Return Engagement (25 page)

When U.S. lines moved back, the tents moved with them. And when U.S. soldiers counterattacked and regained ground, the aid station went along. The latest counterattack in eastern Ohio was aimed at Zanesville, which had fallen to the Confederates two weeks before.

Just because it was aimed at Zanesville didn’t mean it would get there. Confederate dive bombers had stalled it outside of Cooperdale, twenty miles north of the target. The aid station was operating in an oak wood a few miles north of the hamlet, which the Confederates were defending as if it were Columbus.

O’Doull himself was operating on a man with a wounded leg. An X ray would have shown just where the shell fragment lay. The X-ray machine was at a field hospital five miles farther back. O’Doull was finding the sharp metal the old-fashioned way, with a probe.

He’d given the soldier a local, but it hadn’t really taken hold. The man wiggled and cussed every time the probe moved. O’Doull couldn’t blame him. He thought he would have done the same thing had he been on the other end of the probe. It did make his job harder, though.

“Try to hold still, Corporal,” he said for about the dozenth time. “I think I’m very close to— Ah!” The probe grated on something hard.

“Shit!” the corporal said, and wiggled again. O’Doull felt like saying
shit,
too; the writhe had made him lose the fragment.

But he knew it couldn’t be far. He found it again a minute later. He slid the probe out of the wound and slipped a long-handled forceps in instead. The noncom gave his detailed opinion of that, too. O’Doull didn’t care. He felt like cheering when the jaws of the forceps closed on the fragment. “Now you have to hold still,” he warned the corporal. “This
will
hurt, but it’ll be the end of it.”

“Awright, Doc.” The man visibly braced himself. “Go ahead.”

When O’Doull did, a torrent of horrible curses broke from the corporal’s lips. He did hold still, though. O’Doull eased the shell fragment out through the man’s torn flesh. When he drew it out, he found it about the size of his thumbnail. He opened the forceps. The fragment dropped with a clank into a metal basin.

“That it?” the corporal asked, staring with interest at what had laid him up. “That goddamn little thing?”

“I think so. I hope so.” O’Doull dusted the wound with sulfa powder and sewed it up. After a moment’s hesitation, he put a drain in it. Maybe it would heal clean—the new drugs did some wonderful things. But you never could tell.

He’d just straightened up when a yell came from outside: “Doc! Hey, Doc! We got a sucking chest!”

Now O’Doull did say, “Shit,” but under his breath. “Bring him in,” he called. “I’ll do what I can.”

He cut the soldier’s tunic off him—that being the fastest way to get rid of it—to work on the wound on the right side of his chest. One of the corpsmen who’d come in with the casualty said, “Pulse is fast and weak and thready, Doc. He’s losing blood in there like a son of a bitch.”

One look at the wounded man’s pale face would have told O’Doull that. The man was having trouble breathing, too. That blood was drowning him. O’Doull clapped an ether cone over his face. “Plasma!” he shouted. “Run it into him like it’s going out of style.” He might not have spoken English much over the past quarter of a century, but it came back.

All he could do was hope the wounded man was under when he started using the scalpel. If he waited, the soldier would die on him. He didn’t need to be a medical genius to know that. The bullet, he saw when he got in there, had chewed up the lower lobe of the right lung. No chance to save it; he cut it out. A man could live on a lung and a half, or even on a lung. He cleared the blood from the chest cavity, stuck a big drain in the wound—no hesitation this time—and closed.

“That’s a nice piece of work, Doc,” the corpsman said. The war was less than a month old, but he’d already seen plenty to have some professional expertise. “He may make it, and I wouldn’t have given a wooden nickel for his chances when he got here.”

“I dealt with the worst of the damage,” O’Doull said. “He’s young. He’s strong. He’s healthy—or he was before he got hit. He does have a shot.” He stretched, and let out a sigh of relief. Only his right arm had been moving while he worked on the patient.

“Morphine?” the corpsman asked. “He ain’t gonna be what you call happy when he comes out from under the ether.”

“Half a dose, maybe,” O’Doull answered after considering. He nodded to himself. “Yes, half a dose. He’ll have a devil of a time breathing anyway, what with the wound and the collapsed lung I gave him opening up his chest.”

“He’d be dead if you hadn’t,” the other man observed.

“Yes, I know,” O’Doull said. “But morphine weakens the breathing reflex, and that’s the last thing he needs right now.”

“I suppose.” The corpsman took out a syringe and injected the unconscious soldier. “Half a dose, like you say. If it was me laying there, though, I bet like anything I’d want more.”

“He can have more when he shows it won’t kill him,” O’Doull answered. “He wouldn’t want that, would he?”

The corpsman took a somber look at the long, quickly sutured wound across the injured man’s chest. “Damned if I know. He’ll wish he was dead for a while, I’ll tell you.”

He was bound to be right on that score. O’Doull didn’t feel like arguing with him, and ducked out of the tent for a while. He couldn’t light a cigarette in there, not with the ether. If he lit one out here, he was taking his chances with snipers. But it would steady his hands. He needed about fifteen seconds to rationalize it and talk himself into doing what he already wanted to do anyhow.

Now that, for a moment, he wasn’t frantically busy, he listened to the way things were going up at the front. He didn’t have much experience there, but he didn’t like what he heard. All the artillery and machine guns in the world seemed to be pointing back at him. The front was alive with the catamount screech soldiers on both sides still called the rebel yell. The Confederates had their peckers up, and the U.S. soldiers facing them didn’t.

A couple of men in green-gray came back through the trees. They both carried their rifles. Neither one looked panic-stricken. But they didn’t look like men who intended to do any more fighting any time soon, either.

They eyed Dr. Leonard O’Doull. “Got some butts you can spare, buddy?” one of them asked. Wordlessly, he held out the pack. They each took a cigarette and leaned close to him for lights. Then, nodding their thanks, they kept on heading north.

He started to call after them, but checked himself. It wasn’t fear they would turn their rifles on him, though that crossed his mind, too. What really stopped him was just the conviction that they wouldn’t pay any attention to him. He saw no point in wasting his breath.

He ground out his cigarette under his heel. Army boots were a discomfort he’d forgotten in the years since taking off his uniform. He felt as if he had a rock tied to each foot. He understood why infantrymen had to wear such formidable footgear. He was much less sure why he did.

Back into the tent. Back to work. He checked the man with the chest wound. The fellow wasn’t in great shape, but he was still breathing. If sulfa drugs let him dodge a wound infection, he might pull through.

O’Doull looked around in sudden confusion. He’d been maniacally busy for he’d forgotten how many hours, running on nerves and nicotine and coffee. Now, all at once, he had nothing to do. His tremble was like the last lingering note from an orchestra after a piece had ended.

“Jesus, I’m bushed!” he said to nobody in particular.

“Why don’t you flop, then, Doc?” said a corpsman named Granville McDougald: a man who had no degree in medicine but who would have made a good general practitioner and a pretty fair jackleg surgeon.

“I don’t know, Granny. Why don’t I?” O’Doull answered, and yawned.

“Go sleep,” McDougald told him. “We’ll kick your ass out of bed if we need you. Don’t you worry about that.”

“I’m not.” O’Doull yawned again. “What I’m worried about is, will I have any brains if you wake me after I’ve been sleeping for a little bit? Or will I be too far underwater to do anybody any good for a while?”

“If you
don’t
go to sleep, will you be able to do anybody good?” McDougald asked reasonably. “Sleepy docs kill patients.”

He was right about that. O’Doull knew it. It got proved all too often. He found his cot and lay down on it. He couldn’t sleep on his belly the way he liked to, not without taking off his boots. That demanded too much energy. He curled up on his right side and fell asleep as if someone had pulled his plug.

He had no idea when Granny McDougald shook him awake. All he knew was, he hadn’t been asleep nearly long enough. “Wha’ happened?” he asked muzzily. “Who’s hurt? What do I have to do?”

“Nobody’s hurt,” the corpsman replied. “Nobody’s hurt that you gotta deal with, anyway. But we’re pulling back, and we figured you better come along. It’s that or you do your doctoring in a Confederate POW camp.”

“What the hell?” O’Doull said. “Something go wrong while I was out?”

“Either you’ve got a clean conscience or you really were whupped,” McDougald told him. “Didn’t you hear all the shooting and bombing off to our right? The Confederates have smashed our line. If we don’t get out, we get caught.”

“Oh.” O’Doull left it at that, which McDougald thought was pretty funny. They took down the tents, loaded them and their patients into trucks, and headed north. They didn’t stop for quite a while. Nobody thought that was funny, nobody at all.

VII

J
efferson Pinkard prowled Camp Dependable like a hound hunting a buried bone. The black prisoners got out of his way. Even his own guards were leery of him. When the boss wanted something he couldn’t figure out how to get, everybody was liable to suffer.

What Pinkard wanted was a bigger camp, or fewer shipments of Negroes coming in from all over the CSA. He wasn’t likely to get either one of those. He would have settled for a way to reduce population quickly, efficiently, and above all neatly. He hadn’t been able to manage that, either.

The morning’s news was what had set him prowling. Mercer Scott had come to him with a scowl on his face. Scott always scowled, but this was something special. “Chick Blades is dead,” he’d told Pinkard. “Killed himself.”

“Aw, shit,” was what Pinkard had said. Some of that was dismay. More was a sort of resigned disgust. Blades was a man who’d gone out on a lot of population-reduction details. After a while—how long depended on the man—some people cracked. They couldn’t keep doing it, not and stay sane. Blades was the second or third suicide Camp Dependable had seen. One or two men were wearing straitjackets these days. And others got drunk all the time or ruined themselves other ways.

Mercer Scott had nodded. “That’s what I said when I found out.” He took a somber satisfaction in passing on bad news.

“How’d he do it? Wasn’t a gun—somebody would’ve reported the shot.” Pinkard liked to have things straight. “He hang himself?”

“Nope. Went out to his auto, ran a hose from the exhaust to the inside, closed all the windows, and started up the motor.”

“Christ!” That had damn near made Pinkard lose his breakfast. The idea of sitting there waiting to go under, knowing what you’d done to yourself . . . If you were going to do it, better to get it over with all at once, as far as he was concerned.

“Yeah, well . . .” Scott had only shrugged. “Healthiest-looking goddamn corpse you ever seen.”

“What do you mean?”

That question had surprised the head guard. Then he looked sly. “Oh, that’s right—you never were a real cop or anything like that, were you?” He knew damn well Pinkard hadn’t been. He went on, “When they kill themselves with exhaust, they’re always pink instead of pale the way dead bodies usually are when you find ’em. Something in the gas does it. It’s got a fancy name—I misremember what.”

“Oh, that.” Pinkard had nodded. “Now I know what you’re talkin’ about. Burn a charcoal fire in a room that’s closed up tight and you’re liable not to get out of bed the next morning, or ever. And if you don’t, you look like that—all pink, like you say.”

“Didn’t figure Chick’d be the one to do it,” Mercer Scott had said. “He never fretted over getting rid of niggers, not that I ever knew.”

Jeff Pinkard hadn’t noticed that Blades carried any special burden, either. That bothered him. If he’d pulled the guard off of population reductions, would Blades still be alive today? How could you know something like that? You couldn’t. You could only wonder. And so Pinkard prowled and prowled and prowled.

He kept chewing on what had happened. The worst thing about a guard’s suicide was what it did to the morale of those who survived. He’d have to watch three or four people extra close for a while, to make sure they didn’t get any bright ideas. And they were free citizens, like everybody else—everybody white, anyhow—in the CSA. You couldn’t watch them every damn minute of every damn day. If they decided to kill themselves, you probably couldn’t do much about it.

Chick Blades, if he remembered straight, had a wife and kids. Pinkard supposed it was a good thing the man hadn’t hauled them into the motorcar with him. Exhaust from an engine could have done in four or five for the price of one.

A hurrying Negro almost ran into him. “Where the hell you think you’re going, God damn you?” Jeff roared.

“Latrine, suh,” the black man answered. “I got me the gallopin’ shits, an’ I don’t want to get it on nothin’.” He shifted anxiously from foot to foot.

“Go on, then.” Pinkard watched him with narrowed eyes till he squatted over the slit trench. The chief of Camp Dependable could see flies rising in a buzzing cloud. The guards put down chloride of lime every day. But a lot of prisoners came down with dysentery. The chemical didn’t do much good, and didn’t do good for long. For the moment, the breeze blew from him toward the latrine trenches. That cut down on the stink, but didn’t kill it. Nothing could kill it. When the wind blew in the other direction, it really got fierce.

The black man rose and set his tattered trousers to rights. He went on about his business. Had he waved to Pinkard or done anything cute, the camp commandant would have hauled him in for questioning. Here, no. Not worth the bother.

“Labor gang!” a guard bawled. “Get your lazy nigger asses over here, you stinking labor-gang men!”

The Negroes came running. A man who showed himself useful building roads or crushing rock wasn’t likely to be added to the next population reduction. So the blacks thought. They fought to get included in labor gangs, and worked like maniacs once they were. Lazy? Not likely!

Chick Blades’ funeral came two days later, at a church in Alexandria. Behind her black veil, his widow looked stunned, uncomprehending. Pinkard got the idea the dead guard hadn’t told her everything he did at Camp Dependable. Nobody would tell her now, either. She wouldn’t understand. Neither would his little boys. His wife would wonder if she’d done something that pushed him over the edge or failed to notice something that might have saved him. Jeff didn’t believe it for a minute, but he couldn’t explain why, not without talking more than he should.

After the preacher read the graveside service and the body went into a hole in the ground, Mrs. Blades—her name, he thought, was Edith—walked up to him and said, “Thank you for coming.” Her face was puffy and swollen and pale. Had she slept at all since she found out about her husband? Jeff would have bet against it.

“Least I could do,” he mumbled. “He was a good man.”

Edith Blades nodded with frantic eagerness. “He was. He really was. He was a kind man, a gentle man. He wouldn’t have hurt a fly, Chick wouldn’t.”

Jeff bit back a sardonic reply. He also bit back a burst of laughter that would have turned the funeral into a scandal. No, the widow didn’t know what her husband had been up to. How many Negroes had Chick Blades shot in the head from behind? Hundreds? Thousands? Pinkard shrugged. He’d shot one too many to keep doing it and go on breathing, and that was the only thing that mattered.

“Everybody liked him real good,” Jeff managed at last. “He could play the mouth organ like you wouldn’t believe.”

“He courted me with it,” she said, and broke down in tears again. She wouldn’t have been a bad-looking woman, not at all, if she were herself. She was somewhere in her thirties, dishwater blond, with a ripe figure the mourning dress couldn’t hide. “He was such a funny fellow.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Pinkard said uncomfortably. “I’ll do what I can to make sure you get his pension.”

She blinked in surprise. “Thank you!”

“You’re welcome,” Pinkard said. “I can’t promise you anything, on account of this has to go through Richmond. But I sure think you ought to have it. If any man ever died for his country, Chick Blades did.”

“That’s true,” Blades’ widow breathed. It was a lot more true than she knew. With any luck, she wouldn’t find out how true it was. Chick had got rid of more enemies of the Confederacy than any general except maybe that Patton fellow up in Ohio, but would anybody ever give him any credit for it? Not likely. The only credit he’d ever get was a pine box. Dirt thudded down on it as the gravediggers started filling in the hole.

“You take care of yourself, ma’am,” Jeff said, and then startled himself by adding, “You ever need anything, you let me know. Like I say, I dunno if I can manage everything, but I’ll do my best.”

“I may take you up on that, sir, after things settle a bit,” she answered. “I don’t know, but I may.” She shook her head in confusion. “Right now, I don’t know anything—not anything at all. It’s like somebody picked up my world and shook it to pieces and turned it upside down.”

“I understand,” Jeff said. She shook her head again, and then looked sorry she had. She didn’t want to make him angry or anything. But he wasn’t. It was no wonder she didn’t believe him. But he knew more than she thought he did—he knew more than she did, come to that.

What would happen when she found out? Sooner or later, she would, sure as hell. Pinkard shrugged. He couldn’t do anything about that.

He went back to Camp Dependable in a somber mood. What he saw in Alexandria did nothing to cheer him up. People who spoke English gestured and flabbled like Cajuns. People who spoke French—fewer than the English-speakers—peppered it with fiery Anglo-Saxon obscenities. Rusty decorative ironwork from before the War of Secession ornamented downtown businesses and houses. The whole town seemed rusty and rustic. He wondered if Pineville, on the other side of the Red River, was any better. The town’s name was ugly enough to make him doubt it.

Mercer Scott had the same feeling. “Ass end of nowhere, ain’t it?” he said as their motorcar carried them out of town.

“Maybe not quite, but you can see it from there,” Jeff answered.

Scott’s chuckle, like a lot of his mirth, had a nasty edge. “Some of the white trash back there’d count themselves lucky to be living in the camp. I’m from Atlanta, by God. I know what a real city’s supposed to be like, and that one don’t measure up.”

Jeff hit the brakes to keep from eradicating an armadillo scuttling across the road. “Atlanta, is it?” That explained a lot. Atlanta was too big for its britches, and had been since before the turn of the century. People who came from there always acted as if their shit didn’t stink just because they were Atlantans. Pinkard said, “Me, I come out of Birmingham. I could give you an argument about what makes a good city.”

“If you want to be a horseshoe or a nail or anything else made out of iron, Birmingham’s a fine enough town, I reckon. You want anything else, Atlanta’s the place to be.”

That struck home, after all the time Jeff had spent at the Sloss Foundry working with molten steel. He was damned if he’d admit it. “Atlanta says it’s a big city, but all you’ve got is fizzy water. And the fellow who invented the number one brand outa that place sucked up cocaine like it was going out of style.”

Mercer Scott only laughed. “You had that kind of scratch back at your house, wouldn’t you do the same?”

Since Jeff probably would have, he changed the argument in a hurry: “Besides, next to Richmond you ain’t so much of a much.”

“You don’t want to push me too far,” Scott said in suitably menacing tones. “You really don’t . . . boss.”

That could have provoked a fight between the two men as soon as they got out of the auto. It could also have made Pinkard pull off the road and settle things then and there. But he judged the other man’s menace was put on, not genuine, and so he laughed instead. Mercer Scott laughed, too, and the moment passed.

“Hell of a thing about Chick,” Pinkard said a minute or so later.

“Well, yeah.” But Scott didn’t seem unduly upset, not any more. “We’re here to get rid of niggers. If you can’t do the job, you don’t belong.”

“I wish he’d’ve asked for a transfer out or something, though,” Jeff said. “I’d’ve given him a good notice. He did the best he could, dammit.” His hands tightened on the wheel. If that didn’t sound like an epitaph, he didn’t know what did.

“Whole country did the best it could in the last war,” Scott replied. “That’s not good enough. Only thing that’s good enough is doing what you got to do.”

He had no give in him, not anywhere. That made him good at what he had to do. A camp guard who showed mercy was the last thing anybody needed. But it made Scott uncomfortable to be around. He was always looking for signs of weakness in other people, including Jefferson Pinkard. And if he found one, he’d take advantage of it without the least pity or hesitation. He made no bones about that at all.

“There’s the camp,” he said when Jeff swung the rattling Birmingham—iron, sure enough—around a last corner.

“Yeah,” Jeff said. “Wonder when they’re gonna send us some more population.”

“Whenever they do, we’ll reduce it,” Mercer Scott declared. “Only thing that can stop us is running out of ammo.” He laughed again. So did Pinkard, not quite comfortably.

F
lora Blackford’s secretary stuck her head into the Congresswoman’s office. She said, “Mr. Jordan is here to see you.”

“He’s right on time,” Flora said. “Show him in.”

Orson Jordan was a tall blond man in his mid-thirties. He was so pink, he looked as if he’d just been scrubbed with a wire brush. “Very pleased to meet you, ma’am,” he said. By the way he shook Flora’s hand, he was afraid it would break if he squeezed it very hard.

“Please sit down,” Flora told him, and he did. She went on, “Shall I have Bertha bring us some coffee—or tea, if you’d rather?”

“Oh, no, thank you, ma’am.” Orson Jordan shook his head. He turned pinker than ever. Flora hadn’t thought he could. He said, “Go right ahead yourself, if you care to. Not for me, though. I don’t indulge in hot drinks.”

He sounded like an observant Jew politely declining the shrimp cocktail. There were parallels between Jews and Mormons; Mormons had a way of making more of them than Jews did. Flora shrugged. That wasn’t her worry, or she didn’t think it was. “It’s all right,” she said. “Tell me, Mr. Jordan, what do you think I can do for you that your own Congressman from Utah can’t?”

“It’s not what I think you can do, ma’am,” Jordan said earnestly. “It’s what Governor Young hopes you can do.” Heber Young, grandson of Brigham, had headed the Mormon church in Utah during the occupation after the Great War, when legally it did not exist. He was elected Governor the minute President Smith finally lifted military rule in the state. By all appearances, he could go on getting elected Governor till he died of old age, even if that didn’t happen for the next fifty years.

Patiently, Flora asked, “Well, what does Governor Young think I can do for him, then? He’s not my constituent, you know.”