamed made George ask, “Have you ever been Father Neptune?”

“Who, me? What could have given you that idea?” The petty officer might have been the soul of innocence. Then again, he might not have.

The all-clear sounded then. Lieutenant Crowder kept right on talking with the other officer. As Enos drifted away from his battle station, he quietly asked, “Is he a polliwog, by any chance?”

“I don’t know,” Sturtevant said. “I really don’t know. I may have to go and ask a few questions, because that would be worth finding out. An officer polliwog is just another damn polliwog, as far as Father Neptune’s concerned.” He slapped George on the back. “That could be a lot of fun, couldn’t it?”

“Couldn’t it, though?” George said dreamily. “It’s not that he’s dumb-more that he thinks he’s so smart.”

Chipping paint was easier to take after that, somehow; instead of thinking about himself going through the antics Father Neptune would require of him, he thought about Lieutenant Crowder going through them. When someone else was the victim, the joke got a lot funnier.

The petty officer supervising the never-ending job of stopping rust stared at Enos when he strolled by. “Damn me to hell if you haven’t pulled your weight today,” he said. “Well done.”

When George looked back to see what had impressed the petty officer, he discovered he’d chipped twice as much paint as he usually would have done in so much time. Thinking about Lieutenant Crowder making an ass of himself in front of the whole crew had been so entrancing, he hadn’t kept his work pace to the usual just enough to get by. He shook his head. Now they’d expect him to work this hard all the time-and it was Lieutenant Crowder’s fault.

Everything was Lieutenant Crowder’s fault. “If I get killed, I’ll never forgive him,” George muttered.

Lieutenant Straubing paced among the big White trucks as colored roustabouts hauled supplies from the Covington wharves and loaded them into the green-gray machines for the drive south. Straubing spoke to the men, some white, some black, who would be in the cabs of those trucks: “What you’ve got to remember, boys, is that the war’s not over. Yes, there’s a cease-fire in Tennessee, and it’s still holding pretty well. But the shooting could start up again any day, and there’s still fighting in Virginia and out in the West. Besides, God only knows there are Rebel diehards loose in Kentucky. Don’t do anything stupid like dropping your guard this late in the war. It’d be a shame to get yourself killed now.”

Cincinnatus-Cincinnatus Driver, as he was learning to think of himself these days-turned to the driver nearest him and said, “The lieutenant don’t give two whoops in hell if we get ourselves killed. If the cargo don’t get through to where it’s supposed to go, that’s a different story. That ticks him off plenty.”

Herk chuckled. “You got that one right.” He was as white as Lieutenant Straubing, and Cincinnatus, despite spending a lot of time on the road with him, even getting shot up by some of those diehards with him, still had no idea what his last name was, or even if he owned one. He’d always just been Herk. Now he went on, “The lieutenant treats the cargo like he was paying for it out of his own pocket.”

“Yeah,” Cincinnatus said. He watched the roustabouts load more trucks. He’d done that work himself, before he’d convinced the U.S. forces to let him drive instead-and to pay him more money for doing it. Despite his own experience at their job, he muttered, “I wish they’d move faster, damn it.”

Herk didn’t make any cracks about lazy niggers. Lieutenant Straubing would have given him seventeen different kinds of hell if he had. Men of one color giving men of another a hard time about it interfered with getting materiel down to the front, so he refused to tolerate it. What Herk did say was, “You’ve been itchy to get on the road lately, haven’t you? Kid givin’ you a hard time at home?”

“Nah, it ain’t that so much,” Cincinnatus answered. “When I’m movin’, though, nobody’s botherin’ me, you know what I’m sayin’? There’s just me and the truck and the road, that’s all.”

“Yeah, sure-unless somebody’s layin’ in the bushes with a goddamn machine gun like happened before,” Herk said.

“Happen inside Covington easy as it can outside,” Cincinnatus said. “Had a man shot dead on my own front stoop, remember. Could have been me shot dead out there, easy as that other fella.”

When he was on the road, he didn’t have to worry about whether every stranger he passed on the sidewalk would carry tales about him to Luther Bliss…or to Apicius-no, Apicius Wood-and his Red friends…or to Joe Conroy and however many other Confederate diehards still operated in Covington. When he was on the road, he was free. Oh, he had to obey Lieutenant Straubing’s orders, but his spirit was free. That counted for more than he’d ever imagined.

At last, the cargo bay in his truck was full. Whistling under his breath, he cranked the White’s engine to loud, flatulent life. When it was going, he jumped into the cab and fed it more gas. Other trucks rumbled awake, too. With Lieutenant Straubing in the lead, they headed south.

More of the road down to Tennessee was paved every time Cincinnatus drove it. He suspected that wasn’t true only of the road that went through Covington. The United States would need to move supplies down every highway they could. When the war ended, Kentucky would have a pretty fine network of paved roads, or at least the north-south strands of such a network.

A man in the trucking business-a man like Cincinnatus Driver, say-might do well for himself. There were some