American Front (25 page)

Neither of them knew who she was. Even so, Ralph Briggs started slavering as if he were a dog and she that steak he’d ordered, not cooked medium but raw. Kimball, on the other hand, just shrugged and nodded.

Their meals did arrive then. If Roger Kimball’s steak had been over the flames at all, you could hardly tell by looking. The waiter hovered anxiously all the same. When Kimball cut the meat, he let out a long “Mooo!” without moving his lips, which made the Negro jump. Only after he nodded did the fellow smile in relief and go on about the rest of his business.

Since she’d broken the ice herself, Anne expected the submariners to try whatever approach they thought would work. Briggs started to, a couple of times. But Kimball wanted to talk shop and, being senior to Briggs, got his way. It was almost as if the two men had started speaking some foreign tongue, one where words sounded as if they were English but meant obscure, indecipherable things. Anne listened, fascinated, to grumbles about fish that wouldn’t swim straight, twelve-pounder and three-inch bricks, and eggs that would blow you to kingdom come if you couldn’t keep away from them.

“We’ve laid ours, the damnyankees have laid theirs, and by the time both sides are done, won’t be any room for boats left in the whole ocean, and I mean our boats and theirs both—ships, too,” Kimball said.

“Don’t know what to do about it,” Briggs said, pouring whiskey from the bottle into his glass. He drank, then laughed, and said, “If we were still in those gasoline-engine boats, I’d be drunker’n this, just off the fumes.”

“Diesel’s the way to go there,” Kimball agreed. “Gas-jag hangover is worse than anything you get from rotgut.”

“Amen,” Briggs said with what sounded like the voice of experience, though Anne wasn’t quite sure what sort of experience. The lieutenant, junior grade, went on, “They’re building heads in the new boats, too, thank God.”

“Thank God is right,” Kimball said, “even if they aren’t everything they ought to be. You can’t discharge ’em down deeper than about thirty feet, and you don’t want to do it where the enemy can spot you.”

“And when you do do it, you want to do it right,” Briggs said.

“That’s a fact.” Kimball laughed out loud, a laugh that invited everyone who could to share the joke. “Ensign on my boat opened the wrong valve at the wrong time and got his own back—right between the eyes.” He laughed again, and so did Ralph Briggs. Kimball finished, “After that, the poor miserable devil wouldn’t even try unless he was crouched down in front of the pan.”

When Anne Colleton discussed modern art, she and her fellow cognoscenti used terms that shut the uninitiated out of the conversation. Now she found herself shut out the same way. She didn’t care for it. “What
are
you talking about?” she asked with some asperity.

Briggs and Kimball looked at each other. Briggs turned almost as red as the juice from Kimball’s rare steak. Roger Kimball, though, laughed yet again. “What are we talking about?” he said. “You can’t just flush the toilet when you’re under the water in a submarine. You have to use compressed air and a complicated set of valves and levers. You have to use them in the right order, too, or else what you’re trying to get rid of doesn’t leave the boat. Instead, it comes back up and hits you in the face.”

If Briggs had been red before, he was incandescent now. Kimball leaned back in his chair and waited to see how she’d take his blunt answer. She nodded to him. “Thank you. This happened to someone in your crew?”

“That’s right. We were laughing about it for days afterwards,” Kimball answered.

“Everyone but him, of course,” Anne said.

Kimball shook his head. “Jim, too, after he got hold of a washrag.”

Briggs poured his glass of bourbon full and gulped it down, maybe in an effort to drown his own embarrassment. Perhaps not surprisingly, he fell asleep in his chair about ten minutes later.

Kimball leaned him against the wall of the dining car. “There,” he said in satisfaction. “Now he won’t fall down and hurt himself.” He got to his feet. “Thanks for sharing the table with us, Miss Colleton.”

Not even
A pleasure to have met you or Hope to see you again sometime
, Anne noted, more than a little annoyed. She glanced back toward the table where Julia was eating and laughing and joking with other servants and some of the colored train crew. Her maid would be there for a while: she might stay there all night if she got the chance. Anne rose from her seat. “I’m going up to my car, I think.”

Kimball made no effort to take up the unspoken invitation to walk with her. He didn’t move so fast, though, as to leave her behind. They went through a couple of cars not quite together, not quite apart. Then he stopped in the hallway to a Pullman and said, “This is my compartment. Ralph’s, too, matter of fact, but he found himself that berth in the diner. Not the one I’d take, but what can you do?” His eyes twinkled.

When he slid open the compartment door, Anne stepped in after him. She was a modern woman, after all, and did as she pleased in such things.

“What…?” he said, both reddish eyebrows rising. Then she kissed him, and after that matters took their own course. The lower berth was cramped for one, let alone for two, or so Anne found it, but Kimball acted as if it had all the room in the world. Maybe compared to arrangements aboard a submarine, it did. He didn’t bang his head on the bottom of the upper berth or the front wall; he didn’t bump his feet against the back wall. What he did do, with precision and dispatch, was satisfy both him and her. He even used his hand to help her along a little when her pace didn’t quite match his.

Afterwards, just as efficient, he helped her dress again, those clever hands doing up hooks and buttons with accurate, unhurried haste. He stuck his head out into the hallway to make sure she could leave the compartment unnoticed. Now he did say, with a knowing smile. “A pleasure to have met you.” As soon as she was on her way, he shut the door behind her.

She was almost back to her own seat when, ignoring her body’s happy glow, she stopped so suddenly that the old man behind her stepped on the heel of her shoe. She listened to his apologies without really hearing them.

“That sneaky devil!” she exclaimed. “He planned the whole thing.” And Kimball had done it so smoothly, she hadn’t even noticed till now. She didn’t know whether to be furious or to salute him. She, who’d manipulated so many people so successfully over the past few years, had been manipulated herself tonight. Then she shook her head. No, she hadn’t just been manipulated. She’d been, in the most literal sense of the word, had.

Sergeant Chester Martin looked down at the three stripes on the sleeve of his green-gray tunic. He didn’t delude himself that he’d done anything particularly heroic to deserve the promotion. What he’d done, and what a lot of people—an awful lot of people—hadn’t, was stay alive.

He looked back toward Catawba Mountain. Coming down it had been almost as bad as fighting his way up it. The Rebs moved back from one line to another, and made you pay the butcher’s bill every time you attacked.

“Dumb fool luck,” he muttered. “That’s the only reason I’m here, let alone a three-striper.”

“You bet, Sarge,” said Paul Anderson, who was using a wire-cutter to snip his way into a can of corned beef that let out an embalmed smell when he got it open. He wore a corporal’s chevrons now himself, for the same reason that Chester was a sergeant. “A machine gun, it doesn’t care how smart you are or how brave you are. You get in front of it, either you go down or you don’t. All depends on how the dice roll.”

“Yeah.” Martin tore his eyes away from the scarred slopes of Catawba Mountain and looked east, toward the Roanoke River and Big Lick. He didn’t stand up for a better look; you were asking for a sniper to blow your lamp out for good if you did anything that stupid. The lines were quiet right this minute, but what did that mean? Only that the Rebel snipers, who were used to shooting for the pot and reckoned men deliciously large targets, had plenty of time to get ready to take advantage of any chance you gave ’em.

He knew what he’d see, anyhow. Big Lick, or what was left of it after endless shelling, still lay in Confederate hands, though a lot of the iron mines nearby had the Stars and Stripes flying over them now. But the last big U.S. push had bogged down right on the outskirts of town, and after that the Rebs had counterattacked and regained a mile or two of ground. One of these days, he expected, the Army would try another push toward the river. He was willing to wait—forever, with luck.

He dug in his own mess kit and chose a hardtack biscuit. Hard was the word for it; it might have been baked during the War of Secession. And at that, troops were better supplied than they had been at the start of the campaign. Railroads were snaking out of West Virginia to the front, to bring in food and ammunition faster and in bigger lots than horses and mules and men could manage.

“Now if we could only put the Rebel trains out of action,” he said. That was a big part of the reason the brass had attacked Big Lick in the first place. But the tracks remained in Confederate hands, though repeated bombardment meant the Rebs tried running trains through only at night.

“Good luck, Sarge,” Andersen said. Now he pointed east. “’Stead of earthworks, they got their niggers runnin’ up new lines out of range of our guns, anyhow. Don’t seem fair.”

Chester Martin nodded gloomily. Captain Wyatt had been grousing about those lines, too. But the captain’s grousing wasn’t what worried Martin about the Confederate tracklaying. Sure as hell, the brass would want to push guns up close enough to pound the new lines. And who’d have to do the dirty work to make that happen? Nobody he could see but the infantry.

As if thinking of him had been enough to make him appear. Captain Orville Wyatt stepped into the firing pit Martin and Andersen were sharing. He tossed each of them a chocolate bar. “Courtesy of the cooks,” he said. “They had so many, they didn’t know what to do with ’em, so I liberated as many as I could. They’ll probably eat the rest themselves.”

“Yeah, who ever saw a skinny cook?” Martin said, peeling silver paper off the bar before he crammed it into his mouth. “Mm—thank you, sir. Beats the hell out of biscuits and corned beef.” Wyatt was a damned good officer—he looked out for his men. If your captain took care of things like that, odds were good he’d also be an effective combat leader, and Wyatt was. He was also up for promotion to major, for most of the same reasons Martin and Andersen had seen their ranks go up.

Wyatt dug a much-folded newspaper out of his pocket. “This came up to the front on the last train—only four days old,” he said; he believed in keeping minds full along with bellies. He gave the sergeant and corporal the gist of what was in the news: “Big fight out in the Atlantic. We torpedoed a French armored cruiser, and it went down. We sank some Confederate and Argentine freighters heading for England, too.”

“Good,” Martin said. “Hope the limeys starve.”

Wyatt read on: “The Rebs torpedoed one of our cruisers, too, the cowardly sons of bitches, but we rescued almost the whole crew. And TR made a bully speech in New York City.”

That got Martin’s attention, and Andersen’s, too. Nobody could make a speech like Teddy Roosevelt. “What does he say?” Martin asked eagerly.

Captain Wyatt knew nobody could make a speech like TR, too. He skimmed and summarized, saying, “He wants the world to know we’re at war to support our allies and to restore what’s ours by rights, what the English and the French and the Rebs took away from our grandfathers…Wait. Here’s the best bit.” He stood very straight and drew back his lips so you could see all his teeth, a pretty good TR imitation. “‘A great free people owes to itself and to all mankind not to sink into helplessness before the powers of evil. I ask that this people rise to the greatness of its opportunities. I do not ask that it seek the easiest path.’”

“That
is
good,” Andersen said with a connoisseur’s approval.

Chester Martin nodded, too. Roosevelt knew about the harder path. Along with Custer, though on a slightly smaller scale because he’d been just a colonel of volunteers, he’d come out of the Second Mexican War a hero, and his stock had been rising ever since. No nation could have hoped for a better leader in time of war.

All the same, sitting in a firing pit that had started life as a shell hole, surrounded by the stench of death, the rattle of machine guns, the occasional roar of U.S. and Rebel artillery, lice in his hair, Martin couldn’t help wondering whether Teddy Roosevelt had ever walked a path as hard as this one.

Scipio bowed and said in tones of grave regret, “I am sorry to have to inform you, sir, that we have no more champagne.”

“No more champagne?
Merde!
” Marcel Duchamp clapped a dramatic hand to his forehead. Everything the modern artist did, as far as Scipio could tell, was deliberately dramatic. Duchamp was tall and thin and pale and in the habit of dressing in black, which made him look like a preacher—until you saw his eyes. He didn’t behave like a preacher, either, not if half—not if a quarter—of the stories Scipio heard from the maids and kitchen girls were true. Now he went on, “How shall I endure this rural desolation without champagne to console me?”

Whiskey
was the first thought that came to Scipio’s mind. If it worked for him, if it worked for the Negroes who picked Marshlands’ cotton, it ought to do the job for a dandified Frenchman. But he’d been trained to give the best service he could, and so he said, “The war has made importing difficult, sir, as it has disturbed outbound travel. But perhaps my mistress, Miss Colleton, would be able to procure some champagne in New Orleans and order it sent here for you. If you like, I will send her a telegram with your request.”

“Disturbed outbound travel: yes, I should say so,” Duchamp replied. “No one will put out to sea from Charleston, it seems, for fear of being torpedoed or cannonaded or otherwise discommoded.” He rolled those disconcerting eyes. “Would you not agree, the risk of going to the bottom of the sea is only slightly less than the risk of staying here?”