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“Do Jesus! I du
“You can still get word through.” That was a statement, not a question. Cinci
“What if I kin?” Lucullus didn’t deny it. He just spread his hands, pale palms up. “Ain’t go
That had a chilling feel of probability to Cinci
And it worked. Lucullus very visibly gathered himself. “Mebbe,” he said. “But only mebbe, dammit. Freedom Party fellas is hunting Bliss right now like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Hell I wouldn’t,” Cinci
“Mebbe,” Lucullus said again. “What kin he do, though? They gots police an’ them damn stalwarts all around. Anytime they wants to come in an’ start gettin’ rid of us…”
“We got guns. You got guns. You ain’t go
“Oh, yeah.” Lucullus’ jowls wobbled as he nodded. “They be sorry. But we be sorrier. Any kind o’ fight like that, we loses. Guns we got is enough to make them fuckers think twice. Ain’t enough to stop ’em. Cain’t be, and you got to know that, too. They uses barrels, we ain’t got nothin’ ’cept Featherston Fizzes against ’em. They sends in Asskickers to bomb us flat, we ain’t even got that. We kin hurt ’em. They kin fuckin’ kill us, an’ I reckon they is lookin’ fo’ the excuse to do it.”
Cinci
“What good it do me?” Lucullus asked sourly. “I done told you-”
“Yeah, you told me. But so what?” Cinci
Lucullus kept right on staring, but now in a new way. “Mebbe,” he said once more. This time, he didn’t seem to mean, You’re crazy. Even so, he warned, “Luther Bliss don’t care nothin’ about niggers just ’cause they’s niggers.”
“Shit, I know that. Luther Bliss hates everybody under the sun,” Cinci
“Well, yeah, but the people he hates next most is Reds,” Lucullus said. “You got to remember, that don’t help me none.”
“You got any better ideas?” Cinci
Lucullus glared at him. If anything, that relieved Cinci
“What do you mean?” Cinci
“They got the wire around us. We is in here. Whatever they wants to do with us-whatever they wants to do to us-they got us where they wants us. How we get out? How we get away?”
Cinci
“You hope we ain’t,” Lucullus said, but a little spirit came back into his voice.
“Talk to Luther Bliss,” Cinci
“Like he listen to you,” Lucullus said scornfully. “You ain’t got no guns. You ain’t got no people who kin do stuff. I tells you somethin’-you git outa the barbed wire, you try an’ get your black ass back to the USA. Ain’t far-jus’ over de river.”
“Might as well be over the moon right now,” Cinci
“You is the stubbornest nigger ever hatched,” Lucullus said. “Onliest thing that hard head good for nowadays is gittin’ you killed.” He made shooing motions with his hands. “Go on. Git. I don’t want you ’round no mo’.”
Cinci
Cane tapping the ground ahead of him, he walked out for a better look at what the whites in Covington had done. He’d seen more formidable assemblages of barbed wire when he was driving trucks in the last war, but those had been made to hold out soldiers, not to hold in civilians. For that, what the cops and the stalwarts had run up would do fine.
Normally, making a fence out of barbed wire would have been nigger work. Whites had done it here, though. That worried Cinci
A swagbellied cop with a submachine gun strolled along outside the fence. He spat a brown stream of tobacco juice onto the sidewalk. The sun sparkled from the enameled Freedom Party pin on his lapel. Hadn’t Jake Featherston climbed to power by going on and on about how whites were better than blacks? How could they be better than blacks if they got rid of all the blacks? Then they would have to work things out among themselves. Race wouldn’t trump class anymore, the way it always had in the Confederacy.
That fat policeman spat again. His jaw worked as he shifted the chaw from one cheek to the other. Did he care about such details? Did the countless others like him care? Cinci
Cinci
He didn’t like the combination, not even a little bit. Except for trying to escape with his father as soon as he got even a halfway decent chance, though, he didn’t know what he could do about it.