American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (4 page)

  “If our boys go drinking and their boys go drinking, there’s liable to be trouble,” Carsten said.

  “Probably.” Hirskowitz sounded as if he looked forward to it. After making a fist and looking at it in surprise—what was such a thing doing on the end of his arm?—he went on, “If there is trouble, they’ll be sorry for it.”

  “Yeah,” Sam Carsten said again. For one thing, the
O’Brien
had a bigger crew than the German destroyer. For another, winning the Great War had made him certain the USA could win any fight. He shook his head in bemusement. That was certainly a new attitude for an American to take. After losing the War of Secession and getting humiliated in the Second Mexican War, Americans had come to have a lot of self-doubt in their character.
Amazing what victory can do,
 he thought.

  He peered toward the
S135
. By the polished way the sailors over there went about their business, they’d never heard of self-doubt. And why should they have? Under Bismarck and under Kaiser Bill, Germany had gone from triumph to triumph. Victories over Denmark and Austria and France let her unite as a single kingdom. And victory in the Great War left her a colossus bestriding Europe in almost the same way the USA bestrode North America.

  Sailors aboard the
O’Brien
threw lines to waiting longshoremen, who made the destroyer fast to the quay. “Welcome!” one of the longshoremen called in a musical brogue. “I’ll be glad to buy some of you boys a pint of Guinness, that I will.”

  “What’s Guinness?” Hirskowitz asked Carsten.

  “It’s what they make in Ireland instead of beer,” Sam said helpfully. “It’s black as fuel oil, and almost as thick. Tastes kind of burnt till you get used to it. After that, it’s not so bad.”

  “Oh.” Hirskowitz weighed that. “Well, I’ll see. They make real beer, too?”

  “Some. And whiskey. Got some good whiskey the last couple of times I was here.”

  “When was that, sir?”

  “Once during the war,” Carsten answered. “We were running guns to the micks to help ’em give the limeys hell. They paid us back in booze.” He smacked his lips at the memory. “And then again in
Remembrance
afterwards, when we were helping the Republic put down the limeys and their pals up in the north.”

  The captain of the
O’Brien
, an improbably young lieutenant commander named Marsden, assembled the crew on the foredeck and said, “I’m pleased to grant you men liberty—this is a friendly port, and everybody has gone out of his way to make sure we’re welcome. I know you’ll want to drink a little and have a good time.”

  Sailors nudged one another and grinned. Somebody behind Sam said, “Skipper’s all right, ain’t he?” Carsten frowned. He knew boys would be boys, too, but that didn’t mean an officer was supposed to encourage them. He wouldn’t have done that as a petty officer, and he wouldn’t do it now.

  But then Marsden stiffened and seemed to grow taller. His voice went hard as armor plate as he continued, “Having a good time doesn’t mean brawling. It especially doesn’t mean brawling with the Kaiser’s sailors. We’re on the same side, us and the Germans. Anybody who’s stupid enough to quarrel with them will have the book thrown at him, and that’s a promise. Everybody understand?”

  “Yes, sir!” the sailors chorused.

  “What do you say, then?”

  “Aye aye, sir!”

  “Good.” Lieutenant Commander Marsden’s smile showed sharp teeth. “Because you’d better.

  Dismissed!”

  Sam Carsten didn’t get to go into Cork for a couple of days. He was less than impressed when he did.

  It wasn’t a very big city, and it was grimy with coal smoke. And he almost got killed the first two or three times he tried to cross the street. Like their former English overlords, the Irish drove on the wrong side of the road. Looking right didn’t help if a wagon was bearing down on you from the left.

  Before long, Carsten discovered he’d given Nathan Hirskowitz at least half a bum steer. Along with the swarms of GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU! signs, pubs hereabouts also extolled the virtues of a local stout called Murphy’s. Sam strolled into one and, in the spirit of experiment, ordered a pint of the local stuff. He’d changed a little money, but the tapman shoved his sixpence back across the bar at him.

  “You’re one o’ them Yanks,” he said. “Your money’s no good here.”

  “Thanks very much,” Carsten said.

  “My pleasure, sir, that it is.” The fellow left a little more than an inch of creamy head on the pint, and drew a shamrock in the thick froth with the drippings from the tap. Catching Sam’s eye on him, he smiled sheepishly. “Just showing off a bit.” Sam smiled back; he’d seen the same stunt and heard the same line in Dublin. Every tapman in the country probably used it on strangers. This one slid Sam the glass. “Enjoy it, now.”

  “I bet I will.” Carsten took a sip. The tapman waited expectantly. Sam smiled and said, “That’s mighty good.” But in truth, he couldn’t have told Murphy’s from Guinness to save his life.

  A couple of American sailors came in not long after he did. He nodded to them. They sat down well away from him—he was an officer, after all, even if he sometimes had trouble remembering it—and ordered drinks of their own. Then a couple of more sailors came in. An Irishman stuck his nose in the door, saw all the blue uniforms, and decided to do his drinking somewhere else.

  Carsten raised his finger to order another Murphy’s. The tapman was pouring it for him when half a dozen more sailors walked into the pub. They too wore navy blue uniforms, but theirs were of a different cut, and their hats struck Sam’s eye as odd. They were off the
S135
, not the
O’Brien
.

  They eyed the Americans already there with the same wariness those Americans were showing them.

  Sam didn’t know German rank markings any too well, but one grizzled German sure had the look of a senior petty officer. The man spoke English, of a sort: “Friends,
ja
?”

  “Yes, friends,” Carsten said, before any of the
O’Brien
’s men could say anything like,
No, not friends
.

 
  “Gut, gut,”
 the German said. “England,
Frankreich
—” He shook his head. “No, France . . .” He made it sound more like a man’s name—Franz—than a country’s, but Carsten nodded to show he got it.

  “England, France—so.” The squarehead made a thumbs-down gesture that might have come from a Roman amphitheater.

  All the Americans got that. “Yeah,” one of the sailors said. “To hell with England and France, and the horse they rode in on.”

  The German plainly didn’t know about the horse they rode in on, but the smiles from the Americans encouraged his pals and him to come in and order beers for themselves. Sam noticed the tapman took their money, where he hadn’t for any of the Americans. If the Germans noticed that, too, it might cause trouble.

  Picking up his pint of Murphy’s, he went over and sat down by the German who knew a little English.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Good day, sir,” the veteran said. He didn’t come to ramrod attention, the way he would have for one of his own officers—the Germans were devils for discipline, even by the tough standards of the U.S.

  Navy—but he wasn’t far from it. One of his own officers probably wouldn’t have deigned to talk with him at all.

  “We should stay friends, your country and mine, eh?” Sam said.

 
  “Jawohl, mein Herr!”
 the petty officer said. He translated that for his pals. They all nodded. Sam got out a pack of cigarettes. He offered them to the Germans. The tobacco was as good as prewar,
imported from the CSA. All the Germans took a cigarette or two except one man who apologetically showed him a clay pipe to explain why he didn’t.
“Danke,”
 the petty officer said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” Carsten raised his mug. “Let’s stay friends.” Again, the petty officer translated. Again, his men solemnly nodded. They all drank with Sam. A couple of the Americans came over. One spoke a little German, about as much as the petty officer spoke English. A couple of hours passed in a friendly enough way—especially since the tapman had the sense to stop charging the Germans. But Sam knew he would have to draft a report when he got back to the
O’Brien
. He suspected the German petty officer would be doing the same thing on the
S135
.

 
  Friends?
 he thought.
Well, maybe.
 He eyed the capable-looking German sailors. The fellow with the clay pipe sent up a cloud of smoke.
Maybe friends, yeah. But rivals? Oh, you bet. Rivals for sure.

 
W
inter, spring, summer, fall—they didn’t matter much in the Sloss Works. It could be snowing outside—not that it snowed very often in Birmingham, Alabama—but it would still be hell on earth on the pouring floor in the steel mill.

  Jefferson Pinkard shook his head. Sweat ran down his face. It was hot as hell in here, no doubt about that. But he’d seen hell on earth fighting the Red Negro rebels in Georgia, and again, worse, fighting the damnyankees in the trenches in west Texas. You could hurt yourself—you could kill yourself—right here, but nobody was trying to do it for you.

  When the shift-change whistle screamed—a sound that pierced the din of the mill like an armor-tipped shell plowing through shoddy concrete—he nodded to his partner and to the men who’d come to take his crew’s place. “ ’Night, Fred. ’Night, Calvin. ’Night, Luke. See y’all tomorrow.” He clocked out by himself. Once upon a time, he’d worked side by side with his best friend and next-door neighbor, Bedford Cunningham. But Bedford had got conscripted before he did, and had come back to Birmingham without most of his right arm. Pinkard had stayed at the Sloss Works a while longer, working side by side with black men till he got conscripted, too.

  But after he’d put on butternut . . . After he’d put on butternut, Emily had got lonely. She’d been used to getting it regular from him, and she wanted to keep getting it regular regardless of whether he was there or not. He’d come home on leave one night to find her on her knees in front of Bedford Cunningham, neither of them wearing any more than they’d been born with.

  Pinkard growled, deep in his throat. “Stinking tramp,” he muttered. “It was the war, it was the goddamn war, nothin’ else but.” Even after he’d come back when the fighting stopped, their marriage hadn’t survived. Now he lived in the yellow-painted cottage—company housing—all by himself. It was none too clean these days—nothing like the way it had looked when Emily took care of things—but he didn’t care.

  He had only himself to please, and he wasn’t what anybody would call a tough audience.

  He headed back toward the cottage, part of the stream of big, weary men in overalls and dungarees heading home. He walked by himself, as he always did these days. Another, similar, stream was coming in: the swing shift. It had a few more blacks mixed in than the outgoing day shift, but only a few. Blacks had taken a lot of better jobs during the war; now whites had almost all of them back.

  “Hey, Jeff!” One of the whites waved to him. “Freedom!”

  “Freedom!” Pinkard echoed. “When you gonna get your ass to another Party meeting, Travis?”

  “I be go to hell if I know,” the other steel worker answered. “When they take me off swing, I reckon, but God only knows when that is. Remember me to the boys tonight, will you?”

  “Sure will,” Pinkard said. “That’s a promise.” He walked on. When he got to the cottage, he lit a kerosene lamp (there was talk about putting electricity into the company housing, but so far it was nothing but talk), got a fire going in the coal-burning stove, and took a ham out of the icebox. He cut off a big slice and fried it in lard, then did up some potatoes in the same iron frying pan. The beer in the icebox was homebrew—Alabama had been formally dry since before the war—but it washed down supper as well as anything storebought could have.

  He put the plate and the frying pan in the sink, atop a teetering mountain of dirty dishes. One day soon he’d have to wash them, because he was running out of clean ones. “Not tonight, Josephine,” he muttered; he’d started talking to himself now that he was the only one in the house. “I got important things to do tonight, by God.”

  He scraped stubble from his chin with a straight razor, splashed on water, and then shed his overalls and work shirt for a clean white shirt and a pair of butternut wool trousers. He wished he had time to shine his shoes, but a glance at the wind-up alarm clock ticking on his nightstand told him he didn’t, not if he wanted to get to the meeting on time. And there was nothing in the world he wanted more.

  The trolley stopped at the edge of the company housing. Looking back over his shoulder, Jeff saw the mills throwing sparks into the night sky, almost as if it were the Fourth of July. A couple of other men came up to wait for the trolley. They too wore white shirts and khaki trousers. “Freedom!” Jefferson Pinkard said.

  “Freedom!” they echoed.

  Jeff sighed. Back in the days before Grady Calkins had shot down President Hampton when he came to Birmingham, a lot more men would have come to Party meetings. The Freedom Party had looked like the wave of the future then. Now . . . Only the dedicated, the men who really saw something wrong with the CSA and saw that Jake Featherston knew how to fix it, went to Freedom Party meetings these days.

  And even now . . . “Where’s Virgil?” Jeff asked.

  Both other men shrugged. “Don’t rightly know,” one of them said. “He was at the foundry, so I don’t reckon he’s feelin’ poorly.”

  Bell clanging, the trolley came up. Jeff was glad to climb aboard and drop five cents in the fare box so he wouldn’t have to think about what Virgil’s absence might mean. He was also glad to pay a fare measured in cents and not in thousands or millions of dollars. After the war, inflation had ripped the guts out of the Confederate States. Its easing had hurt the Freedom Party, too, but that was one bargain Pinkard was willing to make.