In at the Death (76 page)

Most of the men aboard were soldiers going home on leave. When they found out George didn’t have to come back, they turned greener than their uniforms.
You lucky stiff
was the least of what he heard from them. George just smiled and didn’t let them provoke him. He didn’t intend to end up in the brig instead of in Connie’s arms.

Nobody fired at the train while it worked its way through the wreckage of the Confederacy. As George had when he traveled through the USA during the war, he eyed the damage with amazement—and with relief that he hadn’t had to fight on land. He’d seen plenty of danger, but it might have been nothing next to this. Connie’d got mad at him for joining the Navy, but he figured he was more likely never to have come home if he’d waited for the Army to conscript him. Of course, his old man had made the same calculation….

What now?
he wondered. Now he would go out to T Wharf, hope his boat didn’t hit a mine loose from its moorings, and come home to watch the kids grow up and to watch Connie get old. It wasn’t the most exciting way to pass the next thirty or forty years he could think of. But he’d had enough excitement to last him the rest of his days. Fishing was honest work. What more could you want, really?

The stretch from the border up past Philadelphia was as battered as anything down in the CSA. He didn’t see any of the damage from the superbomb in Philly—or miss it. The towns closer to New York City hadn’t been hit so hard. From New York City north, he saw only occasional damage. The main exception was Providence. The Confederates had plastered the Navy training center as hard as they could.

And then he got into Boston. On other leaves, he’d seen the pounding his home town had taken. Now he had other things on his mind, and hardly noticed. He slung his duffel over his shoulder and pushed out of the train car. Lots of people—sailors, soldiers, civilians—were getting off here.

“George!” Connie yelled, at the same time as the boys were squealing, “Daddy!”

He hugged his wife and squeezed his kids and kissed everybody. “Jesus, it’s good to be home!” he said. “You know that Kennedy guy pulled wires for me?”

“I hoped he would,” Connie said. “I wrote him about how you’d been in long enough and who your folks were and everything, and it worked!” She beamed.

He kissed her again. “Except on a fishing boat, I’m never leaving this town again,” he said. Connie cheered. The boys clapped. They tried to carry the duffel bag. Between them, they managed. That let him put one arm around them and the other arm around Connie. It was an awkward way to leave the platform, but nobody cared a bit.

R
ain drummed down out of a leaden sky. Chester Martin’s breath smoked whenever he went outside. It was nasty and chilly and muddy. He only laughed. He’d lived here long enough to know this was nothing out of the ordinary. “January in Los Angeles,” he said.

Rita laughed, too. “The Chamber of Commerce tries not to tell people about this time of year.”

“Yeah, well, if I were them, I wouldn’t admit it, either,” Chester said. “They do better with photos of orange trees and pretty girls on the beach.”

“I’ve never seen a photo of an orange tree on the beach,” Carl said. While Chester was off being a top kick, his son had acquired a quirky sense of humor. Chester sometimes wondered where the kid had got it. Knowing Carl, he’d probably won it in a poker game.

“You might as well hang around the house today,” Rita said. “There won’t be any work.”

“Boy, you got that right,” Chester agreed. Rain in L.A. left construction crews sitting on their hands. “In the Army, they just went ahead and built stuff, and the heck with the lousy weather.”

“Yeah, but you’re not in the Army any more. Good thing, too, if anybody wants to know what I think.” By the way Rita said it, he’d better want to know what she thought.

“Hey, you get no arguments from me. It wasn’t a whole lot of fun.” Chester still didn’t want to think about what he’d done in that little South Carolina town. Oh, he wasn’t the only one. He could blame Lieutenant Lavochkin for most of it. He could—and he did. But he was there, too. He pulled the trigger lots more than once. That was one thing he never intended to talk about with anybody.

Carl asked, “If it wasn’t any fun, why did you do it?”

“Good question,” Rita said. “Maybe you can get a decent answer out of him. I never could.” She gave Chester a dirty look. She still resented his putting the uniform back on. Chances were she always would.

He shrugged. “If Jake Featherston beat us this time around, I was just wasting my time in the last war. I didn’t want that to happen, so I tried to stop it.”

“Oh, yeah. You were going to whip Jake Featherston all by yourself. And then you wake up,” Rita said.

“Not all by myself. That colored kid did, though.” Chester shook his head. “Boy, am I jealous of him. Me and all the other guys who put on the uniform. But everybody who fought set things up so he could do it.” He looked at his son. “Is that a good enough answer for you?”

“No,” Rita said before Carl could open his mouth. “All it did was get you shot again. You’re just lucky you didn’t get your head blown off.”

“I’m fine.” Chester had to speak carefully. Rita’s first husband
had
bought a plot during the Great War. “Wound I picked up doesn’t bother me at all, except in weather like this. Then it aches a little. That’s it, though.”

“Luck. Nothing but luck,” Rita said stubbornly, and Chester couldn’t even tell her she was wrong.

“How many people did you shoot, Dad?” Carl asked.

That made Chester think of the massacre again. It also made him think of firing-squad duty. Neither of those was what his son had in mind, which didn’t mean they hadn’t happened. “Some,” Chester answered after a perceptible pause. “I don’t always like to remember that stuff.”

“I should hope not!” Rita made a face.

“Why don’t you?” Carl asked. “You joined the Army to kill people, right?”

Rita made a different face this time, a see-what-you-got-into face. Chester sighed. “Yeah, that’s why I joined,” he said, as steadily as he could. “But it’s not so simple. You look at a guy who got wounded, and you listen to him, and it doesn’t matter which uniform he’s wearing. He looks the same, and he sounds the same—like a guy who’s been in a horrible traffic accident. You ever see one of those?”

Carl nodded. “Yeah. It was pretty bad. Blood all over the place.”

“All right, then. You’ve got half an idea of what I’m talking about, anyway. Well, imagine you just ran over somebody. That’s kind of the way you feel when you’ve been through a firefight.”

“But when you’re in a wreck, the other guy isn’t trying to hit you,” Carl objected.

“I know. Knowing he’s trying to get you, too…I think that’s why you can do it at all. It’s a fair fight, like they say. That means you can do it—or most people can do it most of the time. It doesn’t mean it’s a game, or you think it’s fun,” Chester said.
Unless you’re Boris Lavochkin
, he added, but only to himself. Maybe that was what made the lieutenant so alarming: killing didn’t bother him the way it did most people.

Carl was full of questions this morning: “What about guys who can’t do it any more? Is that what they call combat fatigue?”

“This time around, yeah. Last war, they called it shellshock. Same critter, different names.” Chester hesitated. “Sometimes…a guy sees more horrible stuff than he can take, that’s all. If you can, you get him out of the line, let him rest up awhile. He’s usually all right after that. War’s like anything else, I guess. It’s easier for some people than it is for others. And some guys go through more nasty stuff than others, too. So it all depends.”

“You sound like you feel sorry for soldiers like that. I thought you’d be mad at them,” his son said.

“Not me.” Chester shook his head. “I went through enough crap myself so I know how hard it is. A few guys would fake combat fatigue so they could try and get out of the line. I am mad at people who’d do something like that, because they make it harder for everybody else.”

“Did you run into anybody like that?” Rita asked.

“Not in my outfit,” Chester answered. “It happened, though. You’d hear about it too often for all of it to be made up. Over on the Confederate side, they say General Patton got in trouble for slapping around a guy with combat fatigue.”

“What do you think of that?” Rita and Carl said the same thing at the same time.

“If the guy really was shellshocked, Patton should have left him alone. You can’t help something like that,” Chester said. All the same, he was sure Lieutenant Lavochkin would have done the same thing. Having no nerves himself, Lavochkin didn’t see why anybody else should, either.

Before Chester’s wife and son could come up with any more interesting questions, the telephone rang. He stood closest to it, so he got it. “Hello?”

“Hello, Mr. Martin. Harry T. Casson here.”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Casson?” Chester heard the wariness and the respect in his own voice. Rita’s eyes widened. Harry T. Casson was the biggest building contractor in the Los Angeles area. Before the war, he’d wrangled again and again with the construction union Chester helped start. They didn’t settle things till well after the fighting started. Now…Who could guess what was on Casson’s plate now? If he wanted to try to break the union—well, he could try, but Chester didn’t think he’d get away with it.

He started off in a friendly enough way: “Glad you’re back safe. I heard you were wounded—happy it wasn’t too serious.”

“Yeah.” The only wound that wasn’t serious was the one that happened to the other guy. Chester asked, “Did you ever put the uniform on again yourself?”

“A few weeks after you did,” Casson answered. “I was bossing construction projects, mostly up in the Northwest. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t come anywhere close to the sound of guns. Well, once, but that was just a nuisance raid. Nothing aimed my way.”

“You paid those dues last time around.” Chester knew the building magnate had commanded a line company—and, briefly, a line regiment—in the Great War.

“Generous of you to say so,” Casson replied.

“So what’s up?” Chester asked. “Latest contract still has a year to run.”

“I know. All the more reason to start talking about the new one now,” Casson said easily. “That way, we don’t get crammed up against a deadline. Everything works better.”

He was smooth, all right—smooth enough to make Chester suspicious. “You’re gonna try and screw me, and you won’t respect me in the morning, either.”

Harry T. Casson laughed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Chester.”

“Now tell me another one,” Chester answered. “C’mon, man. We both know what the game’s about. Why make like we don’t?”

“All right. You want it straight? I’ll give it to you straight. During the war, you got a better contract than you really deserved,” Casson said. “Not a lot of labor available, and there was a war on. We didn’t want strikes throwing a monkey wrench into things. But it’s different now. Lots of guys coming out of the Army and going into the building trades—look at you, for instance. And it’s not unpatriotic to care a little more about profit these days, either.”

“So how hard are you going to try to hit us?” Chester asked. When Harry T. Casson told him, he grunted as if he’d been hit for real. “We’ll fight you if you do that,” he promised. “We’ll fight you every way we know how.”

“I think you’ll lose,” the building magnate said.

“Don’t bet on it, Mr. Casson. You know how big our strike fund is?” Chester said. Casson named a figure. Chester laughed harshly. “Make it three times that size.”

“You’re lying,” Casson said at once.

“In a pig’s…ear,” Chester replied. “We’ve been socking it away since 1942. We figured you’d try to give us the shaft first chance you got. We’ll fight, all right, and we’ll make your scabs sorry they were born. We whipped Pinkertons before. With all the vets back, like you say, sure as the devil we can do it again. Piece of cake, the flyboys call it.”

“Siccing the Pinkertons on you was a mistake. I said so at the time, but my colleagues didn’t want to listen,” Harry T. Casson said slowly. “Do you swear you’re telling the truth about your strike fund?”

“Swear to God.” Martin made his voice as solemn as he could.

“Damnation,” Casson muttered. “That could be difficult. Not just a hard strike, but bad publicity when we don’t need it…Will you agree to extend the present contract unchanged for another two years, then? Come 1948, both sides can take a long look at where they are and where they want to go.”

“You can get your friends to go along with that?” Chester asked.

“Yes, if you’re sure the rank and file will ratify it.”

“They will,” Chester said. “Some of them might want a raise, but they’re doing all right. Staying where we’re at’s a good enough deal.”

“A good enough deal,” Harry T. Casson echoed. “I’m not thrilled with it, but I think you’re right. It will do. Good talking with you, Chester. So long.” He hung up.

So did Chester. He also started laughing like a maniac. “What was that all about?” Rita asked.

“New contract. Two years. Same terms as the wartime one,” Chester got out between guffaws.

“But what’s so funny?” Rita demanded.

Chester didn’t tell her. One more thing he never intended to tell anybody. The real strike fund was smaller than Harry T. Casson thought, not three times as big. He’d raised Casson with a busted flush, and he’d made the magnate fold. Rain? So what? If this wasn’t a good day’s work, for him and for everybody else in the union, he’d never done one.
The sooner we sign the papers, the better
, he thought. But they would. After the war, a contract was…a piece of cake.

E
lizabeth clucked at Cincinnatus. “Aren’t you ready yet?”

“I been ready for twenty minutes. So has my pa,” he answered. “You’re the one keeps checkin’ her makeup an’ makin’ sure her hat’s sittin’ just the right way.”

“I’m doin’ no such thing,” his wife said, and Cincinnatus prayed God would forgive the lie. Elizabeth added, “Not every day you marry off your onliest daughter.”