Return Engagement (80 page)

How long had he known and kept quiet? If he could add two and two, how many other people in Rosenfeld could do the same thing? “I always watch myself, Mort,” Mary said, but she knew she would have to be more watchful yet.

A
corner drugstore not far from Chester Martin’s house in East L.A. had gone belly-up a few months before the war started. Times were still hard; the building had stood vacant ever since, the door padlocked, the going out of business! sign painted on the window slowly fading in the harsh California sun.

And then, quite suddenly, the place wasn’t vacant any more. Off came going out of business! A new sign went up on the window: a fierce-looking bald eagle in left profile in front of crossed swords, and below it, in red, white, and blue, the legend u.s. army recruiting station.

Chester eyed that with thoughtful interest. He smiled a little when he thought about the men who’d be working there. They had a tough job, didn’t they? Talking other people into carrying rifles and going off to shoot Confederates was a hell of a lot safer than carrying a rifle and going off to shoot Confederates yourself.

His wife couldn’t have been more horrified if a bordello had opened up in that building. By the hard, set expression on Rita’s face, she would rather have seen a bordello there. Chester knew why, too—she was afraid the recruiting station would take him away from her.

He knew what she was waiting for: for him to laugh and joke and tell her she was worrying over nothing. Then she would have relaxed. For the sake of family peace, he wished he could have. But the eagle’s hard golden stare reproached him every time he saw it. He knew what he could do for the country; he’d been through the mill. He just hadn’t decided whether the country truly needed him to do it.

“You haven’t been in there, have you?” she anxiously asked him one Sunday afternoon, as if it
were
a house of ill repute.

All he wanted to do was drink a bottle of beer, eat a corned-beef sandwich, and listen to the football game on the wireless. President Smith had decreed that football was essential to U.S. morale, so some leagues had resumed play. Some of their stars had joined the armed forces, and some of the players they were using wouldn’t have had a chance of making their squads before the shooting started. But the Dons were still the Dons, no matter who wore their black and gold. Today they were in Portland, squaring off against the Columbias.

“Well?” Rita said when he didn’t answer right away. “Have you?”

He washed down a bite of the sandwich with a swig of Lucky Lager. “No, I haven’t been in there,” he said. “I am curious—”

“Why?” Rita broke in, her voice sharp with fear. “Don’t you already know everything you ever wanted to about getting shot?”

“You bet I do.” Chester wore a long-sleeved shirt, so the scars on his arm didn’t show. That didn’t mean he’d forgotten them. You couldn’t forget something like that, not ever. After another pull at the Lucky, he went on, “No, what I’m curious about is who’s doing things in there. Have they got real soldiers, or are they cripples or Great War retreads? You’d think they’d want every able-bodied man up at the front.”

“What difference does it make?” Rita wouldn’t see reason on this. She’d made that very plain. “You don’t need an oak-leaf cluster on your Purple Heart. I don’t need a Western Union boy knocking on my door. I’ve already done that once.”

Most of the time, the kids who delivered telegrams were welcome visitors. Not when the USA and CSA grappled with each other. Then they were all too likely to bring bad news, a dreaded Deeply Regret message from the War Department. Their uniforms were a little darker than U.S. green-gray. People watched them go by on their bikes and prayed they wouldn’t stop. One of those kids had rung Rita’s doorbell in 1916.

Chester said, “I haven’t been in there. I—” He stopped. The Portland crowd was yelling its head off. The Dons had just fumbled. Having Rita in the same room with him inhibited his choice of language.

“You what?” she asked suspiciously.

“I wish we could find a halfback who can hold on to the darn ball, that’s what.”

“That isn’t what you were going to say, and we both know it.” Rita spoke
ex cathedra,
as the Pope or an upset wife had the right to do.

He sighed. “Like I said before, the only thing I’m curious about is who they’ve got in there.”

Rita rolled her eyes. “Like
I
said before, what the devil difference does it make? Whoever they are, what are they selling? The chance to get killed. They already gave you that once. Are you dumb enough to want it again?”

“No,” he said, but even he heard the doubt in his own voice.

“Don’t you want to live to see Carl grow up? Don’t you want to live to see your grandchildren?” His wife had no more compunction about fighting dirty than did the officers on both sides of this war who fired poison gas at their foes.

“That’s not fair,” Chester protested, a complaint that did him no more good with Rita than it did an ordinary soldier on the battlefield.

She got the last word, as wives have a way of doing: “All you care about is how sharp you’ll look in the uniform, even if they have to use it to lay you in a coffin. What the hell makes you think there’ll be enough of you left to bury?” She stormed out of the living room in tears.

Chester swore mournfully. How the deuce was he supposed to enjoy a football game—or even a corned-beef sandwich and a bottle of beer—after that?

Rita eased up on him during the week, but turned up the heat on the weekends. To her, that no doubt seemed perfectly logical. During the week, he was busy working, so he wasn’t likely to have the time to do anything she disapproved of. On the weekend, he could run loose. He could—but she didn’t aim to let him.

He didn’t always vote the straight Socialist ticket the way she did, but he understood the way the dialectic worked. A thesis created an antithesis that reacted against it. The more Rita told him to stay away from the recruiting station, the more he wanted to go inside. He almost wished it were a whorehouse. He could have had more fun if he did.

The clash of thesis and antithesis generated a synthesis. Chester never wondered what that might be. A more thoroughgoing Socialist might have.

He hoped Rita believed him when he said he was going out to get a haircut two Sundays after their big argument. It wasn’t that he was lying; he did visit the barbershop. He got a shave, too—an unusual luxury for him, because he took care of that himself most mornings. But it was also camouflage of a sort. If he came back to the house smelling of bay rum, Rita couldn’t doubt where he’d been.

No bell chimed when he walked into the recruiting station. He’d half expected a carillon to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Inside, a first sergeant with row after row of fruit salad on the chest of his dress uniform was talking earnestly with a man in his mid-thirties. Chester had expected to see kids here. He needed only a moment to figure out why he didn’t, though. Kids would get conscripted anyhow. The Army didn’t need to recruit them. This place was geared to persuading people like him to put on the uniform again.

Another noncom in a fancy uniform nodded to him. “Hello, sir,” the man said in friendly tones. “What can I do for you today?”

“I don’t know that you can do anything for me,” Chester answered. “I just came in for a look around.”

“Well, you can do that,” the recruiter said easily. “Want a cup of coffee while you’re doing it?”

“Thanks. I wouldn’t mind one a bit,” Chester said, even though he was thinking,
Step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly. . . .

“We’ve got a hot plate back here. You take cream and sugar?” the noncom asked. He walked over to the pot on the hot plate with a peculiar rolling gait. Chester had seen that before; it meant the man had an above-the-knee amputation. He wouldn’t be any good in combat. He had to be a smooth talker, though, or they wouldn’t have let him keep wearing the uniform.

Once he’d doctored the coffee to Chester’s taste, he brought it back. “Thanks,” Chester said again.

The recruiter eyed him. “You saw the elephant the last time around, I’d say,” he remarked.

“Oh, yeah.” Chester sipped the coffee. It tasted about the way coffee that had sat on a hot plate since early morning usually tastes: like battery acid diluted with cream and sugar.

“What did you top out at, you don’t mind my asking?”

Chester didn’t answer. The guy in his thirties got up and left. The sergeant to whom he’d been talking pushed back his chair—and Chester saw it was a wheelchair. He had legs, but they evidently weren’t any good to him. “Are you sure you guys are recruiting?” Chester blurted.

He wondered if the noncom who’d brought him coffee would deliberately misunderstand. The man didn’t. He didn’t even blink. “Yes, we are,” he said. “If you went through it, you already know what can happen. We don’t need to be able to run and jump to do this job. In the field, we would. Here, we can still help the country. So . . . You were in the last one, you said.”

“Yeah, from start to finish. I ended up a sergeant. I was in charge of a company for a while, till they scraped up an officer for it.”

“Wounded?”

“Once—in the arm. It healed up pretty good. I was lucky.”

“You sure as hell were,” the recruiter agreed soberly. “What have you done since?”

“Steel. Construction. Union organizing.” Chester wondered if that would faze the Army man.

It didn’t. The fellow just nodded. “If you can command a company, you can run civilians, too. As long as you’re not a Freedom Party stalwart or a Mormon, I don’t care about your politics. And if you’re a loyal Mormon—there are some—and you take the oath, we’ll find some kind of place for you. The other stuff? Socialist? Democrat? Republican? Nobody gives a damn. You can argue about it in the field. It helps the time go by.”

“Interesting,” Chester said, as noncommittally as he could.

The recruiter looked him in the eye. “What have you got to say for yourself? Did you just come here to window shop, or are you serious about helping the country?”

There it was, right out in the open. Chester licked his lips. “If I go back in, can I hold off induction for a month? I’m not a kid any more. I’m going to need to straighten out some things.”

“It’s a seller’s market,” the noncom said. “However you want us, we want you.” He stuck out his hand. Chester shook it.
Rita’s gonna kill me,
he thought.

A
ir-raid sirens screamed. Flora Blackford and her son hurried downstairs to the basement of their block of flats. Joshua said, “They haven’t come over Philadelphia for a while.” He sounded excited, not afraid.

“I’d just as soon they didn’t,” Flora answered. A very fat man—he was a lobbyist for the meat-packing business—was taking the stairs at a snail’s pace, which was as fast as he could go. He filled the stairwell from side to side, so nobody could get around him. Flora felt like giving him a push and going over his back. Bombs were already bursting in the city.

“I’d just as soon they didn’t, too,” Joshua said. “It means we aren’t putting enough pressure on them in Virginia—they think they can use their bombers up here instead of against the troops.”

Flora almost asked if she should send him over to the General Staff. The only thing checking her was the certainty that he’d say yes. He’d take it for an invitation, not sarcasm. He studied war with a passionate intensity altogether alien to her—and, she was convinced, understood its permutations in ways she didn’t. Maybe he would do some good on the General Staff. You never could tell.

At last, the fat lobbyist came to the bottom of the stairs. People surged around him to either side in the hall. He placidly rolled on at his own pace. If that pace had happened to kill him and a lot of people behind him . . . But, yet again, it hadn’t, so why flabble?

People in the shelter mostly wore flannel pajamas. Some of them had thrown robes over the PJs. Men’s-style nightwear was now de rigueur for women in cities likely to be bombed. Filmy peignoirs lost most of their allure when you were liable to be showing off for everyone in your apartment building.

Thump! Thump! Thump!
The ground shook under Flora’s feet. Several people in the basement groaned. The lights flickered. The sound on the old wireless set faded out for a moment, but then came back to life.

“There is an enemy bomber going down in flames!” the announcer said excitedly. “I don’t know whether our antiaircraft guns or a night fighter got him, but he’s a goner.”

Three or four people clapped their hands. A few more applauded when the Confederate bomber hit the ground. The blast when it did was different from ordinary bomb impacts: larger, more diffuse. Most of the men and women down there just waited to see what would happen next. The CSA lost some bombers whenever it sent them over Philadelphia. The Confederates never lost enough to keep them from sending more.

On and on the pounding went. It always seemed to last an eternity, though the bombers rarely loitered more than an hour. The building, so far, had lived a charmed life. Its windows had lost glass, but not many buildings in Philadelphia kept unshattered glass these days. No bomb had landed on it. That counted most.

The wireless announcer went on giving a blow-by-blow account of the fight against the airplanes from the CSA. Not all of that blow-by-blow account would be the truth, though. The Confederates—both in the air and down in Virginia—would be monitoring the stations broadcasting from cities they bombed. Keeping them guessing about what they actually accomplished struck the U.S. powers that be as a good idea. Flora normally extolled the truth. Here, she could see that telling all of it might not be a good idea.

Twenty minutes after bombs stopped dropping, the warbling all-clear sounded. A man in front of her and a woman in back of her both said the same thing at the same time: “Well, we got through another one.” The same thought had been in her mind, too.

Along with everybody else, she wearily trudged up the stairs. She wondered whether she would be able to sleep when she got back to her flat. Joshua seldom had trouble dropping off again, but he lived in the moment much more than she did. She couldn’t help brooding on what might have been and what might be.