Breakthroughs (62 page)

“So what?” the drunk said. “We’ll lick ’em. We’ll lick all them bastards.” He paused and leered. “Now how about a kiss?”

Sylvia wondered if she would have to use a knee in a most unladylike fashion. Her expression, though, must have been fierce enough to get the message across even to a lush. He turned away, muttering things she was probably lucky not to be able to understand.

She also wondered if she was the only person anywhere in the United States
not
convinced all the shooting was over as of this moment. By all appearances, she was the only person on the streetcar who thought that way. People avoided her and patted the drunk on the back. One of the women he’d kissed now kissed him in turn. She didn’t look like a slattern. She looked like a schoolteacher.

At last, after fighting its way through endless traffic jams, the trolley got to Sylvia’s stop. Two more men, one drunk, one sober, tried to kiss her before she got to the shoe factory. She dodged the drunk and stepped on the sober man’s foot, hard. He hopped and cursed and cursed and hopped. She hurried to work.

She clocked in almost twenty minutes late. When she went in from the front hall where the time clock stood to the great cave of a room where she worked, she expected the foreman to descend on her with fire in his eye. Despite being only an inch or so taller than she was, despite a snowy mustache, Gustav Krafft was not a man to trifle with.

But he only nodded and said a guttural “Good morning” as she went to her sewing machine. A good third of the workers hadn’t yet made it to the factory. Sylvia let out a silent sigh of relief.

Women and more little old men drifted in as the morning wore along. Some of them, like the drunk on the trolley, were visibly the worse for wear. Sylvia would not have wanted to come to work that way, not when she was working at a machine that could bite if she was careless. She sewed pieces of upper together and tossed them into a box. When it got full, a feebleminded young man carried it away to the workers who would join uppers to soles.

Halfway through the morning, one of the men who looked as if he’d been born at his sewing machine let out a horrible yell and held up a hand that poured blood. Gustav Krafft dashed to his aid at a speed that belied the foreman’s years. “
Ach,
Max,
Dummkopf!
” he shouted, and then a spate of German Sylvia could not understand at all.

After wrapping his own handkerchief around the wound, Krafft led Max out of the chamber toward first aid. The worker was still yelling, and emitting hot-sounding gutturals of his own between yells.

Sylvia turned to the woman at the sewing machine next to hers and said, “I wouldn’t have thought he’d be one who let himself get hurt.”

“Neither would I. Max has been here since this place opened up, I hear,” replied the other woman, whose name was Emma Kilgore. She was plump, a few years older than Sylvia, and had curly hair two shades darker than a carrot. “It’s the war news—everybody’s going crazy now that things are over.”

“But they
aren’t
,” Sylvia protested. “There’s still fighting, and plenty of it.”

“My husband’s down in that Tennessee place,” Emma said. “As long as they aren’t shooting at Jack, the war’s over as far as I’m concerned.”

“George is in the Navy, out in the Atlantic,” Sylvia said. “It’s not over for him, not by a long shot, and that means it’s not over for me, either.”

“That’s a tough one, dearie.” Emma’s sympathy was real but perfunctory. As she’d said, her own worries were gone. Few people, Sylvia had seen, really cared about the troubles of others unless they shared them.

Gustav Krafft came back into the cavernous room. Max’s blood stained the front and side of his shirt. He looked around, saw how many machines weren’t working, and scowled fiercely. “Even if the war is over, the work is not,” he said. “The devil loves idle hands. I do not.”

“If you loved milk, it’d curdle,” Emma Kilgore muttered. Sylvia let out a strangled snort of laughter, but her head was bent over her machine, which was snarling before Krafft’s eyes could pick out from whom the sound had come. The foreman’s gaze swept on. Sylvia laughed again, this time silently. She felt as if she’d been naughty in class and got away with it.

In a couple of hours, Max came back, his hand wrapped in bandages that had turned red here and there. “He’s crazy,” Emma Kilgore whispered.

“Maybe he needs the money,” Sylvia whispered back.

Emma shook her head, which made those copper curls fly about. “I hear tell he owns an apartment house, and I know for a fact he’s got one son who’s a cop and another one who’s a cabinetmaker. He ain’t broke.”

As if to offer his own explanation, Max said, “It is not the first time the machine gets its teeth in me. It is probably not the last, either.” He sat down and went back to work. Now that he was paying attention to what he was doing, he was more deft with one good hand and one bandaged than Sylvia could dream of being with both of hers. But an absentminded moment had given him a nasty wound.

Krafft came over, thumped Max on his bent back, and said something to him in German. He answered in the same language. The foreman thumped him again, careful not to disturb him while he was guiding leather under the needle. Then Krafft spoke in English: “Max says he is like the United States. He has been hurt many times, but he wins at the last.”

Several people clapped their hands: on this day of all days, patriotic sentiment won applause. Sylvia kept right on working, with doggedness similar in kind if not in degree to that which Max showed. Emma muttered, “Christ, he didn’t cut his hand off.” Her patriotism, plainly, was limited to getting her husband back in one piece. Sylvia was ready to settle for having George home safe, too.

She clocked out as slowly as she could after the closing whistle blew, to make up a couple of the minutes she’d lost in the morning because the trolley hadn’t got her to work on time. It was late coming to pick her up, too. The celebration on the streets of Boston hadn’t slowed down since she’d last seen it. If anything, crowds were thicker, louder, and better lubricated than they had been earlier in the day.

When at last she got to George, Jr.’s, school, she found it festooned with red, white, and blue bunting. George, Jr., came pelting over to greet her when she stuck her head into his room. “We won, Ma!” he shouted. “We licked the dirty Rebels, and that means Pa can come home!” He jumped up and down in excitement.

“I wish it was that simple,” she answered. “Your father’s not home yet, and I don’t know when he’s going to be. For that matter, we’re not home yet, and I don’t know when we’re going to be, either. We still have to get your sister, and everything’s a little crazy today.”

“We won!” George, Jr., repeated. He wasn’t old enough to know any better. But plenty of people who were old enough to know better were saying the same thing.

Sylvia led George, Jr., up to Mrs. Dooley’s to get his little sister more than half an hour late. She resigned herself to another lecture from the woman about tardiness. But Mrs. Dooley opened the door with a smile on her face. She smelled of what Sylvia recognized after a moment as cooking sherry. “Hello, Mrs. Enos,” she said. “Isn’t it a grand and glorious time to be alive?”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Sylvia said. “I am sorry I’m late. Everyone seems to be in the streets today.”

“Nobody will blame anybody for anything today,” Mrs. Dooley said. She turned. “Mary Jane, your mother is here.” By the noises from within, Mary Jane wasn’t the only child whose mother was late today.

When she came around Mrs. Dooley’s billowing black skirt, she chirped, “We won the war, Mama!”

“Well, we’re certainly winning,” Sylvia said. That let her state her own opinion without sounding too much as if she was disagreeing with what seemed to be the whole world but for her. “Now we, the three of us, need to go home.” There was an opinion on which she would put up with no disagreement at all.

They were late getting home, too, of course, which meant they had a late supper. The children were too excited to want to go to bed when they should. Sylvia had known they would be. At last, she got them settled. Then she had to settle herself, too. The trouble she had going to sleep made her wonder whether, down deep, she was exulting over victory, too.

Lieutenant Brearley stowed the code book in the locked drawer and turned the key. “Here’s what it means, sir,” he said, handing the decoded wireless message to Roger Kimball. “It’s—important.”

“Give it here,” the commander of the
Bonefish
said. “I’ll decide how important it is.” He wished the exec hadn’t said anything to draw the crew’s attention to the message. Sailors were curious enough without encouragement.

He unfolded the paper, read it, and then read it again to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. It still said the same thing the second time:
SEEKING CEASE-FIRE ON LAND. END OFFENSIVE ACTIVITY. IF ATTACKED, DEFEND SELF. ACKNOWLEDGE RECEIPT.

“You’re sure you decoded it right?” he demanded of Brearley.

“Yes, sir,” the executive officer said. “Here are the groups they sent.” He made as if to open the drawer again and get out the code book.

“Never mind,” Kimball said wearily. “I believe you. I believe it. We were getting hammered the last time the
Bonefish
went into port. It’s just that…aah, God damn it to hell.” His left hand closed into a fist and struck his left thigh, hard enough to hurt. Then, slowly and deliberately, he tore the message into tiny, indecipherable shreds and threw them away.

“What do we do, sir?” Brearley asked.

“We acknowledge receipt, as ordered,” Kimball said. “Then we keep right on with the patrol. We weren’t ordered to hold in place. I don’t see a surrender order or anything like it, do you?”

“Well, no, sir, not when you put it like that,” Brearley admitted. He looked even unhappier than he had already. “I wish they’d have told us more, so we’d have a better idea of what we’re supposed to do.”

Kimball reveled in commanding a submersible not least because the Navy Department had very few chances to tell him what to do. “The more code groups they send, the better the odds the damnyankees’ll figure out what they mean,” he answered. “Now, you get clicking on the wireless telegraph and acknowledge that we got that order.” He lowered his voice but raised the intensity in it: “And for God’s sake keep your mouth shut afterwards. I don’t want the crew to hear one word about what kind of shape the country’s in. You got that, Tom?”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley answered, and then, “Aye aye, sir,” to show he not only understood but would willingly obey.

Gloomily, Kendall climbed back up to the conning tower and peered out over the Atlantic. It was a hell of a big place. As far as he could tell, the
Bonefish
might have been alone in the middle of it. If he spotted no plumes on the horizon, he didn’t have to worry about following the order from the Navy Department.

But he
wanted
to spot a smoke plume, there on the edge of visibility. He
wanted
to send more Yankee ships to the bottom, the same way a hunting dog
wanted
to tree a possum or a coon. It was what he’d been trained to do, and it was what he enjoyed doing. And, he knew without false modesty, he was damn good at it.

As he raised the binoculars to his eyes, he knew the secret wouldn’t keep forever. It probably wouldn’t even keep very long. He wished he could blame Brearley for calling him down from the conning tower to read the decoded message, but he couldn’t. It was too important to allow delay. The crew would already be wondering what it was all about, though. One way or another, they’d learn, too. Somehow or other, they always did.

And what would they do then? Would they cause trouble, saying peace was at hand and they didn’t want to fight any more? Or would they want to keep fighting no matter what happened on land?
They
hadn’t lost the war, regardless of the failures of the fools in butternut.

“Miserable bastards,” Kimball muttered, meaning the soldiers, not the crew of the
Bonefish
. But then a long, grim sigh burst from his lungs, followed by more muttering: “Shit, it doesn’t hardly matter anyhow, not with Brazil in the war on the wrong side.”

With the Empire of Brazil in the war on the wrong side, all the shipping routes from Argentina that had kept England fed for so long didn’t work any more. And with France out of the fight across the Atlantic, the German High Seas Fleet was liable to pick off any freighters the U.S. Navy missed.

In that case, why go on fighting?
he wondered. The only answer he could come up with was that the C.S. Navy, though battered, did remain unbeaten. As long as he could strike a blow against the enemies of his country, he would do it.

He scanned the horizon, turning slowly through 360 degrees. Nothing. And then, as he’d learned to do in the past few weeks, he scanned the rest of the heavens, too. Any aeroplane he spotted through his field glasses would belong to the United States.

Experience paid off, as experience has a way of doing. The aeroplane was too far away for him to hear its engine. Without the binoculars, he might not have seen it at all, or might have taken it for a distant soaring albatross. He started to scramble down the hatch and order a quick dive, then made himself watch and wait. If the aeroplane came closer, he would dive before it could drop a bomb on the
Bonefish
. If it didn’t, if it turned away…

Slowly, he smiled. If it turned away, it would be turning away for a reason, or he hoped it would. Sure enough, a minute later the moving speck swung off toward the north. Looking more satisfied than he had any business being, given the state of the war and the state of his orders, Kimball paced the steel roof of the conning tower. The aeroplane had spotted the
Bonefish
. He was sure of that; it wouldn’t have changed course so abruptly if it hadn’t. And Kimball didn’t think the pilot thought anyone on the
Bonefish
had noticed him. No reason he should. Nothing aboard the submersible had changed while he looked it over.