Antiaircraft guns started hammering. Someone in the crowded cellar said, "I hope they knock a lot of those shitheads out of the sky."
Dowling hoped the same thing. But antiaircraft fire, no matter how ferocious, couldn't stop bombers. All it could do, at best, was make raids expensive. The Confederates had already proved they didn't mind paying the bill.
Bomb bursts walked closer to the building. After each one, the floor shook more under Dowling's feet. A captain a few feet away from him started screaming. Some men simply couldn't stand the strain. A scuffle followed. Finally, somebody clipped the captain, and he shut up.
"Thank God," Dowling said. "A little more of that, and I'd've started howling like a damn banshee, too."
Colonel Morrell nodded. "It really can be catching," he remarked, and rubbed the knuckles of his right hand against his trouser leg. Had he been the one who'd laid out the captain? He'd been in the brawl, but Dowling hadn't seen him land the punch.
The stick of bombs passed over the headquarters building. Dowling thought of the Angel of Death, and wondered if someone had slapped lamb's blood on the doorframe at the entrance. The bursts diminished in force as they got farther away.
"Whew," somebody said, which summed it up as well as anything else.
"Columbus is catching hell, though," someone else said. "Too goddamn bad. This is a nice town."
"Too goddamn bad is right," Morrell said. "This is a town we've got to hold." He plainly didn't care whether Columbus was nice, dreary, or actively vile. All he cared about was Columbus as a military position.
After about half an hour, the all-clear sounded. Confederate air bases weren't very far away. The bombers could loiter for a while if U.S. fighters didn't rise to drive them off. That didn't seem to have happened this time. Of course, the C.S. bombers would have had fighters of their own riding shotgun.
"Well," Dowling said in what he hoped wasn't black despair, "let's see what they've done to us this time."
He and Morrell and the rest of the officers and enlisted men climbed the stairs out of the basement. A corporal looked up and said, "Jesus God, but it's good to see the sky again!" He crossed himself.
Dowling was more than happy to see the sky again, too, even if clouds and streamers of smoke and the contrails left by airplanes now departed still marred its blue perfection like burn scars on what would have been a beautiful face. A staff officer pointed to a tall pillar of smoke off to the west and said, "They've gone and pasted Camp Custer again, the sons of bitches."
"No big surprise there," Dowling said. The Confederates had been hitting the training facility every chance they got ever since the war broke out. It was, without a doubt, a legitimate military target. But they were also punishing civilian sectors of Columbus and other U.S. cities. In retaliation-President Smith said it was in retaliation-the United States were visiting the same sort of destruction on C.S. towns.
Colonel Morrell was thinking along the same lines. "Going to be a swell old war, isn't it?" he said to nobody in particular.
The air-raid sirens started up again, not the usual shrill warble but one that got louder and softer, louder and softer, over and over again till back-teeth fillings started to ache. "What the hell?" Dowling said.
Everybody stared for five or ten seconds, trying to remember what that signal was supposed to mean. At last, a sergeant exclaimed, "It's a goddamn gas alert!"
There was a new wrinkle. The Confederates hadn't dropped that kind of death from the air before, at least not on Columbus. The soldiers dashed back into the building they'd so gratefully vacated moments before. Some of them found gas masks. Others had to take their chances without.
From behind his hot, heavy rubber monstrosity, Dowling said, "This is going to be hell on civilians. They don't have anywhere near enough masks." Even he could hear how muffled his voice was.
Morrell wore a mask, too. He did so self-consciously, as if he didn't want to but knew he had to. He said, "The Confederates only need to drop a few gas bombs, too, to make us flabble all over the place. You can't help taking gas seriously, and they get a big payback for a small investment."
"So they do," Dowling said morosely. "But I'll tell you this, Coloneclass="underline" they won't be the only ones for long."
III
When it came to waiting tables at the Huntsman's Lodge, summer was the worst season of the year. Scipio had to put on his tuxedo in the Terry-Augusta, Georgia's, colored quarter-and then walk through the heat and humidity to the restaurant where he worked. The walk would also expose him to what passed for wit among the whites of Augusta. If he had a dime for every time he'd heard penguin suit, he could have retired tomorrow and been set for life.
He would have liked to retire. He was, these days, nearer seventy than sixty. But if he didn't work, he wouldn't eat. That made his choices simple. He would work till he dropped.
Bathsheba, his wife, had already left their small, cramped apartment to clean white folks' houses. Scipio kissed his daughter and son and went out the door. They'd had a better flat before the white riots of 1934 burned down half the Terry. Not much had been rebuilt since. The way things were, they were lucky to have a place at all.
A couple of blocks from the apartment building, a long line of Negroes, almost all men, stood waiting for a bus. It pulled up just as Scipio walked by. Some of the blacks stared at him. Somebody said something to his friend that had penguin suit in it. Scipio kept walking. He shook his head. Real wit was hard to come by, whether from whites or blacks.
The placard on the bus that pulled up said war plant work. Scipio shook his head again. Negroes weren't good enough to be Confederate citizens, weren't good enough to be anything but the CSA's whipping boys. But when the guns started going off…
When the guns started going off, the whites went to shoot them. But the soldiers went right on needing more guns and ammunition and airplanes and barrels. If the CSA took whites out of the line to make them, it wouldn't have enough men in uniform left to face the USA's greater numbers. That meant getting labor out of black men and white women.
Scipio wouldn't have wanted to make the tools of war for a government that also used those tools to hold Negroes down. But none of the blacks getting on that war plant work bus seemed unhappy. They had jobs. They were making money. And if they were doing something Jake Featherston needed, Freedom Party stalwarts or guards were less likely to grab them and throw them in a camp. Those camps had a reputation that got more evil with each passing day.
Scipio didn't believe all the rumors he'd heard about the camps. Some of them had to be scare stories, of the sort that had frightened him when he was a pickaninny. Nobody in his right mind could do some of the things rumor claimed. Confederate whites wanted to keep blacks down, yes. But killing them off made no sense. Who would do what whites called nigger work if there were no blacks to take care of it?
He imagined white women cleaning house for their rich sisters. And he imagined white men out in the cotton fields, picking cotton dawn to dusk under the hot, hot sun. It was pretty funny.
And then, all of a sudden, it wasn't. One of the things the Freedom Party had done was put far more machinery in the fields than had ever been there before. A few men on those combines could do the work of dozens, maybe hundreds, with hand tools. It's almost as if they were working out ahead of time how they would get along without us. That precisely formed sentence made Scipio nervous for two reasons. First, it had the unpleasant feel of truth, of seeing below the surface to the underlying reality. And second, it reminded him of the education Anne Colleton had forced on him when he was her butler at the Marshlands plantation. Again, she hadn't given it to him for his benefit, but for her own. But that didn't mean it hadn't benefited him.