The other soldier spat a stream of brown tobacco juice. “There is that,” he allowed. Armstrong had thought about chewing tobacco himself. You could do it where the sight of a match or a glowing coal or even the smell of cigarette smoke would get you killed.
An officer called, “The route south has been resecured. Boarding will commence in five minutes.”
Do I want R and R enough to risk getting shot on the way? Armstrong wondered. He must have, because he got on the bus when his turn came.
When Cincinnatus Driver walked into the Des Moines Army recruiting station, the sergeant behind the desk looked up in surprise from his paperwork. Cincinnatus eyed him the same way: the sergeant held his pen between the claws of a steel hook.
“What can I do for you?” the sergeant asked.
“I want to join up,” Cincinnatus answered.
“Sorry, pal. We don’t use colored soldiers,” the sergeant said. “Navy takes colored cooks and stewards. If you want to, you can talk to them. You don’t mind my saying so, though, you’re a tad overage. That cane won’t do you any good, either.”
“You got a uniform on even though you got a hook,” Cincinnatus said.
“I was in the last one,” the recruiting sergeant said. “That’s where I got it. I’m no damn good at the front, but I can do this.”
“Well, I was in the last one, too,” Cincinnatus said. “Drove a truck haulin’ men an’ supplies in Kentucky and Tennessee. Been drivin’ a truck more’n thirty years now. Sure as hell can do it some more. Put me in a deuce-and-a-half and you got one more white boy can pick up a rifle and shoot at Featherston’s fuckers.”
“Ah.” The sergeant looked more interested. “So you want to be a civilian auxiliary, do you?”
“If that’s what you call it these days,” Cincinnatus answered. “Last time around, I was just a truck driver.” He eyed the man behind the desk. “They pay any better on account of the fancy name?”
“Oh, yeah, pal-and then you wake up,” the sergeant said. Cincinnatus chuckled; he hadn’t expected anything different. The veteran reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a fresh form. He did that with his left hand, which was still flesh and blood. Then he poised the pen over the blank form. “Name?”
“Cincinnatus Driver.”
After the sergeant wrote it down, he glanced over at Cincinnatus. “Heard of you, I think. Didn’t you get exchanged from the Confederates not so long ago?”
“Yes, suh, that’s right,” Cincinnatus said.
“You don’t call me ‘sir.’ You call me ‘Sergeant.’ ” The noncom scribbled a note. He handled the pen very well. As he wrote, he went on, “Just so you know, they’re gonna check you seven ways from Sunday on account of you were in the CSA.”
“They can do that,” Cincinnatus agreed. “They reckon a colored man’d help Jake Featherston, though, they’re pretty goddamn stupid.”
“Yeah, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? But it all depends,” the sergeant said. “Maybe they got your wife an’ kids down there, and they’ll feed ’em to the alligators unless you play along.”
“My wife an’ kids are right here in Des Moines,” Cincinnatus said.
“Good for you. Good for them,” the sergeant said. “You know what I mean, though. They’ll check. Now-you say you drove an Army truck in the Great War? What was your base? Who commanded your unit?”
“I drove out of Covington, Kentucky, where I come from,” Cincinnatus replied. “Fella who ran things was a lieutenant name of Straubing.”
The sergeant raised his right eyebrow. “Think he’d remember you?”
Straubing had shot a Confederate diehard dead on Cincinnatus’ front porch. With a jerky nod, Cincinnatus said, “Reckon he would. He still in the Army?”
“Oh, you might say so.” The sergeant wrote another note. “There’s a Straubing who’s a brigadier general in logistics these days. Might not be the same man, but you don’t hear the name every day, and the specialization’s right. You know what logistics is?”
Are you a dumb nigger? he meant. But Cincinnatus did know the answer to that one: “Gettin’ men and stuff where they’re supposed to go when they’re supposed to get there.”
“Right the first time.” The sergeant nodded. “Bet you did drive a truck in the last war. Where else would you have heard the word?”
“I done said I did.” Cincinnatus paused. “But I bet you hear a lot o’ lies, sittin’ where you’re sittin’.”
“Oh, you might say so,” the sergeant repeated, deadpan. “You sure you want to go through with this, Mr. Driver?”
“Yes, suh-uh, Sergeant-an’ I tell you why,” Cincinnatus answered. The sergeant raised a polite eyebrow. Cincinnatus went on, “You just called me Mistuh. Ain’t no white man anywhere in the whole CSA call a colored man Mistuh. Call him boy, call him uncle if his hair’s goin’ gray like mine is. Mistuh? Never in a thousand years. An’ if you don’t respect a man, you don’t have no trouble killin’ him off.”
“Uh-huh.” The sergeant wrote something else on Cincinnatus’ papers. Cincinnatus tried to read what it was, but he couldn’t, not upside down. The man with the hook looked across the desk at the man with the cane. “Thanks for coming in, Mr. Driver. Like I told you, we’re going to have to look at you harder because the Confederates turned you loose. You have a telephone?”
“No, suh,” Cincinnatus answered.
“All right. We’ll send you a letter, then,” the sergeant said. “Probably be ten days, two weeks, something like that. We’ll see what General Straubing has to say about you.”
“Thank you, Sergeant.” Cincinnatus did it right this time. “When he was in Covington, he always treated the colored fellows who drove for him like they was men. Reckon he was the first white man I ever knew who did.”
Cincinnatus went home, not so happy as he’d hoped but not so disappointed as he might have been. He felt as if he were cluttering up the apartment. That was another reason he’d visited the recruiting station. But his urge to get even with the Confederates counted for more.
“Don’t want to jus’ sit here playin’ with my grandbabies,” he told Elizabeth. “I love my grandbabies, but I got some doin’ in me yet.”
“I didn’t say nothin’, dear,” his wife answered.
“I love you, too,” Cincinnatus said, mostly because she hadn’t said anything. They’d been married a long time. Despite the separations they’d gone through, she knew him better than anybody.
The letter from the recruiting station came eight days later. That was sooner than the sergeant had said. Cincinnatus didn’t know whether the quick answer meant good news or bad. He opened the letter-and still didn’t know. It just told him to come back to the station two days hence.
“Why couldn’t that blamed man say one way or the other?” he asked when he took it upstairs.
“You find out then, that’s all,” Elizabeth said. She was calmer than he was-and she wasn’t trying to find out what she’d be doing for the rest of the war.
Cincinnatus took a trolley to the recruiting station bright and early on the appointed day. He got there before it opened, and went across the street to a diner to get out of the cold. The guy behind the counter who served him a cup of coffee gave him a fishy look, but took his five cents without saying anything.
The one-handed sergeant got to the station when Cincinnatus was about halfway through the cup. He left it on the counter and limped over to find out what was what. The sergeant was getting his own pot of coffee going on a hot plate. He looked up without much surprise when the bell above the door jingled.
“Good morning, Mr. Driver,” he said. “You didn’t waste any time, did you?”
“No, suh-uh, no, Sergeant,” Cincinnatus said, and the noncom smiled at the self-correction. Cincinnatus wished he’d got it right the first time. He went on, “You gonna let me drive a truck, or shall I see what I can do in a war plant? Gotta do my bit some kind o’ way.”