In at the Death (30 page)

“Ahh, your mother,” Squidface said. Only somebody who’d saved Armstrong’s bacon plenty of times could have got away with that. Squidface qualified. So did several other guys from the platoon.

After the shower, food. Along with canned rations, Armstrong had eaten a lot of fried and roasted chicken in the field—plenty of henhouses around, and you didn’t need much more than a skillet or, in a pinch, a sharp stick to do the cooking. But this was fried chicken done right, not half raw and half burnt. The hash browns were crisp and just greasy enough, too. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a regular potato that didn’t come out of a can. Yams and sweet potatoes were all right for baking, but they just didn’t cut it when you sliced them up and put them in hot lard.

And apple pie! And vanilla ice cream on top! “Goddamn!” Squidface said reverently. “I think I just came in my pants.”

“I know what you mean.” The size of the bite Armstrong took would have made a boa constrictor jealous.

“I want a slice of cheese to put on my pie, not ice cream,” Herk said. The replacement was a veteran now, entitled to a veteran’s gripes—and entitled to get razzed like a veteran, too.

“Herk wants to cut the cheese.” Squidface held his nose.

“You were the one who came in your pants,” Herk retorted. “Me, I want a broad.”

Up and down the long table, soldiers nodded solemnly, Armstrong among them. This camp had everything for giving soldiers a good time except a whorehouse. Bluenoses made sure the U.S. Army didn’t officially sponsor any such thing. If you wanted a woman, you had to find your own—which could get you killed if you picked the wrong one, and could easily leave you with a disease that would land you in big trouble when the Army found out you’d caught it.

Squidface had several suggestions on how Herk could satisfy himself, each more alarming than the one before. “Shut up already,” Armstrong said after a while. “You’re making me lose my appetite.”

“You better show up for sick call in the mornin’, Sarge,” Squidface said. “Something’s sure as shit wrong with you.”

The line for the nightly movie was almost as long as the one for a brothel would have been. Armstrong got a seat just before they showed the newsreel. “Here is the first film from ruined Petrograd!” the announcer said importantly.

Armstrong had seen plenty of ruined cities. He’d seen Provo and Salt Lake City, and you couldn’t ruin a place any worse than they got ruined. Or he thought you couldn’t, till the camera panned across what was left of Petrograd. The Russian town was
leveled
, all the way out to the horizon. When the camera got to something that stuck up from the devastation, it moved in for a closer look.

It was an enormous bronze statue of a man on horseback—or it had been. Now it looked melted, melted from the top down. Armstrong tried to imagine what kind of heat could have done such a thing.

“This was the statue of Peter the Great, who founded Petrograd,” the announcer said. “Now he demonstrates the power of our allies’ scientific accomplishments.”

“Fuck our allies,” Squidface said. “We don’t get one of those ourselves pretty damn quick, the goddamn Kaiser’ll drop one on Philly next.”

That struck Armstrong as a pretty good guess. He made a guess of his own: “What do you want to bet Featherston’s got guys in white lab coats working on one, too? With his fucking rockets, he could throw one anywhere in the USA.”

“Shit.” Squidface looked around, as if expecting one of those rockets to crash down any second now. “You’re right.”

As a matter of fact, Armstrong was wrong. The most powerful Confederate rockets reached only a couple of hundred miles. That meant they couldn’t touch most of the USA, especially since the areas C.S. soldiers actually controlled shrank by the day. But, with a bomb like that, worry outran reality with ease.

“On our side of the Atlantic…” the newsreel announcer said. The screen showed the charred wreckage of gracious homes that had to date back to long before the War of Secession. It showed sunken ships in a bombed-out harbor district. It showed dirty, unshaven Confederate soldiers shambling off into captivity.

“We was there. We seen that,” Squidface said.

“Better believe it,” Armstrong agreed.

“On our side of the Atlantic, the capture of Savannah cuts the Confederate States in half,” the announcer said proudly. “This on the heels of the loss of Richmond…”

The Stars and Stripes flew over the wreckage of the Confederate Capitol. U.S. soldiers prowled the cratered grounds of the Gray House, walking past twisted and overturned antiaircraft guns. Scrawny civilians got meals at a U.S. field kitchen.

“How long can the enemy hope to keep up his useless resistance in the face of overwhelming U.S. might?” the announcer asked, as if the soldiers watching the newsreel would be able to tell him.

The answer they were supposed to give him was,
Not very long
. Armstrong had seen enough propaganda to understand that. But this time the newsreel had outsmarted itself. The fearsome bomb that leveled Petrograd made you think twice. It made Armstrong think twice, anyhow. If the Confederates came up with one of those, or more than one, before the United States could, they were liable to win the war in spite of losing their capital and getting their country cut in half. Drop something like that on Philadelphia and New York and Boston, and the United States would really have something to worry about.

Drop one on Birmingham
, Armstrong thought savagely.
Drop one on New Orleans. Drop one on fucking Charleston
. Like most people from the USA, he particularly despised the city where the War of Secession broke out.

After the newsreel came a short feature, with the Engels Brothers involved with an actor plainly meant to be Jake Featherston. “I’ll reduce your population!” he yelled, which made the Brothers get into a ridiculous brawl to see which of them would be eliminated. That was all propaganda, too, but it was funny. Armstrong and Squidface grinned at each other in the darkness.

And the main feature was a thriller, with the Confederates after the secret of a new bombsight and the heroine thwarting them at every turn. She was pretty and she had legs up to there, which might have made Armstrong root for her even if she saluted the Stars and Bars.

After the feature, he got to lie down on a real bed. He hadn’t done much of that lately—oh, a few times, when he flopped in a house some Georgians had vacated, but not very often. With snoring soldiers all around him, he could relax and sleep deep. Out in the field, he might as well have been a wild beast. The least little noise would leave him not just awake but with his heart pounding and with a rifle or a knife in his hand.

Bacon and eggs and more hash browns and halfway decent coffee the next morning were wonderful, too. So was eating them without peering this way and that, afraid of holdouts and snipers and his own shadow if it caught him by surprise.

“You know, this is pretty damn good. I could really get used to this.” He was surprised at how surprised he sounded.

“It is, isn’t it?” Squidface sounded surprised, too. Had he been in the war from the start? Armstrong didn’t know. But he’d sure been in it long enough to turn into a vet.

“I think this is called peace. We used to have it all the time.” Armstrong didn’t think about those days very often. He’d gone from high school almost straight into the Army. He’d been a boy then. If he wasn’t a man now, he didn’t suppose he ever would be.

“Not quite peace,” Squidface said. “No pussy around. We went through that when we got here.”

“Well, yeah, we did,” Armstrong admitted. “All right, it isn’t quite peace. But it beats the shit outa where we were at before.” Squidface solemnly nodded and stuffed another slice of bacon into his mouth.

T
hey gave George Enos shore leave after he helped bring the
Tierra del Fuego
back to New York City. They gave it to him, and then they forgot about him. He grabbed a train up to Boston, had a joyous reunion with Connie and the boys, and set out to enjoy himself till the Navy decided what the hell to do with him next.

The Navy took so long, George wondered whether he ought to look for a slot on a fishing boat going out of T Wharf. He could have had one in a minute; the Navy had sucked in a lot of first-class fishermen. But he had plenty of money as things were, with so much back pay and combat pay in his pocket. And if he was out a few hundred miles from shore when he got called back to active duty, there would be hard feelings all around. His wouldn’t matter. The Navy’s, unfortunately, would.

He was back from church one Sunday morning when the telephone in his apartment rang. He’d found he liked Catholic services. He’d converted for Connie’s sake, and never expected to take the rigmarole seriously. But the fancy costumes and the Latin and the incense grew on him. If you were going to have a religion, shouldn’t you have one with tradition behind it?

“I bet that’s my ma,” Connie said as she went to answer the call. “She was saying she wants us over for dinner…. Hello?” The pause that followed stretched too long. As soon as she spoke again, her tone told George it wasn’t her mother on the other end of the line: “Yes, he’s here. Hold on…. George! It’s for you.”

“I’m coming,” George said. Connie’s stricken face told him who the caller was likely to be. He answered formally, something he rarely did: “This is George Enos.”

“Hello, Enos. This is Chief Thorvaldson, at the Navy Yard. The
Oregon
’s going to put to sea day after tomorrow, and she’s got a slot for a 40mm loader. You fit that slot, and you’ve had a long leave. Report aboard her by 0800 tomorrow.”

“The
Oregon
. 0800. Right, Chief.” George said what he had to say. Standing there beside him, Connie started to cry. He put his arm around her, which only made things worse.

“A battleship, Enos. You’re coming up in the world,” the CPO said. “You could hide your old destroyer escort in her magazines.”

“Sure,” George said, and hung up. He didn’t much want to sail on a battleship. Like a carrier, it would draw enemy aircraft the way a dog drew fleas. But he couldn’t do anything about that, either. With a sigh, he tried to smile at his wife. “We knew it was coming, babe. War’s getting close to over, so I probably won’t be gone real long now.”

“I don’t want you gone at all!” She clung to him fiercely. “And things can still go wrong at the end of a war. Look at your father.”

He wished he’d never told her that story. Then he shrugged. He would have thought of it himself, too. He jumped when the telephone rang again. Connie picked it up. “Hello?…Oh, hi, Ma. God, I wish you’d been on the line a few minutes ago…Yes, we can come, but we can’t stay late. George just got a call from the Navy…The
Oregon
. Tomorrow morning…’Bye.” She hung up. “Pa’s got lobsters, so it’ll be a good supper, anyway.”

“Won’t see them in the Navy,” George agreed.

Lobsters, drawn butter, corn on the cob…It wasn’t quite a traditional New England boiled dinner, which didn’t mean it wasn’t damn good. “Enjoy it, George,” Connie’s father said, sliding a Narragansett ale down the table to him. “Navy chow ain’t even like what the Cookie makes on a fishing boat. I know that.”

“It’s the truth, Mr. McGillicuddy,” George said sadly. He took a pull at the cold bottle of ale. It wasn’t
bad
, but he’d had better. He didn’t say anything about that. Narragansett went back further than he did. “How long have they been brewing this stuff, anyway?”

“It’s been around about as long as I have, and I was born in 1887,” McGillicuddy answered. “Can’t tell you exactly, ’cause I wasn’t paying much attention to beer back then, but that’s about it, anyhow.”

“Sounds right,” George said. He was born in 1910, and Narragansett had been a Boston fixture his whole life long. He took another swig from the bottle.

What with all the food and the ’Gansett, he wanted to roll over and go to sleep when he and Connie and the boys got back to their apartment. But he wanted to do something else, too, and he did. Connie would have thought something was wrong with him if he hadn’t. And God only knew when he’d get another chance. “Gotta make it last,” he said, lighting a cigarette to try to stretch the afterglow.

“I should hope so.” Connie poked him in the ribs. “Don’t want you chasing after chippies when your ship gets into some port that isn’t Boston.”

“Not me.” George lied without hesitation.
Not very often, anyway
, he amended silently.

“Better not.” His wife poked him again. “Give me one of those.” He could reach the nightstand more easily than she could. He handed her the pack. They were Niagaras, a U.S. brand—they tasted of straw and, he swore, horse manure. But they were better than nothing. Connie leaned close to him for a light. He stroked her cheek. “Thanks,” she said, whether for the smoke or the caress he didn’t know.

He managed an early-morning quickie, too. Connie wouldn’t have put up with that except on a day when he was shipping out. He kissed the boys good-bye—they bravely fought against the sniffles—and, duffel on his shoulder, headed across the Charles for the Boston Navy Yard.

Before he got in, Marine guards patted him down and searched the denim sack. Finding nothing more lethal than a safety razor and a clasp knife, they let him through. “Can’t be too careful,” one of the leathernecks said.

“Last week down in Providence, this shithead showed up in a lieutenant commander’s uniform—he’d rolled the officer in an alley behind a bar. He blew up two guards—poor bastards—but he didn’t get to the ships, and that’s what counts.”

“Story didn’t make the news,” George said.

“No—I guess they sat on it,” the guard replied. “But one of the guys who bought a plot was my brother-in-law’s best friend since they were kids. I knew Apple a little bit myself. He was a good guy.”

“Apple?” George had heard a lot of nicknames, but that was a new one on him.

“Like a baby’s arm holding one,” the Marine explained. “Be some sad broads around, I’ll tell you. Now pass on through.”

Finding the
Oregon
was easy enough. George looked for the biggest damn ship tied up at any of the piers, and there she was: a mountain of steel bristling with guns of all sizes, up to the dozen fourteen-inchers of her main armament. She could smash anything that came within twenty miles of her—but, in these days of airplane carriers, how many enemy ships were likely to?