'I don't know. What is it?'
'Can you arrange my train route to take me through Covington, Kentucky? I was born and raised there, and I want to see if any of my people in the colored quarter came through in one piece.'
'It's irregular. It's an extra expense…' The officer in green-gray frowned, considering. 'Let me talk to my superiors. You may have to stay in Alabama an extra day or two while we set things up-if they approve, that is.'
'I don't mind,' Cincinnatus said. 'Not even a little bit.'
He stayed an extra three days, in fact. The rest of the drivers in his unit headed for home long before he did. Hal Williamson shook his hand and said, 'Good luck to you, buddy. Goddamn if I didn't learn something from you.'
'What's that?' Cincinnatus asked.
'Colored guys-you're just like anybody else, only darker,' Hal answered.
Cincinnatus laughed. 'Shit, I'll take that. Good luck to you, too, man.'
He got the travel orders he wanted. Back in Confederate days, he would have had to ride in a separate car. No more. Some white passengers looked unhappy at sharing a row with him, but nobody said anything. That suited him well enough. He didn't ask to be loved: only tolerated.
The Stars and Stripes flew over Covington. A blue X that stood for the C.S. battle flag showed up on walls all over town. So did the word FREEDOM! The CSA had lost the war, but not everybody had given up.
Buses were running. He took one east from the train station to the colored quarter by the Licking River, or what was left of it. He sat up near the front of the bus, the first time he'd been able to do that here regardless of whether Covington flew the Stars and Stripes or Stars and Bars.
Not all the fences and barbed wire that sealed off the colored quarter had come down yet. But ways through the stuff were open now. Cincinnatus got off the bus a couple of blocks from Lucullus Wood's barbecue place. If anyone had come through what the Confederates did to their Negroes, he would have bet on the Red barbecue cook.
Houses and shops stood empty. Windows had broken panes; doors sagged open. Leaves drifted on lawns. Ice shivered up Cincinnatus' spine. What was that fancy word people used when they talked about dinosaurs? This place was extinct.
A stray cat darted across the street and behind some untrimmed bushes. Cats could take care of themselves without people. Cincinnatus didn't hear any barking dogs. He should have, if the colored quarter had any life left to it.
When he saw somebody else on the street, he jumped in surprise and alarm. It was an old white man in a cool linen suit, his white hair shining under his Panama hat. The white man seemed as startled to spot a Negro as Cincinnatus was to see him. Then, all of a sudden, he wasn't. 'I might have known it would be you,' he said. 'You're tougher to kill than a cockroach, aren't you?'
'Go to hell, Bliss,' Cincinnatus said wearily. 'Lucullus still alive?'
'His place looks as dead as the rest of this part of town,' Luther Bliss answered. The longtime head of the Kentucky State Police sighed. 'I tried to get him out once they closed off the colored quarter, but I couldn't do it. Don't know what happened to him, but I'm afraid it's nothing good. Damn shame.'
'They go and kill everybody?' Cincinnatus asked. 'They really go an' do that?'
'Just about,' Bliss said. 'And you were in bed with 'em for a while. Doesn't that make you proud?'
'Fuck off and die,' Cincinnatus said coldly. 'I was never in bed with the goddamn Freedom Party, and you know it.'
Luther Bliss spat. 'Maybe. I never knew anything about you for sure, though. That's how come I never trusted you.'
Cincinnatus laughed in his face. 'Don't give me that shit. You never trusted your own grandma.'
'If you'd known the old bat, you wouldn't've trusted her, either. She was an evil woman.' Nothing fazed Bliss. His mournful hound-dog eyes pierced Cincinnatus. 'So you drove a truck, did you?'
'Keepin' tabs on me?'
'Damn straight I was,' Bliss replied. 'You deserve it. But things are all over now. The United States won, and if we kill enough Confederates to keep the rest quiet we'll do all right.'
He waited. Cincinnatus laughed again. 'What? You reckon I'm gonna argue with you? We better kill a lot of them bastards. Otherwise, they'll be killin' us too damn soon.'
'Well, we agree about something, anyway,' Luther Bliss said. 'I hope to God I never see you again. You gave me too much to worry about-more than Lucullus, even. He was smarter than you, but I always knew where he stood. With you, I had to wonder.'
'You son of a bitch,' Cincinnatus said. 'You kept me in jail for two years. Wasn't for that Darrow ofay, you never woulda let me out.'
'I still say I was doing the USA a favor by keeping you in.' Nothing would ever make Bliss back up or admit he might have been wrong, either.
The two men warily sidled past each other. Cincinnatus went on toward the barbecue shack. He didn't trust Bliss' word about anything-he had to see with his own eyes. But the secret policeman wasn't lying here. The place Lucullus had taken over from his father sat quiet and deserted. Oh, the building still stood, but piles of dead leaves and broken windows said no one had come here for a long time. Even the wonderful smell that had always wafted from the shack was gone. You could gain weight just from that smell. No more, dammit. Nothing in Covington would ever be the same.
Sighing, Cincinnatus walked on to the house his father and mother had shared till she passed away. He'd lived there himself, getting over his accident, helping to take care of her as she slid deeper into senility, and then simply trapped in Covington. The house was still standing, too. Cincinnatus supposed his father still owned it. Even with a shell hole in the front yard and a little shrapnel damage, it was bound to be worth something.
Who would want to buy a house in the colored district, though? How many Negroes would want to live here, even with Covington passed back to the USA? How many Negroes were left to live in Covington and all the other towns that had flown the Stars and Bars? Not enough. Nowhere close to enough. Would whites eventually settle in this part of town, too? Or would they tear everything down and try to pretend Negroes had never been a part of life south of the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio?
Cincinnatus couldn't know which, but he sure knew which way he'd bet.
Sore and sad, he walked on through the almost-deserted quarter instead of heading back to the bus stop and the train ride on to his family. His feet knew where he was going better than his head did. Before long, he found himself in front of the Brass Monkey. He'd drowned a lot of sorrows in that bar while he was stuck here.
He almost jumped out of his shoes when a voice floated out through the door: 'C'mon in! We're open!'
'Do Jesus!' Cincinnatus walked inside. There was no electricity, so his eyes needed a little while to adjust to the dimness. A black man sat at the bar, nursing a whiskey. Another one stood behind it, fanning himself. It was the same bartender who'd been there before. 'Didn't reckon I'd see you alive,' Cincinnatus remarked.
'I could say the same thing about you,' the man answered. 'When the police done took you away, I reckoned you was dead meat.'
'I was on a list,' Cincinnatus said.
'Figured you was. That's why they took you away.'
'No, a different kind o' list. They went an' exchanged me an' my pa fo' a couple of Confederates who got stuck up in the USA.'
'Lucky,' the bartender observed.
'Yeah, I reckon,' Cincinnatus said. 'How'd you get by?'
'Me? I was lucky a different kind o' way.' The bartender fanned harder and didn't go on.
The black man at the bar said, 'Cambyses, he done the butternut bastards enough favors, they didn't take him off to no camp.'
'Shut your mouth!' the bartender squawked indignantly.
'Shit, don't make no difference now,' the other man said. 'Me, I done the same damn thing. I ain't what you call real proud o' myself, but I ain't dead, neither, an' a hell of a lot o' folks is.'
Cincinnatus had been about to buy himself a drink-he could have used one. Instead, he turned around and walked out. Had those two Negroes survived by ratting on their fellows? He'd always wondered about Cambyses,
