Several other Negroes nodded. One of them said, “Wish them damnyankees’d come farther down into Georgia.”
“Amen!” Two or three Negroes spoke together, as if responding to a preacher. One of them added, “That’d be about the onliest thing that could save the niggers down here. That or the Second Coming, one.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Spartacus said dryly.
“Well, hell, I know Jesus ain’t comin’,” the guerrilla said. “But the damnyankees, they might.”
“They’re moving again. We’re moving again,” Nick Cantarella said. “I don’t think the Confederates can stop us from breaking out of our bridgehead south of Chattanooga. And once we’re loose in north Georgia…”
“Yeah!” Again, the response might almost have come in church.
“They gonna get here soon enough to do us any good?” Spartacus answered his own question with a shrug. “We gots to las’ long enough to find out, dat’s all.”
One way the guerrillas survived was by never staying in one place very long. Mexican soldiers and white militiamen hunted the Negroes-not all the time, but too often. Not staying around to be found was simple common sense.
Of course, moving had dangers of its own. You could walk into trouble as well as away from it. But Spartacus’ point man, Apuleius, was as good as anybody Jonathan Moss ever saw. He was as good as anybody Cantarella ever saw, too. “Put that little so-and-so in our uniform and he could sneak a division of barrels right on into Richmond,” Cantarella said.
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Moss agreed. “Or he could, anyway, if we let Negroes join the Army.”
“Yeah, well, that’s horseshit, too,” Cantarella said. “You know smokes can fight, and I know smokes can fight, and if Philly’s too goddamn dumb to know smokes can fight, then fuck Philly, you know what I’m sayin’?”
Apuleius held up the band outside an abandoned sharecropper village. He didn’t think it was abandoned. “Somebody in dere,” he told Spartacus after crawling back through the forgotten, overgrown vegetable plots around the place.
“How you know?” Spartacus asked. “Looks quiet enough. Ain’t no smoke or nothin’.”
“Not now,” the point man said. “But sure enough was some not long ago. An’ when I git close, I smell me some people ain’t had no baths in a hell of a long time.”
He kept himself cleaner than most of the other guerrillas. Moss had thought that was because he was unusually fastidious, and had even wondered if he was a fairy. Now he saw good sense lay behind it. If Apuleius didn’t smell himself, he had a better chance of sniffing out other people.
“You reckon they ofays or Mexicans?” Spartacus asked.
“Likely ofays,” Apuleius answered. “They stink worse. The Mexicans, they washes when they gits the chance.”
“How we gonna smoke ’em out?” Spartacus suddenly grinned a predatory grin. “Reckon you kin wiggle back close enough to chuck a grenade into the middle o’ things?”
“I kin try.” The point man didn’t sound thrilled, but he didn’t say no.
“Well, why don’t you wait a bit?” Spartacus said. “Let us set up the machine gun at the edge o’ the brush. Then we be ready to give them ofays a proper how-do-you-do.”
The two-man machine-gun crew positioned their precious weapon. The rest of the guerrillas, riflemen all, took cover where they could. Moss hoped the bush he crouched behind wasn’t poison oak.
Apuleius worked his way forward again. Moss presumed he did, anyhow; were the point man visible to him, he would have been visible to whoever was inside the village, too. Moss didn’t see the grenade fly, either.
He sure heard it when it went off. And all of a sudden that village didn’t seem abandoned any more. Militiamen, some in gray uniforms, others with clothes no fancier than the guerrillas wore, boiled out of the tumbledown shacks that hadn’t been anything much when they were in good repair and looked even more sorrowful now. The white men were cussing and clutching their weapons and pointing every which way. Some of those flying fingers aimed at Apuleius, but others flew in the opposite direction.
“Now!” Spartacus said.
Along with the rest of the riflemen in the band, Moss started shooting at the youths, mutilated men, and old-timers who made up the local militia. The machine gun spat death at the village. Death had visited it before-where were the sharecroppers who once lived there? Where were their wives and children? Gone to camps, most of them, if they were like most of the Negroes in Georgia.
As soon as the gunfire gave him cover, Apuleius tossed another grenade into the village. This one made the militiamen yell and scream even more than they were already doing. The kids, the ones who’d never seen real fighting before, suffered worse than the veterans. Men who’d come under fire knew they needed to get down and get behind something when bullets started flying. The youngsters stayed upright much too long-and paid for it.
“Fish in a barrel,” Nick Cantarella said happily, sprawled behind a bush not far from the one that hid Moss.
A bullet snapped past between them. “Fish don’t shoot back,” Moss said.
One of the militiamen had got his hands on a fancy C.S. automatic rifle. He sprayed bullets back at the guerrillas almost as fiercely as the machine gun fired at his side. A couple of Negroes howled when they were hit, but the noise they made was as nothing beside that from the militiamen caught in the ambush.
When Spartacus ordered a withdrawal, the machine gun gave covering fire. The militiamen didn’t seem to have any stomach for coming after them, anyhow. Were Moss one of them, he wouldn’t have, either, not after the way they got shot up.
“Keep movin’!” Spartacus called. “They be all over the place round these parts now.” He was sure to be right, though Moss wasn’t sure how many militiamen and Mexican soldiers the local authorities could scrape together.
Litter bearers carried one of the wounded men. The other, shot through the right arm, was able to walk-and to swear with remarkable fluency. Moss looked around for Apuleius. He didn’t see the point man, but that proved nothing. Apuleius might need to wait till dark before making his getaway, and he’d caught up with the band before. Odds were he could do it again.
Would any of it matter? Could they hang on till the U.S. Army came down here or put the Confederates out of business? Moss had no idea. With his scheme for stealing an airplane as dead as too many of the men who’d helped him try, he could only hope.
“Bad one, Doc!” Eddie called as he brought the casualty into the aid station.
Leonard O’Doull knew the medic was right even before he saw the casualty. When you smelled something that reminded you of a pork roast left too long in the oven…then it was a bad one, all right.
Vince Donofrio wrinkled his nose. “Christ, I hate burns!” he said.
“Me, too,” O’Doull said. “But I sure don’t hate ’em near as much as the poor bastard who’s got one.”
The wounded man came out of a barrel. That much was plain from what was left of his coverall. One leg was charred, and he was howling like a wolf. “Has he had morphine?” O’Doull asked.
“Three shots, Doc,” Eddie answered. O’Doull bit his lip. Sometimes even the best painkiller was fighting out of its weight. Eddie went on, “Ether’ll put him out.”
“Yeah.” O’Doull turned to Sergeant Donofrio. “Get him under, Vince.”
“Right,” Donofrio said tightly. The man’s hands were burned, too, and so was his face, though not so badly. He tried to fight when Donofrio put the ether cone over his mouth and nose. As gently as Eddie could, he held the wounded man’s arms till they went limp. His screams faded then, too.
“How much can you do for him, Doc?” Eddie asked.
“Me? Not much. I just want to get rid of the tissue that’d go gangrenous if I left it. Then the specialists take over.”