Return Engagement (56 page)

“Thanks very much, Chief,” George said.

“You’re welcome,” Isbell answered matter-of-factly. “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think you had the makings. That wouldn’t be fair to whoever you shipped with. But you can do the job, so why the hell not?”

Lists of those assigned to this, that, or the other school appeared on the door outside the camp’s administrative offices. George scanned them eagerly. His name wasn’t on the one for the gunnery school, but it wasn’t on any of the other lists, either. He wondered if the Navy really wanted him for anything at all.

And then, after a week of what felt like the worst anticlimax in the world, he found his name. Actually, Morrie Fishbein, who was standing beside him to check the lists, found it for him. Fishbein gave him a nudge with an elbow and said, “Hey, George, here you are.”

“What? Where? Lemme see,” George said. Fishbein pointed. George looked. “Gunnery school! Yeah!” He pumped his fist in the air. Then he remembered the other man. “What about you, Morrie? You anywhere?”

“Doesn’t look like it.” Fishbein sounded mournful. “I don’t think anybody gives a damn about me.” George hadn’t been the only one with such worries, then.

A yeoman came out of the office and stuck another list to the door with a piece of masking tape. Morrie turned away in dejection. George took a look at it. “, ‘Fishbein, Morris D.,’ “ he read. “It’s the antisubmersible-warfare list. They’re going to teach you to throw ashcans at subs—either that or put earphones on you and show you how to really use that sound-ranging gear they’ve got.”

“Oh, yeah?” The other man turned back. George aimed an index finger to show him his name. Fishbein thought it over. “Antisub . . . That’s not too bad. They could’ve sent me plenty of worse places. Minesweeping, for instance.” He shuddered at the mere idea.

“If I didn’t get gunnery, I would’ve wanted antisub,” George said. “You sink one of those bastards for me, you hear?”

“Sure as hell try,” Fishbein said. “If you don’t get them, they get you.”

“You’d best believe it,” George said. “Like the chaplain tells us every Sunday—it is better to give than to receive.”

He realized too late that Fishbein listened to
his
chaplain on Saturday, if he listened at all. But the New Yorker laughed. “That’s pretty goddamn funny, George.”

George checked the lists again. “They’re going to ship us out this afternoon. Better throw your stuff in your duffel.”

“Uh-huh.” Fishbein stopped laughing. “Ain’t that a pisser? Everything you got in the world, and you can sling it over your shoulder.”

“Just one of those things,” George answered with a shrug. He’d been used to living with not much more than a duffel’s worth of stuff for weeks at a time when he went on a fishing run. To someone new to the sea, though, it couldn’t be easy.

He stared at the list again. Gunnery school. He nodded to himself. He thought the father he didn’t remember well enough would approve.

H
ipolito Rodriguez turned off the lights in the farmhouse kitchen. As always these days, he did it with enormous respect, after first making sure the floor under his feet was dry. He’d been careless once, and it had almost killed him. If Magdalena hadn’t come out of the bedroom and knocked him away from the switch he couldn’t let go of on his own, it would have finished the job in short order.

From what he’d heard since, she was lucky she hadn’t stepped in the water herself, or the treacherous electricity would have seized her, too. Electricity was a strong servant, yes. Like anything strong, though, it could use its strength for good or ill. He’d found that out. He hoped one lesson would last him a lifetime.

When he went into the front room, Magdalena asked, “How are you?”

“I’m all right. I’m not made of glass, you know,” he answered. His wife gave him a look that said she didn’t believe a word of it. He still hadn’t got back all his strength and coordination. Sometimes he wondered if he ever would, or if he’d remain a lesser man than he once had been.

He frowned. He wished he hadn’t thought of it like that. He was a lesser man than he had been in some other ways, too. He wasn’t quite no man at all, but the electricity hadn’t done that any good, either.

Magdalena hadn’t complained. She’d done everything she could to help him. He was discovering that women got less upset about such things than did the men to whom they happened. That was a small relief, even if one he would rather not have had.

To keep from worrying about his shortcomings, he said, “I’m going to turn on the wireless. It’s just about time for the news.”

“All right.” Magdalena didn’t tell him to be careful when he turned on the set. She never told him anything like that. She knew he had his pride. Whether she said it or not, though, he knew what she was thinking. And he
was
careful when he turned it on. He thought he always would be.

Click!
The set was on. He stepped away from it. Nothing had happened to him. Absurd to feel relief at that, but he did. Then he stepped back and turned the tuning knob to the station he wanted.

As usual when the wireless hadn’t been on for a while, the sound needed a bit of time to show up. When it did, the announcer was in the middle of a sentence: “—the news in a moment, after these brief messages.” An improbably cheerful chorus started singing the praises of a brand of kitchen cleanser. By Magdalena’s sniff, it wasn’t a brand she thought much of.

Another chorus, this one full of deep, masculine voices, urged people to buy Confederate war bonds. Rodriguez had already done that: as many as he could afford. “Bonds and bullets, bonds and bombs!” they chanted, drums thudding martially in the background. Just hearing them made you want to give money to the cause.

Their music faded. The familiar fanfare that led off the news followed. “Now it is time to tell you the truth,” the announcer said. “Yankee air pirates were severely punished in raids over Virginia and Kentucky last night. Confederate bombers struck hard at Yankee shipping in the Great Lakes yesterday. U.S. industry cannot keep making munitions if it cannot get supplies.”

“Es verdad. Tiene razón,”
Rodriguez said. His wife nodded—she thought it was true and the newsman was right, too.

“In Utah, poison-gas attacks did not make the Mormon freedom fighters rebelling against Yankee tyranny pull back from Provo,” the newsman went on. “And in New Mexico, a daring raid by the Confederate Camel Corps caused the destruction of a U.S. ammunition dump outside of Alamogordo. The shells and bombs would have been used against Confederate women and children in Texas.”

Rodriguez found himself nodding. That was how the damnyankees did things, all right.

“There were minor raids by Red
mallate
bandits in Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina over the past few days,” the newsreader said. “None of them did much damage, and the Negroes were driven off with heavy losses.” Rodriguez nodded again. If blacks in the CSA took up arms against the government, they deserved whatever happened to them. Even if they didn’t . . .

“And in Richmond, President Jake Featherston announced the formation of the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades,” the newsman said. “These men, while no longer fit for the demands of modern war, will free younger men now serving behind the lines to go up to the front.”

More singing commercials followed. Rodriguez listened to them with half an ear. When they went away, the newsman gave football scores from across the CSA. Rodriguez waited for the score of the Hermosillo-Chihuahua match. It had ended up 17–17. He sighed. He’d hoped for a win, but Chihuahua had been favored, so he didn’t suppose he could be too disappointed that the team from the Sonoran capital had managed to earn a tie.

After the sports came the weather forecast. Rodriguez did about as well by going outside and watching the clouds and feeling the breeze as the weathermen did with all their fancy gadgets. He listened anyway, not least so he could laugh at them when they turned out to be wrong.

Music came back after more commercials. He listened for a while, then got up and yawned and stretched. “
Estoy cansado.
I’m going to bed,” he said.

“I’m tired, too,” his wife agreed. She turned off the wireless. Rodriguez didn’t say anything. If he had, she would have told him she was closer to the set than he was. It would have been the truth, too, but not all of the truth.

When they lay down together, he wondered if he would know the sweetness of desire. It had been a while. But nothing happened. He sighed once more, yawned, rolled over, and fell asleep.

He was chivvying a chicken into the henhouse the next morning when an auto pulled off the road and stopped not far from the barn. He blinked. That didn’t happen every day—or every month, either. The motorcar wasn’t new, and hadn’t been anything special when it was: a boxy, battered Birmingham with bulbous headlights that stuck out like a frog’s eyes. Out of it stepped Robert Quinn.

The Freedom Party organizer hadn’t come to Baroyeca to get rich—or if he had, he’d been out of his mind. He hadn’t got rich, either. That was one of the reasons he commanded so much respect in town. He was doing what he believed in, not what would serve his own selfish interests.

Rodriguez waved to him. “
Hola, Señor
Quinn. What can I do for you today?”

“Well, I thought I’d come by and see how you were doing,
Señor
Rodriguez,” Quinn replied. “How do you feel?”

“From what the doctor said, I am doing about the way I should be,” Rodriguez said. “I wish I were better, but I could be worse. I am not shockingly bad, anyhow.”

Quinn made a face at him. “I see the electricity did not fry your brains—or maybe I see that it did.”

“Would you like to come in the house?” Rodriguez asked. “If you have the time, we could drink a bottle of
cerveza.
”

“
Muchas gracias.
I would like that,” Quinn said. “I have a question I would like to ask you, if you don’t mind.”
I want something from you,
was what he meant. But he was too smooth, too polite, to say so straight out. Maybe he would have when he first came to Baroyeca from the more bustling northeast of the Confederate States. But he’d learned to fit into the Sonoran town’s slower rhythms.

“I would be very pleased to hear it,” Rodriguez said. “Just let me attend to this miserable hen first. . . .” He waved his hat. The hen, which had paused to peck in the gravel, squawked irately and retreated. He got it back where it belonged and slammed the door on it. Then he raised his voice: “Magdalena, we have company.
Señor
Quinn has come to ask me something.”

His wife came out onto the front porch. She nodded to Robert Quinn. “Very good to see you,
señor.
”

“And you as well.” Quinn’s answering nod was almost a bow.

“Come in, come in,” Rodriguez said. “Magdalena, would you get us some beer,
por favor
?”

“Of course,” she answered. If they’d been down to their last bottle of beer and had nothing else on the farm, Quinn would have got it. Not only that—he would have got it in a way that said they had plenty more, even if they didn’t.

Rodriguez settled his guest in the most comfortable chair. That was the one he usually sat in himself, but the next best would do. Magdalena brought in two bottles of beer. She served Quinn first. “Thank you very much,” he said, and raised his bottle to Rodriguez.
“¡Salud!”

The simple toast—
health
—meant more than it would have before Rodriguez almost electrocuted himself.
“¡Salud!”
he echoed feelingly. He sipped at the beer. “Ask me your question,
Señor
Quinn.”

“I will, never fear.” Quinn nodded to the wireless set. “Did you hear any news last night?”

“Some,” Rodriguez said, surprise in his voice: that wasn’t the sort of question he’d expected.

Robert Quinn went on, “Did you hear the news about what President Featherston is calling the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades?”

“Yes, I did hear that,” Rodriguez answered. “It struck me as being a good idea.”

“It struck me the same way,” Quinn said. “It is something this country needs when we fight an enemy larger than we are. I was wondering if you had thought about joining the Veterans’ Brigades yourself.”

“I see,” Rodriguez said. “Before my . . . my accident, I was wondering whether
los Estados Confederados
would call me back to the colors to fight at the front, not behind it.”

“Así es la vida,”
Quinn said. “The way things are now, you would probably not do well with a Tredegar automatic rifle in your hands.” He was being polite, and Rodriguez knew it. If he put on the butternut uniform again, he would be almost as big a danger to his own
compadres
as he would to the damnyankees. Robert Quinn added, “But you also serve your country if you free up a fitter man to fight. That is what the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades are for.”

“I understand. But one thing I am not so sure I understand is who would take care of the farm if I went away. My one son is already in the Army. The other two are bound to be conscripted soon. Magdalena cannot possibly do everything by herself.”

“People can do all sorts of things when they find they have to,” Quinn remarked. “But the Freedom Party looks out for the people. You would have your salary, of course. And the Party would pay your wife an allowance that would go a long way toward making up for your being gone.”

“Well, that is not so bad,” Rodriguez said. “It gives me something to think about, anyhow.”

“You might do better not to think too long. So far, the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades are voluntary.” Quinn paused to let that sink in before continuing, “I do not know when, or if, men our age will be conscripted into them. But I know it could happen. This is war, after all. If you volunteer, you will have the best chance to get the assignment you might want. You could patrol the dams in the Tennessee Valley to guard against sabotage, or you could guard the
mallates
taken in arms against the Confederate States, or—”

He knew what levers to pull. He even knew not to name guarding the Negroes first, lest it seem too obvious. “I
will
think about that,” Rodriguez said. Robert Quinn didn’t even smile.