C.S. military rations were nothing to write home about. In truces to pick up wounded men, Confederate soldiers traded tobacco and coffee to their U.S. counterparts for canned goods made in the USA. And U.S. rations, as Moss knew too well, wouldn't put the Waldorf out of business any time soon.
But greasy hash and salty stew filled the belly. Moss' had rubbed up against his backbone too often lately. He was amazed at how many tins of meat he could bolt down before he even started getting full.
"Man, I feel like I swallowed a medicine ball," Nick Cantarella said after a while.
"Yeah, me, too," Moss said. "I like it."
He lit a cigarette, the way he might have after a fine meal in a fancy restaurant. He'd had plenty to eat, and nobody was shooting at him right this minute. How could life get any better?
C incinnatus Driver wanted to strut through the streets of Ellijay, Georgia. Strutting wasn't in the cards when you walked with a cane and a limp, but he felt like it anyway. How could a black man from the USA not want to strut in a little town his country had taken away from the Confederacy?
Here I am! he felt like shouting. What are you ofay bastards gonna do about it? And the whites of Ellijay couldn't do one damn thing, not unless they wanted the U.S. Army to land on them with both feet.
The hamlet seemed pleasant enough, with a grassy town square centered on a rock fountain. Groves of apple and peach trees grew nearby; Cincinnatus had heard the trout and bass fishing in the nearby stream was first-rate. Ellijay probably made a nice place to live…for whites.
Whenever the locals saw Cincinnatus, though, the way they acted gave him the chills. They stared at him as if he were a rare animal in a zoo-a passenger pigeon come back to life, say. They hadn't thought any Negroes were left in these parts, and didn't bother hiding their surprise.
"What're you doin' here?" a gray-haired man in bib overalls asked around an enormous chaw.
"Drivin' a truck for the United States of America," Cincinnatus answered proudly. "Helping the Army blow all this Confederate white trash to hell and gone."
He thought the Georgian would swallow the cud of tobacco. "You can't talk that way! You ought to be strung up, you know that?"
Along with his cane, Cincinnatus carried a submachine gun some Confederate soldier would never need 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."