In War Times (34 page)

Sometimes he dreamed of Hadntz. It was always the same dream, brief and simple and not even very dreamlike. She wore an elegant dress of midnight-blue satin, a string of pearls, and heavy, foreign-looking black shoes. She spoke only in mathematics and he never remembered exactly what she said. Sometimes he dreamed of Bette, and he welcomed those dreams. He didn’t have any hope of ever seeing her again, though. She’d probably forgotten him long ago.

As for Keenan, his desperate longing for his brother had modulated into simply missing him, daily. Any thoughts of revenge had been burned out of him by his witnessing the act that ended the war in the Pacific. If that wouldn’t satisfy him, nothing would.

He felt guilt, apprehension, and a vague sense of failure at having abandoned Hadntz’s dreams. But it was time to accept reality.

The diary-keeping had become a habit, and he continued it. He went through his composition books and added a lot of details, refined his past entries, but did so only for himself, to make an accurate record.

When it came time to make a career choice, remembering the fires of Europe, he went with the field of fire protection.

Finally, he graduated. It was 1947. Everybody was making money after the war. He quickly got a job at a large engineering firm. He thought he had a good idea, a moneymaking idea, and took it to the brass. They weren’t interested.

So he made a phone call, then another. He took a long weekend and went to Aberdeen and was met at the gate by a man he’d known in the Army. This time the guy had a few more decorations on his sleeve.

Sam gave a presentation to a committee later that afternoon, and a few days later he got a phone call offering him a temporary contract with the War Department.

He had created the job. They’d even accepted his budget proposal—adequate, but not unduly inflated. Carefully thought out.

He got a modest number of War Department buildings outfitted with sprinkler systems. It was a start.

I
N APRIL 1948
, Sam held a reunion for the 610th. It came about by accident.

He was living in Cleveland, working for an insurance company while he developed more government proposals.

It was a Saturday night in February and he was at a jazz bar, the Carousel. He was with his latest in a string of girlfriends, Doris Figley. Jimmy McPartland was playing. He was Dixieland-oriented, but when his wife Marion took the lead during the bridge, she was airy, impressionistic, modern. A strange mix—though Doris couldn’t understand why, since she knew little about jazz, and was getting tired of rushing down the street to see Sarah Vaughan during the breaks.

“Dance!”

Sam turned. “
Kocab
?”

The company magician was cleaned up, well-dressed, and sported a wife, whom he introduced. Sam quickly recovered from his surprise. “What are you doing here?”

It was Kocab’s turn to look surprised. “Lived here all my life.” He patted his wife’s hand. “And here’s my childhood sweetheart. We’ve got a little girl. You think our parents are going to let us move away? Besides, who would do the baby-sitting if we did.”

After a few drinks, Kocab said, “We ought to have a reunion.”

An instant of fear passed through Sam. He’d have to endure Wink’s loss afresh. Eventually, Kocab talked him into it—he couldn’t find any logical reason to object.

By the time the night was through, Sam had agreed to find a venue, and Kocab was going to take care of the invitations. This was deliberate. Sam couldn’t face trying to contact the others. After his experience with Wink, he didn’t know what would happen.

The room Sam scouted out was perfect: right size, right price, even right acoustics. He nervously checked and rechecked the bar arrangements, the food setup, the DJ’s directions. By six, the reunion was off to a swinging start. The guys were trickling in, many with wives and some with girlfriends, poking fun at one another, swapping stories.

Wild Card Zee held forth to one group. “Hell, yeah, I’m up on a hill on the edge of town, got enough guns, some loudspeakers that play calliope music when I see somebody comin’. They all think I’m nuts in town. They keep away and that’s what I like. Tell the little kids, keep away from the nasty vet!” His laugh, a hoarse crescendo, echoed and haw-hawed over the low roar of the rest of the crowd.

The food was good; the dancing, the mingling, the stories as satisfying as Sam had imagined they would be. The decor was chosen to evoke the
biergarten
: fairy lights, a
volkspark
-like bar. Sam was completely busy with keeping it running smoothly and looked around for someone to spell him so he could socialize. He hadn’t had much of a chance to talk to anyone.

Finally, Sam dropped into an empty chair at a table.

“Great party, Dance,” Alberteen—the former Earl T.—offered from across the table. He had filled out, now that he was nearing thirty, and Sam realized that he’d served with boys and that he had been a boy himself.

“Oh yes,” said his wife, a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

“Thanks.”

Alberteen said, “Say, want to join us on our trip to Berlin? The wives want to see it. We’re thinking about organizing a group.”

Sam was startled. “Are you sure it’s the best place to go right now?” Stalin was presently trying to starve the Allied-controlled sector of Berlin, isolated from the rest of West Germany by a fifty-mile swath of Soviet-controlled territory. Truman had ordered that food be flown in; the Berlin Air Drop was in full swing. They were still struggling to rebuild the city. Not much had been left at the end of the war. He remembered it as the landscape of Armageddon. He couldn’t imagine what these women would do in such a place.

Alberteen fished the olive out of his martini and popped it into his mouth. “No better time. Dollar’s way up.”

“I don’t doubt that.” The battle between Stalin and the West had begun over currency devaluation.

“Everybody’s talking about it,” said Jake’s wife. “I just read a piece in the
New Yorker
. Nightclubs, shopping. What did they say? A showplace of postwar prosperity.”

“What?” asked Sam, straining to hear over the Bird recording the DJ had just put on the record player. The sharp array of notes hijacked his thoughts, his being, and the world seemed to jump with the octave jumps, move between two different keys, with such ease that it seemed like the most natural thing in the world, when in fact it defined a radically different way of looking at music, of playing it, of experiencing it.

Two different scales.
Two coinciding events, which come from their own pasts, share a few beats of unison, and then diverge into their own futures
.

“My company just got a big order from a plant in Berlin,” said Alberteen. “That’s what got us thinking. I could make it a business trip.”

Sam could not speak for the enormity of what he was hearing.

It had worked.

But not for him.

Then Wink walked in the door.

Sam was dumbfounded.

Wink’s face lit in a huge smile when he spotted Sam, and he hollered “Dance!” over the myriad conversations, the jumping drums and hi-hat accents of bebop. He grabbed a drink on his way to Sam’s table, gulped it down, and picked up another, all in an instant of smooth, utterly Winklike grace.

Feeling ill, Sam made his way toward him.

“Damn, it’s good to see you, Dance.” Then, “What’s wrong?”

His face was unlined, still boyish; his eyes were that old party-merry that Sam remembered, and his nasal New York voice still ruled the room.

“What’s wrong is that Mutt and Jeff over there are taking their wives to Berlin. It’s the hot spot. The place to be.”

“That’s pretty much true. What’s wrong with that?”

“No Soviet blockade?”

Wink suddenly looked completely sober. He lowered his voice. “No.”

“Well then, what is Stalin—”

“Stalin’s dead. Assassinated right after the war by a bunch of Poles. Don’t know how they did it. Molotov went into hiding. They got a new top guy. I can never remember his name, but he’s one of the old Bolshies who’d survived in exile—a White Russian.”

Sam shook his head. “No. Uh-uh. This is different.”

“Different than what? How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Something happened.”

Wink looked at him steadily.

“That’s not the way it is. In…” He was at a loss for words.

Wink stared at him. “Christ on a stick.”

“Truman president.” Sam ticked off the main points as they sat in a dark corner, their voices masked by the music. Two draft beers stood reassuringly on the white tablecloth.

“Yes.”

“Attlee is prime minister.”

Wink shook his head. “Churchill.”

“No, no,” said Sam. “Attlee, Churchill’s nemesis, called an election in 1945. Right in the middle of negotiations at Potsdam with Stalin and Truman about postwar Europe. Churchill had to leave Potsdam for a few days. The negotiations were fumbled, especially after Churchill lost the election and then came back to the table. Except they weren’t fumbled by Stalin. He got what he wanted, pretty much.”

“Impossible!” Wink’s single word was vehement. “After Stalin was killed, Churchill held negotiations together. Got us—the Americans—to agree to a less punitive peace for Germany than what Marshall and Morgenthau wanted. After the Allies took Berlin—”

“No. Eisenhower let Stalin take Berlin. Was Stalin killed before that?”

Wink looked somewhere over Sam’s shoulder. “No. But the Russians
didn’t
get to Berlin first. There
was
an agreement to let them take Berlin first. Eisenhower was fit to be tied and sent Patton east. We took it.”

“That is quite different. Maybe that’s when it happened.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it was about the time we were on that strange tour in the Pacific.”

“Or right after. What if Sunny hadn’t gotten us on the boat? We would have been sent to Berlin for the occupation.”

“In
your
world,” said Wink.

“This
is
my world,” said Sam, getting irritated. “I’m here. Kocab’s here.”

“Yes, but you have other memories. And I’ll bet you any money that when this reunion is over you won’t be able to find me again. Or Kocab. And I won’t be able to find you. I mean, where the hell were you on Easter Eve? Go ahead. Tell me. I’ll bet you were at Minton’s. And I was too.”

“Who was playing?” asked Sam.

“Bird. You would have loved it.”

“No. I did see him, and I did love it. But he was playing at the Three Deuces, with a kid named Miles Davis on trumpet. I watched him there, then blew most of my money on a cab to Minton’s because I was late. Monk was there. But Bird didn’t show.”

“This is my theory,” said Wink. “See what you think. The device was activated in the Pacific. It was spewing out—whatever—some kind of subatomic particle that has an effect on that whole delicate mechanism that Hadntz described in her paper. You know, the genes, consciousness, the sense of time…”

“And it affected the whole group,” said Sam. “At Camp Lucky Strike, and then on the boat.”

“There must be others,” said Wink. “There were a lot of people on the boat.”

“So why didn’t it affect me?”

“It did. Obviously. But for some reason we’re each in a slightly different time—”

“Slightly!”

“We still have the war in common. I think.”

They began to thrash through their war experiences, telling their war stories.

They were pretty well synched. Finally they gave up. “It’s impossible,” said Wink. “It could be any little thing. Maybe it was right after we got off that observation plane.”

“No,” said Sam. “It was just a series of hops till we got to France. Tinian to the Philippines. The Philippines to India. India to Palestine. Palestine to Libya.”

“Palestine to Morocco,” said Wink. “The plane went to Morocco.”

“That’s it, then,” said Sam. He gulped down his drink, set the glass down on the table, hard. “I went to Libya.”

“We must have looped apart then, because—”

“We met up again. Yeah. Flew to Paris, and took ground transport to Camp Lucky Strike.”

“Back together—at least for the camp?”

“What did we play? At the last.”

“‘Salt Peanuts’.”

“And who won the most money at cards on the boat?”

“That’s no mystery. Wild Card Zee. I guess nobody figured out how he cheats.”

“I did. He deals himself six cards, doesn’t fan them out, at some point discards two. Risky, but he’s slick. Let’s try something a little more difficult.”

They finally agreed that they had both crossed the Atlantic on the
Robin Sherwood
.

Sam said, “Then who’s that Wink that died in…in my world?”

“Look, didn’t Hadntz postulate that time is constantly splitting? Instant by instant. But our consciousness doesn’t register that. Seems to stay steady. So there are probably uncountable selves, uncountable worlds, uncountable realities.”

“All with their own share of misery, obviously.”

“I don’t know,” Wink said. “She seemed to sincerely believe that, in some timeline, war would end. Through the use of her device. People would somehow become less aggressive. There was some gene that caused people to…like one another. To get along.”

“Now that I think about it, it sounds like Sunday school.”

“With a twist, though. Where would you rather live? This might really work. I mean, what did I tell you? We’re
not
at odds with the Russians. We’re not spending money maintaining troops in Europe. We’re not amassing a nuclear arsenal, which I presume you are. We’re on a big kick to make the schools better. Train more engineers and scientists. A bill just passed in Congress mandating equal rights by federal law to Negroes. A whole lot of them kicked up a fuss after the war about the way they were being treated after having served their country.”

“Can I switch?” Sam was being sarcastic. Wink knew it, but deliberately took him seriously.

“It might be too late. I mean, we won’t have this critical mass for long. These guys will be gone tomorrow. Kocab seems to be the link.”