Scipio made a point of being careful.
Coming home was worse than going up to the Huntsman's Lodge. Going to work, he had to face harassment from whites who fancied themselves wits. Most of them overestimated by a factor of two. He had to give soft answers. He'd been doing that all his life. He managed.
He came home in the middle of the night. Darkness gave predators cover- and the Augusta police rarely wasted their time looking into crimes blacks committed against each other. Every street corner on the way to his apartment building was an adventure.
Most of the time, of course, the corners were adventures only in his own imagination. He could-and did-imagine horrors whether they were there or not. Every once in a while, they were. He walked as quietly as he could. He always paused in the blackest shadows he could find before exposing himself by crossing a street. Nobody had worried about street lights in the Terry even before the rise of the Freedom Party. These days, the idea of anyone worrying about anything that had to do with blacks was a painful joke.
Voices from a side street made Scipio decide he would do better to stay where he was for a little while. One black man said, "Ain't seen Nero for a while."
"You won't, neither," another answered. "Goddamn ofays cotched him with a pistol in his pocket."
"Do Jesus!" the first man exclaimed. "Nero always the unluckiest son of a bitch you ever seen. What they do with him?"
"Ship him out West, one o' them camps," his friend said.
"Do Jesus!" the first man said again. "You go into one o' them places, you don't come out no more."
"Oh, mebbe you do," the other man said. "Mebbe you do-but it don't help you none."
"Huh!" the first man said-a noise half grunt, half the most cynical laugh Scipio had ever heard. "You got dat right. They throws you in a hole in the ground, or else they throws you in the river fo' the gators and the snappers to finish off."
"I hear the same thing," his friend agreed. "Gator sausage mighty tasty. I ain't gonna eat it no mo'. Never can tell who dat gator knowed." He laughed, too. The black men walked on. They had no idea Scipio had been listening.
He waited till their footsteps faded before he went on to his apartment. The Huntsman's Lodge served a fair amount of wild game: venison, raccoon, bear every once in a while, and alligator. Scipio had been fond of garlicky alligator sausage himself. He didn't think he would ever touch it again.
Three days later, he was walking to work when police and Freedom Party stalwarts with submachine guns swept into the Terry. They weren't trying to solve any specific crime. Instead, they were checking passbooks. Anybody whose papers didn't measure up or who didn't have papers, they seized.
"Let me have a look at that there passbook, boy," a cop growled at Scipio.
"Yes, suh." Scipio was old enough to be the policeman's father, but to most whites in the CSA he would always be a boy. He didn't argue. He just handed over the document. Arguing with a bad-tempered man with a submachine gun was apt to be hazardous to your life expectancy.
The cop took a brief look at his papers, then gave them back. "Hell, I know who you are," he said. "You been paradin' around in them fancy duds for years. Go on, get your black ass outa here."
"Yes, suh. Thank you kindly, suh." Scipio had taken a lot of abuse from whites for going to work in a tuxedo. Here, for once, it looked to have paid off. He got out of there in a hurry. That was unheroic. He knew it. It gnawed at him. But what could he do against dozens of trigger-happy whites? Not one damned thing, and he knew that, too.
He'd gone only a few blocks when gunfire rang out behind him: first a single shot, then a regular fusillade. He didn't know what had happened, and he wasn't crazy or suicidal enough to go back and find out, but he thought he could make a pretty good guess. Somebody must have figured his chances shooting it out were better than they would have been if he'd gone wherever the cops and the stalwarts were taking people they grabbed.
The fellow who'd started shooting was probably-almost certainly-dead now. Even so, who could say for sure he was wrong? He'd died quickly, and hadn't suffered much. Scipio thought of alligators, and wished he hadn't.
One of the waiters, a skinny young man named Nestor, didn't show up at the Huntsman's Lodge. Jerry Dover muttered and fumed. Scipio told him about the dragnet in the Terry. The manager eyed him. "You reckon they picked up Nestor for something or other?"
"Dunno, Mistuh Dover," Scipio said. "Reckon mebbe they could've, though."
"What do you suppose he did?" Dover asked. "He's never given anybody any trouble here."
"Dunno," Scipio said again. "Dunno if he done anything. Them police, I don't reckon they was fussy." They were standing right outside the kitchen, in a nice, warm corridor. He wanted to shiver even so. Nestor would have been wearing a tuxedo, too. Fat lot of good it had done him.
Jerry Dover rubbed his chin. "He's a pretty fair worker. Let me make a call or two, see what I can find out."
What would he have done if Nestor were a lazy good-for-nothing? Washed his hands like Pilate? Scipio wouldn't have been surprised. He didn't dwell on it. With the crew shorthanded because Nestor wasn't there, he stayed hopping.
And Nestor didn't show up, either. Dover wore a tight-lipped expression, one that discouraged questions. Scipio and the rest of the crew got through the evening. When he went back the next day, the missing waiter still wasn't there. That nerved him to go up to the manager and ask, "Nestor, he come back?"
"Doubt it." Dover sounded as if he had to pay for every word that passed his lips. "Time for a new hire. He won't know his ass from Richmond, either."
"Nestor, what he do?" Scipio persisted. "You find out?"
"He got himself arrested, that's what." Jerry Dover sounded angry at Scipio-or possibly angry at the world. "He picked the wrong goddamn time to do it, too."
"What you mean?" Scipio asked. "Ain't no right time to git arrested."
Dover nodded. "Well, that's so. There's no right time. But there's sure as hell a wrong time. What the cops told me yesterday was, the city jail's full. So those niggers they caught in the Terry-you know about that?"
"Oh, yes, suh," Scipio said softly. "I tol' you, remember? They almost 'rests me, too."
"That's right, you did. Well, I'm damn glad they didn't, because I'd be down two waiters if they had." If the restaurant manager was glad for any other reason that they hadn't arrested Scipio, he didn't show it. He went on, "Jail's full up, like I said. So they went and shipped these here niggers off to one of those camps they've started."
"Lord he'p Nestor, then," Scipio said. "Somebody go into one of them places, I hear tell he don't come out no mo', not breathin', anyways." He'd heard it as gossip between two men he'd never seen, but that didn't mean he didn't believe it. It had the horrid feel of truth.
Jerry Dover shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. What had he heard? Back in the days when Scipio worked at Marshlands, he'd been convinced the Colletons couldn't keep a secret for more than a few minutes before the blacks on the plantation also knew it. Here at the Huntsman's Lodge, the colored cooks and waiters and cleaners quickly found out whatever their white bosses knew. Or did they? Just as blacks kept secrets from whites out of necessity, so whites might also find it wise to keep certain things from blacks.
But if Dover had that kind of knowledge, it didn't show on his face. Scipio thought it would. Dover did what he had to do to get along in the world in which he found himself. Who didn't, except crazy people and saints? But the manager was pretty honest, pretty decent. He was no "Freedom!" — yelling stalwart without two brain cells to rub against each other.
He said, "You want to watch yourself on the street, then, don't you? You know I've got some pull. But it doesn't look like I can do anything about one of those places."