again. He gestured with it. 'You try, Uncle, an' it's the last dumb thing you ever do.'
'Uncle? Uncle?' That pissed the white man off as much as Cincinnatus hoped it would. It was what Confederate whites called Negroes too old to get called boy. Throwing it in the local's face felt wonderful. 'You can't speak to me that way! I'll talk to your officer, by God, and he'll teach you respect.'
Cincinnatus laughed in his face. 'You're the enemy, Uncle, and we done beat you. We don't need to waste respect on the likes of you.'
Muttering under his breath, the local stomped off. Cincinnatus hoped he did complain to an Army officer. That would serve him right-wouldn't it just? Cincinnatus tried to imagine what the officer would tell him. He couldn't, not in detail, but it would boil down to, Tough shit, buddy. Now fuck off and leave me alone. He was sure of that.
Technically, Cincinnatus wasn't even in the Army. The U.S. Navy accepted Negroes, but the Army didn't- though he'd heard talk that that might change. If it did, it would matter to his son, but not to him. He was both overage and not in any kind of shape to pass a physical.
But he could still drive a truck. A lot of drivers were overage civilians, many of them with not quite disabling wounds from the Great War. They freed up younger, fitter men to go to the front and fight. And, when Confederate bushwhackers hit them, they showed they still knew what to do with weapons in their hands, too.
When Cincinnatus first volunteered to drive after getting back to U.S. territory, he'd carried a.45. He patted the ugly, functional submachine gun with almost the affection he might have shown his wife. Elizabeth had got him out of some tough spots, and so had the captured Confederate piece. And it didn't talk back.
U.S. 105s north of Ellijay thundered to life. Somebody-a spotter in a light airplane, maybe-must have seen Confederates up to something. With luck, the guns would disrupt whatever it was. Before long, Confederate artillery would probably open up, too, and maim or kill a few U.S. soldiers. Always plenty of fresh meat on both sides in war.
U.S. forces might push farther east from Ellijay, but they were unlikely to go farther north soon. They held this part of Georgia mostly to keep the enemy from bringing reinforcements down towards Atlanta. They didn't want any more of it-they were shield, not sword.
The drivers guarded their own trucks. Several men who weren't on sentry duty sat around a liberated card table playing poker. Soldiers probably would have sat on the ground, but it wasn't comfortable for geezers with old wounds and assorted other aches and pains. Green U.S. bills and brown C.S. banknotes went into the pot. They had good-natured arguments-and some not so good-natured-about what Confederate money was worth. Right now, in the drivers' highly unofficial rate of exchange, one green dollar bought about $2.75 in brown paper.
'Call,' Hal Williamson said. A moment later, Cincinnatus' friend swore as his three sevens lost to a nine-high straight.
'Come to papa.' The other driver raked in the pot.
Williamson got to his feet. 'Well, that's about as much money as I can afford to lose till Uncle Sam gives me some more,' he said.
One of the kibitzers sat down in the folding chair he'd vacated and pulled out a fat bankroll of green and brown. 'I'm not here to lose money,' he announced. 'I'm gonna win me some more.'
'Emil's here. We can start now,' another poker player said. The guy with the roll flipped him off. The other man turned to Cincinnatus. 'How about you, buddy? Got any jack that's burning a hole in your pocket?'
'Nope,' Cincinnatus said. 'Don't play often enough to get good at it. Don't like playin' enough to get good at it. So why should I throw my money down the toilet?'
'On account of I got grandkids who need shoes?' suggested the man sitting at the card table. 'We need suckers in this here game-besides Emil, I mean.'
'You'll see who's a sucker,' Emil said. 'You'll be sorry when you do, too.'
'If you're no good at somethin', why do it?' Cincinnatus said.
'Well, there's always fucking,' the other driver replied, which got a laugh.
'Maybe you ain't no good at that,' Cincinnatus said, which got a bigger one. 'Me, though, I know what I'm doin' there.'
'That's telling him,' Williamson said.
Cincinnatus' answering grin was crooked. Even his buddies seemed surprised when he held his own in banter or didn't turn cowardly when he got shot at or generally acted like a man instead of the way they thought a nigger would act. It might have been funny if it weren't so sad. These were U.S. citizens, men from a country where Negroes mostly had the same legal rights as anybody else, and they thought-or at least felt down deep somewhere-he ought to be a stupid buffoon.
What about white people in the Confederate States? His mouth tightened, the grin disappearing altogether. He knew the answer to that, knew it much too well. They thought Negroes were so far below ordinary human beings that they got rid of them without a qualm. And what would the local in overalls say about that? He'd probably say the Confederacy's Negroes had it coming.
'Fuck him, too,' Cincinnatus muttered.
'Who? Dolf there?' Williamson nodded toward the poker player who'd gone back and forth with Cincinnatus. 'What'd he do to you?'
'No, not Dolf. This peckerhead redneck I was talkin' with in town,' Cincinnatus answered, not even noticing he was tarring the Confederate with the same kind of brush whites in the CSA used against blacks. 'He reckoned I was uppity. If I was really uppity, I would've plugged the son of a bitch.'
'Probably no great loss,' Williamson said. 'We're gonna have to kill a lot of these Confederate assholes to scare the rest into leaving us alone.' Again, Confederate whites might have talked about Negroes the same way.
The next morning, soldiers loaded crates of 105mm shells into the back of Cincinnatus' truck. The convoy of which he was a part rattled north to replenish the guns that had been firing at the Confederates the day before. The artillery position was only a few miles away. Even so, a halftrack and three armored cars came along with the trucks. No one inside Ellijay seemed eager to take on the assembled might of the U.S. Army, but things were different out in the countryside. It seethed with rebellion.
Two bushwhackers fired from the undergrowth that grew too close to the side of the road before the convoy got halfway to where it was going. One bullet shattered a truck's windshield. Another flattened a tire. The armored cars sprayed the bushes with machine-gun fire. Cincinnatus hadn't seen any muzzle flashes. He would have bet the soldiers in the armored cars hadn't, either.
One of those cars stayed behind to help the truck driver with the flat change his tire-and to shield him from more bullets while he worked. Cincinnatus hoped the driver would be all right. He had to keep going himself. He wished a barrel with a flail were preceding the convoy. That way, it would probably blow up any land mines before they blew up people. As things were…
As things were, they didn't run into-or over-any. Cincinnatus figured the convoy was lucky. He also figured it had no guarantee of being lucky again on the way back. Who could guess what holdouts or stubborn civilians were doing while nobody in a green-gray uniform could see them?
Gun bunnies unloaded the crates. 'We'll give 'em hell,' one of them promised. Cincinnatus nodded, but the artillerymen couldn't do anything about the enemies likeliest to hurt him.
He wished he could stay by the gun pits. Bushwhackers didn't come around here. But then, as he was driving back towards Ellijay, he heard thunder behind him. A glance in the rear-view mirror told him the artillerymen were catching it. Wherever you went, whatever you did, the war would reach out and grab you and bite you.
Snipers fired a few shots at the trucks on the way back to the depot. When they got there, one of the drivers said, 'You guys are gonna have to help me out of the cab. They got me in the knee.'
'Jesus, Gordie, how come you ain't screamin' your head off?' another driver asked. 'How the hell'd you make it back?'
Gordie started laughing to beat the band. 'On account of I lost that leg in 1915,' he answered. 'Fuckers ruined the joint in my artificial one, but that's about it.'
'How'd you work the clutch without your knee joint?' Cincinnatus asked.
'Grabbed the leg with my hand and mashed down on the sucker,' Gordie said. 'Wasn't pretty. Don't figure I did my gear train any good. But who gives a damn? I made it back. 'Course, the leg's just a piece of junk without that joint. Better find me a wheelchair or some crutches-I ain't goin' anywhere without 'em.'
Cincinnatus had a lot of parts that didn't work as well as they should have. He wasn't out-and-out missing
