Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Scipio and Aurelius reeled back to the Terry together. No explosions marred the night. No automobiles going up in fireballs threw jagged metal and blazing gasoline in all directions. No desperate Negroes threw nails and chunks of themselves every which way. Except for a whip-poor-will’s mournful call, everything was peaceful and quiet.

“You damn coons are late,” grumbled the cop who opened the gate for them. “Even for y’all, you’re late.”

“Sorry, suh,” Scipio slurred. “We was sayin’ good-bye to our boss. He goin’ into de Army.”

The cop’s left hand had only the thumb and index finger. You didn’t notice straight off, probably because he kept that hand in his pocket whenever he could. “Good luck to him,” he said. “You spooks don’t know when you’re well off. You don’t got to worry about shit like that.”

Was he right? Scipio didn’t think so. If Negroes had the same privileges and rights as whites, wouldn’t they be glad to pick up rifles to help defend the Confederacy? It looked that way to him. But if they had all those privileges and rights, the Confederacy they were defending would be a very different place. Just for openers, it would be a place where Jake Featherston could never get elected, and neither could anyone like him.

Well, it wasn’t like that, and it never would be. The thump of the gate behind Scipio and Aurelius proved as much, and proved it all too well.

He did have a headache when he got up. Cassius scowled at him. “How can you have a good time sayin’ so long to a damn ofay?” his son demanded.

With a sigh, Scipio answered, “It ain’t as simple as you think it is.”

“Oh, yeah,” Cassius said scornfully-he’d got to the point where he would quarrel with anything Scipio said just because Scipio said it. “How come?”

“On account of I be dead if Jerry Dover don’t want me alive an’ workin’ there,” Scipio said. “On account of you an’ your sister an’ your mama go to a camp-or else you jus’ end up dead, too.”

“Jerry Dover still a damn ofay,” Cassius said.

“Fine.” Scipio didn’t feel like arguing with him, especially not with a head pounding like a drop forge. He took a couple of aspirins. They made his stomach sour, but after a while his headache receded.

He hated walking through the cleaned-out parts of the Terry on his way to work that afternoon. Lawns grew tall and untended and full of weeds. Lots of houses had broken windows. Quite a few had doors standing open. A skinny dog trotted out of one of them and gave Scipio a hard stare. If it were a little bigger, it might have gone for him. Stray dogs scrounged whatever they could. So did stray people. The cleanouts hadn’t missed many. If not for Jerry Dover, they wouldn’t have missed Scipio and his family.

And now Dover was in the Army. Scipio shook his head, dreading what would come next. He’d got to the age where he feared any kind of change. It was too likely to be change for the worse.

A white man waited just inside the kitchen entrance to the Huntsman’s Lodge. “Are you Xerxes or Aurelius?” he asked.

“I is Xerxes, suh,” Scipio answered. The new manager was younger than he’d expected-in his early forties. He had a thin, sharp, clever face and cold blue eyes. Scipio didn’t wonder why he wasn’t in the Army: he sat in a wheelchair, his legs thin and useless inside his trousers.

“My name’s Willard Sloan,” he said, and tapped the arms of the chair with his own arms, which seemed fine. A moment later, he explained why: “Stopped a damnyankee bullet with my back in 1917. I used to be a hell of a football player, you know? So much for that.” His mouth twisted. Then he went on, “Jerry Dover says you’ve been here since dirt. If I need to know anything special, I’m supposed to ask you.”

“I tells you anything I knows, suh.” Scipio meant it. He didn’t expect the white man to like him. It might end up happening, but he didn’t expect it. If Sloan found him useful, that would do almost as well.

“All right. If I have to pick your brains, I’ll holler. For now, you just go on about your business the way you always have. I’ll keep an eye on things, cipher out how they are, before I decide what works good and what needs tinkering.”

“Fair enough, suh. Dis place been de bes’ in town a long time. Sure enough want to keep it dat way,” Scipio said. He and the rest of the staff would be judging Willard Sloan as he judged them. The only trouble was, his judgment carried more weight than theirs.

He did start well. When the cooks were unhappy with some of the beef they got, he used the telephone like a deadly weapon. “You bastard, you reckon you can screw me over on account of I ain’t Dover?” he screamed at the butcher. “You reckon I don’t know Chet Byers? You reckon I won’t do business with him from here on out if you ever pull this shit on me again? Make it right in fifteen minutes, or I blacken your name all over town.” New beef-of the proper quality-got there in twelve minutes flat. Jerry Dover couldn’t have done better, and there was no higher praise than that.

Autumn was when the leaves turned red and gold and then fell off the trees. It was when the weather got crisp, so your cheeks also turned red and tingled after you’d stayed outside a while. If you were a fisherman on the North Atlantic, it was when the ocean started tossing you around, not knowing-or caring-your boat was out there.

George Enos, Jr., was used to the rhythms of the changing year. A Massachusetts man had to be. In the Sandwich Islands, the year didn’t change much. The sun still rode high in the sky, if not quite so high. Days remained warm. Everything stayed green.

Bigger swells did start rolling in out of the north. The Townsend would slide up over a crest and then down into a trough. That didn’t seem enough to get excited about.

When George said so out loud, Fremont Dalby laughed at him. “Christ, Enos, haven’t you had enough excitement for a while?” the gun chief said. “Far as I’m concerned, I can stay at my station and gather dust for a while, because that’ll mean nobody’s trying to strafe the ship or drop a bomb on her or stick a torpedo up our ass.”

“Japs are out there somewhere,” George said.

“I know, I know. You don’t got to remind me,” Dalby said. “But I don’t like thinking about it every goddamn minute, you know what I mean?”

“Sure, Chief.” George didn’t want to get the CPO ticked off at him. Getting any CPO ticked off at you was a bad idea. When the man in question happened to be your boss, it was four times as bad.

They kept station with three other destroyers and with the Trenton. The escort carrier hadn’t taken too much damage in her last brush with the Japanese. Her airplanes had given out more than she’d got. That was the first real naval victory the USA had had in the islands around the Sandwich Islands for quite a while.

U.S. fighters buzzed overhead. They flew a dawn-to-dusk combat air patrol. The Townsend ’s Y-ranging antenna went round and round. Y-ranging gear could spot incoming enemy aircraft while they were still well out to sea. The other destroyers and the carrier all had sets, too. Whatever else happened, the Japs wouldn’t be able to get in a sucker punch at the little flotilla. The Trenton would be able to scramble all her fighters. The destroyers would start throwing up as much anti-aircraft as they could. And after that, what could you do but pucker your asshole and hope?

Fritz Gustafson pointed off to starboard. The loader didn’t bother with words when one finger would do. Fremont Dalby wasn’t shy about words, though. “Dolphins!” he said with a smile. “They’re supposed to be good luck. Here’s hoping, anyway.”