Return Engagement (45 page)

J
ust swinging a hammer felt good to Chester Martin. Watching a house go up, making a house go up, seemed a lot more satisfying than tramping along the sidewalk with a picket sign on his shoulder. He’d never been thrilled about taking on a general’s role in the war against capitalist oppression.

So he told himself, anyhow—and told himself, again and again. With patriotic zeal, one big builder after another had made his peace with the construction workers’ union. Nobody could afford strikes any more. Everyone from the President on down was saying the same thing. People were actually acting as if they believed it, too. Love of country trumped love of class. That was one of the lessons of 1914, when international solidarity of the workers hadn’t done a damn thing to stop the Great War. A generation of peace had let memories grow hazy. Now the truth came to light again.

Martin found himself quietly swearing at Harry T. Casson as he rode the trolley home from work one hot afternoon. The building magnate had known him better than he knew himself. Try as he would to get back to normal, to return to being an ordinary working man, he
missed
the class struggle,
missed
heading the proletariat’s forces in that struggle. Was ordinary work enough after such a long, bruising fight?

When he got off the trolley a few blocks from his place, a newsboy on the corner was hawking the
Daily Mirror
—Los Angeles’ leading afternoon paper—with shouts of, “Sabotage! Treason! Read all about it!”

That was a headline Chester would have expected from the
Times.
In fact, half a block away another newsboy was selling the afternoon edition of the
Times
with almost identical cries. In the
Times,
they were usually aimed at union organizers and other such subversives. Chester bought a copy of the
Daily Mirror.
That way, he didn’t have to give the
Times
any of his money.

He discovered that the
Daily Mirror
—and, presumably, even the
Times
for once—meant their headlines literally. A U.S. offensive against the Confederates in Ohio had been blunted because Confederate sympathizers blew bridges, took down important road signs, and otherwise fouled things up. One of them had been caught in the act. He’d killed himself before U.S. forces could seize him and, perhaps, squeeze answers out of him.

“Fighting the enemy is hard enough. Fighting the enemy and our own people at the same time is ten times worse,” an officer was quoted as saying. Right next to his bitter comment was a story about the secondary campaign in Utah. The Mormons were using lots of land mines against U.S. soldiers and U.S. barrels, making the advance toward Provo hideously expensive.

Chester almost walked past his own building. He folded the newspaper under one arm and thumped his forehead with the heel of his other hand. Then he went inside and went upstairs. He sniffed when he let himself into the apartment. “What smells good?” he called.

“It’s a tongue,” Rita answered from the kitchen. Chester smiled. When times were good, back in the 1920s, he would have turned up his nose at tongue. He and Rita had started eating it when times went sour. They’d kept on eating it afterwards because they both found they liked it. So did their son. Rita went on, “How did it go today?”

“All right, I guess.” Chester did his best not to think about his discontent. To keep from flabbling about what he was doing, he flabbled about external things instead: “War news isn’t very good.”

“I know. I’ve been listening to the wireless,” his wife said. “Not much we can do about it, though.”

He walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and took out a bottle of Lucky Lager. “Want one?” he asked. When Rita nodded, he opened the beer, put it on the counter by her, and got another one for himself. They clinked the brown glass bottles together before drinking.

Not much we can do about it.
Rita knew he sometimes thought about putting on the uniform again. He wasn’t afraid of getting shot at. Her knowing he might get shot at? That made him shiver.

“Ahhh! That hits the spot!” Chester said after a third of the bottle ran cold down his throat. Rita, who’d taken a smaller sip, nodded. Chester drank again, then went on, “At least it doesn’t look like the Confederates are going to take Toledo away from us.”

“Thank God for small favors.” Rita’s second swig was a hefty one. Chester understood that. They’d come to Los Angeles from Toledo after he lost his job at a steel mill there. Both of them still had family in the town. If the Confederates had decided to drive west after reaching Lake Erie at Sandusky . . .

But they hadn’t. Chester added, “Last letter we got from my old man, he says even the bombers aren’t coming over as often as they did.”

“They don’t need to so much, not any more,” Rita said.

One more truth,
Chester thought. Till the Confederates cut the USA in half, all sorts of cargoes rolled through Toledo, bound for points farther east. Now those cargoes couldn’t go much farther east—not on land, anyhow. “I’ll bet the docks are booming,” Chester said.

His wife gave him a look. “Of course they are. That’s why the bombers still come over at all: to make them go boom.”

Chester groaned. “I didn’t mean it like that.” Whether he’d meant it or not, it was still so. He usually made the jokes in the family, but he’d walked right into this one. He said, “You can get rich sailing on a freighter in the Great Lakes today.”

“You can get blown to kingdom come sailing in one of those freighters, too,” Rita pointed out. Pay was high because the chances of running the Confederate gauntlet were low. Chester finished his beer with a last gulp and opened another one. Rita didn’t say anything. He wasn’t somebody who made a habit of getting smashed after he came home from work. He certainly wasn’t somebody who made a habit of pouring down a few boilermakers before he came home from work. He’d known a few—maybe more than a few—steelworkers like that. Builders drank, too, but mostly not with the same reckless abandon.

“I’m home!” Carl shouted. The front door slammed. Feet thundered in the hall.

“Oh, good,” Chester told his son. “I thought we were in the middle of an elephant stampede.”

Carl thought that was funny. He also thought his father hadn’t been joking. Rita said, “Go wash your hands and face. With soap, if you please. Supper’s just about ready.”

Despite the warning, Carl’s cleanup was extremely sketchy. Like any boy his age, he was not only a dirt magnet but proud of it. When he came out of the bathroom with the dirt still there and not even visibly rearranged, Chester sent him back. “Do a better job or you won’t have to worry about supper,” he said. “And it’s tongue tonight.”

That got Carl moving—yes, he loved tongue. Nobody’d told him it was poor people’s food. He just thought it tasted good. When he emerged this time, there was no doubt water had touched his face. Chester wasn’t so sure about soap. But when he went into the bathroom himself to unload some of that beer, he found the bar of Ivory had gone from white to muddy brown.

“For Pete’s sake, wash the soap after you use it,” he told his son when he came out.

Carl giggled. “That’s a joke, Daddy! You wash
with
the soap.”

“If anybody washes with the soap after you’ve been anywhere near it, he’ll get dirtier, not cleaner,” Chester said. Carl thought that was funny, too. Chester wondered if anything this side of a clout in the ear would make him change his mind.

Along with the tongue, supper included potatoes and carrots and onions. Sometimes Rita made tongue with cloves, the way most of her cookbooks recommended. Chester liked it better with lots of salt and horseradish. Carl couldn’t stand horseradish—it was too strong for him. Chester hadn’t liked it when he was a kid, either. Too big a mouthful was like a dagger up into your head.

After supper, Rita washed dishes and Carl unenthusiastically dried. Chester turned on the wireless. He spun the dial, going from quiz show to comedy to melodrama to music. Not a football game anywhere. He muttered to himself, even though he’d known there wouldn’t be. The war had put paid to football leagues strong and weak all across the country. Travel for nothing more important than sport seemed unpatriotic—and a lot of football players were wearing uniforms of green-gray, not some gaudier colors.

Chester missed the broadcasts even so. He’d played a lot of football when he was younger—not for money, but he knew the game. And listening to announcers describing far-off action was one of the best ways he knew to wind down after a long, hard day.

Without any games, he settled on an adventure story set in Canada. The hero was trying to forestall Japanese agents from touching off an uprising. The Japs sounded like characters from a bad imitation of Gilbert and Sullivan. The Canadians who stayed loyal to the USA were almost as good as real Americans; the ones who didn’t were truly despicable. All in all, the show was pretty dumb, but it made half an hour go by and it sold shaving cream—to say nothing of selling the Stars and Stripes.

At the top of the hour came five minutes of news. Stations had to have some if they wanted the government to renew their broadcast licenses. This was a pretty bare-bones setup—the reader droned away, presenting copy plainly taken straight from the wire services: “U.S. pilots have pounded strategic targets in Richmond, Louisville, and Nashville for the third night in a row. Damage is reported heavy. Only a few Confederate raiders appeared over Philadelphia last night. Several of them were shot down, while those that escaped did little harm.”

Chester wondered how much of that he could believe. All of it? Any of it? What were the people who could actually see what was happening hearing on the news? Was it so relentlessly upbeat? He wouldn’t have bet anything on it.

“Confederate authorities have denied reports that former Vice President Willy Knight was killed while attempting to escape,” the newsman said. “Knight has been imprisoned since failing in his attempt to overthrow President Featherston. When asked about his current whereabouts and condition, Confederate spokesman Saul Goldman declined comment.”

Again, more questions than answers. Was Willy Knight still alive? Had he died not attempting escape? Chester Martin shrugged. He wished Knight had managed to get rid of Featherston. The CSA wouldn’t have been so dangerous without that maniac in charge.

“President Smith has announced that the United States are preparing strong counterblows against the Confederate States., ‘We are one people. We are strong and determined, and we will prevail,’ the President said to war workers in a factory outside Philadelphia. Long and tumultuous applause greeted his remarks.”

Well, Chester knew what that meant: nothing at all. It was only wind and air. Of course the United States were preparing counterblows. Whether any would work was a different question. So far, the Confederates had been ready for everything the United States threw at them.

After a couple of local stories, the announcer said, “Coming up next is the popular
Marjorie’s Hope.
Stay tuned.”
Marjorie’s Hope
wasn’t popular with Chester. He turned off the wireless.

XII

W
hen George Enos, Jr., joined the Navy, he thought he would go aboard a warship right away. Why not? He’d been a seaman for years. What more did he need to know? In his mind, the answer to that was
nothing.
The Navy had other ideas.

The Navy’s ideas won. When the Navy’s ideas bumped up against his, they always won. That was annoying, but it was how things worked.

It was also one of the things he had to learn before he could go from fisherman to Navy man. As the saying went, there was a right way, a wrong way, and a Navy way. If you did things the Navy way, you couldn’t get in too much trouble. The training camp outside Providence drove that home.

George had been hundreds of miles out to sea. Except for his honeymoon at Niagara Falls, the train ride to Providence was the longest one he’d ever made. He was jammed up against a window. He liked that fine, except when he had to fight his way to the aisle to go to the toilet. Otherwise, he pressed his nose to the dirty, smeary glass and gaped at the countryside rolling by.

Training camp wasn’t what he’d expected, either. The Navy seemed determined to make soldiers, not sailors, out of its recruits. George didn’t mind the calisthenics, though the fellows ten years younger than he was had an easier time with them. He didn’t mind making his cot up just so; he understood the need to keep things tidy in cramped places. He
did
mind the endless marching in formation. He saw no point to it. “Are we going to do close-order drill on a battleship deck, for crying out loud?” he grumbled one hot, sticky evening before lights-out.

“You know what it is? I’ll tell you what it is,” a skinny New York kid named Morris Fishbein said. His accent and George’s were much further apart from each other than the miles separating their home towns; sometimes they hardly seemed to be speaking the same language. “They want to pound the individualism out of us, that’s what they want to do.”

“What do you mean?” George asked.

Before answering, Fishbein lit a cigarette. He smoked in quick, nervous puffs. Everything he did seemed fast and herky-jerky. His thoughts went the same way, leaping over the mental landscape where George had to plod one mental step at a time. Blowing out smoke, Fishbein said, “Only stands to reason. We all gotta act the same way on a ship. We all gotta do what they tell us, no matter what the hell it is, without even thinking about it. We don’t do that, we get in trouble and maybe we put the ship in trouble. We gotta do it automatic-like, you know what I mean? So that’s what close-order drill is for.”

Maybe he was right. Maybe he was wrong. Right or wrong, he was sure as hell plausible. When George was marching and countermarching and turning to the left flank and the right, he didn’t feel like an individual. He barely felt like a human being. He was just one gear in an enormous machine where all the pieces worked smoothly together. Maybe that was what Fishbein was talking about.

Every once in a while, something would go wrong in the machinery. Somebody would turn right when he should have turned left, or else keep going straight when he should have countermarched. What happened to such luckless people didn’t bear thinking about. CPOs descended on them like a swarm of cats on a mouse. The abuse they screamed startled George, who’d been working at T Wharf and going to sea since before he started shaving, and who thought he’d heard it all.

“They should treat us better,” he complained.

“Yeah, and then you wake up,” Morrie Fishbein said scornfully. “All we’re there for is to get work out of us. Military proletariat is what we are. They don’t have to treat us good. We fuck up, they replace us.”

“You talk too much like that, they’ll come down on you,” George said.

“I’m a Socialist. So what? So’s the President. It’s still a free country—more or less. I’m not talking about the revolt of the proletariat. I don’t want that. I want to blow the reactionaries in the goddamn CSA to hell and gone. We need an Army and a Navy for the job. But I know a class structure when I see one.”

A big, slow-talking Midwesterner named Oswald Schmidt said, “I know something you don’t know.” His flat accent sounded nothing like George’s or Fishbein’s.

“Oh, yeah? What’s that?” Fishbein bristled at the very idea.

“I know you talk too goddamn much.”

It could have been the start of a fight. But everybody who heard it laughed too hard for anything to get started. And everybody except possibly Morris Fishbein knew he
did
talk too much.

Reveille at half past five made a lot of people groan every morning. George took it in stride. He put in longer hours at sea than the Navy made him put up with. Navy cooks weren’t anything special—they couldn’t very well be, not cooking for so many men. But quantity counted, too. Bacon and eggs and fried potatoes and plenty of coffee made the day worth facing.

George also learned to shoot a Springfield as if he were in the Army. He supposed that gave him a certain mental discipline, too. From rifles, he graduated to machine guns, and then to one-pounder antiaircraft guns. He felt a certain thrill firing one of those—his father had helped tend the same kind of weapon in the Great War.

Some of the recruits had no idea how to take care of weapons, or how to fix them when part of their mechanism went out of whack. George had no problems there. Any fisherman had to be a pretty good jackleg mechanic. If something broke down while you were out on the Grand Bank, you couldn’t take it to the nearest repairman. You damn well had to fix it yourself, with whatever you had on your boat.

A couple of petty officers noticed that George’s hands knew what they were doing. “Keep that up and you’ll be a machinist’s mate in jig time,” one of them said.

“I don’t much want to be a machinist’s mate,” George answered.

“Why not? People who can put things back together like you don’t grow on trees. The Navy needs as many of ’em as it can get,” the chief said, scowling at George for daring to have a mind of his own.

George shrugged. “If I have my druthers, I’ll be a gunner. That’s what my father was. Besides, I’d sooner blow up the other guys if I’m going to be in the scrap at all.”

The chief stuck out his chin farther than should have been humanly possible. “Listen, Enos, you’re in the Navy now. You don’t get your druthers, and you ain’t gonna have ’em, neither. You’ll do what we tell you, or else you’ll be the sorriest son of a bitch ever born—and then you’ll do what we tell you. You got that?”

“Yes, Chief Isbell. Sure do.” George knew better than to come right out and argue. That would have asked to get his square peg self rammed into a round hole. But he didn’t volunteer for special machinist’s training, either. He wondered if anybody would volunteer him. No one did. He let out a discreet sigh of relief, making sure none of the fearsome chiefs could hear him when he did it.

Before long, the raw seamen started training cruises in a destroyer that hadn’t been new in the Great War and was downright ancient now. The
Lamson
’s decrepitude made her a better ship to learn in than a newer vessel would have been. Things were always going wrong with her. Her hull wasn’t much more than rust covered by paint. That gave the aspiring sailors endless practice at chipping paint and polishing metal, two skills any seaman needed.

She was so old, she burned coal. George did a stretch in the black gang, shoveling it into her furnace. He came off those shifts exhausted and looking like the end man in a minstrel show. He coughed up black-streaked phlegm for days afterwards.

Once upon a time, the
Lamson
had been able to make twenty-eight knots. The only way she could do that these days was by falling off a cliff. Her boilers had more wheezes than a sanatorium full of consumptives. George knew diesels, but he’d never worked with steam before. He found himself interested in spite of his vow to steer himself toward gunnery.

He had a hammock and a duffel bag to call his own: even less in the way of space and belongings than he’d had on the
Sweet Sue.
For him, though, the adjustment was small. Some of the landsmen groused all the time. A couple of them just couldn’t take it. They’d managed the barracks outside of Providence, but couldn’t stand the even tighter quarters at sea.

Or maybe it was the heads that did them in. They had no partitions. You did your business sitting next to somebody else who was doing his business, and if what you saw and heard and smelled put you off your stride, you got more and more constipated. The pharmacist’s mates did a booming—so to speak—business in castor oil.

The
Lamson
had five three-inch guns. They hadn’t been much back when she was built, and they were only popguns by today’s standards. But they were big enough to give the crew practice at loading, firing, and shooting real artillery pieces.

An ensign with peach fuzz on his cheeks asked, “What would you do, men, if we were attacked by a British cruiser?”

Get blown to hell and gone,
George thought, but that probably wasn’t what the baby-faced officer wanted to hear. Morrie Fishbein said, “Launch torpedoes, sir. They’d be our best chance against anything that outgunned us by so much.”

The ensign frowned. That was a good answer, but not the one he’d been looking for. He said, “But how would you fight back with our guns?”

“Shoot like hell and hope for the best, sir,” Fishbein answered. “One hit from a six-inch gun and we’re scrap iron anyway.” He was right there, too. Destroyers weren’t armored against shellfire. They couldn’t be; they depended on speed instead. Armor added weight and would have slowed them down.

After that, the ensign asked fewer questions.

George did everything at the
Lamson
’s guns: he jerked shells, loaded, handled the altitude and azimuth screws, and finally commanded the piece. If he served a gun once he was assigned to his own ship, he knew he would start as a shell jerker. That was low man on the totem pole. He didn’t care. As long as that gun was shooting at the Confederates—or the British, or the French, or the Japanese—he didn’t care at all.

Some of the men on the
Lamson
got dreadfully seasick. The waves did pick her up and toss her around a good deal. That fresh-faced ensign turned almost as green as the Atlantic. George took the destroyer’s motion in stride. Whatever the ocean did to her, it wasn’t a patch on a fishing boat riding out a storm. Once you’d been through that, nothing else on the ocean would faze you . . . unless you were the luckless sort who never did find his sea legs. In that case, the Navy—or at least a warship—was a ghastly mistake.

There were men who kissed the dirty, splintery planks of the wharf when the
Lamson
got back to port in Providence. Nobody laughed at them. Everyone had been through enough to feel
There but for the grace of God go I.
If the grace of God didn’t decide who made a good sailor and who didn’t, George couldn’t imagine what would.

As usual, the land seemed to reel when he came ashore. He was used to a constantly shifting surface under his feet; one that stayed in place felt wrong. So did a horizon that failed to roll and pitch. He knew the abnormalities would subside in a little while, which made them no less strange while they were going on.

Routine returned, including close-order drill. George endured it, waiting for his next cruise. The Navy had more nonsense in it than he’d expected when he put on the uniform. Once he was at sea, though, most of it went away. And that was what really mattered.

T
hese days, cops with submachine guns patrolled the bus stop where blacks in the Terry went off to Augusta’s war plants. They made sure nobody could repeat the atrocity that had scarred the colored part of town. Scipio didn’t care. He went a couple of blocks out of his way every day so he didn’t have to walk past that bus stop.

He knew avoiding it might not save him. There weren’t enough cops in Augusta to examine every automobile in the Terry, let alone every one in the whole town. And a bomb didn’t have to hide inside an auto. A creative terrorist had plenty of other choices.

Fewer whites joked about his penguin suit as he walked to the Huntsman’s Lodge. Fewer joked at all. Hard suspicion filled most of the glances he got. His passbook got checked two or three times in the trip up to the restaurant.

Bathsheba said the same thing happened to her when she went to clean houses. More and more, whites in Augusta didn’t want Negroes coming out of the Terry at all unless they rode on those buses.

Scipio wondered what the whites thought they would do if they started excluding waiters and cleaners and barbers and others who served them and made their lives easier and more comfortable. Would they start waiting on one another? He couldn’t believe it. In the Confederate States, that was nigger work. The whole point of being a white in the CSA was that you didn’t have to do nigger work. All whites were equal, above all blacks. Why else had the Confederate States seceded, if not to preserve that principle?

He slipped into the Huntsman’s Lodge with a sigh of relief. As long as his shift lasted, everything would probably be all right. He knew his role here. He knew what to expect from his boss and the cooks and the other waiters and the customers. They wouldn’t be wondering if he aimed to blow the place to hell and gone. The most they’d worry about was whether the steak they’d ordered rare would come back medium-rare. They’d look down their noses at him, but in a familiar way.

“Hello, Xerxes,” Jerry Dover said when he came in. “You know a colored fella about your age named Aurelius? He said you did.”

“Yes, suh, I knows Aurelius,” Scipio answered. “How come
you
knows he?”

“He’s looking for work here. Place he was at’s closing down.”

“Do Jesus! John Oglethorpe’s place closin’ down?” Scipio said in altogether unfeigned dismay. “He give me my first job waitin’ tables in dis town—alongside Aurelius—when I come here durin’ de las’ war. What fo’ he closin’ down?”

“Got somethin’ wrong with his ticker—he’s not strong enough to keep the place open any more,” Dover answered. “Too damn bad—I know he’s been here a long time. This Aurelius knows his stuff, then?”