Dover only shrugged. He wasn't worrying about it. "Get the hell out of here," he said. "You got your reasons, whatever they are. I've known you for a while now. You don't fuck around with me. So get."
Scipio got. He wasn't used to being out on the street so early. He made a beeline for the Terry. The sooner he got into his own part of town, the safer he'd feel.
Then he heard a gunshot down an unlit alleyway, a scream, and the sound of running feet. Maybe he wasn't so safe in the Terry after all. Whites preyed on blacks, but blacks also preyed on one another. He wondered why. His own people had so little. Why not try to rob whites, who enjoyed so much more? Unfortunately, an answer occurred to him almost at once. If a Negro robbed a white, the police moved heaven and earth to catch him. If he robbed another Negro, they yawned and went about their business.
"Hey, nigger!" A woman's voice, all rum and honey, called from the darkness. "You in your fancy clothes, I show you a good time like you ain't never seen." Scipio didn't even turn to look. He just kept walking. "Cocksuckin' faggot!" the woman yelled after him, all the sweetness gone.
Bathsheba stared when Scipio came into the apartment so early. "What you doin' here?" she demanded. "I jus' put the chillun to bed."
He'd been trying to figure out what to tell her ever since he left the Huntsman's Lodge. "Once upon a time, you asked me how I came to be able to speak like this," he answered in soft, precise, educated white man's English. Bathsheba's eyes went wide. The only time he'd ever spoken like that in her hearing was to save their lives in the rioting not long after the Freedom Party took over. Now he had to tell the truth, or some of it. In that same dialect, he went on, "A long time ago, I was in the upper ranks of one of the Socialist Republics we tried to set up. Someone came into the restaurant tonight who knew me in those days. I'm not certain whether she recognized me, but she might have. She's… very sharp." Seeing Anne Colleton forcibly reminded him how sharp she was.
"You learn to talk like dat on account of you was a Red?" Bathsheba asked.
Scipio shook his head. "No. I was useful to the Reds because I could already talk like this. I… I was a butler, a rich person's butler in South Carolina." There. Now she knew-knew enough, anyhow.
He waited for her to shout at him for not telling his secret years before. But she didn't. "If you was a big Red, no wonder you don't say nothin'," she told him. "What we do now?"
"Dunno." He fell back into the slurred speech of the Congaree Negro. Talking in that other voice took him off to a world that had died in fire and blood and hate-but also a world where he'd grown to manhood. The contrasts terrified him. "Mebbe nuttin'. Mebbe run fas' as we kin."
"How?" Bathsheba asked, and he didn't have a good answer for her. Passbooks were checked these days as they'd never been before the war. Any black without a good reason for being where he was-and without the papers to back up that reason-was in trouble. People talked about camps. No one knew much about them, though; they were easy to get into, much harder to leave.
Even so, he said, "Better we takes de chance. They catches me…" He didn't go on. If they caught him and realized who he was, he wouldn't last ten minutes. No trial. No procedure. They'd just shoot him.
Bathsheba was still staring at him. His wife clucked sadly, a sound of reproach: self-reproach, he realized when she said, "I shoulda pussected what you was." He needed a heartbeat or two to figure out that she meant suspected. She went on, "If you was a Red, you had to hide out. And you was smart, gettin' out o' the state where you was at."
"I weren't no Red, not down deep, not for real an' for true," Scipio said. "But dey suck me in. I don't go 'long wid dey, dey shoots me jus' like de buckra shoots me." That was the truth. Cassius and Cherry and the rest of the Reds on the Marshlands plantation had been in deadly earnest. Confidence in their doctrine had sustained them-till rifles and what little else they got from the USA ran up against the whole panoply of modern war, and till they discovered their oppressors wouldn't vanish simply because they were called reactionaries.
Bathsheba's mind went in a different direction. Suddenly, she said, "I bet Xerxes ain't even your right name."
"Is now. Has been fo' years."
"What your mama call you?"
"Scipio," he said, and wondered how long it had been since he'd spoken his own name. More than twenty years; he was sure of that.
"Scipio." Bathsheba tasted it, then slowly shook her head. "Reckon I like Xerxes better. I's used to it." She sent him an anxious look. "You ain't mad?"
"Do Jesus, no!" he exclaimed. "You go an' forget you ever hear de other one. Dat name get around, de buckra after we fo' sure. Dey still remembers me in South Carolina." Was that pride in his voice? After all these years, after all that terror, after being sure at the time that he was walking into a disaster (and after proving righter than even he'd imagined), was that pride? God help him, it was.
His wife gave him a kiss. "Good." She was proud of him, too, proud of him for what had to be the stupidest thing he'd ever done in his life. Madness. It had to be madness. There was no sensible explanation for it. But no sooner had that thought crossed his mind than Bathsheba said, "Every once in a while-Lord, more'n every once in a while-them white folks deserves a whack in the chops, they truly does."
And that did make sense. When things were bad, you tried your best to make them better. How didn't matter much. "Let's go to bed," he said.
"How you mean dat?" Bathsheba asked.
Now he kissed her. "However you wants, sweetheart."
He went up to the Huntsman's Lodge the next day with a certain amount of apprehension. He checked the autos parked near the restaurant with special care. None of them looked as if it belonged to either the police or Freedom Party goons. He had to go to work. If he didn't, he wouldn't eat, and neither would his family. In he went.
Jerry Dover met him just inside the door. "Go home," the manager said bluntly. "Get the hell out of here. You're still sick. You'll be sick another couple of days, too."
Scipio blinked. "What you say?"
"Go home," Dover repeated. "Damn Freedom Party woman asking all kinds of questions about you."
Ice congealed in Scipio's belly. He might have known Anne Colleton would spot him. Did she ever miss a trick? "What you say to she?" he asked, already hearing hounds baying on his trail.
"I told her you ain't who she thinks you are. I told her you been working here since 1911," Jerry Dover answered. His eyes twinkled.
"God bless you, Mistuh Dover, but when she catch you in de lie-"
"She ain't gonna catch me." Dover grinned at him. "I showed her papers from back then to prove it."
"How you do dat?" Now Scipio was all at sea.
Still grinning, the manager said, " 'Cause a nigger named Xerxes did work here then. He was only here a couple months, but those were the papers I showed her. Bastard stole like a son of a bitch. That's why they canned his ass. I heard one of the owners bitching about it not too long after we hired you. The name stuck in my head, and so I watched you close after that, but old Oglethorpe was right-you're first-rate. Anyway, this here gal like to shit, I'll tell you. You don't ever want to tell that one she's wrong. She ain't got no wedding ring, and I can see why."
That made a perfect thumbnail sketch of the Anne Colleton Scipio had known. She would have thought she had him at last-and then she would have seen her hope snatched away. No, she wouldn't be happy, not even a little bit. "God bless you, Mistuh Dover," Scipio said again.