XIX
The Sweet Sue jounced west across the rough waters of the Atlantic, back toward Boston harbor. George Enos Jr. stood near the bow of the fishing boat, thinking about things that had changed and things that hadn’t. He turned to Carlo Lombardi, who was smoking a cigarette beside him. “Back in 1914,” George said, “my old man was coming home from a fishing run. He didn’t have a wireless set on his ship. When he got back into port, he found out that goddamn Serb had blown up the Austrian archduke and his wife, and everything was going to hell.”
Lombardi paused to take another drag before he answered, “We’re lucky. We can find out everything’s going to hell before we get into port. Ain’t life grand nowadays?”
“Yeah. Grand.” George tried to look every which way at once. “Of course, it’s liable not to be the wireless that tells us.”
“How do you mean?” the other fisherman asked, scratching his head.
“If a war starts, you’ve got to bet the Confederates’ll have their submarines up here ahead of time. Only stands to reason, right?” George said. “If they do, first thing we’ll know about it is—wham!”
“Fuck,” Lombardi said, and pitched his cigarette into the green water. He eyed George sourly. “You bastard. Now you’re going to have me looking around for a periscope or a goddamn torpedo all the way till we tie up at T Wharf.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been doing that ever since we started back from the Grand Bank,” George said. “That sneaky Confederate son of a bitch torpedoed my father after the last war was done. It’d be just like one of those bastards to nail me before this one even starts.”
“Fuck,” Lombardi said again, and gave George an even more jaundiced once-over. “You better not be a goddamn Jonah, that’s all I’ve got to say.”
“My old man was the one with the bad luck,” George said. The other man thought that over, then slowly nodded. If he didn’t believe it, he kept it to himself. George went on, “Maybe there won’t be a war this time around. Maybe. I keep on hoping there won’t, anyway.”
“I hope for free pussy, too, when I go to a whorehouse,” Lombardi said, lighting another cigarette. “I hope for it, but that ain’t how things work.” He sucked in smoke. “Better not be another war. If there is, the tobacco’ll all be shitty. My pa used to bitch about that all the goddamn time, how lousy the smokes were ’cause we couldn’t get no Confederate tobacco.”
George didn’t remember whether his father had complained about bad tobacco. He’d been too little when George Enos Senior got killed, and his father had been away at sea too much while alive to leave behind a lot of memories. George did recall one night when his father kept asking if he and Mary Jane were ready to go to bed yet. He hadn’t been ready, and his indignation still rankled across a quarter of a century.
All of a sudden, out of a clear blue sky, he started laughing like hell. “What’s so goddamn funny?” Lombardi asked.
“Nothing, not really,” George answered. The other fisherman gave him a particularly fishy stare. He didn’t care. It wasn’t the sort of joke he could explain. Just the same, he suddenly understood why his father had kept wanting him to go to bed, which he hadn’t when he was a little boy. He was liable to use that same impatient tone of voice to find out if his own boys were ready to go to sleep so he could be alone with Connie. As a matter of fact, he knew damn well he’d used that tone of voice with them before.
And if a new war does start, and if your boat goes to the bottom, is that what you want them to remember you for? he wondered. Had the same question ever occurred to his father? Probably not. But then, his father hadn’t known anything about a big war before he found himself in the middle of the biggest one of all time. People living in the USA nowadays didn’t have that excuse.
Neither did people living in the CSA. The Great War had hurt them even worse. They, or at least Jake Featherston, seemed ready—hell, seemed eager—for another round. George wondered why.
He found an answer, too, the same way as he’d found an answer when he thought about his old man. The Confederates lost. That means they want revenge. The USA had lost two wars in a row to the CSA. That had made people here twice as serious about getting their own back. Now, after a win, people here thought everything was square. South of the border, they didn’t.
Will there ever be an end? Will both sides ever be satisfied at the same time? He thought that one over, too. Unlike the other questions, it didn’t have an answer that leaped into sight.
No Confederate submersible or commerce raider challenged the Sweet Sue. No dive bomber dropped explosives on her from the sky. She sailed back into Boston harbor as if pulling fish from the sea were the hardest, most dangerous thing to do men had ever invented. In peacetime, it came close. Peacetime, though, felt like summertime. Even as you enjoyed it, you knew it wouldn’t last.
When the Sweet Sue tied up at T Wharf, the first officer made the best deal he could with the buyers. Normally, George would have stuck around to find out how good the deal was. His own share of the pie depended on how big a pie he was looking at. Today, though, he drew fifty dollars against whatever the total would be and headed for the apartment where he spent rather less time than he did at sea.
He had to get past all the harborside attractions that tried to separate fishermen from their money and make them forget about their wives. Football games and raucous music blared from wireless sets in saloons. A drunk reeled out of a tavern. He almost ran into George. “Easy, pal,” George said, and dodged.
Music with more of a thump and pound to it, music played by real live musicians, poured out of strip joints. Hearing that kind of music made you think about the girls who’d dance to it, and about what they would—or wouldn’t—be wearing. You could get drinks in those joints, too, but they’d cost twice as much.
If you didn’t want to drink, if you didn’t want to watch, if you wanted to get down to business … A swarthy, tired-looking woman about George’s age leaned out of a second-story window and beckoned to him. She wasn’t wearing anything from the waist up. Her breasts drooped. They seemed tired, too. She tried to sound alluring when she called, “How about it, big boy?”
George kept walking. The whore swore at him. Even her curses sounded tired.
His block of flats stood only a couple of streets farther on. He hurried to it. Unlike the one where he’d lived with his mother, it had an elevator. Most of the time, he took that as proof he’d come up in the world. When he stepped into the lobby now, though, the cage was empty. The car was on some upper floor. He didn’t have the patience to wait for it. He went up four flights of stairs, taking them two at a time till his knees got tired.
The key to his apartment was brass. A good thing, too; with all the time he spent out on the ocean, an iron key would have rusted on the chain. He put the key in the lock and turned it.
Connie’s startled voice came from the kitchen: “Who’s there?” And then, realizing only one person besides her had a key, she went on, “Is that you, George?”
“Well, it’s not the tooth fairy and it’s not the Easter Bunny and it’s not Santa Claus,” he answered.
She came rocketing out of the kitchen and into his arms. He squeezed her till she squeaked. She felt wonderful. He didn’t stop to think that he’d been at sea so long, the Wicked Witch of the North would have felt good to him. He kissed her. Things might have—no, things would have—gone straight on from there if Bill and Pat hadn’t charged him and tried tackling him in ways that would have got flags thrown on any gridiron in the country. Fortunately, they weren’t big enough to do any serious damage.
“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” they squealed. If they went on after that, it was in voices only dogs could hear.
He let go of Connie and hugged the boys. They were also good to come home to, in a different way. His wife asked, “How long will you be here this time?”
“Don’t know. Didn’t hang around to find out,” he said. “I just drew part of my pay and headed on over here. When they want me again, they’ll come after me.”
“Well, at least they won’t have to scour the saloons to find you,” Connie said. “Some of those people …”
George didn’t say anything to that. He just tried to look virtuous. He didn’t know how good a job he did. For one thing, he intended to take a drink or three while he had the chance. For another, Connie’s father had seen the inside of a tavern and the bottom of a glass more than a few times in his day.
But George didn’t want to think about that right this minute, either. He asked, “How are things here?”
“Pretty good,” Connie answered. “They’ve been good boys. They haven’t tried to pull the ears off the cat or flush the Sears, Roebuck catalogue down the toilet.” They had committed the felony with the catalogue, one crumpled page and then more than one crumpled page at a time, till a flood and two spankings resulted. They hadn’t messed with the cat’s ears, at least not where their parents could catch them. But then Whiskers, unlike the hapless catalogue, could take care of himself.
The cat strolled up to see what the commotion was about. He gave George a leisurely glance, then yawned, showing needle teeth. Oh, it’s you, he might have said. He remembered George between trips just well enough to tolerate being petted. And, of course, George smelled of fish, which made him interesting.
“How was the run?” Connie did her best not to sound anxious. Her best could have been better. If the run wasn’t good, things got tight. She had to make ends meet on whatever George brought home.
“Pretty good. We brought back a lot of tuna,” he answered. “Only question now is how much it’ll bring.”
“News hasn’t been good,” Connie said, and he nodded. She went on, “That might drive prices up.”
“Maybe. I can hope.” He sniffed. “What smells good?”
“I was stewing a chicken,” she told him. “We were going to have it for two nights, maybe three, but who cares? I’ve got to show you I’m a better cook than the Cookie, don’t I?”
“You’re a lot cuter than Davey, anyhow,” he said, which made her squawk. He went on, “I just hope Bill and Pat get sleepy pretty soon.” Both boys let out indignant howls. If he’d listened to them, he would have believed they would never fall asleep again. Fortunately, he knew better.
Connie turned red. “My father used to say things like that when he came home from a fishing run.”
“So did mine,” George said. “I never understood why till not very long ago. I don’t remember much about my pa, but that sticks in my mind.”
“How come, Daddy?” Bill asked.
“I don’t know. It just does,” George answered. “It’s the sort of thing a fisherman would say, that’s for sure.” Bill asked why again. George didn’t say, not in words. He kissed Connie again instead. As far as he was concerned, that was the best answer he could give.
Jefferson Pinkard looked around at his kingdom and found it … not so good. He turned to Mercer Scott, the guard chief at Camp Dependable. “For Chrissake, Mercer,” he said, “what the hell are we gonna do when those goddamn sons of bitches in Richmond send us another shipment of niggers? This camp’ll go boom, on account of there just ain’t no room for any more spooks in here. Do they care? Do they give a shit? Don’t make me laugh.”
Scott shifted a chaw of Red Man from his left cheek to his right. He spat a stream of tobacco juice onto the ground. “You sure as hell ain’t wrong,” he said. “We got us coons hangin’ from their heels like they was bats. Dunno where else we can put ’em. On the roofs, maybe?” He laughed to show that was a joke.
Jeff laughed, too, though it was anything but funny. If he could have put bunks on the roofs of the prisoner barracks, he would have done it. He didn’t know where else to put them, that was for sure. “Bastards don’t send us enough in the way of rations, neither. We got pellagra, we got hookworm, we got plain old-fashioned starvation. Wouldn’t take a whole lot more food to make all that stuff a hell of a lot better.”
“Damned if I can see why you’re gettin’ your ass in an uproar about that,” Scott said. “They’re only niggers. No, they ain’t only niggers. They’re a bunch of goddamn Reds, too. So who gives a shit if they die? Ain’t nobody gonna miss ’em.”
“It’s not …” Pinkard frowned, looking for the word that summed up how he felt about it. “It’s not orderly, dammit. If they give me so many prisoners, they’re supposed to give me enough food for that many, too. That’s just the way things work.”
As a matter of fact, that wasn’t the way things worked. They’d worked that way in the prisoner camps down in the Empire of Mexico, not least because Jeff had made sure they did. And they’d worked that way in the Birmingham jail, because it was longstanding policy that they work so. There was no longstanding policy for camps housing political prisoners and Negroes taken in rebellion. Every day that passed saw such policy made.
Scott seemed to understand instinctively the root of that policy. It was, Who gives a shit if they die? Pinkard could see that for himself. A hell of a lot of prisoners left Camp Dependable feet first. He didn’t like it. He scavenged across the countryside for more rations than he was officially issued. No doubt that did some good. Against the kind of overcrowding he was facing, it didn’t do much.
A guard trotted up to him, heavy belly bouncing above his belt. “Telephone call for you, boss,” the man said. He hadn’t missed any meals. None of the guards had. Neither had Pinkard himself.
“Thanks, Eddie,” he said, though he didn’t know why he was thanking the guard. Telephone calls weren’t likely to be good news. He tramped back to the office and picked up the phone. “Pinkard speaking.”
“Hello, Pinkard.” The clicks and pops on the line said it was a long-distance call. “This is Ferdinand Koenig, calling from Richmond.”
“Yes, sir!” The attorney general was Jake Featherston’s right-hand man. “Freedom!”
“Freedom! I’ve heard you aren’t happy because you haven’t been getting enough advance notice of prisoner shipments,” Koenig said, as if he’d just finished listening to Jeff bitching to Mercer Scott.
“Uh, yes, sir. That’s true,” Jeff said. Meanwhile, he was thinking, Goddammit, some son of a bitch here is telling stories about me back in Richmond. Have to find out who the bastard is. He didn’t suppose he should have been surprised that Koenig—as attorney general or as Freedom Party big wig?—had spies in Camp Dependable. All the same, he wanted to be rid of them.
The attorney general didn’t sound too angry as he said, “Don’t suppose I can blame you for that. Here’s your news then: you’ve got about fifteen hundred niggers—maybe two thousand—heading your way. They ought to be there in three, four days.”
“Jesus Christ!” It wasn’t a scream, but it came close. Pinkard went on, “Sir, no way in hell this camp will hold that many more people. We’re overflowing already.”
“That’s why I’m telling you now.” Koenig spoke with what sounded like exaggerated patience. “You have the time to get ready for those black bastards.”
“I don’t suppose we’ll get the rations we need to feed ’em,” Jeff said. Only silence answered him. He hadn’t really expected anything else. Reproachfully, he continued, “Sir, you know I’m a good Party man. I don’t mean any disrespect or anything like that. But what the hell am I supposed to do to get my camp ready for a shipment that big?”
“Whatever you have to do.” Ferdinand Koenig paused. Pinkard didn’t think he would say anything more, but he did, repeating, “Whatever you have to do. Is that plain enough, or do I have to draw you a picture? I’d better not have to draw you a picture. I heard you were a pretty smart fellow.”
Maybe he had just drawn a picture. “Jesus Christ!” Jeff said again, not much liking what he thought he saw. “You mean—?”
Koenig cut him off. “Whatever you have to do,” he said for the third time. “You can take care of it, or I’ll find somebody else who will. Your choice, Pinkard. Which would you rather?”
Jeff thought it over. It didn’t take long. He was a good Party man. The Party mattered more to him than anything else. The ruins of his marriage proved that. And, where Emily had screwed around, the Party had always been faithful. Without it, God only knew what he would have done when he lost his job at the Sloss Works. Didn’t loyalty demand loyalty in return? “I’ll take care of it, Mr. Attorney General. Don’t you worry about a thing.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Koenig said. “Like I told you, if you didn’t, somebody else would. But I’m glad it’s you. I know you’ve put in a lot of time for us. And I know you’ll do a good job here, too. You won’t screw it up and leave a bunch of loose ends or anything like that.” You’d better not, was what he meant.
“Hell, no,” Jeff said quickly. “When I do somethin’, I do it right and proper.”
“Good,” Koenig said, and the line went dead.
Pinkard stared at the telephone for close to half a minute. “Fuck,” he muttered, and finally hung it up. He trudged out of the office.
“What’s up?” Mercer Scott called to him.
Are you the spy? I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ve run my mouth around you. Well, no more, goddammit. But Scott had to know about this. Jeff said, “In three or four days, we’re getting another fifteen hundred, two thousand niggers.”
Scott stared. “Holy shit!” he said. “They can’t do that! This place won’t hold ’em.”
“Oh, yes, it will,” Pinkard said.
“How?” Scott demanded. “You were just now telling me it wouldn’t hold the niggers we’ve got, and you were right. You know damn well you were right.”
“I’ll tell you how.” And Pinkard did.
“Holy shit,” Scott said again, this time in an altogether different tone of voice. “You sure you know what you’re talking about? You sure you know what you’re doing?” Under other circumstances, the questions would have infuriated Jeff. Not now.
He nodded uneasily. “I know, all right. Get the guards we need—you’ll know the ones we can count on. Then pull out the niggers.”
“All at once?” Scott asked.
After a moment, Jeff shook his head. “No. That’d be asking for trouble. Take out a couple hundred. Less chance of anything going wrong.”
“Yeah.” The guard chief eyed him. “How come I’m the lucky one? What are you gonna be doing? Sittin’ in your office pouring down a cold beer?”
Had things been different, that would have infuriated Jeff, too. The way things were, Mercer Scott had the right to ask. Pinkard shook his head. “You stay here and get the next bunch ready. I’m going out with the first ones, and I won’t come back till the job’s done.”
“All right.” Scott nodded. “That’s fair. I can’t tell you it ain’t.” He stuck out his hand. Pinkard shook it. He was grateful for any sort of reassurance he could get.
Along with fifteen guards, he led two hundred Negroes away from Camp Dependable. The black men came willingly enough. As far as they knew, it was just another work detail. When they’d gone two or three miles from the camp, he ordered them to dig a long, deep trench. “This here ain’t nothing but a waste o’ time,” one of them said. But he was only complaining, the way people did when they had to do work they didn’t care for.
Pinkard didn’t argue with him. When the ditch was dug, he ordered the Negroes to lie down in it. That drew more complaints. “You gots to put us on top of each other?” a man said. “We ain’t no goddamn fairies.”
The guards stepped up onto a parapet made from the dirt the Negroes had dug out. Even when they aimed their submachine guns at the men in the trench, the blacks didn’t seem to believe what was happening. This is my camp, Jeff thought miserably. I’m responsible for what goes on here. He nodded to the guards. The order was his to give, and he gave it: “Fire!”
They did. As soon as they started shooting, it was as if the ground convulsed. The submachine guns roared and stuttered and spat flame. The guards slapped in magazine after magazine. Pinkard was appalled at how much ammunition his men needed to kill the prisoners. The stenches of blood and shit filled the humid air. At last, the screaming stopped. Only the groans of the dying were left.
More than one guard vomited into the trench. Jeff felt like heaving up his guts, too, but sternly refrained. “Scrape dirt over ’em,” he told the guards. “We’ve got more work to do.” The guards grumbled, but not too much. They seemed too stunned to do a whole lot in the way of grumbling.
And it got harder after that. The Negroes at the camp had to have understood what was going on when the guards came back and the men they’d been guarding didn’t. But Mercer Scott was no fool. The first gang of blacks had gone off willingly enough, yes. He made sure the next bunch were shackled. That way, nobody tried to run off into the woods and swamp.
Over the course of the next three days, Pinkard reduced the population of Camp Dependable by two thousand men. That was how he referred to it in his reports. That was how he tried to think about it, too. If he thought about reducing population, he didn’t have to dwell on shooting helpless prisoners.
A few of the guards were exhilarated after the job was done. They were the ones who thought Negroes had it coming to them. Most of the men were very subdued, though. They didn’t mind jailing blacks or starving them. Shooting them in cold blood seemed to be something else again.
One shot rang out in the middle of the night: a guard blowing his brains out. He got buried, too, with almost as little fuss as if he were one of the blacks so casually disposed of.
When the promised—the threatened—new shipment of Negro prisoners arrived, Camp Dependable was able to take them. Pinkard wondered if he would get a congratulatory call from Ferd Koenig. He didn’t. Maybe that made sense, too. After all, he’d only done what the attorney general needed him to do.
Scipio wished to God he could get out of Augusta. But it wasn’t so easy as it would have been a few years before. Things had tightened up. Everywhere a black man went, it was, “Show me your passbook, boy.” If he started working in, say, Atlanta, he would have to produce the document that proved he was himself—or proved he was Xerxes, which amounted to the same thing. And if he did that, he would be vulnerable to either Anne Colleton or Jerry Dover.
He didn’t think his boss at the Huntsman’s Lodge had anything in particular against him. He knew damned well his former boss at the former Marshlands plantation did. But he didn’t like the idea of being vulnerable to Dover much better than he liked being vulnerable to Miss Anne. Being vulnerable to anybody white terrified him.
At the restaurant, the rich white men who ate there talked more and more of war. So did the newspapers. Jake Featherston was thumping his chest and foaming at the mouth because Al Smith wouldn’t give him what he’d promised not to ask for the year before. Scipio remembered too well what a catastrophe the last war had been for the Confederate States. Under other circumstances, the prospect of a new one would have appalled him.
Under other circumstances … As things were, he more than half hoped the CSA did start fighting the USA gain. All eyes, all thoughts, would turn toward the front. They would turn away from a town in the middle of nowhere like Augusta. And he had heard some of the things bombing airplanes could do nowadays. That made him all the gladder Augusta was a long, long way from the border.
What made life harder was that whites weren’t all he had to worry about in Augusta. The Terry was full of sharecroppers displaced from the land by the tractors and harvesters and combines that had revolutionized farming in the CSA since the Freedom Party came to power. The Terry, in fact, held far more people than it held jobs. A man who wasn’t careful could easily get knocked over the head for half a dollar—especially a man who wasn’t young and who had to wear a penguin suit to and from work, so he looked as if he had money.
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.”
“I watches myself real good, suh,” Scipio answered. “You say de city jail full up?” Jerry Dover nodded. Scipio asked him, “They ’rest white folks now, de white folks go to dese camps, too?”
His boss looked at him as if he’d asked whether the stork brought mothers their babies. “Don’t be stupid,” Dover said.
That was good advice, too. It always was. What worried Scipio was, it might not be enough. He’d escaped the last dragnet as much by luck as by anything else. You could tell a man not to be stupid, and maybe—if he wasn’t stupid to begin with—he’d listen. But how the devil could you tell a man not to be unlucky?