Harry Turtledove - Return engagement

Dover shook his head. "Sorry, Xerxes, but you're not."

"What you mean?" For a second, Scipio thought the restaurant manager thought he'd pocketed the missing banknote before complaining. Then he realized something else was going on. "You mean it's one o' them-?"

"Contributions. That's right. Thought you might have seen the story in the Constitutionalist yesterday, or maybe heard about it on the wireless. It's on account of the bombing in the Terry."

"Lawd!" Scipio burst out. "One o' dem bombs almost kill me, an' now I gots to pay fo' it? Don't hardly seem fair." It seemed a lot worse than unfair, but saying even that much to a white man carried a certain risk.

Jerry Dover didn't get angry. He just shrugged. "If I don't short you and the rest of the colored help, my ass is in a sling," he said. If it came to a choice between saving his ass and the black men's, he'd choose his own. That wasn't a headline that would make the Augusta Constitutionalist.

Scipio sighed. Only too plainly, he wasn't going to get his ten dollars. He said, "Wish I seen de newspaper. Wish I heard de wireless. Wouldn't be such a surprise in dat case."

"How come you missed 'em?" Dover asked. "You're usually pretty well up on stuff." He didn't even add, for a nigger. Scipio had worked for him a long time now. He knew the colored man had a working brain.

"One o' them things," Scipio said with a shrug of his own. He'd missed buying a paper the day before. He hadn't listened to the wireless very much. He did wonder how he'd managed not to hear the newsboys shouting the headline and the waiters and cooks and dishwashers grousing about it. "Been livin' in my own little world, I reckon."

"Yeah, well, shit like that happens." Dover was willing to sound sympathetic as long as he didn't have to do anything about it.

Before Scipio could answer, a dishwasher came up to their boss. "Hey, Mr. Dover!" he said. "I got ten clams missin' outa my envelope here!"

"No, you don't, Ozymandias," the manager said, and went through the explanation again. Scipio knew a certain amount of relief that he hadn't been the only one not to get the word.

Ozymandias, a young man, didn't take it as well as Scipio had. He cussed and fumed till Scipio wondered whether Jerry Dover would fire him on the spot. Dover didn't. He just let the Negro run down and sent him out the door. Quite a few white men boasted about being good with niggers. Most of them were full of crap. Jerry Dover really was good with the help at the Huntsman's Lodge, though he didn't go around bragging about it.

Of course, Dover was good with people generally, whites as well as Negroes. We are people, dammit, Scipio thought. The Freedom Party had a different opinion.

Dover said, "You be careful on the way home, you hear? Don't want your missus and your young ones grieving on account of some bastard who's out prowling after curfew."

"I's always careful," Scipio said, and meant it. "But I thanks you fo' de thought."

He went out into the black, black night. Augusta had never been bombed, but remained blacked out. Scipio supposed that made sense. Better safe than sorry was a pretty good rule.

The weather was cooler and less muggy than it had been. As fall came on, the dreadful sticky heat of summer became only a memory. It wasn't cold enough to put all the mosquitoes to sleep for the winter, though. Scipio suspected he'd get home to his apartment with a new bite or two. He couldn't hear the mosquitoes buzzing any more unless they flew right past his ears. Those nasty whines had driven him crazy when he was younger. He didn't miss hearing them now-except that they would have warned him the flying pests were around.

An auto slid past, going hardly faster than Scipio was. Masking tape reduced its headlights to slits. They cast a pallid glow that reached about as far as a man could spit. At least the driver here didn't have the delusion he could do more than he really could. Accidents were up even though fewer motorcars were on the road. That meant one thing and one thing only: people were driving like a bunch of damn fools.

As usual, Scipio had no trouble telling when he got to the Terry, even though he could hardly see a hand in front of his face. As soon as the sidewalk started crumbling under his feet, he knew he'd come to the colored part of town.

He skirted the shortest way home, which took him past what had been the bus stop for war workers. It remained a sea of rubble. Repairs got done slowly in the Terry-when they got done at all. Some of the buildings white mobs had burned in the pogroms after the Freedom Party took over remained ruins after seven years.

He'd almost died then. Two different auto bombs had almost killed him. He'd lived through the bloody rise and even bloodier fall of the Congaree Socialist Republic. He'd outlived Anne Colleton, and he never would have bet anything on that. After what I've been through, maybe I'll go on forever, he thought.

A bat flittered past, not a foot in front of him. It was out of sight almost before he realized it had been there. He wondered if the war had brought hardship to bats. Without street lights to lure insects, wouldn't they have to work harder to get enough to eat? Strange to imagine that one man's decision in Richmond might affect little furry animals hundreds of miles away.

"Hold it right there!" The harsh, rasping voice came out of an alley not ten feet away. "Don't even breathe funny, or it'll be the last thing you ever do."

Scipio froze. Even as he did it, he wondered if it was the worst thing he could do, not the best. If he ran, he might lose himself in the darkness. Of course, if he ran, he might also give the owner of that voice the excuse to blast him to hamburger with a charge of buckshot. He'd made his choice. Now he had to see what came of it.

"All right, nigger. Suppose you tell me what the fuck you're doin' out after curfew."

He'd thought that was a white policeman there, not a black robber. He would have been more likely to run from a man of his own color. "Suh, I works at de Huntsman's Lodge," he answered. "Dey don't let me off till midnight. I goes home at all, I gots to go after curfew."

"Likely tell," the white man said. "Who's your boss, damn you? Make it snappy!"

"Jerry Dover, suh," Scipio said quickly. "Mebbe he still dere. I ain't left but fifteen minutes ago. He tell you who I is."

Footsteps crunching on gravel, thumping on cement. A dark, shadowy shape looming up in front of Scipio. The silhouette of the juice-squeezer hat the other man wore said he really was a policeman. He leaned forward to peer closely at Scipio. "Holy Jesus, you're in a goddamn penguin suit!"

"I gots to wear it," Scipio said wearily. "It's my uniform, like."

"Get the fuck outa here," the cop said. "Nobody's gonna be dumb enough to go plantin' bombs or nothin' in a lousy penguin suit."

"I thanks you kindly, suh," Scipio said. If the policeman had been in a nasty mood, he could have run him in for being out after curfew. Scipio thought Jerry Dover or the higher-ups at the restaurant would have made sure he didn't spend much time in jail, but any time in jail was too much.

"A penguin suit," the cop said one more time-another dime Scipio didn't have. "Shit, the boys at the station'll bust a gut when I tell 'em about this one."

With a resigned chuckle and a dip of his head to show he was a properly respectful-a properly servile-Negro, Scipio made his way deeper into the Terry. He peered carefully up and down every street and alley he came to before crossing it. How much good that would do, with so many inky shadows for robbers to hide in, he didn't know. But it was all he could do.

When he came to a couple of the places where he was most likely to find trouble-or it was most likely to find him-he wished he had that foul-mouthed policeman at his side. He shook his head, ashamed and embarrassed at wanting a white man's protection against his own people. Ashamed and embarrassed or not, though, he did. The Terry was a more dangerous place these days than it had been a few years before. Sharecroppers and farm workers forced from fields when tractors and harvesters took their jobs away had poured into Confederate cities, looking for whatever they could find. When they could find nothing else-which was all too often- they preyed on their fellow Negroes. And Reds sheltered here, too. They weren't above robbery (from the highest motives, of course) to keep their cause alive.