Breakthroughs (13 page)

She walked the short distance to the canning plant, which was no more lovely than it had to be. It wasn’t far from the harbor, and stank of fish. A skinny cat looked at her and gave an optimistic meow. She shook her head. “Sorry, pussycat. No handouts from me today.” The cat meowed again, piteously this time. Sylvia shook her head again, too, and walked on.

She grabbed her time card and stuck it in the clock. The money wasn’t good—it wasn’t as if she were a man, after all—but, with it and her monthly allotment from George’s pay, she managed well enough.

“Good morning, Mrs. Enos,” the foreman said as she hurried toward the machine that stuck bright labels on cans of mackerel.

“Good morning, Mr. Winter,” she answered. He nodded and limped on past her: as a young man, he’d taken a bullet in the leg during the Second Mexican War.

A couple of minutes later, Isabella Antonelli took her place on the machine next to Sylvia’s. She wore black; her husband had been killed fighting in Quebec. She nodded shyly to Sylvia, set down her dinner pail, and made sure her machine was in good working order.

With a rumble of motors and several discordant squeals of fan belts, the line started moving. Sylvia had to pull three levers, taking steps between them, to bring bare, bright cans into her machine, squirt paste on them, and affix the labels—which made the mackerel whose flesh went into the cans look remarkably like tuna. Being a fisherman’s wife, she knew what a lie that was. People who bought the cans in Ohio or Nebraska wouldn’t, though.

Some days, stepping and pulling levers could be mesmerizing, so that half the morning would slip by while Sylvia hardly noticed any time passing. This was one of those mornings. The only time she got jolted out of her routine was when her paste reservoir ran dry and she had to refill it from the big bucket of paste under the machine before she could put on more labels.

As it did sometimes, the lunch whistle startled her, jerking her out of the world in which she was almost as mechanical as the machine she tended. The line groaned to a stop. Sylvia shook herself, as she might have done coming out of the bathtub at the end of the hall in her apartment building. She looked around. There was her dinner pail, of black-painted sheet metal like the one a riveter might have carried to the Boston Navy Yard.

Isabella Antonelli’s dinner pail might have been identical to her own. The two women sat on a bench near a wheezing steam radiator. Sylvia had a ham sandwich in her dinner pail, leftovers from the night before. Isabella Antonelli had a tightly covered bowl that also looked to hold leftovers: long noodles that looked like worms, smothered in tomato sauce. She brought them to the factory about three days out of five. Sylvia thought they were disgusting, though she’d never said so for fear of hurting her friend’s feelings.

Mr. Winter limped by, a cigar clamped between his teeth. He was carrying his own dinner pail, looking for a place to sit down. His eyes lingered on Isabella as he walked past. “You can go with him, if you’d like,” Sylvia said.

“I will sit with you today,” the Italian woman said. She smiled, which made her look younger and not so tired. “He should not take me too much for granted, don’t you think?”

She and the foreman—a widower for years—had been lovers for a couple of months. They were discreet about it, both at the factory and with their own families. Winter had aimed a few speculative remarks at Sylvia since she’d started working at the canning plant; she was just as well pleased to see him attached to someone else. To his credit, he hadn’t aimed any of those remarks at her since taking up with Isabella.

Sylvia said, “Anybody who takes anybody else for granted is a fool.”

She didn’t realize with how much bitterness she’d freighted the remark till Isabella Antonelli, a worried look on her face, asked, “But all is well with your Giorgio, yes?”

“He’s well, yes,” Sylvia replied, which was by no means a complete answer. Isabella obviously realized it wasn’t a complete answer. She also obviously realized it was all the answer she would get. The rest of the half-hour lunch passed in uneasy silence.

For once, Sylvia was glad to go back to her machine, to lose herself in the routine of pulling and stepping, pulling and stepping, of watching cans bright with their tinning go into the machine and cans gaudy with their labels stream out. The machine asked no questions she would sooner not have answered. The machine asked no questions at all.

As she had at the lunch whistle, Sylvia started when the quitting whistle screamed. It was dark when she clocked out and walked to the trolley stop, but not quite so dark as it had been earlier in the year. Twilight lingered in the west, a harbinger of spring ahead. It was the only harbinger of spring she could find; the wind cut like a knife.

She had to stand almost all the way back to the stop by her apartment building. Except for lunch, she’d been standing since she got to the plant. Now that she’d returned from that mechanistic world, she felt how tired she was. Her legs didn’t want to hold her up any more. When she finally did get to sit down, she nearly fell asleep before the streetcar got to her stop. She’d done that once, and walked back more than a mile. This time, she didn’t, but getting up and getting off the trolley were more mind over matter than anything else.

She checked her mailbox in the entrance hall to the apartment building. No letter from George, which meant he hadn’t come to port as of a few days before, which meant he hadn’t had the chance to get into trouble in a port. He might have got into trouble on the sea, but that was a different sort of trouble, and one over which she worried in a different sort of way.

Circulars from the Coal Board, the Scrap Metal Collection Agency, the Ration Board, the Victory Over Waste Committee, and the War Savings and Tax Board helped fill the mailbox. So did one from an agency new to her, the Paper Conservation Authority, which informed her in the portentous bureaucratic tones of any government outfit that paper was an important war resource and should not be wasted.

“Then why do I get so much worthless paper every day?” she muttered, tossing the multicolored sheets into the battered wastebasket there. The answer to that was only too clear: “Because one board writes this and none of the others read it, that’s why.”

She went upstairs to reclaim her children from Brigid Coneval, who, after her husband was conscripted, had decided to take in the children of other women who got jobs in factories instead of getting a factory job herself. Each flight of stairs seemed to have twice as many as the one before, and each step twice as high.

When she came out into the hallway, she walked down the hall to Mrs. Coneval’s flat to get George, Jr., and Mary Jane and take them back to her own apartment, where she would make supper and let them play till they were ready for bed—or, more likely, till she was ready for bed and managed to persuade them that they should lie down, too.

They were getting harder to persuade. George, Jr., was six now, heading toward seven, and Mary Jane nearly four. Sylvia needed more sleep these days, while they needed less. It hardly seemed fair.

With so many children in Brigid Coneval’s flat, shrieks and cries as Sylvia came up were the order of the day. But the shrieks and cries that Sylvia heard now did not come from the throats of children. Fear shot through her, sharp as if she’d seized a live electric wire. She had to will herself to knock, and then had to knock twice to make anyone inside notice her.

The woman who opened the door was not Brigid Coneval, though she looked very much like her. Seeing Sylvia, George, Jr., and Mary Jane came running up and embraced her. Above them, Sylvia asked the question she dreaded, the question that had to be asked: “Is she—? Is it—?”

“It is that.” The woman, doubtless Brigid’s sister, had a brogue like hers, too. “Less than an hour ago, the telegram came. Down in Virginia he was, poor man, and never coming back from there again.”

“That’s dreadful. I’m so sorry,” Sylvia said, feeling the inadequacy of words. She knew what Brigid Coneval was feeling. She’d twice thought George lost, once when his fishing boat was captured by a Confederate commerce raider and once when his river monitor was blown out of the water. The only thing that had saved him then was that he hadn’t been aboard, but on the riverbank, drunk and about to lie down with a colored strumpet.

She couldn’t even say she understood, for Brigid’s sister would not believe her. Then she found a new worry, different but in its own way no less urgent: while Brigid Coneval mourned, who would take care of the children when she had to go to work?

Sam Carsten swabbed the deck of the USS
Dakota
with a safety line tied round his waist. The battleship pitched like a toy boat in a rambunctious boy’s bathtub, chewing its way over and through waves that put to shame any others he’d ever known.

He shouted to his bunkmate, Vic Crosetti, who plied a mop not far away: “Everything they say about Cape Horn is true!”

“Yeah,” Crosetti shouted back, through the howl of the wind. “Only trouble is, they don’t say near enough, the tight-mouthed sons of bitches.”

There was nothing tight-mouthed about him. He was a voluble Italian, little and swarthy and hairy and ugly as a monkey. Carsten, by contrast, was tall and muscular, with pink skin and hair so blond, it was almost white.

Crosetti leered at him. “You sunburned yet, Sam?”

“Fuck you,” Carsten said amiably. He’d burned in San Francisco. Christ, he’d burned in Seattle. Duty in the Sandwich Islands and the tropical Pacific had been a hell of burning and peeling and zinc oxide and half a dozen other ointments that didn’t do any good, either. “I finally find weather that suits me, and what do I get? A scrawny dago giving me a hard time.”

Had some men called him a scrawny dago, Crosetti would have answered with a kick in the teeth or a knife in the ribs. When Sam did, he grinned. Carsten had a way of being able to talk without ticking people off. He even had trouble starting brawls in waterfront saloons.

Another enormous swell sweeping along from west to east lifted the
Dakota
to its crest. For a moment, Sam could see a hell of a long way. He spotted another battleship from the U.S. force that had set out from Pearl Harbor for Valparaiso, Chile, the autumn before—except autumn meant nothing in the Sandwich Islands and was spring down in Chile. Farther off, he made out a U.S. armored cruiser and a couple of the destroyers that guarded the big battlewagons from harm.

He also spied a Chilean armored cruiser. But for the different flag and different paint job—the Chileans preferred a sky blue to the U.S. gray—it looked the same as its American counterpart. It should have; it had come out of the Boston Navy Yard.

Pointing to it, Carsten said, “We sold the Chileans their toys, and England sold the Argentines theirs. Now we get to find out who’s a better toymaker.”

“Hell with all of ’em,” Crosetti said. “If Argentina was on our side, Chile’d be in bed with the limeys. But Argentina’s keeping England fed, so Chile ends up playin’ on our team. Big deal, you ask me.”

“Hey, listen, if Argentina was on our side, we’d be sailing east to west, straight into all these damn waves and this stinking wind instead of riding with ’em. How’d you like that?”

“No thanks,” Crosetti said at once.

Carsten got a faraway look in his eyes. “How’d you like to try sailing east to west through here in a ship without an engine—I mean
really
sailing through here?” he said. Crosetti crossed himself. Sam laughed. “Yeah, that’s how I feel about it, too.”

“They were tough bastards in the old days,” Vic Crosetti said. “Stupid bastards, too, to want to come down to such a god-forsaken corner of the world.”

Before Carsten could answer that, klaxons started hooting, a noise hideous enough to cut through the raging wind. Everyone on deck undid his safety line and ran for his battle station. Sam had no idea whether it was a drill or whether some destroyer up ahead had spotted British or Argentine or maybe even French ships. He knew he had to treat the noise as if shells would start dropping around—or on—the
Dakota
at any moment.

The battleship sank into the trough between waves, plunging her bow steeply downward. Sam’s foot skidded on seawater. He flailed his arms wildly, and somehow managed to keep from falling on his face. Then his shoes rang on metal rungs as he went below.

His battle station was loader on the forwardmost starboard five-inch gun. He flung himself into the cramped sponson and waited to see what would happen next.

There ahead of him—he would have been astonished were it otherwise—was the commander of that five-inch gun, a chief petty officer and gunner’s mate named Hiram Kidde and more often than not called “Cap’n.” He’d ditched his habitual cigar somewhere on the way to the sponson. He couldn’t have been too far from it; he wasn’t breathing hard, and he was a roly-poly fellow who’d been in the Navy for years before Sam got his first pair of long pants.

“Is this practice, or for real?” Sam asked.

“Damned if I know,” Kidde answered. “Think they tell me anything?”

In scrambled the rest of the crew: gun layers and shell jerkers. They were all at their stations when Commander Grady, who was in charge of the starboard secondary armament, stuck his head into the sponson. Grady nodded approval; he was a pretty decent sort. “Well done, men,” he said.

Hiram Kidde asked the same question Carsten had: “What’s the dope, sir? Is this just another drill, or have we got trouble up ahead?”

“We’ve got trouble up ahead sure as the sun comes up tomorrow,” Grady answered. “Sooner or later, if they don’t stop us, we
are
going to be in position to disrupt shipments of wheat and beef from Argentina to England. If we can do that, the limeys starve, so they’ll move heaven and earth to keep us away.”

“I understand that, sir,” Kidde answered patiently. “What I meant was, have we got trouble up ahead right now?” Grady would know. Whether he would tell was liable to be a different question.

He started to answer, but then somebody in the corridor spoke to him. “What?” he said, sounding surprised. He hurried off.

“Damn,” said Luke Hoskins, one of the shell haulers. He was the right man for his job, being both taller and thicker through the shoulders than Carsten, who wasn’t small himself. Nobody the size of, say, Vic Crosetti could have handled five-inch, sixty-pound shells as if he were about to load them into his shotgun. Also, shell-jerker wasn’t the sort of job that called for much in the way of brains.

“I think it’s—” Kidde began, just as the klaxons signaled the all-clear.

“You were going to say you thought it was the real thing, weren’t you?” Carsten said as they started filing out of the cramped sponson.

He expected Kidde to deny everything, but the gunner’s mate nodded. “Hell yes, I did. We should have done this months ago, instead of wasting time in Valparaiso and Concepción like we did. Shit, we were ready, but the Chilean Navy ain’t what you’d call a fireball.”

“How do you say
tomorrow
in Spanish?” Carsten said. “
Mañana,
that’s it. I wonder how many times we heard
mañana
up there.”

“Too damn many, however many it was,” Kidde said positively. “Wasted time, wasted time.” He shook his head, a slow, mournful gesture. “Seas wouldn’t have been near so heavy if we’d got moving in the middle of summer hereabouts instead of waiting till we were heading down toward fall. I still don’t trust our steering, either. Wish I did, but I don’t.”

Carsten’s laugh was a noise he made to hold fear at bay. “What’s the matter, ‘Cap’n’? You don’t want to do a circle toward the limeys and Argentines, the way we did toward the limeys and Japs in the Battle of the Three Navies?”

Kidde swore loudly and sulfurously for a couple of minutes before calming down enough to say, “We were lucky once, which is how come we ain’t on the bottom of the Pacific. You can’t count on being lucky once. You sure as hell can’t count on being lucky twice.”

“I expect you’re right.” Carsten went up onto the main deck, made his way back to where he’d been working, and reattached his safety line. He might as well have been starting over from scratch; plenty of seawater had splashed up since he’d dashed to his battle station.

Vic Crosetti resumed his place a minute or so later. They were jawing back and forth when a starched young lieutenant, junior grade, came up and said, “Seaman Carsten?” When Sam admitted he was himself, the officer said, “The force commander will see you in his cabin immediately.”

“Sir?” If Sam’s heart didn’t skip a beat, he couldn’t guess why. He hadn’t thought Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske knew he existed. Like any other sensible sailor, he’d hoped that pleasant condition would continue indefinitely. In a choking voice, he asked, “What does he think I’ve done, sir?”

“Come with me, Carsten,” the j.g. answered, and Sam, a lump of ice about the size of the nearby Antarctic continent in his belly, had to obey.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed another officer bringing Vic Crosetti along.
God damn that little dago,
he thought.
What’s he done, and how in hell did I get in hot water for it?

He seldom had occasion to go up into officers’ country. He’d never had occasion to visit the force commander’s quarters, nor imagined that he would. Sure as hell, Vic Crosetti was heading there, too. Carsten cursed under his breath.

The lieutenant, j.g., went in ahead of him, then came back out and said, “The admiral will see you—both of you—now.” As they went in, Crosetti gave Sam a venomous glare.
Christ,
Sam thought,
does he figure he’s in trouble on account of something
I
did? What kind of foul-up have we got here?

There stood Rear Admiral Fiske, a sturdy man of about sixty, in the middle of a cabin that could have held half a dozen three-level bunks. So much space inside the
Dakota
was amazing. Even more amazing was the bottle of medicinal brandy Fiske held, and that he poured three glasses from it, handing one to Sam and one to Crosetti and keeping the third for himself. “Congratulations, you men!” he boomed.

Carsten and Crosetti stared at each other, then at Rear Admiral Fiske. Sam felt as if he’d been up and down too fast on the Coney Island roller coaster. He had to say something. He knew he had to say something. “Sir?” His voice was a hoarse croak.

Fiske looked impatient. He knew what was going on, which struck Carsten as an unfair advantage. “Some time ago, you two men reported your suspicions that a certain native of the Sandwich Islands, one John Liholiho, used his position and good nature to spy for England after the USA took the said islands from her at the outbreak of the war. Investigation has confirmed those suspicions, I am informed by wireless telegraph. Liholiho has been arrested and sentenced to death.”

“Sir?” Sam and Crosetti said it together now, in astonishment. Sam had almost forgotten about the affable, surf-riding Sandwich Islander. He’d long since assumed Liholiho wasn’t in fact a spy, because no one had said anything to the contrary.

Fiske was saying that now. He was also saying something else: “You men are both promoted from Seaman First Class to Petty Officer Third Class, effective the date of your report. Back pay in your new rank will also accrue from the said date.” He raised his glass in salute. “Well done, both of you!” He drank.

Numbly, Carsten raised his own glass. Numbly, he drank, and discovered the rear admiral got a much better grade of medicine than did the men he commanded. After the stuff went off like a bomb in his stomach, he wasn’t numb any more. He tried on a smile for size. It fit his face like a glove.

As Scipio walked down the road toward the swamp, he knew he was a dead man. Oh, his lungs still moved air in and out, his heart still beat, his legs still took step after step. He was a dead man even so. The only questions left were who would kill him, how soon, and how long he’d hurt before he finally died.

He looked back over his shoulder. Somewhere back there, Anne Colleton was liable to have a scope-mounted Tredegar aimed at his spine. She’d had one slung on her back when she sent him out on his way to the swamps by the Congaree. By the way she handled it, she knew just what to do with it, too.

She’d started following him. He didn’t know if she still was. He’d caught glimpses of her once or twice, but only once or twice. He got the idea she’d wanted him to get those glimpses, to remind him she was on his trail. When she wanted him not to see her, he didn’t. He’d never dreamt she could stalk like that.

Was she good enough to stalk Cassius? Scipio found that hard to believe. Cassius had been Marshlands’ chief hunter for years. What he didn’t know about the swamps of the Congaree, no one did. He’d been able to keep the raiders who were the hard core of the Congaree Socialist Republic a going concern in the swamp for most of a year after the Socialist Republic was crushed everywhere else.

And Cassius and the rest of the Red holdouts were about as likely to kill him as Anne Colleton was. If they found out he was acting as her bird dog, they
would
kill him. They might kill him simply for abandoning the cause and trying to live what passed for a normal life in the CSA after the black uprising went down to defeat.

Something rose from the roadside marsh in a thunder of wings. Scipio’s heart rose, too, into his throat. But it was only an egret, flapping away from his unwanted company. When he was a boy, the big white birds had been far more common than they were today. The demand for plumes on ladies’ hats had all but caused their extermination. Only a shift in fashion let any survive.

Here where—he hoped—no one could hear him, he trotted out the educated white man’s voice he’d used while serving as butler at Marshlands: “And what shift in fashion will let
me
survive?” For the life of him—literally, for the life of him—he could think of none.