Breakthroughs

Achilles, too.

As if taking some small revenge for that, the clerk shook his head. “Not enough, boy. You got any other kin in town, any other kin at all, who haven’t been registered yet? Names and addresses both, mind you-you reckon I’m gonna let you waste my time, you can think again.”

“My pa’s called Seneca. My mother’s name is Livia.” Cincinnatus gave their address, too.

“Now we’re gettin’ somewhere,” the clerk said in sour satisfaction. He gnawed the pen some more, scribbled on the form in front of him, and went on, “All right, boy, what surname are you choosing for this lot of people here?”

Having hashed that out with his family ahead of time, Cincinnatus answered without hesitation: “Driver, suh.”

“Driver,” the clerk repeated. He seemed to weigh it on some mental scales, which finally came down on the side of approval. “Well, that’s not too bad. Anybody would’ve asked me, I’d’ve told him letting niggers own surnames was a pack of damnfoolishness, but nobody asked me. Even niggers have surnames in the USA, and we’re in the USA, so…” He shrugged, as if to show he wasn’t responsible for the policy he had to carry out.

“Makes it easier to keep tabs on us,” Cincinnatus said, not altogether without bitterness.

“Did fine with passbooks for a hell of a long time,” the clerk said, but he brightened, if only fractionally. “Maybe you’re right.” He wrote some more, reading as he wrote. “Cincinnatus Driver. Elizabeth Driver. Achilles Driver. Seneca Driver. Livia Driver. Wherever any of you go in the United States, that there last name goes with you.”

When you got right down to it, that was a pretty large thought. “You don’t mind me sayin’ so, I’d sooner carry around a name than a passbook.”

The clerk looked at Cincinnatus as if he emphatically did mind his saying any such thing. “Cards for all you people will be coming in the mail in the next few days. From now on, if it has to do with you, it has to do with Cincinnatus Driver, whatever it is. You got that, boy?”

“Yes, suh,” Cincinnatus answered.

“Then get the hell out of here,” the clerk said, and Cincinnatus-Cincinnatus Driver-took his leave. Behind him, the clerk called “Next!” and the black man in back of Cincinnatus stepped forward to take his place.

He got out of the Covington city hall as fast as he could; he kept expecting Luther Bliss to pop out of nowhere and start grilling him. Had the Kentucky State Police chief known what all Cincinnatus had done instead of merely suspecting him because of the company he kept, he would have been in a different line, a line where his ankles were shackled to those of the prisoners in front of and behind him.

When he got outside, he let out a sigh of relief. He also felt a surge of pride that surprised him. Somebody might actually call him Mr. Driver now, a form of address impossible before. In the form of his name-if in very little else-he had become a white man’s equal.

He spotted Apicius in the line snaking its way toward the building. The barbecue cook saw him, too, and waved. As he waved back, he wondered what the local Red leader would think of this small measure of equality. Nothing much, he suspected; mystification was one of Apicius’ favorite words.

Apicius waved again, more urgently this time. With a certain amount of reluctance, Cincinnatus approached. “What are you callin’ yourself?” the fat black man asked him.

“Driver,” Cincinnatus answered. “How ’bout you? You gonna be Cook?”

“Hell, no.” Apicius’ jowls wobbled as he scornfully shook his head. “I’m gonna call me an’ my boys Wood. You ain’t got the right wood in the fire, you ain’t got no barbecue.”

“Apicius Wood.” As the clerk had before, Cincinnatus tested the flavor of the new surname. As the clerk had, he decided he approved. “Sounds pretty good, you want to know what I think.”

“Don’t care much,” the Red answered, “on account of it don’t matter a hill of beans any which way. Just one more tool of the oppressors to do a better job of exploitin’ us. Hell of a lot easier to keep track of Apicius Wood than it is to keep track of Apicius the barbecue king.”

He made no particular effort to keep his voice down. Most Kentucky Negroes, like most down in what was still the CSA, had at least some sympathy for the Marxist line. Cincinnatus felt that way himself. Grinning at Apicius, though, he said, “They ain’t gonna have much trouble keepin’ track o’ you.”

Apicius set his hands on his hips, which only made him look wider than ever. “I ain’t sayin’ you’re wrong, mind you, but I ain’t sayin’ you’ re right, neither,” he said. “Other thing is, ain’t a whole lot o’ niggers stand out in a crowd like I do.” He snapped his fingers. “In a crowd-that reminds me, goddamn if it don’t.”

“Reminds you of what?” Cincinnatus asked.

“Reminds me of why Tom Kennedy got his head blown off,” Apicius replied.

Cincinnatus stiffened. “I think maybe you better tell me whatever it is you reckon you know.”

“Wonder if I ought to,” Apicius said thoughtfully. “I still don’t know whose game you’re playin’.”

“I’m playing my own game, goddammit,” Cincinnatus replied in a low, furious voice. “And I’ll tell you somethin’ else, too-I know how to play rough. You don’t reckon I’m tellin’ you the truth, you remember what happened to Conroy’s store and you reckon it up again.”

“You come prowlin’ round my place, you ain’t goin’ home again,” Apicius told him. “Catfish on the river bottom git hungry this time o’ year.” Cincinnatus looked back at him and said not a word. The barbecue cook was the first to shift from foot to foot. “Dammit, I do recollect about Conroy’s.”

“Tell me what you know, then.”

“Think about it like this,” Apicius said. “Think about how come Kennedy came round your place. Think about how come he didn’t go to Conroy or any o’ them Confederate diehards.”

Cincinnatus duly thought about it. His first thought was the one Apicius no doubt wanted him to have: that Kennedy had fallen foul of the diehards and was trying to escape them. But Cincinnatus’ ex-boss could as easily have been fleeing Luther Bliss or the U.S. Army. Or, for that matter, the Reds might have been after him while trying to make him-and Cincinnatus-think someone else was.

Letting Apicius see any of those thoughts but the first one was dangerous. “Uh- huh,” Cincinnatus said, as if to tell the Red leader he was with him and had not gone one step beyond him.

A broad, friendly grin spread over Apicius’ face. Cincinnatus trusted it no further than he would have trusted a smile from Luther Bliss. Apicius said, “That’s the way the money goes.”

Pop goes the weasel, Cincinnatus thought. Popped right between the eyes, most likely. And I’m the weasel. He took up his new surname and carried it off toward his home.

“We’ve grabbed ’em by the nose!” Lieutenant General George Custer said in the map room of what had been the Tennessee state capitol. “Now we have to kick ’em in the pants.”

“Yes, sir,” Major Abner Dowling said resignedly. Custer was a great one for mouthing slogans. He was a great one for inspiring his men, too. He’d had a lot of practice at that, having fed so many of them into the meat grinder. But, now that he’d come up with what was admittedly the great military idea of his career, he seemed disinclined to think about any other military ideas.

He had reasons, too, or thought he did. “The War Department is run by morons,” he growled, “and expects everyone else to be a moron, too.”

“Sir, as I’ve said before, in my opinion it’s just as well that First Army doesn’t advance on Memphis,” Dowling answered. “We’re too distant for the thrust to do much good. Murfreesboro is a better choice all the way around.”

Custer muttered something into his gilded mustache. It sounded like, If the War Department orders it, it must be wrong. But, since he hadn’t said it quite loud enough to compel Dowling to notice it, his adjutant didn’t. He made such a point of not noticing, in fact, that Custer had to say something intelligible: “So long as we kick ’em in the pants hard enough, maybe it won’t matter which direction we go in.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said, more enthusiastically than before. “We truly may have them on the ropes. All we need to do is finish them off.”

Was he really talking like that? He was. Did he really believe what he was saying? He did. That he believed it still astonished him. The Rebs were fighting hard-nobody had ever accused Confederate soldiers of having any quit in them-but there weren’t enough of them, white or black, and they didn’t have enough guns or barrels to hold back the United States, not any more.