In at the Death (75 page)

You want to do something stupid about it
, Jorge thought. He kept that to himself. If you got into an argument when you were hung over, you were much too likely to get into a brawl. He didn’t want to punch Pedro—most of the time, anyhow.

The Bible said a soft answer turned away wrath. No answer seemed to work just as well. When Jorge didn’t rise to the bait, Pedro left him alone. He wondered whether he ought to remember that lesson for later. A shrug was all he could give the question. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t.

He went on about his business. Even in winter, the farm needed work. He tended the garden and the livestock. He went into Baroyeca once more, and came back sober. Magdalena Rodriguez nodded to him in somber approval.

Then Pedro went into town a few days later. When he came home, he was wild with rage. “The Yankees! They’ve taken
Señor
Quinn!”

“I was afraid of that,” Jorge said.

“But how could they know what he stands for?” Pedro demanded.

“He talks too much,” Jorge answered, which was true. “And too many people know he was the Freedom Party man here. Someone in town must have blabbed to the
soldados
from
los Estados Unidos
.” Most of that was true, but not all.

“What can we do?” his brother cried.

“I don’t know. I don’t think we can do anything. The Yankees have machine guns and automatic rifles. I don’t want to go up against them. If you do, you have to be out of your mind.”

Pedro frowned; that wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “I hope nobody decides to inform on me,” he said. “All we’ve got here are a couple of .22s, and you can’t fight anybody with those.”

“Of course not. That’s why the Yankees let us keep them,” Jorge said.

Then his brother brightened. “Maybe we could get some dynamite from the mines, and we could—”

“Could what?” Jorge broke in. “You can’t fight with dynamite, either. What are you going to do, throw sticks of it?”

“Well, no. But if we made an auto bomb—”

“Out of what? We don’t have an auto,” Jorge reminded him. “Besides, do you know how many the Yankees shoot for every auto bomb that goes off?”

“We’ve got to do something for
Señor
Quinn,” Pedro said.

“
Bueno.
What do you want to do? What can you do that will set him free and won’t get us into trouble?”

Pedro thought about it. The longer he thought, the more unhappy he looked. “I don’t know,” he said at last.

“Well, when you answer that, then maybe you can do something. Now we have to worry about keeping ourselves safe, and keeping
Mamacita
safe, and keeping Miguel safe,” Jorge said.

Miguel sat in the wheelchair. Was he listening to his brothers argue, or not paying any attention at all? Jorge was never sure how much Miguel understood. Sometimes he even thought it varied from day to day. Now, though, Miguel’s eyes came alive for a moment. “Stay safe!” he said clearly. “Get down!” Was that the last thing he said or the last thing he heard before the shell crashed down and ruined his life? Jorge wouldn’t have been surprised.

Pedro gnawed on the inside of his lower lip. “You can put up with things easier than I can, Jorge.”

“Sometimes, maybe,” Jorge said.

“But it gets to you, doesn’t it? It gets to you, too.” His brother pointed an accusing forefinger at him. “Otherwise, why did you need to go to the cantina and get drunk?”

Jorge spread his hands. “Well, you’ve got me there.”

“I thought so.” Pedro sounded smug. Not many things anyone liked better than being sure he knew what someone else was thinking.

“Careful,” Miguel said, maybe at random, maybe not. Was he still thinking about getting shelled? Or was he warning Pedro not to think he was so smart? How could anyone outside the wreckage of his body and mind and spirit guess?

With a sigh, Pedro said, “I
will
be careful. I won’t do anything that gets us into trouble or gets us hurt.”

“That’s the idea.” Jorge hoped his brother would keep the promise. “Maybe things will get better. We just have to wait and see—what else can we do that’s safe?”

“
Señor
Quinn didn’t talk that way.” Pedro wasn’t ready to give up, not quite.

“No, he didn’t,” Jorge agreed. “And look what happened to him. If he’d just tried to fit in, the Yankees would have let him alone, I bet. But he started running his mouth, and—”

“Some dirty
puto
ratted on him,” Pedro said savagely.

“
Sí
. It only goes to show, it can happen to anybody who isn’t careful,” Jorge said.

He knew what he was talking about. He knew more than he would ever talk about. He’d written the anonymous letter that betrayed Robert Quinn to the U.S. authorities. He hadn’t been happy about it, not then. That was why he came home drunk that evening. But he wasn’t sorry now that he’d done it. He’d kept Pedro safe—safer, anyhow. He’d done the same thing for the whole family. They could go on. After you lost a war, that would do.

G
eorge Enos and Wally Fodor and most of the other guys at the twin-40mm mount had their shirts off. They basked in the warm sunshine like geckos on a rock. “January,” George said to the gun chief. “Fuckin’ January. I tell you, man, Florida’s been wasted on the Confederates too goddamn long.”

“You got that straight,” Fodor agreed.

It was somewhere close to eighty. Up in Boston, the snow lay thick on the ground. George had just got a letter from Connie talking about the latest blizzard. He missed his wife. He missed his kids. He sure as hell didn’t miss Massachusetts weather.

“When I get old and gray, I’ll retire down here,” he said.

“Good luck, buddy. The Confederates’ll blow your old gray ass from here to Habana,” Wally Fodor said. “Do you really think these guys’ll be glad to see us even by the time we get old?”

“Probably be glad to take our money,” George said.

The gun chief laughed. “Like that’s the same thing. A whore’s glad to take your money, but that doesn’t mean she’s in love with you.” Fodor laughed again. “Hell with me if you ain’t blushing.”

“Hell with you anyway, Wally.” George smiled when he said it, but he knew how uneasy the smile was. He always felt bad about going to brothels. That didn’t stop him, but it made him flabble afterwards.

All the joking stopped when a supply boat approached the
Oregon
. The 40mm crews and even the men on the battlewagon’s five-inch guns covered the vessel while sailors searched it. That was, of course, locking the door with the horse long gone, but what else could you do? The diehards might hurt other warships, but they wouldn’t get the
Oregon
again.

Everybody hoped like hell they wouldn’t, anyhow.

This particular boat proved harmless. So the searchers said. If they were wrong, if the locals had outfoxed them…George did his best not to think about that. He breathed a sigh of relief when hams and flitches of bacon and sides of beef came aboard. Nothing explosive there.

He wasn’t the only one who relaxed after seeing everything was on the up and up. “We keep eating awhile longer,” Wally Fodor said.

“Yeah.” George nodded. “We keep breathing awhile longer, too. Ain’t it a pisser that we aren’t getting combat pay any more?”

“Hey, we’re at peace now, right?” Fodor said, and the whole gun crew laughed sarcastically. He went on, “’Sides, all the bookkeepers in the Navy Department are a bunch of damn Jews, and they make like it’s their own personal money they’re saving, for Chrissake. You ask me, we’re fuckin’ lucky we still get hazardous-duty pay.”

“What would you call it when the bumboat blows us halfway to hell?” George said. “Hazardous enough for me, by God.”

“Amen, brother,” the gun chief said, as if George were a colored preacher heating up his flock.

The gun crews also covered the supply boat as it pulled away from the
Oregon
. If its crew were going to try anything, logic said they’d do it while they lay right alongside the battleship. But logic said people down here shouldn’t try anything at all along those lines. They were well and truly licked. Didn’t they understand as much? By the evidence, no.

A few minutes after the boat drew too far away to be dangerous, the
Oregon
’s PA system crackled to life. “George Enos, report to the executive officer’s quarters! George Enos, report to the executive officer’s quarters on the double!”

As George hurried away from the gun, Wally Fodor called after him: “Jesus, Enos! What the fuck did you do?”

“I don’t know.” George fought to keep panic from his voice. If the exec wanted you, it was like getting called to the principal’s office in high school. Here, George figured he’d be lucky to come away with only a paddling. But he wasn’t lying to Fodor, either—he had no idea why he was getting summoned like this. Did they think he’d done something he hadn’t? God forbid, had something happened to his family? He found the rosary in his trouser pocket and started working the beads.

Going up into officers’ country gave him the willies on general principles. He had to ask a j.g. younger than he was for help finding the exec’s quarters. The baby lieutenant told him what he needed to know, and sent him a pitying look as he went on his way. By now, the whole ship would be wondering what he’d done. And he was wondering himself—he had no idea.

He knocked on the open metal door. “Enos reporting, sir.”

“Come in, Enos.” Commander Hank Walsh was about forty, with hard gray eyes and what looked like a Prussian dueling scar seaming his left cheek. “Do you know a Boston politico named Joe Kennedy?”

“Name rings a bell.” George had to think for a couple of seconds. “Yeah—uh, yes, sir. He used to get my mother to do work for the Democrats sometimes.” What he really remembered was his mother’s disdain for Kennedy. Piecing together some stuff he hadn’t understood when he was a kid, he suspected Kennedy had made a pass, or maybe several passes, at her.

“Family connection, is there?” Walsh said. George only shrugged; he hadn’t thought so. The exec eyed him. “Well, whatever there is, he’s pulled some strings. You can have your discharge if you want it, go back home and pick up your life again. I’ve got the papers right here.”

“You mean it, sir?” George could hardly believe his ears.

“I mean it.” Commander Walsh didn’t sound delighted, but he nodded. “It’s irregular, but it’s legal. No hard feelings here. I know you’re not a regular Navy man. I know you have a family back in Boston. You’ve served well aboard the
Oregon
, and your previous skippers gave you outstanding fitness reports. If you want to leave, you’ve paid your dues.”

George didn’t hesitate for a moment. Walsh might change his mind. “Where’s the dotted line, sir? I’ll sign.”

The exec shoved papers across the desk at him and handed him a pen. “This is the Navy, Enos. You can’t get away with signing just once.”

So George signed and signed and signed. He would have signed till he got writer’s cramp, but it wasn’t so bad as that. When he got to the bottom of the stack of papers, he said, “There you go, sir.”

“Some of these are for you, for your records and to show the shore patrol and the military police to prove you’re not AWOL.” Walsh handed him the ones he needed to keep. “Show them to your superiors, too. We’re sending a boat ashore at 1400. Can you be ready by then?”

By the clock on the wall behind the exec, he had a little more than an hour to let people know and throw stuff into a duffel. “I sure can. Thank you, sir!”

“Don’t thank me. Thank Joe Kennedy.” Walsh raised an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you get the chance to do just that once you’re home. If Kennedy’s like most of that breed, he’ll expect favors from you now that he’s done you one. Nothing’s free, not for those people.”

From what George knew of Joe Kennedy, he figured the exec had hit that one dead center. “I’ll worry about it when it happens, sir…. Oh! Could you have somebody wire my wife and let her know I’m coming home?”

Commander Walsh nodded. “We’ll take care of it. Get moving. You don’t have a lot of time.”

“Aye aye, sir.” George jumped to his feet and saluted. “Thanks again, sir!”

When he showed Wally Fodor his discharge papers, the gun chief made as if to tear them up. George squawked. Grinning, Fodor handed back the precious papers. “Here you go. Good luck, you lucky stiff!”

A sailor in the waiting boat grabbed George’s duffel at 1400 on the dot. George climbed down into the boat. The sailor steadied him. The boat’s outboard motor chugged. It pulled away from the
Oregon
. George didn’t look back once.

When he came ashore, he got a ride to the train station in an Army halftrack. “Nice to know they love us down here,” he remarked to the soldier sitting across from him.

“Yeah, well, fuck ’em,” the guy in green-gray said, which only proved the Army and the Navy had the same attitude about the Confederates.

The station was a young fortress, with concrete barricades keeping motorcars at a distance. There were barrels near the entrance, and machine guns on the roof. George showed his papers at the ticket counter and got a voucher for the trip up to Boston. When the train came in, it had machine guns atop several cars. All the same, bullet holes pocked the metalwork.