American Front (44 page)

“Makes me wish I was an artist,” Gribbin said, eyeing her with genuine respect. “Get to see girls like that, and in the altogether—I tell you for a fact, Reggie, it just beats the stuffing out of freezing your feet in a trench in Pennsylvania. That country’s so cold in the wintertime, the Yanks are welcome to it, far as I can see.”

They strode off to the bar, squeezing in alongside of a couple of portly, middle-aged men in expensive suits. “Beer,” Bartlett said. Gribbin ordered a whiskey. Reggie put a quarter on the bar. It disappeared. No change came back.

“Not your five-cents-a-shot place,” Gribbin observed. Then he knocked back the whiskey. His eyes got big. “I see why, too. That’s the straight goods there. Those cheap joints, they put in red peppers and stuff, make you think you’re getting better’n raw rotgut. You know, real whiskey’s
good
.” He watched Bartlett drink half his schooner of beer, then said, “Come on, finish that so as I can buy you another one. We can hit the free lunch, too. We drink enough, they won’t care how much we dent the profits with what we eat.”

Bartlett drained the schooner. “Ahh,” he said. His new friend slapped down a quarter. The barkeep, a Negro in a boiled shirt, fixed refills.

The two portly fellows were talking about pension plans for soldiers after the war was over: congressmen, or else lobbyists. Important people, yes, but Bartlett wasn’t much interested in pension law. He wished he had more money now, sure, but he wasn’t going to worry about fifty years down the line, especially not when his life expectancy once he got back to the front was more likely to be measured in weeks than in years.

Gribbin returned with salami and radishes on rye bread, a couple of deviled eggs, fried oysters, pickles, and pretzels. Reggie went and got some food for himself. The spread the Ford Hotel set out was another reason to come here, and the congressmen or lobbyists or whatever they were didn’t have too much pride to keep them from raiding it, either.

A tough-looking fellow in a foreign naval uniform came up and stood at the bar next to Bartlett. He ordered scotch, which, with his accent, gave a pretty clear notion of his nationality. Nodding affably to Bartlett, he said, “Confusion to the Yankees, what?” and lifted his glass.

“I’ll drink to that.” Reggie proceeded to prove it.

The Englishman made his drink disappear so fast, he might have done it by magic or inhalation. He got another, then raised his glass again and proceeded to elaborate on his earlier toast: “To the Empire and the Confederacy, and to keeping the United States in their place.”

“And out of ours,” Bartlett added, which made Alec Gribbin laugh and the naval officer smile wide enough to show a pair of front teeth a rabbit would have been proud to claim. He drank his second shot of scotch as fast as he had the first. Emboldened by his friendly manner, Reggie asked, “How’s it going, out on the ocean?”

Before replying, the Royal Navy man ordered a third scotch. Then he said, “Damned if I know how it will all turn out. Damned if anyone knows how it will all turn out. Honors about even thus far in the Atlantic. Argentina’s coming in on our side, I’d say, outweighs Chile’s joining the Americans and Germans, though none of the South American navies is important enough to swing the balance in any decisive way.” Then, seeming to contradict himself, he went on, “I do wish the Empire of Brazil would come to a decision of one sort or the other.”

“They damn well better come in on our side when they come,” Reggie said angrily, to which Alec Gribbin gave an emphatic assent. Bartlett went on, “Hell, they held on to their slaves longer than we did.”

He had thought that a convincing argument. He kept on thinking it a convincing argument. The Royal Navy man called for yet another drink and gulped it with the same alacrity he’d shown with the ones before. “Allies,” he muttered, but it didn’t sound like a toast. Mostly to himself he went on, “The South and the czars. God have mercy on a free country.”

“And what the devil is that supposed to mean?” Alexander Gribbin demanded. He sounded a lot hotter with whiskey in him than he had without. “You saying we aren’t free? Is that what you’re saying? Go up to the USA and see how you like it there. The Confederacy is the freest country in the world, and that’s a fact.”

“Is it?” The Englishman had taken on whiskey, too. He pointed to the bartender. “Would you agree with that statement, sir? The statement that this great nation is the freest country in the world, I mean.”

The bartender looked from the English officer to the two Confederate privates and back again. He didn’t say anything, though his eyes were wide in his dark face. “Oh, hell, what are you asking him for, anyway?” Bartlett said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “He’s just a nigger. He doesn’t know anything.”

“Something more than one man in three of your populace falls into that category,” the Royal Navy man said. “In spite of that, you still call yourself the freest country in the world?”

“Of course we do,” Reggie said. “We are.”

He and the Englishman stared at each other in mutual incomprehension. “Enjoy it, then,” the fellow said at last. He called for one last drink, drained it, and left after adding a tip for the bartender.

Bartlett shook his head. “Can’t figure out what’s chewin’ on him. I’d say lice, but he’s never seen the inside of a trench, not the likes of him.”

“Don’t worry about it, soldier,” one of the prominent men in dark suits said. “There’s a certain kind of Englishman who thinks that if you’re not English, you’re sort of halfway to being a nigger yourself.”

“Is that a fact? Well, to hell with him, then,” Gribbin said, and started after the naval officer. “Anybody who thinks I’m halfway to a nigger, he’s halfway to the hospital.”

Reggie grabbed him by the arm. “Ease off, Alec,” he said urgently. “You beat on an ally, you get yourself in more trouble than you can shake a stick at.”

“That, in essence, is correct,” the man in the suit said. “It doesn’t matter whether we love the limeys and they love us. What matters is that, no matter what else we do, we don’t do anything to make them like us less than they like the USA. Should that misfortune ever strike us, boys, you can buy a coffin, on account of we are dead and buried.”

“I don’t want to buy me a coffin,” Reggie said. “All I want is another schooner.” He raised his voice to call to the Negro tending bar: “Boy, another beer!”

“Yes, sir,” the bartender said, and brought him one.

After he paid for it, he turned to Gribbin and said, “You know what’s nice about niggers? You don’t have to waste time bein’ polite with ’em.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Alec said, and did.

The bartender picked up a rag and polished the gleaming surface of the bar, over and over again. He did not look up at the two soldiers.

Sam Carsten slept in the middle bunk on the
Dakota
, which made him feel like the meat in a sandwich. You had a guy on top of you and a guy underneath, to say nothing of a whole bunk room full of guys all around. Your skinny mattress creaked and groaned on the iron frame, as did those of your two bunkmates. Everybody snored. Everybody farted. Nobody washed his feet often enough.

And, half the time or more, you didn’t even notice, not from lights-out to the klaxon that yanked you from your bunk as if it physically grabbed you and threw you down on the deck. If you weren’t dead beat when you lay down, you’d figured out how to screw around so well, it looked as if you were working to some chief petty officers who’d long since seen every kind of screwing around known to man.

This particular morning, Sam really resented the klaxon. In his dream, Maggie Stevenson had just started doing something highly immoral and even more highly enjoyable. If she’d kept on for another few seconds—

His feet hit the iron deck before his eyes came open all the way. When they did, they saw not voluptuous Maggie but skinny, hairy, snaggle-toothed Vic Crosetti, who had the top bunk. “You ain’t no beautiful blonde,” Carsten said accusingly.

“Yeah, and if I was, I wouldn’t want nothin’ to do with the likes of you,” Crosetti said, scrambling into his trousers.

Sam got dressed, too, and staggered down the hall to the galley for breakfast. After oatmeal, bacon, stewed prunes, and several mugs of scalding, snarling coffee, he decided he was going to live. He went up on deck for roll call and sick call.

The sky was brilliantly blue, the sea even bluer. The sun blazed down. He could feel his fair skin starting to sizzle, the same way the bacon had on the griddles down below.
No help for it
, he thought ruefully. He’d smeared every ointment under the tropic sun on his hide, and that tropic sun had defeated them all. He thought longingly of San Francisco, of mist, of fog, of damp. He’d been happy there; that was the country he was made for.

“Romantic,” he muttered under his breath as he started chipping paint, stopping rust before it got started. “The South Pacific is supposed to be romantic. What the hell’s so romantic about looking like an Easter ham all the goddamn time?”

Chip, chip, chip. Chip, chip, chip. The
Dakota
plowed through light chop, several hundred miles south and west of Honolulu. The only way to find out what the limeys and the Japs were up to—if they were up to anything—was to go out on patrol and look around.

With the
Dakota
steamed the
Nebraska
and the
Vermont
, as well as a pair of cruiser squadrons and a whole flotilla of speedy destroyers. The fleet could handle any probe the English and the Japanese tried, and could damage a full-scale assault against the Sandwich Islands, meanwhile warning Honolulu of impending danger. “We caught the limeys napping,” Carsten said, chipping away so industriously, no one could give him a hard time about it. “They won’t give us the same treatment.”

As if to underscore his words, a high-pitched buzzing, as if from a gnat made suddenly bigger than any eagle, rose from the bow of the
Dakota
. Sam stopped what he was doing and looked that way. The buzz rose in volume, then steadied. It was followed by an enormous hiss that might have come from an outsized snake alarmed at the outsized gnat. A rattling and clattering unlike any found in nature accompanied the hiss.

The compressed-air catapult threw the aeroplane off the deck of the
Dakota
. Inside a space of fifty feet, it had accelerated the flying machine up past forty miles an hour, plenty fast enough for the aeroplane to keep on flying and not fall into the Pacific.

Carsten stood for a moment, watching the aeroplane gain altitude. He shook his head in bemusement. It was such a flimsy thing, wood and canvas and wire, a mere nothing when measured against the armor plate and great guns of a battleship. But if it spotted the enemy where the bulge of the earth still hid them from the
Dakota
, it made a formidable tool of war in its own right.

Up at the bow, the catapult crew were taking their toy apart and stowing it so it wouldn’t be in the way if the guns of the
Dakota
had to go into action. That didn’t take long. They had an interesting job up there, and people seemed to fuss more about aeroplanes with every passing month.

“People can fuss all they want,” Sam said. “Let’s see an aeroplane sink a ship. Then I’ll sit up and take notice. In the meantime, guns are plenty good enough for me.”

He worked away for a while. Then horns blared and voices started shouting through megaphones. Sam sprinted toward the forward starboard sponson, one running sailor among hundreds. “Battle stations!” officers and senior ratings shouted, over and over again. “Battle stations!”

When he was working out in the open, Carsten hadn’t too much minded the warm, muggy air. He would have enjoyed it, had the sun not pounded down on him. Down below in the sponson, the sun wasn’t baking him. In that hot, cramped place, though, he felt as if he were being steamed like a pot of beans in the galley.

“This the real thing?” he asked Hiram Kidde.

The gunner’s mate shrugged. “Damned if I know,” he answered. “Could be, though. That new wireless they’ve put on board the aeroplanes, it lets ’em pass on the news before they come back to us.”

“Yeah,” Carsten said. “Wish we would have had a set like that last year, when we were steaming for the Sandwich Islands. Would have come in mighty handy, spying out the harbor and everything.”

Kidde nodded. “Sure would. But the new aeroplanes got bigger engines, so they can carry more’n the ones we brought with us last year, and the new wireless sets are lighter than the ones they had then, too.”

“Things keep changing all the damn time.” Carsten could not have said for sure whether that was praise or complaint. “Hell, one of these days, ‘Cap’n,’ maybe even battleships’ll be obsolete.”

“Not any time soon.” Kidde set an affectionate hand on the breech of the five-inch gun whose master he was. But then he looked thoughtful. “Or maybe you’re right. Who the devil can say for sure? You’re just a pup; the way it looks to you, the Navy hasn’t changed a whole hell of a lot since you’ve been in. Me, though, I joined in 1892. An armored cruiser nowadays’d run rings around what they called battleships back then, and blow ’em to hell and gone without breaking a sweat. You look back on things, they ain’t the same as they used to be. Nobody ever heard of aeroplanes when I joined up, that’s for damn sure. So who really does know what things’ll look like twenty, thirty years from now?”

“I was thinking about aeroplanes when we launched ours,” Carsten said.

“Probably thinking when you should have been working,” Kidde said with a laugh—he’d been in the Navy a long time, all right.

“Who, me?” Sam answered, drolly innocent. Kidde laughed again. Carsten went on, “I was thinking how good they were for spotting, but that they couldn’t really do anything to a ship. What you’re saying, though, makes me wonder. If their engines keep getting bigger, maybe they’ll be able to haul big bombs or even torpedoes one of these days.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Kidde frowned. “I wouldn’t like to be on the receiving end of something like that, I tell you. Torpedoes from submersibles, they pack more punch than a twelve-inch shell, even if they don’t have the range. But you can outrun a submersible. You can’t outrun an aeroplane.”