With Lucullus… disabled, Cincinnatus took his troubles to the Brass Monkey instead. He didn’t talk about them in the saloon, but that didn’t mean they didn’t go away. A lot of things dissolved in beer, and there was whiskey for what beer wouldn’t melt.

Covington’s colored quarter had always had a lot of saloons. People there had always had a lot of trouble that needed dissolving. Saloons were the one kind of business in the colored part of town that was doing better now than before the wire went up. Even more sorrows than usual needed drowning. And the Confederate authorities no doubt learned all sorts of things from saloon talk. Some of what they learned might even have been true.

Cincinnatus perched on a stool under one of the two lazily spinning ceiling fans. He slid a dime across the bar. “Let me have a Jax,” he said.

“Comin’ up.” The bartender took one out of the cooler, popped the cap with a church key, and handed Cincinnatus the beer.

Resting his can against one knee, Cincinnatus closed both palms around the cold, wet bottle. “Feels good,” he said, and held it for a little while before lifting it to his lips and taking a long pull. “Ah! That feels even better.”

“I believe it.” Sweat beaded the barkeep’s forehead the way condensation beaded the bottle. In his boiled shirt and black bow tie, he had to be hotter and more uncomfortable than Cincinnatus was.

Motion up near the ceiling caught Cincinnatus’ eye. He glanced up. It was a strip of flypaper, black with the bodies of flies it had caught, twisting in the breeze from a nearby fan. That strip had been there since Cincinnatus started coming into the Brass Monkey, and probably for a long time before that. The dead flies couldn’t be anything but dried-up husks. Plenty of live ones buzzed in the muggy air.

Two stools down from Cincinnatus, a very black man in dirty overalls waved to the bartender. “Gimme ’nother double,” he slurred. By his voice and his potent whiskey breath, he’d had several doubles already. The bartender took his money and gave him what he asked for.

The drunk stared down into the glass as if the amber fluid inside held the meaning of life. Maybe, for him, it did. He gulped it down. When the glass was empty, the drunk set it on the bar and looked around. Whatever he saw, Cincinnatus didn’t think it was in the Brass Monkey. During the last war, soldiers had called the glazed look in his eyes the thousand-yard stare. Too much combat and too much whiskey could both make a man look that way.

“What is we gonna do?” the drunk asked plaintively. Was he talking to Cincinnatus, to the bartender, to himself, or to God? No one answered. After half a minute of silence, the Negro brought out the question again, with even more anguish this time: “What is we gonna do?”

The barkeep ignored him, polishing the battered bar top with a none too clean rag. God ignored the drunk, too-but then, God had been ignoring Negroes in the CSA far longer than the Confederacy had been an independent country. If the man was talking to himself, would he have asked the same question twice? That left Cincinnatus. He thought about ignoring the drunk like the bartender, but he didn’t have a polishing rag handy. Swallowing a sigh, he asked, “What are we gonna do about what?”

“Oh, Lordy!” Resignation and annoyance mixed in the bartender’s voice. “Now you done got him started.”

The drunk, lost in his own fog of alcohol and pain, might not have heard the barkeep. But Cincinnatus’ words somehow penetrated. “What is we gonna do about what?” he echoed. “What is we gonna do about us? — dat’s what.”

He might have been pickled in sour mash. That didn’t mean the question didn’t matter. No, it didn’t mean anything of the sort. Cincinnatus wished it did. “What can we do about us?” he asked in return.

“Damfino,” the drunk said. “Yeah, damfino. But we gots to do somethin’, on account of they wants to kill us all. Kill us all, you hear me?”

His voice rose to a frightened, angry shout. Cincinnatus heard him, all right. So did about half the colored quarter of Covington, Kentucky. Even the bartender couldn’t ignore him anymore. “Hush, there. Easy, easy,” the man said, putting away the rag. He might have been trying to gentle a spooked horse. “Ain’t nothin’ you kin do about it, Hesiod.”

Hesiod muttered and mumbled to himself. “Gots to be somethin’ somebody kin do,” he said. “Gots to be. If’n they ain’t, we is all dead.”

Before the barbed wire went up, Cincinnatus would have taken that for no more than a drunk’s maunderings. He still took it for a drunk’s maunderings-what else was it? — but not just for that, not any more. If Freedom Party goons wanted to reach into the quarter they’d cordoned off, take out some Negroes, and do away with them, they would. Who’d stop them? Who’d even know for certain what they’d done?

Hesiod slapped four bits on the bar. “Gimme ’nother double,” he said, and then, as if still ordering the drink, “Gots to kill them ofays. Kill ’em, you hear me?”

“Here you is.” The bartender set the drink in front of him. “Now you get outside o’ this. When you ain’t drinkin’, shut your damn mouth. You gonna open it so wide, you falls in.”

There was another home truth, even if the Brass Monkey was a long way from home. Somebody in the dive-maybe even the barkeep himself-was bound to be spying for the white man, spying for the government. Some blacks thought they could make deals with the devil, grab safety for themselves at the expense of their fellows, their friends, their families.

Cincinnatus didn’t believe it, not for a minute. Like any wild beast, sooner or later the Freedom Party would bite the hand that fed it. Anyone who thought it would do anything else was bound to be a sucker. No, Jake Featherston had never bothered lying about what he aimed to do with and to Negroes, because that was exactly what so many whites in the CSA wanted to hear.

“Them ofays come in here, we gots to shoot ’em! Shoot ’em, hear me?” Hesiod said.

The only trouble with that was, the white men would shoot back. And they were the ones with the heavy weapons. Lucullus Wood had seen as much, and Lucullus knew more than anybody else about the guns the Negroes in Covington had. Lucullus, no doubt, had brought a lot of those guns into the colored part of town.

Expecting a drunk to know what Lucullus knew was bound to be blind optimism. Cincinnatus did say, “Anybody shoot at the ofays, everybody gonna be real sorry.” He didn’t want Hesiod grabbing a.22 and trying to blow out the brains of the first white cop he saw.

“Everybody real sorry already,” Hesiod said, breathing more bourbon into Cincinnatus’ face. “How you reckon things git worse?”

Before Cincinnatus could say anything to that, the bartender spoke up: “Things kin always git worse.” He did not sound like a man who intended to let himself be contradicted.

And he did not impress Hesiod. “What they gonna do? Line us up an’ shoot us?”

“Matter of fact, yes.” This time, Cincinnatus spoke before the barkeep could. “They’d do that. They wouldn’t lose a minute o’ sleep, neither.”

“But they’s already doin’ it. Already,” Hesiod said triumphantly. “They ship your ass to one o’ them camps, you don’t come out no more. They shoots you there, else they kills you some other kind o’ way. Might as well shoot back at them ofay motherfuckers. They come after us, we gots nothin’ to lose.”

A considerable silence followed. Both Cincinnatus and the bartender wanted to tell Hesiod he was wrong. Both of them wanted to, but neither one could. He was too likely not to be wrong at all.

Cincinnatus finished his Jax, set the bottle on the bar, and walked out of the Brass Monkey. The tip of his cane tapped against the sawdust-strewn floor, and then against the battered sidewalk outside. He still carried the cane everywhere he went, but it wasn’t a vital third limb for him the way it had been when he was first getting around after the car hit him. He wasn’t as spry as his father, but he got around tolerably well these days.