Drive to the East (74 page)

U.S. artillery woke up about ten minutes later. Shells screamed into the area from which the screaming meemie had come. But then, the launcher was bound to be long gone.

“How far do you think it is to the Temple?” Armstrong asked. His voice sounded strange because he was talking through his gas mask. Some of the crap the Army threw at the Mormons was liable to blow back into the U.S. positions. And the Mormons still had gas of their own, which they fired from mortars whenever the artillery used it against them. Armstrong didn’t know whether they got it from the CSA or cooked it up in a basement in Ogden. He didn’t care, either. He did know it was a major pain in the rear.

Yossel Reisen also looked like a pig-snouted Martian monster in a bad serial. “Couple miles,” he answered, sounding almost as unearthly as he looked.

“Yeah, about what I figured,” Armstrong agreed. “How long you think we’ll need to get there? How hard will those Mormon fuckers fight to hang on to it?”

“Too long, and even harder than they’ve fought already,” Yossel said.

That wasn’t scientific, but it matched what Armstrong was thinking much too well. He said, “What do you think the odds are we’ll live through it?”

This time, Reisen didn’t answer right away. When he did, he said, “Well, we’re still here so far.”

Armstrong almost asked him what the odds of that were. The only reason he didn’t was, he already knew the answer. The odds were damn slim. He wouldn’t have been leading a squad if that people bomb hadn’t got Sergeant Stowe. He wouldn’t have had the platoon if that mine hadn’t nailed Lieutenant Streczyk. Either or both of those disasters could have happened to him just as easily. So could a thousand others. The same went for Yossel. But they were both still here, neither of them much more than scratched.

In the next few days, Armstrong really started wondering how long he would last. More and more barrels came forward. Most were the waddling monsters kept in storage since the Great War, but some more modern machines went into the mix. None, though, had the stouter turrets and bigger guns that marked the latest models. Every time one of those rolled off the assembly line, it headed straight for the closest Confederate concentration.

More artillery came in, too. And when the weather cleared enough for bombers and fighters to fly, there were more of them, and less antiquated machines, than usual. He knew the signs. The United States were gearing up for another big push.

All the support would help. When the balloon went up, though, it would still be man against man, rifle against rifle, machine gun against machine gun, land mine against dumb luck. Armstrong had a wholesome respect for the men he faced. Nobody who’d been in the line more than a few days had anything but respect for the men of what they called the Republic of Deseret.

Armstrong respected them so much, he wished he didn’t have to go after them one more time. Such wishes usually mattered not at all. This time, his fairy godmother must have been listening. The high command pulled his battered regiment out of the line and stuck in a fresh one that was at full strength.

“Breaks my heart,” Armstrong said as he trudged away from what was bound to be a bloody mess.

“Yeah, I can tell,” Yossel Reisen agreed. “I’m pretty goddamn disappointed myself, if anybody wants to know the truth.” They both laughed the giddy laughs of men who’d just got reprieves from the governor.

The rest of the soldiers heading back into reserve were every bit as relieved. They were dirty and skinny and unshaven. Their uniforms were faded and torn and spotted. A lot of them wore ordinary denim jackets and canvas topcoats liberated from the ruins instead of Army-issue warm clothing. Their eyes were far away.

By contrast, the men replacing them might have stepped out of a recruiting film. They were clean. Their uniforms were clean. Their greatcoats were the same green-gray as everything else. Armstrong was younger than most of the rookies, but felt twenty years older. These fellows hadn’t been through hell—yet.

“Does your mama know you’re here?” he called to a natty private moving up.

By the private’s expression, he wanted to say something about Armstrong’s mother, too. He didn’t have the nerve. It wasn’t just that Armstrong outranked him, either. The kid probably hadn’t seen action yet. Armstrong’s grubby clothes, his dirt, and his whiskers said he had. He’d earned the right to pop off. Before long, the youngster would enjoy it, too—if that was the word, and if he lived.

“Look at all these men.” Yossel nodded toward the troops marching past. “Remember when our regiment was this big?”

“Been a while.” Armstrong tried to work out just how long it had been. He needed some thought. “Shit, I think we’d taken enough casualties after the first time we ran into the Confederates in Ohio to be smaller than that outfit.”

“I think you’re right,” Yossel said. “And they never send enough replacements to get us back up to strength, either.”

“Nope.” Armstrong pulled out a pack of cigarettes, stuck one in his mouth, and offered them to Yossel. The other noncom took one. He lit it. Armstrong leaned close to get his started, then went on, “The ones we do get aren’t worth much, either.”

“If they live long enough, they mostly learn,” Yossel said. “Those first few days in the line, though . . .”

“Yeah.” Armstrong knew he’d lived through his opening brushes with combat as much by dumb luck as for any other reason. After that, he’d started to have a better idea of what went into staying alive when Featherston’s fuckers or Mormon fanatics tried to do him in. That gave him no guarantee of living through the war, something he knew but tried not to think about. But it did improve his chances.

Replacements got killed and wounded in large numbers, just because they didn’t know how not to. They didn’t dig in fast enough. They didn’t recognize cover when they saw it. They didn’t know when to stay down and when to jump up. They couldn’t gauge whether incoming artillery bursts were close enough to be dangerous. And that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that they got veterans killed, too, because they gave things away without even knowing they were doing it.

Most veterans tried to stay away from them those first couple of weeks. That wasn’t fair. It meant even more replacements became casualties than might have been otherwise. But it saved veterans’ lives—and it saved the pain of getting to know somebody who wasn’t likely to stick around long anyway.

A swarm of soldiers waited at the makeshift bus depot to go from the line back to some of the comforts of civilization: hot showers, hot food, clean clothes, real beds. Armstrong surveyed the swarm with a jaundiced eye. “Something’s fucked up somewhere,” he predicted.

“Bet your ass, Sarge.” That was one of the men already milling around. “Goddamn Mormons snuck a machine gun somewhere down the highway. They shot up a bus like you wouldn’t believe. Now everybody’s trying to hunt ’em down.”

“Christ, I hope so,” Armstrong said. “That’d be what everybody needs, wouldn’t it?—getting your goddamn head blown off when you’re on your way to R and R?”

“Sooner we kill all the Mormons, happier I’ll be,” the other soldier said. “Then we can get on with the real war. Finally starting to go our way a little, maybe.”

“Maybe, yeah. Depends on how much you believe of what they tell you.” Armstrong knew damn well the wireless didn’t tell the truth all the time. When he was in Ohio, it had gone on and on about U.S. victories and advances while the Army got bundled back and back and back again. He couldn’t prove it wasn’t doing the same thing about what was going on in Ohio and Pennsylvania now.

The other soldier spat a stream of brown tobacco juice. “There is that,” he allowed. Armstrong had thought about chewing tobacco himself. You could do it where the sight of a match or a glowing coal or even the smell of cigarette smoke would get you killed.

An officer called, “The route south has been resecured. Boarding will commence in five minutes.”

Do I want R and R enough to risk getting shot on the way?
Armstrong wondered. He must have, because he got on the bus when his turn came.

W
hen Cincinnatus Driver walked into the Des Moines Army recruiting station, the sergeant behind the desk looked up in surprise from his paperwork. Cincinnatus eyed him the same way: the sergeant held his pen between the claws of a steel hook.

“What can I do for you?” the sergeant asked.

“I want to join up,” Cincinnatus answered.

“Sorry, pal. We don’t use colored soldiers,” the sergeant said. “Navy takes colored cooks and stewards. If you want to, you can talk to them. You don’t mind my saying so, though, you’re a tad overage. That cane won’t do you any good, either.”

“You got a uniform on even though you got a hook,” Cincinnatus said.

“I was in the last one,” the recruiting sergeant said. “That’s where I got it. I’m no damn good at the front, but I can do this.”

“Well, I was in the last one, too,” Cincinnatus said. “Drove a truck haulin’ men an’ supplies in Kentucky and Tennessee. Been drivin’ a truck more’n thirty years now. Sure as hell can do it some more. Put me in a deuce-and-a-half and you got one more white boy can pick up a rifle and shoot at Featherston’s fuckers.”

“Ah.” The sergeant looked more interested. “So you want to be a civilian auxiliary, do you?”

“If that’s what you call it these days,” Cincinnatus answered. “Last time around, I was just a truck driver.” He eyed the man behind the desk. “They pay any better on account of the fancy name?”

“Oh, yeah, pal—and then you wake up,” the sergeant said. Cincinnatus chuckled; he hadn’t expected anything different. The veteran reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a fresh form. He did that with his left hand, which was still flesh and blood. Then he poised the pen over the blank form. “Name?”

“Cincinnatus Driver.”

After the sergeant wrote it down, he glanced over at Cincinnatus. “Heard of you, I think. Didn’t you get exchanged from the Confederates not so long ago?”

“Yes, suh, that’s right,” Cincinnatus said.

“You don’t call me ‘sir.’ You call me ‘Sergeant.’ ” The noncom scribbled a note. He handled the pen very well. As he wrote, he went on, “Just so you know, they’re gonna check you seven ways from Sunday on account of you were in the CSA.”

“They can do that,” Cincinnatus agreed. “They reckon a colored man’d help Jake Featherston, though, they’re pretty goddamn stupid.”

“Yeah, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? But it all depends,” the sergeant said. “Maybe they got your wife an’ kids down there, and they’ll feed ’em to the alligators unless you play along.”

“My wife an’ kids are right here in Des Moines,” Cincinnatus said.

“Good for you. Good for them,” the sergeant said. “You know what I mean, though. They’ll check. Now—you say you drove an Army truck in the Great War? What was your base? Who commanded your unit?”

“I drove out of Covington, Kentucky, where I come from,” Cincinnatus replied. “Fella who ran things was a lieutenant name of Straubing.”

The sergeant raised his right eyebrow. “Think he’d remember you?”

Straubing had shot a Confederate diehard dead on Cincinnatus’ front porch. With a jerky nod, Cincinnatus said, “Reckon he would. He still in the Army?”

“Oh, you might say so.” The sergeant wrote another note. “There’s a Straubing who’s a brigadier general in logistics these days. Might not be the same man, but you don’t hear the name every day, and the specialization’s right. You know what logistics is?”

Are you a dumb nigger?
he meant. But Cincinnatus did know the answer to that one: “Gettin’ men and stuff where they’re supposed to go when they’re supposed to get there.”

“Right the first time.” The sergeant nodded. “Bet you did drive a truck in the last war. Where else would you have heard the word?”

“I done said I did.” Cincinnatus paused. “But I bet you hear a lot o’ lies, sittin’ where you’re sittin’.”

“Oh, you might say so,” the sergeant repeated, deadpan. “You sure you want to go through with this, Mr. Driver?”

“Yes, suh—uh, Sergeant—an’ I tell you why,” Cincinnatus answered. The sergeant raised a polite eyebrow. Cincinnatus went on, “You just called me
Mistuh.
Ain’t no white man anywhere in the whole CSA call a colored man
Mistuh.
Call him
boy,
call him
uncle
if his hair’s goin’ gray like mine is.
Mistuh?
Never in a thousand years. An’ if you don’t respect a man, you don’t have no trouble killin’ him off.”

“Uh-
huh.
” The sergeant wrote something else on Cincinnatus’ papers. Cincinnatus tried to read what it was, but he couldn’t, not upside down. The man with the hook looked across the desk at the man with the cane. “Thanks for coming in, Mr. Driver. Like I told you, we’re going to have to look at you harder because the Confederates turned you loose. You have a telephone?”

“No, suh,” Cincinnatus answered.

“All right. We’ll send you a letter, then,” the sergeant said. “Probably be ten days, two weeks, something like that. We’ll see what General Straubing has to say about you.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.” Cincinnatus did it right this time. “When he was in Covington, he always treated the colored fellows who drove for him like they was men. Reckon he was the first white man I ever knew who did.”

Cincinnatus went home, not so happy as he’d hoped but not so disappointed as he might have been. He felt as if he were cluttering up the apartment. That was another reason he’d visited the recruiting station. But his urge to get even with the Confederates counted for more.

“Don’t want to jus’ sit here playin’ with my grandbabies,” he told Elizabeth. “I love my grandbabies, but I got some doin’ in me yet.”

“I didn’t say nothin’, dear,” his wife answered.

“I love you, too,” Cincinnatus said, mostly because she hadn’t said anything. They’d been married a long time. Despite the separations they’d gone through, she knew him better than anybody.

The letter from the recruiting station came eight days later. That was sooner than the sergeant had said. Cincinnatus didn’t know whether the quick answer meant good news or bad. He opened the letter—and still didn’t know. It just told him to come back to the station two days hence.