Breakthroughs

rich Negroes in the USA: not many, but a few. That put the USA a few up on the CSA. “A chance,” Cincinnatus muttered. No one sitting beside him in the cab could have heard the words, but that didn’t matter. He knew what he was saying. “All I want is a chance. I ever get it, I’ll make the most of it.”

He wasn’t going to hold his breath hoping he would get it. Laws against blacks weren’t so tough as they were in the CSA, though that varied from state to state. What didn’t vary was that most whites in the USA would have been just as well pleased if they could have readmitted Kentucky without its Negroes.

He rolled past a truck by the side of the road, the driver, a black man, out there with a jack and a pump and a patch, repairing the puncture. Cincinnatus hoped it was only one of those things that happened now and again, and that the diehards hadn’t gone and strewn the road with nails or broken glass or specially made four-pronged inner- tube biters. That would make a lot of trucks late, and that would make Lieutenant Straubing unhappy. Very little else would, but that was guaranteed to do the trick.

Parts of the country were very much as they had been before the war began: prosperous farmlands raising wheat and corn and tobacco and horses. More, though, looked as if a mad devil had lost his temper and spent twenty years kicking it to pieces. That wasn’t even so far wrong, except that war had done the job faster than any devil could have managed.

Near Covington, almost three years had passed since U.S. forces overran the countryside. Grass had grown over trenches; rain had softened their outlines; some of the rubble and wrecked buildings had been cleared away; some had even been rebuilt. The farther south Cincinnatus went, the fresher the scars of war got. The Confederate States had fought as hard as they could to keep Kentucky one of their number-the tormented landscape told of their effort. But it spoke even more loudly of their failure.

Cincinnatus’ luck held: he got through the day without a puncture. After a stop for fuel for the truck and a bowl of pork and beans from an Army kettle at midday, he rolled on steadily until, toward evening, he crossed from Kentucky into Tennessee. He started passing bands of soldiers heading toward the front. They got off onto the soft shoulder for the truck convoy and smiled and waved as the big, square, clumsy machines passed them. They even smiled and waved at Cincinnatus. They had the world by the tail, and they knew it.

He also steered the truck past columns of men coming away from the front. A few of them, a very few, showed the same high spirits as the soldiers who were replacing them. Most simply trudged along toward the north, putting one foot in front of the other, their faces and no doubt their minds far away. They’d seen so much hell, they didn’t yet realize they’d escaped it-or perhaps they’d brought it with them.

They’d converted the White from acetylene lamps to electric ones not too long before; Cincinnatus enjoyed being able to throw light on the dimming road ahead at the turn of a knob, without having to stop and get out. He’d liked it even better the first time he’d done it in the rain.

At last, about nine o’clock, they pulled into the supply depot. “We expected you an hour ago,” complained an officer with a quartermaster’s badge: crossed sword and key over a wheel on which perched an eagle. Cincinnatus had never known a quartermaster with a good word to say to or about the men who fetched him the supplies he then grudgingly disbursed.

“Sorry, sir,” Lieutenant Straubing said. “We made the best time we could.” He had to give a soft answer: the other man outranked him.

“Likely story,” the quartermaster sniffed. “Well, you’re here now, so we’ll unload you.” He made it sound as if he were doing the truck convoy an enormous favor.

“That’s good, sir,” Straubing said equably. “I can certainly see you’ve been ready for us this past hour.”

In the cab of his truck, Cincinnatus chuckled. Nobody was waiting to unload the trucks. Plenty of people should have been. Straubing knew just how to place the dart to get the most damage with it. “Lieutenant…” the other officer began, doing his best to make Straubing wish he’d never been born. But the truth was too obvious for him to bluster his way past it. He seemed to deflate like a punctured observation balloon that hadn’t caught fire. Then he started shouting for soldiers to get off their lazy backsides and come unload the trucks.

Lieutenant Straubing, having got what he wanted, turned into the soul of helpfulness, offering all sorts of suggestions so the soldiers could do the job quicker and more efficiently. He seemed to be everywhere at once. When he passed Cincinnatus’ truck, he tipped him a wink. Cincinnatus grinned and winked back.

Straubing used the quartermaster’s embarrassment to get him to order his men to run up tents in which the drivers from the truck convoy could spend the night. More and more trucks kept rattling into the depot, as those that had had punctures or breakdowns on the road down from Covington caught up with the rest.

Straubing also arranged for bedrolls and hot meals for the men in his charge. Spooning up greasy stew full of meat that might have come from an elderly cow or a fairly tender mule, Herk said, “The lieutenant, he looks out for his people, no two ways about it.”

“He does that,” Cincinnatus agreed, talking with his mouth full. He’d seen as much before, when Lieutenant Straubing placed under arrest soldier-drivers who tried to refuse to work alongside Negroes from Covington. He didn’t mention that to Herk, because he wasn’t sure the white driver would take it as supporting his point of view. “I ain’t worked for many bosses as good as he is like that. Don’t know if I ever worked for any, now as I think about it.”

Tom Kennedy had come pretty close. Like Lieutenant Straubing, though not to the same degree, he’d been more interested in the work he could get out of Cincinnatus than in what color he was. For a white citizen of the Confederate States, he’d been as good a boss as a colored resident-not citizen-of the CSA could hope for. If he hadn’t been, Cincinnatus would have turned him over to the Yankee soldiers, that night they came looking for him.

His life probably would have been simpler if he had. Too late to worry about that, though. Too late to worry about Tom Kennedy, too, except to wonder who had put a bullet through his head. Shaking his own head, Cincinnatus went back to get more stew and a tin cup full of coffee.

“Come on, boys-eat up and get some sleep,” Straubing called, like a father telling a houseful of children what to do. “We’re heading back to Covington before it gets light; they’ll need us again soon as we can be there. I told you before, the war’s not done till the Rebs roll over and play dead along the whole line.”

The men in the convoy obeyed as children would obey their father, too. Cincinnatus gulped down his coffee- he was tired enough, he knew it wouldn’t keep him awake long-and ducked into one of the tents. He took off his shoes, wrapped himself in a blanket as much to hold bugs at bay as for warmth, and drifted toward sleep.

Outside the tent, the officer from the depot spoke: “Lieutenant, I will say you have yourself a pretty fair batch of men there.”

“I’ve spent a lot of time getting them to where I want them, sir,” Lieutenant Straubing answered. “I must say, I’m not altogether displeased with them now myself. By whatever means necessary, they get the job done. They took a while to learn that from me, but now they’ve got it down solid. They get the job done, and that’s what counts.”

XVII

In Augusta, Georgia, Scipio didn’t turn around every few seconds, as if afraid his own shadow were about to rise up and stab him in the back. It wasn’t that a price didn’t remain on his head. It did. It probably would, as long as he lived: certainly as long as Anne Colleton lived. However unenthusiastically, he’d played too big a role in the Congaree Socialist Republic for that to change.

But, with the Confederate States tottering on the brink of losing the war against the USA-actually, the war was lost, but the CSA hadn’t yet been able to persuade the USA to stop advancing on the fronts where fighting went on-earlier victories over the Socialist Republics were forgotten. Whites on the streets in Augusta went around with stunned, dazed expressions on their faces. They’d never lost a war before. They’d never imagined they could lose a war. The Confederacy had gone from one triumph to another. Now the whites here were learning what the United States had learned half a century before: what defeat tasted like. Next to that, chasing Reds was of small import.

The other side of the coin was that Scipio had got to Georgia. Whatever he’d done in South Carolina, he might as well have done in a foreign country. Confederate states often seemed proud of paying no attention to what went on in their neighbors’ backyards. Georgia had reward posters up for its own Red Negro rebel fugitives, but none for