Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Jake Featherston guffawed. “Good. That’s goddamn good. But we won’t be able to do it again anytime soon, though.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Potter said, nodding.

“We found out what we need to know, so we don’t have to worry about putting the damnyankees’ backs up by trying it again,” Jake said, and Clarence Potter nodded once more. The President aimed his finger like a rifle. “We’ve got to keep the USA from finding out that we know what they’re up to, and from finding out we’re up to the very same thing ourselves. Whatever your super-duper top-secret security business is, use everything you’ve got and then some on whatever has anything to do with uranium.”

“I’ve already given those orders, sir,” Potter said. “Minimum possible in writing, and code phrases all through instead of the name of the metal. No telephone discussion at all-never can tell who might be listening. You did that just right when you had your secretary call me.”

“Thanks,” Jake said. “Uranium! Who would’ve thunk it?” He would have bet money Henderson V. FitzBelmont was a nut. He would have bet big-and he would have lost his shirt.

Scipio felt like a ghost, rattling around in a nearly empty part of the Terry. His family wasn’t the only one in the area to have survived the cleanout, but there weren’t many. A few others had got advance warning, but only a few-the ones that had good connections with white folks one way or another.

Nobody knew where the people who’d been evacuated had gone-or rather, had been taken. They’d just… vanished. No cards, no letters, no photographs came back to Augusta. Maybe the deportees who could write didn’t have the chance. Maybe the C.S. authorities weren’t letting them. Or maybe they were simply dead.

For the handful who remained, life got harder. The authorities shut off electricity and gas in the depopulated areas. The water still ran. Maybe that was only an absentminded mistake, or maybe the people who ran Augusta kept it on so they could put out fires if they had to. Scipio had nobody he could ask.

He did ask Jerry Dover where the deportees went. The white man looked him in the eye and said, “I have no idea.”

“Could you find out, suh?” Scipio asked. “It do weigh on my mind.”

The manager of the Huntsman’s Lodge shook his head. “No, I’m not about to ask. Some answers are dangerous. Hell, some questions are dangerous. Do I have to draw you a picture?”

“No, suh,” Scipio answered unhappily. “Don’t reckon you do.”

“All right, then.” Dover hesitated before adding, “Sometimes finding out is worse than wondering. You know what I mean?”

Had the white man not told him to bring his family when he came to work that one night, they would have found out. Scipio didn’t think the answer would have made them happy. They might yet learn from the inside out, and so might he. He didn’t want to.

Dover lit a cigarette, then held the pack out to Scipio, who couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a white man do even such a simple favor for a black. “I thanks you kindly,” Scipio said. He had matches of his own. He didn’t need to lean close to Dover to get a light from his cigarette; his boss might have taken that as an undue familiarity.

“Everything’s gonna be…” Dover stopped and shook his head. “Shit, I don’t know whether everything’s gonna be all right. You got to do the best you can, that’s all.”

“Yeah.” Scipio smoked with short, savage puffs. “Don’t mean no offense, suh, but you got an easier time sayin’ dat than I does doin’ it.”

“Maybe. But maybe I don’t, too,” Dover said. Scipio felt a rush of scorn the likes of which he’d never known. What kind of trouble could the restaurant manager have that came within miles of a Negro’s? But then Dover went on, “Looks like they may pull me into the Army after all. More and more people are putting on the uniform these days.”

“Oh.” Scipio didn’t find anything to say to that. Horrible things happened to Negroes in the CSA, yes. But horrible things could happen to anybody in the Army, too. The one difference Scipio could see was that Dover’s family wasn’t in danger if he went into the service. Then a fresh worry surfaced: “You puts on de uniform, suh, who take over here?”

“Well, I don’t exactly know.” Dover didn’t sound comfortable with the answer.

“Whoever he be, he give a damn about colored folks?”

“Well, I don’t exactly know that, either.”

“Do Jesus!” Scipio stubbed out the butt in the pressed-glass ashtray on the manager’s desk. The deceased cigarette had plenty of company. “He one o’ dat kind o’ buckra, we is all dead soon.”

“I do know that,” Dover said. “Other thing I know is, I can’t do thing one about it. If they call me up…” He shrugged. “I can talk to my own bosses till I’m blue in the face, but they don’t have to listento me.”

Scipio sometimes had trouble remembering that Jerry Dover had bosses. But he didn’t own the Huntsman’s Lodge; he just ran the place. He was good at what he did; if he hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have kept his job for as long as he had. As long as he stayed in Augusta, he had no place to move up from the Huntsman’s Lodge. He would have to go to Atlanta, or maybe even to New Orleans, to do better.

Now he said, “Go on. Go to work. Get your ass in gear.”

Not having anything else he could do, Scipio obeyed. Despite his worries, he got through the shift. When he went back to the Terry, he had no trouble passing through the barriers around the colored part of town. Cops and stalwarts knew who he was.

Getting back to work the next day, he found his boss in a terrible temper-not because he’d been called up but because two dishwashers weren’t there when they were supposed to be. That was a normal sort of restaurant crisis, and Dover handled it in the normal way: he hired the first two warm bodies off the street that he could.

Neither of them spoke much English. They were Mexicans-not Confederate citizens from Chihuahua or Sonora, but men out of the Empire of Mexico up in the CSA looking for work. Now they’d found some, and they went at it harder than anyone Scipio had seen in a long time. They wanted to keep it.

At first, thinking of the restaurant and nothing more, Scipio was pleased to see their eagerness. He didn’t blame Jerry Dover for telling the black men they’d replaced not to bother coming back to work. The look on the Negroes’ faces was something to see, but the color of those faces didn’t win the men much extra sympathy from Scipio. If you didn’t, if you couldn’t, show up, you were asking for whatever happened to you. Showing up on time all the damn time counted for more than just about anything else in the restaurant business.

That was at first. Then, coming up to the Huntsman’s Lodge a couple of days later, Scipio walked past a barbershop. All the barbers in there had been Negroes; he couldn’t imagine a white Confederate demeaning himself by cutting another man’s hair. But now the barber at the fourth chair, though he wore a white shirt and black bow tie like the other three-a uniform not far removed from a bartender’s-did not look like them. He had straight black hair, red-brown skin, and prominent cheekbones. He was, in short, as Mexican as the two new dishwashers.

Ice ran through Scipio, not when he noticed the new barber but when he realized what the fellow meant, which didn’t happen for another half a block. “Do Jesus!” he said, and stopped so abruptly, the white man behind him almost walked up his back.

“Watch what you’re doing, Uncle,” the ofay said irritably.