Free Andersonville by Edward M. Erdelac

you old tunnel rat!” Red Cap burst out, as if he’d been holding himself back since the man had appeared.
    “The boy’s right,” Limber said finally. “Find another fire.”
    Chickamauga frowned but turned and hobbled away. Red Cap hawked a gob of spit into the middle of his back as he departed.
    “So what’s his story?” Charlie asked.
    “One may smile and smile and be a villain,”
Romeo said, shaking his head.
    “Folks think he sold out Wilderbeck to Wirz,” Limber said.
    “He might spy for them Raiders, too,” said Big Pete.
    “Just watch yourself around him,” Limber said. “He’ll turn over on you in a minute for an extra mouthful of corn bread or a stick of firewood.”
    Barclay looked back at the bloody spot in the ground, but in the interim, Limber had tossed the root into the fire.
    “Why do they call you Limber?” Charlie asked.
    “Aw, I spent some time in the circus,” Limber said.
    “Go on!”
    “Show him, Jim,” Red Cap said, grinning.
    Limber waved them off, but the other men around the fire egged him on.
    “Confinement has unlimbered me, boys,” he begged off.
    But the men wouldn’t hear it.
    With mock reluctance, Limber rose stiffly and took the contents of his trouser pockets out: a small clasp knife, Barclay noticed, and some coins. He passed them to Romeo and then leaned forward and touched his toes. After a bit, he shifted his weight and stood on his hands. Then he backpedaled out of the ring of fire and circled it clockwise, his shoes bobbing in the air as the men hooted and laughed.
    Charlie laughed a high-pitched, girlish giggle that doubled him over and sent the others laughing as well.

Chapter 9
    Barclay watched the hapless men without shelter settle down in long rows in the avenue that stretched almost to the east wall. There must have been three hundred men huddled tightly against one another. As he settled into the shebang with Charlie, he listened as a single voice begged for a shift in position.
    The cry was carried down the line until a man at the head called out, as though ordering maneuvers: “Spoon left!”
    And the great line of men groaned and turned in the night.
    The temperature had dropped significantly, and he got close behind Charlie on the blanket floor, which smelled faintly of death.
    “We’re lucky we got this place, ain’t we?” Charlie muttered in the stillness.
    “Yeah. That we are.”
    “You owe me, Barclay. You stick by me. I don’t wanna wind up sleepin’ out in the cold like them others.”
    Barclay sighed. Was that Charlie’s game? Protection from a big buck of a Negro for his skinny white ass?
    He lay staring at the back of Charlie’s head and occasionally swatting the vermin that crawled over him. His last thought was that he had to find some means of repelling them.
    He had no idea how long they lay there. It might have been only a moment, or it might have been an hour. But when next Barclay opened his eyes, it was to see the toe of the shoe coming at his face. He turned his head and took it in the cheek rather than the teeth. The night blazed with stars only he could see as strong hands gripped him by the shirt and pants and dragged him from the shebang out into the night air.
    He tried to raise an alarm and was struck with something hard in the base of his skull, so he drooped and gasped between the hands of his captors. Who would come for him, anyway, a black man camped among the whites? Maybe Big Pete himself had decided he didn’t want a Negro for a neighbor, or maybe someone had had his eyes on the shelter and decided no fresh fish were going to take it.
    He was barely conscious for the duration of the stealthy rapture across the camp, but he prayed briefly that they did not intend to drown him in that foul creek. When he was finally dropped on his face in the sand, it was in a circle of burning brands set in the ground, and the first thing he saw was Charlie pushing himself up from the ground alongside him, blood leaking