from Confederate Tennessee into U.S. Kentucky, and how Border Patrol and National Guard units had forced them to go back into the CSA. They claimed intolerable persecution in their own country, the reporter wrote, but, as their entrance into the United States would have been both illegal and undesirable, the officers of the Border Patrol rejected their pleas, as is longstanding U.S. policy.
He'd made plenty of deliveries to the Herald-Express. If he'd had that reporter in front of him, he would have punched the man-a white man, of course-right in the nose. He came down on the clutch so clumsily, he stalled his truck and had to fire it up again. That made him realize how furious he was. He hadn't done anything like that since he was learning how to drive back before the Great War.
But, as he rolled north toward the railroad yards, he realized he shouldn't be mad at the reporter alone. The fellow hadn't done anything but clearly state what U.S. government policy was and always had been. Back when the border between the USA and the CSA ran along the Ohio River, U.S. patrols had shot Negroes who were trying to flee to the United States while they were in the water. The USA had only a handful of blacks, and wanted no more. A lot of people here would have been happier without the ones they already had.
Cincinnatus' laughter had a sour edge. 'They was stuck with me and the ones like me, on account of they couldn't no way get Kentucky without us,' he said. He was glad to live under U.S. rather than C.S. rule, especially now that the Freedom Party called the shots down in the Confederacy.
The race riots sweeping through the CSA were the main reason Negroes were trying to get out, of course. Jews had run away from Russian pogroms to the USA. Irishmen had escaped famines and English landlords. Germans had fled a failed revolution. Poles and Italians and Frenchmen had done their best to get away from hunger and poverty. They'd all found places in the United States.
Negroes from the Confederate States? Men and women who had desperately urgent reasons to leave their homes, who already spoke English, and who were ready to work like the slaves their parents and grandparents (and some of them, as youths) had been? Could they make homes for themselves here?
No.
He supposed he should have been glad U.S. military authorities hadn't chased Negroes south into Confederate territory as they advanced during the war. For a moment, he wondered why they hadn't. But he could see reasons. The Confederates could have got good use from the labor of colored refugees. And if anything could have made Negroes loyal to the CSA, getting thrown out of the USA would have been it. U.S. officials, for a wonder, had been smart enough to figure that out, and so it hadn't happened.
Here were the railroad yards, a warren of tracks and switches and trains and fragments of trains scattered here and there over them, apparently-but not really-at random. A couple of railroad dicks, billy clubs in their hands, pistols on their hips, recognized Cincinnatus and his truck and waved him forward. 'Mornin', Lou. Mornin', Steve,' he called to them. They waved again. He'd been coming here a long time now.
As he bumped over railroad crossings toward a train, he watched the two dicks in his rear-view mirror. They were chasing a ragged white man who'd been riding the rails and was either switching trains or getting off for good. Cincinnatus would have bet the fellow was bound for somewhere else, probably somewhere out West. Not many folks wanted to stay in Des Moines. Even if this poor bastard had had that in mind, he wouldn't by the time Steve and Lou got through with him.
There stood the conductor, as important a man on a freight train as the supercargo was on a steamboat. Cincinnatus hit the brakes, jumped out of his truck, and ran over to the man with the clipboard in his hand. 'Ain't seen you in a while, Mr. Navin,' he said, touching the brim of his soft cloth cap. 'What you got for me to haul today?'
'Hello, Cincinnatus,' Wesley Navin said. Cincinnatus wondered how many conductors came through Des Monies. However many it was, he knew just about all of them. By now, they knew him, too. They knew how reliable he was. Only a handful of them refused to give him business because he was colored. Navin wasn't one of those. He pointed down the train to a couple of boxcars. 'How you fixed for blankets and padding? I've got a shipment of flowerpots here, should be enough for this town for about the next hundred years.'
'Got me plenty,' Cincinnatus answered. 'How many stops I got to make on this here run?'
'Let me have a look here…' Navin consulted the all-important clipboard. 'Six.'
'Where they at?' Cincinnatus asked. The conductor read off the addresses. Cincinnatus spread his hands, pale palms up. 'You runnin' me all over creation. I got to ask four dollars. Oughta say five-I might not make it back here to git me another load today.'
'Pay you three and a quarter,' Navin said.
'My mama didn't raise no fools,' Cincinnatus said. 'I get my ass over to the riverside. I get honest pay for honest work there.'
'You're the blackest damn Jew I ever seen,' Navin said. Cincinnatus only grinned; that wasn't the first time people had said such things about him. Still grumbling, the conductor said, 'Well, hell, three-fifty. Since it's you.'
'Don't do me no favors like that,' Cincinnatus told him. 'I ain't goin' nowhere till I don't lose money on the way, and you ain't got there yet.'
They settled at $3.75. A few years earlier, that wouldn't have been enough to keep Cincinnatus in the black. But he was more efficient now than he had been-and prices on everything had come down since money got so tight.
He loaded what seemed like nine million flowerpots into the back of the Ford, using ratty old blankets to keep one stack from bumping another. Anything he broke, of course, he was stuck with. He winced every time the truck jounced over a pothole. He'd done a little thinking before leaving the railroad yard with the flowerpots. The couple of minutes he spent probably saved him an hour of travel time, for he worked out the best route to take to get to all six nurseries and department stores. That was part of what being efficient was all about.
It let him get back to the railroad yard just past two in the afternoon: plenty of time to get more cargo and deliver it before sundown. With the sun setting as he finished the second load, he drove home, parking the truck in front of his apartment building. When he walked into the apartment, his daughter Amanda was doing homework at the kitchen table, while Elizabeth, his wife, fried ham steaks in a big iron spider on the stove.
Cincinnatus gave Elizabeth a quick kiss, then said, 'Where's Achilles at? He in his room?'
She shook her head. She was cooking in the maid's clothes she'd worn to work. 'He blew in a little before you got home, stayed just long enough to change his clothes, and then he done blew out again,' she said.
'Why'd he bother changin'?' Cincinnatus asked. 'What he does, he don't need to.' Thanks not least to Cincinnatus' insistence-sometimes delivered with a two-by-four-his son had earned his high-school diploma. Then he'd amazed everyone-including, very likely, himself-by landing a clerk's job at an insurance company. He wasn't likely to work up much of a sweat filing papers or adding up columns of numbers.
But Elizabeth said, 'Why you think? He takin' Grace out to the movin' pictures again.'
'Oh.' Cincinnatus didn't know how to go on from there. Grace Chang lived in the apartment right upstairs from his own. Her father ran a laundry and brewed excellent beer (a very handy talent in a state as thoroughly dry as Iowa). Cincinnatus couldn't deny that Grace was a sweet girl, or that she was a pretty girl. No one at all could deny that she was a Chinese girl.
She'd been going out with Achilles for more than a year now. It made Cincinnatus acutely nervous. These weren't the Confederate States, and Grace wasn't white, but even so… Having the two of them go out together also made Mr. Chang nervous. He liked Achilles well enough-he'd known him since he was a little boy-but there was no denying Achilles wasn't Chinese.
'Ain't nothin' good gonna come o' this,' Cincinnatus said heavily.
Elizabeth didn't answer right away. She flipped the ham steaks over with a long-handled spatula. 'Never can tell,' she said when they were sizzling again. 'No, never can tell. Mebbe grandkids come o' this.'
'Do Jesus!' Cincinnatus exclaimed. 'You reckon he wants to marry her?'
His wife used the spatula on a mess of potatoes frying in a smaller pan. Then she said, 'Don't reckon he go with a gal for more'n a year unless he thinkin' 'bout that. Don't reckon she go with him unless she thinkin' 'bout it, too.'
'What do we do, he ends up marryin' the Chinaman's daughter?' Cincinnatus asked.
Elizabeth turned more potatoes before answering, 'Upstairs right about now, I reckon Mr. Chang sayin' to his missus, 'What we do, they git married?' ' Her effort to reproduce a singsong Chinese accent was one of the funnier things Cincinnatus had heard lately.
