Long Voyage Back (27 page)

Àll of you men here have just become part of this Army. You are idiots, ignoramuses, assholes, nobodies. Don't pretend you're anything else. We'll teach you to be soldiers. You'll learn. But right from the beginning I want you to know that there's, really only one lesson: obey . . . And don't you forget it ..

Later that night as Jim spread out his sleeping bag next to Tony's on the floor of a double room in the Moonlighter Motel - their temporary barracks - the other six men in the room, all of whom had been 'in' since the second day of the war, were loose and joking. There were three blacks, two of whom were big men and the third a little runt of a man, and three middle-aged whites. They had all been at the theatre and heard the major's talk.

`Sheet, man, we're the kings,' one of the big black men said as he spread his sleeping bag out on top of one of the double beds. 'Ain't no way you gonna get me outa this Army. In here they look out after your ass. Out there it's everybody's ass for hisself. Ain't no way.'

Ì don't like shootin' no people,' the little black man said sullenly as he prepared to crawl into his sleeping bag, also on the floor. 'You shoot anybody they ask you?'

`Sheet, I shoot my muther, man, if they says to,' the first black man countered. 'That's the way it is, man. This is wah!'

The other three men, the older whites, remained silent, two of them preparing to sleep on the second double bed and the third, a plump, redfaced man, bedding down near Tony and Jim.

Ìf they ask us to shoot somebody,' Tony announced loudly in the brief silence, 'you can be damn sure that guy deserves to be shot.'

Jim, uncomfortable, unconvinced, was quietly unlacing his GI boots.

`Well, at least we won't starve to death in the Army,' the plump man said with a hesitant smile.

`They feed us, they give us guns, and when a bomb comes, they tell us to duck,' one of the other white men said. `Compared to what I was facing four days ago this is heaven.'

`You're damn right,' the man next to him echoed.

Jim placed his two boots and his fatigues in a neat pile at the head of his sleeping bag and, in his underwear, crawled into his sleeping bag.

`What this wah is, is a great big mother-fucking urban renewal programme,' the big talkative black man said as he undressed. 'Now Manhattan and Washington and Boston all get to look like Harlem.' He laughed.

The others were silent. Jim linked his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. He could feel the floor swaying underneath him, its motion the counterpoint to that of Vagabond during the last two days at sea.

He felt isolated, alone. Tony appeared to feel at home in the Army; Jim felt he would be lucky to last a single day. He tried to think about what he could do and where he could go if he escaped, but he was tired, the three blacks were laughing about something and the two white men in the other double bed were whispering. He became conscious of Tony getting into the sleeping bag beside his.

`Don't mind these shits,' Tony whispered to him. 'Tomorrow we'll be assigned to a platoon and it'll be a whole new ballgame.

Jim didn't reply. He didn't think the league he was now stuck in was going to be getting any better for a long time.

1 0

For most of his fifty-eight years George Cooper had thought that he would defend his country to the death. He had fought in the Korean War; two of his sons had fought in the war in Vietnam. So it was with some degree of confusion that he found himself behind a barricade of farm machinery, oil tanks, and hay with eighteen other farmers and a few of their teenage sons, preparing to fight a company of soldiers from the Army of the United States. Each decision he had made during the week following the outbreak of war had seemed logical, but there was nothing logical about what was happening now. His own government seemed about to kill him and his sons and friends because they felt they ought to be able to keep some of their farm animals and produce for their own families and friends.

When four days earlier an officer had come and told him the Army needed all his eggs each day and all his spring corn, George had still been too much in shock to resist. But when some of his neighbours began to complain that the Army was taking everything, and then yesterday a new officer came to requisition the rest of his spring vegetables and forty chickens, George began to feel that his country had already been invaded; it was just that the uniforms weren't the colour he'd expected them to be. George understood that food was now gold and that he and his neighbours were now millionaires in a poverty-stricken world. He understood that with real money now almost meaningless he would have to give away most of his food wealth without any compensation so that others wouldn't starve to death. What he couldn't understand and couldn't accept was that he had to give up everything to the government and depend on feeding his own family on what the government planned to give back to him.

Eggs and corn he could spare. But his chickens, or Bart Hasler's cows, or Fred Lapp's hogs, these they couldn't give up without endangering their own families' survival. Taking their animals away was like tearing down small factories. The officer had arrived that morning for the chickens and George had refused to surrender them. The officer had left, announcing he would return with force. He had. About sixty soldiers were standing with automatic rifles around three lorries parked two hundred feet away on the road. The chickens were in the henhouse behind them. About half of Bart's herd of sixty cows and most of Fred's hogs were in the big barn to their left. A large store of recently harvested vegetables was in the cellar of the main house. The women and smaller children were staying over at Fred's farm a mile away. All the young men were in the service some place, one of them, John Simpson's son Cal, standing with an automatic rifle among the sixty soldiers confronting them. When the officer shouted at them through a bullhorn, the men chose George to go out and speak to him. The soldiers began to spread out around the barns and henhouse, and Bart, who was in charge of the military tactics, sent men into various defensive positions in the barn and henhouse to keep the soldiers at a distance. Their orders were to shoot to scare if any soldier got within fifty feet of the barns.

The officer in charge was a Captain Ames, a tall, skinny fellow with a nervous twitch on one side of his face. He didn't seem too sure of himself. George wasn't too sure of himself. He'd left his shotgun back with the others and ambled slowly out to talk to Ames.

`We've come for your chickens, Mr Cooper,' Captain Ames said in an unnaturally loud voice. 'My orders are to confiscate all edible farm animals in this area.'

Àll of them?' George asked in surprise. In the morning the order had been just for forty of his chickens.

Àll of them.' Captain Ames held out a piece of paper presumably containing written authorization for the confiscation.

`Can't give 'em up, Captain.' George replied, staring unseeingly at the paper but not taking it from Ames's hand. Ùntil people are starving to death, I figure I can best take care of 'em here.'

`You're not the one to do the figuring,' Ames countered. `The Army knows what's needed and we need chickens.' `Can't do it, Captain.'

Ì've got sixty men here that says you will.'

Ìf that henhouse catches .on fire, and that barn,' George replied, squinting back at his buildings and watching the circle of soldiers grow tighter around them, 'then nobody's gonna eat the chickens. Or the hogs or anything else. Why don't you go back and talk it over with your general or with whatever asshole sent you out here.'

'My orders were clear and irrevocable,' Ames said nervously. 'I am to bring back the requisitioned food supplies from this area this afternoon and use whatever force is necessary to do so.'

`You can't bring 'em back if we burn down the barns.' Ames flushed. 'Why would you do that?'

"Cause we don't like having our property stolen.'

`Your country's at war,' Ames shot back. 'The President has declared martial law. If the Army orders something taken, that's not stealing.'

Ì don't figure the President had my chickens in mind when he declared martial law.'

Tut he did,' Ames countered. 'He had everyone's chickens in mind.'

• 'Well,' George said after a pause, 'I'm not too good at arguin'.' He stared off at a group of soldiers behind the barn. `Fact is, though, if your soldiers get within fifty feet of our barns bullets will hit three feet in front of them, and if they get within forty-five feet of the barns then they'll bump into our

bullets. And if they get into the barns then our boys will set the barns on fire. We figure there ain't no way you can carry out your order.'

Captain Ames, seeing that his men were within seventy or eighty feet of the barns in some places, shouted out an order to halt and the non-coms passed on the order. Ames then told George to wait where he was and went to the back of one of the trucks and placed a radio call back to headquarters in New Bern. When he returned to George five minutes later he looked pale and shaken.

`Look, Mr Cooper,' he said with an anguished appeal. `The colonel says to get what food I can no matter who gets hurt. He says radioactive fallout is coming this way and all our animals will be useless as food in less than a week. The army will be evacuating the area and we've been ordered to take all the food we can find with us. You people should evacuate too. We'll leave you plenty of food for your families, but most of it we'll have to take.'

George Cooper squinted at the officer. The fallout bit might be an excuse or it might be true.

`You plan to kill us for a few chickens and pigs?' he said after a pause. Ì will have to kill you if you disobey the orders of the military commander of this region.'

`For a few chickens?'

`You seem to plan to destroy your barn for a few chickens.'

`My barns are useless without anything to put in them,' George said slowly. 'I figure that you and your colonel can survive without my chickens.'

`Ten minutes, Cooper,' Ames said with a grimace as he glanced at his watch. 'If you don't put down your weapons and let us take what the local military commander has ordered requisitioned, my men will attack.'

George Cooper looked angrily back at Captain Ames. `Seems like a pretty shitty thing to do,' he said.

`Maybe,' said Captain Ames, flushing. 'But I'll do it.'

George turned and walked slowly back to his friends behind the tractors, examining as he walked the positions of the soldiers around his farm buildings. A few of them behind the henhouse seemed awfully close to within fifty feet of the buildings. Bart, Fred and two others of the older men met him next to Fred's harvester and he began explaining to them his conversation with Ames. He had just got to the Army's claim that fallout was coming their way when a shot rang out. Then two others. George wheeled to see Captain Ames crouched down next to one of the trucks and the soldiers near him throwing themselves down into the grass. Off to the left two soldiers were running away. To the right, a squad of eight or ten soldiers, in a crouch, were running towards the henhouse. A fusillade of shots erupted from the teenagers there and one of the soldiers fell. Then the real firing began.

1 1

As he sat exhausted in his aft cabin and fiddled with the shortwave radio Neil was feeling baffled. The day and a half since his visit to Greg Bonnville and making his separate peace had been frustrating. He'd found it easy enough to bluff his way out of the two confrontations with authorities challenging him about his not being in uniform - he pulled his captain's demeanour and Navy lingo and said he was on special assignment from the Arcady - but found it difficult to learn what was really happening in the world. Official radio announcements indicated that Morehead City was a safe area. Army policy was that refugees should stay put. They were offering no assistance to people wanting to move further south. As long as there was no threat in staying where they were he didn't feel he had any right to take Jeanne and Frank to sea, much less to help Jim desert. Although he himself no longer felt an obligation to serve his government, the transformation of Greg Bonnville was not something he could use to persuade others. It was too personal. He himself felt the only safety lay in escaping the mainland to sea; to others it seemed simply his mania.

Conrad Macklin had disappeared while Neil was at the Arcady and, since he had stolen some food from Vagabond, Neil assumed that he'd seen the last of him. But he'd returned thirty hours later - just four hours ago - to inform Neil that though the Army was maintaining roadblocks to prevent the civilian population from fleeing south, a caravan of Army vehicles containing both military and civilian personnel had been streaming south on Route 17. Macklin had hung around and learned that the Army was having problems with its roadblock units because some were panicking at the sight of so many others going south while they were being ordered to stay put. Macklin urged Neil to take Vagabond to sea immediately whether Jeanne and the others came or not. Neil knew that if he didn't take Vagabond to sea soon Macklin would find somebody else who would. Thus he had not only to worry about a correct course of action but again about Macklin's trying to take Vagabond. With Oily often aboard alone there wasn't much to stop him. Neil had tried to delay any precipitous action by Macklin by telling him he planned to decide tonight his plans. He had visited Jeanne, Frank and Lisa at the refugee centre briefly late that afternoon and been depressed that they seemed to be settling in; they were working hard, making friends, feeling they were making a contribution. Lisa had spent much of the day trying unsuccessfully to see Jim and had just returned in tears so Jeanne was in no condition to make decisions. Her response to Neil's announcing that he wasn't going back into the Navy was a brief stricken look, as if frightened at the implications for her. Frank told Neil that he could take Vagabond, as if for Frank the struggle were over and the Morehead City High School was now home. Neil had left frightened and depressed at their state.

`There was more fallout today. The total's more than an eighth of an inch since we first got some four days ago. Some of the farmers are trying get it off the leaves of the corn and squash and beans, and Pat Nerron reports the wind blows it off the wheat and rye, but it's killing some of the plants even lying in the soil.'