Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“I is powerful sorry, suh,” Scipio replied. The white man walked around him. Scipio stayed right where he was, trying to tell himself he was wrong and having no luck at all. He wasn’t sorry. He was afraid, and the longer he stood there the more frightened he got.

For twenty years and more, Jake Featherston had been screaming his head off about getting rid of the Negroes in the Confederate States. Scipio had had trouble taking the Freedom Party seriously, not because he didn’t think it hated blacks-oh, no, not because of that! — but because he didn’t see how the CSA could get along without them. Who would cut hair? Who would wash dishes? Who would do the field labor that still needed doing despite the swarm of new tractors and harvesters and combines that had poured out of Confederate factories?

Whites? Not likely! Being a white in the Confederacy meant being above such labor, and above the people who did it.

But whites felt themselves superior to Mexicans: not to the same degree as they did toward Negroes, but enough. And the work blacks did in the CSA couldn’t have looked too bad to people who had no work of their own. Which meant…

If workers from the Empire of Mexico came north to do the jobs Negroes had been doing in the CSA, the Freedom Party and Jake Featherston might be able to have their cake and eat it, too.

Scipio wasn’t at his best at work that day. He was far enough from his best to make Jerry Dover snap, “What the hell’s the matter with you, Xerxes?”

“Jus’ thinkin’ ’bout Jose an’ Manuel, Mistuh Dover,” he answered.

“They aren’t your worry. They’re mine. If they keep on like they’ve started, they’re no worry at all, and you can take that to the bank. You just keep your mind on what you’re supposed to be doing, that’s all. Everything will be fine if you do.”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said. But yes, suh wasn’t what he meant. Jose and Manuel-and that barber in the fourth chair-were the thin end of the wedge. If Jake Featherston banged the other end, what would happen? Nothing good.

The restaurant manager eyed him. “You wondering if we can find some damn greaser to do your job? Tell you one thing: the worse you do it, the better the chances are.”

That came unpleasantly close to what Scipio was thinking. Say what you would about Dover, he was nobody’s fool. “Ain’t jus’ me I is worried about,” Scipio muttered.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dover asked.

“More Mexicans they is, mo’ trouble fo’ niggers,” Scipio answered.

“Oh.” Dover thought about it for a little while, then shrugged. “I can’t do anything about that, you know. The only thing I care about is keeping this place going, and I’ll handle that till they stick a uniform on me and drag me out of here.”

He’d done everything a decent man could-more than most decent men would have. Scipio had to remind himself of that. “Yes, suh,” the black man said dully.

“Hang in there,” Dover said. “That’s all you can do right this minute. That’s all anybody can do right this minute.”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said again, even more dully than before. But then, in spite of himself, his fear and rage overflowed. He let them all out in one sarcastic word: “Freedom!”

Jerry Dover’s eyes got very wide. He looked around to see if anyone else could have heard the rallying cry that, here, was anything but. Evidently satisfied no one else had, he wagged a finger at Scipio, for all the world like a mother scolding a little boy who had just shouted a dirty word without even knowing what it meant. “You’ve got to watch your mouth there, Xerxes.”

“Yes, suh. I knows dat.” Scipio was genuinely contrite. He knew what kind of danger he’d put himself in.

Dover went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “You’ve got a nice family. I saw them. You want to leave them without their pa?”

“No, suh.” Again, Scipio meant it. Still clucking, the restaurant manager let it go and let him alone. He’d told the truth, all right. Here, though, how much did the truth matter? His family, like any black family, was all too likely to be torn to bits regardless of what he wanted.

Chester Martin couldn’t have been more bored if the Confederates had shot him. As a matter of fact, they had shot him, or rather, ripped up his leg with a shell fragment. Everybody kept assuring him he would get better. He believed it. He did feel better than he had right after he was wounded. Thanks to sulfa powder and pills and shots, the wound didn’t get badly infected. A little redness, a little soreness on top of the normal pain from getting torn open, and that was it.

Everybody kept telling him he’d get back to duty pretty soon, too. He also believed that. People kept saying it as if it were good news. For the life of him, he couldn’t understand why. Hey, Chester! The Confederates’ll get another chance to maim you or kill you before too long. Ain’t that great? Maybe he was prejudiced, but it didn’t seem great to him.

Meanwhile, he lay on a cot with the iron frame painted Army green-gray. Once a day, he got exercise and physical therapy. The rest of the time, he just lay there. The Army gave him better rations in the hospital than it had while he was in the field. That struck him as fundamentally unfair, but then, so did a lot of other things about the Army.

He also got his pay here. Money in his pocket let him sit in on a poker game whenever he felt like it. The only trouble was, he didn’t feel like it very often. Sometimes he sat in even when he didn’t much feel like it. It was something to do, a way to make time go by.

Because he didn’t much care whether he won or lost, he had a terrific poker face. “Nobody can tell what you’re thinking,” one of the other guys in the game grumbled.

“Me? I gave up thinking for Lent,” Chester said. Everybody sitting around the table laughed. And he had been joking… up to a point.

He’d just come back from his exercise one day when a ward orderly stuck his head into the room and said, “You’ve got a visitor, Martin.”

“Yeah, now tell me another one,” Chester said. “I’m not bad enough off to need the padre for last rites or anything, and who else is gonna want to have anything to do with me?”

The orderly didn’t answer. He just ducked back out of sight. Rita walked into the room. “You idiot,” she told him, and burst into tears.

Chester gaped at his wife. “What are you doing here?” he squeaked.

She pulled a tiny linen handkerchief out of her purse and dabbed at her eyes. “When I found out you got wounded, I asked the War Department where you were,” she answered. “They told me, and so I got on a train-got on a bunch of trains, really-and here I am. Carl’s with Sue and Otis till I get back.”

“All right,” Chester said dazedly. His sister and brother-in-law would do fine with his son. “Jesus, sweetie, it’s good to see you.”

Rita gave him a look laced with vitriol. “If you like seeing me, why did you go put that stupid uniform on again? You could have stayed in L.A. and seen me every day.”

He sighed. “It seemed like a good idea when I did it.” How many follies got perpetrated because they seemed a good idea at the time? Was there any way to count them? Chester didn’t think so.

By the way Rita drummed her fingers against the painted iron of the bedstead, she didn’t, either. “They told me you weren’t hurt bad enough for them to discharge you from the Army,” she said. “That means the Confederates will have to shoot you at least one more time before I get you back, doesn’t it?”

“I… hadn’t thought of it like that,” Chester said, which was true.