'He wants you on account of you's a nigger with balls, and you's a nigger with a truck,' Lucullus said. 'Plenty o' black folks, they tryin' to get up to the USA from the CSA. You hear tell 'bout dat?'
'I hear tell,' Cincinnatus admitted.
'You know 'bout the Underground Railroad back before the War o' Secession?' Lucullus asked. 'Run slaves up into free country so they turn free themselves. That's what we do now. We run niggers up into the USA. An' we needs your help.'
'You want me to go down there an' sneak black folks from the CSA up into the USA?' Cincinnatus asked.
Lucullus nodded. 'That's right. What you say?'
Cincinnatus looked at him. He knew what Lucullus and Apicius were counting on: his urge to protect his own. But he had his own right here- Elizabeth, Achilles, and Amanda. He looked Lucullus straight in the eye and said, 'No.'
Lucullus' jaw dropped. 'What?'
'No,' Cincinnatus repeated. 'That means I ain't gonna do it. Sorry you come all this way, but no anyhow. Tell your pa he should find hisself another nigger, one with rocks where his brains ought to be.'
Now Lucullus started to get angry. 'Why not?' he demanded.
'On account of whoever does this, he gonna get caught,' Cincinnatus replied. 'On account of I already been in Luther Bliss' jail once, and ain't nothin' or nobody make me mess with that man again. On account of I do anything you goddamn Reds don't like, I end up dead an' wishin' I was in Luther Bliss' goddamn jail. No. Hell, no.'
He waited for Lucullus to remind him his mother and father still lived in Covington and bad things might happen to them if he didn't go along. He waited, but Lucullus said nothing of the kind. Maybe he knew it would do no good. He did say, 'My pa, he ain't gonna be real happy with you.'
'I ain't real happy with him, or with you, neither,' Cincinnatus said. 'You got a lot o' goddamn nerve, comin' up here an' tryin' to drag me back into that shit. I done gone away a long time ago, an' I ain't never goin' back.' He was almost shouting. If he'd been any angrier, he would have hurled himself at Lucullus.
The younger man held out both hands, pale palms up, in a placating gesture. 'All right. All right. I hears you. I tells my pa what you say.' He left the railroad yard in a hurry.
'Who was that colored fella?' one of the railroad dicks asked Cincinnatus after Lucullus went away. Not that other colored fella, Cincinnatus noticed: they took him so much for granted, they almost forgot what color he was. That never would have happened in Kentucky, either. People there always paid attention to who was who. They were sometimes less overt about noticing than they were here in Iowa, but they always did.
'I used to know him when I was livin' down in Kentucky,' Cincinnatus answered. 'Ain't seen him for years till now.'
'What did he want?'
'Tryin' to talk me into goin' back there. He had some kind o' business deal.' Cincinnatus shrugged. 'I ain't goin'. He's a fly-by-night.'
'You must be rich, if he came all this way from Kentucky to try and take your money,' the dick said. 'He'll have a long, empty time going back. Thought he could play you for a sucker, did he?'
'Anybody reckon's I'm rich, he ain't never seen all the moths fly outa my wallet when I open it.' Cincinnatus hesitated to admit even to himself that he was doing well.
Both railroad dicks laughed. 'Yeah, well, I know that song,' said the one who did most of the talking. 'Don't I just, goddammit.' He and his partner both strode off to prowl around trains.
Cincinnatus bolted the rest of his lunch. Then he went after work for the rest of the day. He got less than he wanted; wasting time with Lucullus had put him behind the other drivers. He muttered and fumed all afternoon. Not only had Lucullus bothered him, he'd cost him money. That hurt more.
When he got back to his apartment building at the end of that long, frustrating day, he found not only Elizabeth but also Mr. and Mrs. Chang from upstairs waiting in the lobby. Mrs. Chang spoke next to no English, but started yelling at him in Chinese the minute he walked in the door.
'Your foolish boy!' Mr. Chang shouted. 'Foolish, foolish boy! What he think he do? He-' He broke down and started to cry.
Cincinnatus looked a question to Elizabeth. All this excitement was likely to mean only one thing. Sure enough, his wife nodded. 'Achilles and Grace, they run off to get married,' she said.
'Do Jesus!' Cincinnatus said softly. He didn't think that was a good idea- which put it mildly. But he didn't know what he-or the Changs-could do about it. His son and their daughter were of legal age. If they wanted to tie the knot, they could. Whether they would live happily ever after was liable to be a different story, but they weren't likely to worry about that now.
He held out his hand to Grace Chang's-no, to Grace Driver's-father. 'Welcome to the family,' he said. 'I reckon either we make the best o' this or else we spend all our time fighting from here on out.'
Mr. Chang looked at the hand for close to half a minute before finally taking it. 'I got nothing against you. You good man,' he said at last. 'Your boy-against your boy I got plenty. But you, me-we no fight.'
'That's about as much as I can ask for right now,' Cincinnatus said. 'Somehow or other, we'll get through it.' The Changs didn't look as if they believed him. For that matter, neither did Elizabeth. And he hadn't said a word about Lucullus' visit yet.
Mort Pomeroy gave Mary a kiss on the cheek. He was bundled into an overcoat, with mittens and fur hat with earflaps. He was only going across the street to the diner, but in the middle of a blizzard all the clothes he could put on were none too many. 'I'll see you tonight, sweetheart,' he said.
'So long,' Mary answered. 'I've got plenty to keep me busy.'
Her husband nodded, though that wouldn't have been true at the McGregor farm. Mort didn't realize how much harder life had been there. However much she loved him, Mary didn't intend to tell him, either. She didn't like keeping secrets from him, but thought she had no choice here.
He kissed her again and went out the door. She went to the window so she could watch him cross the street. She always did that. He knew it, too. He looked up, waving through the snow that blurred his outline. She waved back, and blew him another kiss. He jerked his head to show he'd got it.
As soon as Mort went into the diner, Mary washed the breakfast dishes. She put them in the drainer; she saw no point to drying them herself. Once she'd done that, she looked out the window again. An auto painted U.S. Army green-gray made its slow way up the street in Rosenfeld. Whoever was in it paid no attention to the Canadian woman looking down on him from the apartment building.
'One of these days, I'll make you pay attention,' she muttered. 'You see if I don't.' She started to fix herself a fresh cup of tea, but stopped and shrugged instead. The cup she'd had with breakfast hadn't sat so well as she would have liked. Maybe the next one ought to wait till later.
Even without the tea, her heart beat faster when she got out the bomb-making gear she'd taken from the barn at the farm a year and a half before. After all this time, Mort had no idea the tools and explosives were here. He was busy in the diner's kitchen, but the kitchen pantries in the apartment were her place, and he left them alone.
She thought she knew as much as she needed to know about this business. Only the experiment, of course, would prove that one way or the other. She hadn't made the experiment yet.
A clock chimed the hour: eight o'clock. Not far away, the general store would be opening for business. It wasn't Henry Gibbon's store any more. Peter Karamanlides, the new owner, was a big-nosed Greek from Rochester, New York. His selection of merchandise was almost identical to what Gibbon's had been. His prices were, if anything, microscopically lower. Mary disliked him just the same, though she bought from him. A lot of things had to come from the general store, because nobody else in Rosenfeld carried them.
Karamanlides seemed decent enough. But here he was, one more Yank yankifying Canada. Mary wished there were Canadians buying general stores in Rochester instead, but there weren't, or she'd never heard of any.
She gave her attention back to the business at hand. Her father's bombs had always had wooden cases. Hers fit into a cardboard box. She could have made the same sort of case as Arthur McGregor had, but she'd decided not to. She didn't want investigators reminded of her father's work. That might make them look her way.
For the same reason, she didn't use the big tenpenny nails her father had. Thumbtacks would do the job well enough. She wound and carefully set an alarm clock, then even more carefully lowered it into the cardboard box. If she dropped it, if the impact made its bells clack against each other… Pa never made a stupid mistake like that, she
