Return Engagement (33 page)

“I’d better do it,” he told his wife on a morning when the war news was particularly bad—not that it had ever been good, not since the very start of things.

Connie began to cry. “You’re liable to get killed!” she said.

“I know,” he replied. “But what’s liable to happen to me if they stick a rifle in my hands and send me off to Ohio? Where are my chances better? And it’s not safe just putting to sea these days.” He remembered too well the gruesome strafing the British fighter had given the
Sweet Sue
.

“Why don’t you just get a job in a war plant here in Boston and come home to me every night?” Connie demanded.

They’d been over that one before—over it and over it and over it again. George gave the best answer he could: “Because I’d start going nuts, that’s why. The ocean’s in me, same as it is with your old man.”

She winced. Her father had been a fisherman forever. As long as he could keep going out, he would. She and George both knew it. She said, “That’s not fair. It’s not fair to me, it’s not fair to the boys. . . .” But she didn’t say it wasn’t true. She couldn’t, and she knew it.

“I’m sorry, hon. I wish I was different,” George said. “But I’m not. And so . . .”

And so the first thing he did the next morning was visit the Navy recruiting station not far from T Wharf. It was in one of the toughest parts of Boston, surrounded by cheap saloons, pawnshops, and houses where the girls stripped at second-story windows and leaned out hollering invitations to the men passing by below and abuse when they got ignored. George wouldn’t have minded stripping himself; the day was breathlessly hot and muggy. Even walking made sweat stream off him.

A fat, gray-haired petty officer sat behind a sheet-steel desk filling out forms. He finished what he was doing before deigning to look at—look through—George. “Why shouldn’t I just be shipping your ass on over to the Army where you belong?” he asked in a musical brogue cold enough to counteract the weather.

“I’ve been going to sea for more than ten years,” George answered, “and my father was killed aboard the USS
Ericsson
at—after—the end of the last war.”

The petty officer’s bushy, tangled eyebrows leaped toward his hairline. He pointed a nicotine-stained forefinger at George. “We can check that, you know,” he rumbled. “And if you’re after lying to me for sympathy’s sake, you’ll go to the Army, all right, and you’ll go with a full set of lumps.”

“Check all you please,” George said. “Half the people in Boston know my story.” He gave his name, adding, “My mother’s the one who shot Roger Kimball.”

“
Son
of a bitch,” the petty officer said. “They should have pinned a medal on her. All right, Enos. That’s the best one I’ve heard since the goddamn war started, so help me Hannah.” He pulled open a desk drawer. It squeaked; it needed oiling, or maybe grinding down to bright metal. “I’ve got about five thousand pounds of forms for you to be filling out, but you’ll get what you want if you pass the physical.” One of those eyebrows rose again. “Maybe even if you don’t, by Jesus. If you come from
that
family, the whole country owes you one.”

“I can do the job,” George said. “That’s the only thing that ought to matter. I never would have said a word about the other stuff if you hadn’t asked me the way you did.”

“You’ve got pull,” the petty officer said. “You’d be a damn fool if you didn’t use it.” He pointed again, this time towards a rickety table against the far wall. “Go on over there and fill these out. To hell with me if we won’t have the doctors look you over this afternoon. You can say your good-byes tonight and head off for training first thing tomorrow mornin’.”

He sent three men away while George worked on the forms. Two went quietly. The third presumed to object. “I’ll go to another station—you see if I don’t,” he spluttered. “I was born to be a sailor.”

“You were born to go to jail,” the petty officer retorted. “Think I don’t know an ex-con when I see one?” The man turned white—that shot struck home like a fourteen-inch shell from a battleship. The petty officer went on, “Go on, be off with you. Maybe you can fool some damn dumb Army recruiting sergeant, but the Navy’s got men with eyes in their heads. You’d be just right for the Army—looks like all you’re good for is running away.”

“What’s he got that I haven’t?” The man pointed at George.

“A clean record, for one, like I say,” the petty officer answered. “And a mother with more balls than you and your old man put together, for another.” He jerked a thumb toward the door. “Get out, or I’ll pitch you through the window.”

The man left. Maybe he would have made a good Navy sailor and maybe he wouldn’t. George wouldn’t have wanted to put to sea with him in a fishing boat. A quarrelsome man in cramped quarters was nothing but a nuisance. And if this, that, and the other thing started walking with Jesus . . . George shook his head. No, that was no kind of shipmate to have.

He finished the paperwork and thumped the forms down on the petty officer’s desk. The man didn’t even look at them. He picked up his telephone, spoke into it, and hung up after a minute or two. “Go on over to Doc Freedman’s. He’ll give you the physical. Here’s the address.” He wrote it on a scrap of paper. “You bring his report back to me. Unless you’ve got a glass eye and a peg leg you haven’t told me about, we’ll go on from there.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” George said.

The petty officer laughed. “You’ve still got some learning to do, and that’s the God’s truth. You don’t call me
sir.
You call me
Chief.
Save
sir
for officers.”

“Yes—” George caught himself. “Uh, right, Chief.”

“That’s the way you do it.” The older man nodded. “Go on. Get the hell out of here.”

George left. The doctor’s office wasn’t far. The receptionist, a sour old biddy, sent the new arrival a disapproving look. “You are unscheduled, Mr. Enos,” she said, as if he had a social disease. But she sent him on in to see the sawbones.

Dr. Freedman was a short, swarthy Jew with a pinkie ring. He looked as if he made his money doing abortions for whores, and maybe selling drugs on the side. His hands were as cold and almost as moist as a cod just out of the Atlantic. But he seemed to know what he was doing. He checked George’s ears, looked in his mouth and ears and nose, listened to his chest, took his blood pressure, and stuck a needle in his arm for a blood sample. Then he put on a rubber glove and said, “Bend over.” Apprehensively, George obeyed. That was even less fun than he thought it would be. So was getting grabbed in intimate places—much less gently than Connie would have done—and being told to cough.

After half an hour’s work, the doctor scrawled notes on an official Navy form. “Well?” George asked as he got back into his clothes. “How am I?”

“Except for being a damn fool for wanting to do this in the first place, you’re healthy as a horse,” Freedman answered. “But if they disqualified every damn fool in the Navy, they’d have twenty-seven men left, and how would they win the war then?”

George blinked. He didn’t think he’d ever run into such breathtaking cynicism before. He asked, “You think going into the Army is better?”

The doctor laughed, a singularly unpleasant sound. “Not me. Do I look that stupid? I’d get a job where they weren’t going to conscript me and sit this one out. Wasn’t the last one bad enough?”

Connie had said much the same thing. George hadn’t wanted to hear it from her. He really didn’t want to hear it from a big-nosed Hebe with all the charm of a hagfish. “Don’t you care about your country?” he asked.

“Just as much as it cares for me,” Freedman said. “It takes my money and throws it down ratholes. It tells me all the things I can’t do, and none of the things I can. So why should I get all hot and bothered?”

“Because the Confederates are worse?” George suggested.

Freedman only shrugged. “What if they are? This is
Boston,
for God’s sake. We could lose the next three wars to those bastards, and you’d still never see one within a hundred miles of here.”

“What if everybody felt the way you do?” George said in something approaching real horror.

“Then nobody would fight with anybody, and we’d all be better off,” Freedman replied. “But don’t worry about that, because it isn’t going to happen. Most people are just as patriotic”—by the way he said it, he plainly meant
just as stupid
—“as you are.” He scratched his name at the bottom of the form. “Take this back to the recruiting station. It’ll get you what you want. As for me, I just made three dollars and fifty cents—before taxes.”

Slightly dazed, George carried the form back to the petty officer. He had to wait; the man was dealing with another would-be recruit. At last, he set the form on the petty officer’s desk, remarking, “The doc’s a piece of work, isn’t he?”

“Freedman? He is that.” The petty officer laughed. “He thinks everybody but him is the world’s biggest jerk. Don’t take him serious. If he was half as smart as he thinks he is, he’d be twice as smart as he really is, you know what I mean?”

George needed a couple of seconds to figure that out. When he did, he nodded in relief. “Yeah.”

“All right, then. It won’t be tomorrow after all—I was forgetting they’d need a few days to run your Wasserman. Report back here in a week. If the test is good, you’re in. If it’s not, you’re likely in anyway. In the meantime, get lost. Don’t put to sea, though. If you’re not back here in a week now, we have to notice, and you won’t like it if we do.”

“A week.” It felt like an anticlimax to George. “My wife’ll want me out of her hair by the time I have to come back here. And she’ll be nagging me all the time while I’m there. Why’d I go and do this? I can hear it already in my head.”

The petty officer only shrugged. “You just volunteered, Enos. Nobody was after holding a gun to your head or anything like that. This is part of what you volunteered for. You don’t like it, you should have joined the Army. The way things are these days, they sure as hell wouldn’t give a damn about your Wasserman. You’re breathing, they’ll take you.”

“No, thanks,” George said hastily. The petty officer’s laugh was loud and raucous.

When George went back to his apartment, he found Connie red-eyed, her face streaked with tears. She shouted at him. He gave back soft answers. It didn’t do him any good. Now that he had volunteered and couldn’t take it back, she was going to get everything she could out of her system. She didn’t quite throw a flowerpot at him, but she came close.

Despite that, they spent more of the following week in bed than they had since their brief Niagara Falls honeymoon. George was used to going without on fishing runs. But how long would it be this time before he saw Connie again? He tried to make up in advance for time to be lost in the future. It wouldn’t work. He could sense that even as he tried. But he did it anyway—why not?

He reported back to the Navy recruiting station on the appointed day. The petty officer greeted him with, “You live clean.” From then on, he belonged to the Navy.

IX

C
hester Martin sat with Rita and Carl in the dark of a Los Angeles movie theater, waiting for the night’s feature to come on. The war hadn’t laid a glove on California. No Confederate bombers had flown this far from Texas or Sonora. No Confederate or Japanese ships had appeared off the West Coast. If you wanted to, you could just go on about your business and pretend things weren’t going to hell in a handbasket back East.

People all around crunched popcorn and slurped sodas. The Martins were crunching and slurping, too. That was what you did when you came to one of these places. Somebody behind them bit down on a jawbreaker. It sounded as if he were chewing a bunch of rocks.

The newsreel came on after the cartoon. Carl enjoyed it. He liked watching things blow up, and wasn’t fussy about whose things they were. But Chester and Rita got very quiet. Watching Ohio torn to pieces hurt them all the more because they’d lived most of their lives there. Rita reached out and squeezed Chester’s hand when the newsreel showed bomb damage in Toledo.

They didn’t cheer up much at seeing the wreckage of Confederate bombers, either. “We are fighting back,” the announcer declared. “Every day, the vicious enemy has a harder time going forward. We will stop him, and we will beat him back.”

Was he whistling in the dark? It sure seemed that way to Chester. So far, U.S. forces had done nothing but retreat.
Could
they do anything else? If they could, when? When would it be too late? What would happen if the Confederates cut the United States in half? The resolutely cheerful announcer not only didn’t answer any of those questions, he didn’t acknowledge that they existed.

Then the newsreel camera cut away to somewhere behind the lines, as the card at the head of the feature declared. Soldiers sat on the ground watching four men with long beards cavort on a makeshift stage with a pathetically dignified woman. “The Engels Brothers entertain the troops,” the announcer said. “Their mad hijinks help our brave men forget the dangers of battle.”

Sure enough, the soldiers were laughing. Chester remained dubious. He’d laughed, too, when he escaped from the trenches for a little while. But he’d never forgotten the dangers. How could he? He still woke up screaming every so often, though now it was once every two or three years, not once every two or three weeks.

After the Engels Brothers left the stage, bathing beauties paraded across it. The soldiers liked them even better, even if they could only look and not touch. The girls were wearing much less than they would have in a Great War entertainment. Chester approved of that. He was sure the young soldiers enjoyed it even more.

Al Smith appeared on the screen. Some people in the theater cheered the President. Others booed. By Smith’s ravaged face, he was hearing those boos—and the roar of the guns—even in his sleep. He looked out at the audience he would never see in the flesh. “Our cause is just,” he insisted, as if someone had denied it. “We will prevail. No matter how fierce and vicious our enemy may be, he will only destroy himself with his wickedness. Stand together, stand shoulder to shoulder, and nothing can hold you back.”

That sounded good. Chester wondered if it was true. So far, the evidence looked to be against it. But then the newsreel cut from President Smith to the Stars and Stripes flying in front of a summer sky. “The Star-Spangled Banner” swelled on the soundtrack. People sang along in the theater. For a couple of minutes, Socialists, Democrats, and the handful of remaining Republicans
did
stand shoulder to shoulder.

The film started. It was a story of intrigue set in Kentucky between the wars. All the villains had Confederate drawls. The hero and heroine sounded as if they came from New York and Boston, respectively. They foiled the villains’ plot to touch off a rebellion and fell in love, both at the same time.

“Kentucky will be ours forever,” he said, gazing into her eyes.

“Kentucky will be free forever,” she replied, gazing into his. They kissed. The music went up. The credits rolled. The film had to have been made in a tearing hurry—certainly since the plebiscite early in the year. Did it help? Or did it only make people feel worse by reminding them that Kentucky was lost?

“Is there another picture after this one?” Carl asked.

“The cartoons and the newsreel and the movie weren’t enough for you?” Chester asked.

Carl shook his head. “Nope.” But he betrayed himself by yawning.

“Well, it doesn’t matter, because there isn’t another picture,” Rita said. “And you’re up way past your bedtime.”

“Am not,” Carl said around another yawn.

Since there wasn’t another picture, though, arguments for staying out later had no visible means of support. They walked back to the apartment where they’d lived since moving from Toledo. It was only a few blocks, but they had to go slowly and carefully through the blacked-out streets. Cars honked to warn other cars they were there as they came to intersections. That no doubt cut down on accidents, but it didn’t do much for people who were trying to get to sleep.

To Chester’s relief, Carl went to bed without much fuss. Chester knew he wouldn’t sleep well himself, and the honks out in the street had nothing to do with anything. “Things are lousy back East,” he said heavily.

“Looks that way,” Rita agreed. “Doesn’t sound like they’re telling everything that’s going on, either.”

“Oh, good,” Chester said, and his wife looked at him in surprise. He explained: “I didn’t want to think I was the only one who was thinking something like that.”

“Well, you’re not,” his wife said. “We’ve both been through this before. If we can’t see past most of the pap, we’re not very smart, are we?”

“I guess not,” Chester said unhappily. He lit a cigarette. The tobacco was already going downhill. The Confederate States grew more and better than the United States. He hoped losing foreign exchange would hurt them. Blowing a moody cloud of smoke toward the ceiling, he went on, “Got to do something about it.”

“Who’s got to do something about what?” Rita’s voice was sharp with fear. She’d been married once before. Her first husband hadn’t come home from the Great War. Had he talked like this before joining the Army? Chester wouldn’t have been surprised. Everybody’d been openly patriotic in 1914. Machine guns hadn’t yet proved heroism more expensive than it was often worth.

Chester sucked in more smoke. It didn’t calm him as much as he wished it would. He said, “Doesn’t hardly feel right, being out here all this way away from the fighting.”

“Why not? Isn’t one Purple Heart enough for you?”

He remembered the wound, of course. How not, when he would take its mark to the grave with him? He remembered hitting a man in butternut in the face with an entrenching tool, and feeling bone give beneath the iron blade. He remembered cowering in trenches as shells came down all around him. He remembered his balls crawling up into his belly in terror as he went forward in the face of machine-gun fire. He remembered poison gas. He remembered lice and flies and the endless stench of death.

But, toward the end, he also remembered the feeling that everything he’d gone through was somehow worthwhile. That wasn’t just his looking back from almost a quarter of a century’s distance; he’d felt it in 1917. Only one thing explained it—victory. He and so many like him had suffered so much, but they’d suffered for a reason: so the USA could get out from under the CSA’s thumb.

That was why the plebiscites in Kentucky and Houston had disturbed him so much. They returned to the Confederates for nothing what the United States had spent so much blood to win. What was the point of everything he and so many millions like him had gone through if it was thrown away now?

Slowly, he said, “If they lick us in Ohio, they’ll turn the clock back to the way it was before 1914.”

“So what?” Rita said. “
So what,
Chester? What difference will that make to you? You’ll still be right here where you’ve been for years. You’ll be doing the same things you’ve done. Your hair is going gray now. You’re not a kid any more. You’ve given the country everything it could want from you. Enough is enough.”

Every word of that made good, solid sense. But how much sense did good, solid sense make when the United States were in trouble? “I don’t feel right standing on the sidelines and watching things go down the drain,” he said.

“And how much difference do you think you’re going to make if you do put the uniform back on?” his wife demanded. “You’re not General Custer, you know. The most they’d do is give you your sergeant’s stripes back. How many thousands of sergeants are there? Why would you be better than any of the others?”

“I wouldn’t,” Chester admitted. “But the Army needs sergeants as much as it needs generals. It needs more of them, but it can’t get along without them.” He thought the Army could get along without lieutenants much more easily than it could without sergeants. Lieutenants, no doubt, would disagree with him—but what the hell did lieutenants know? If they knew anything, they wouldn’t have been lieutenants.

Rita glared at him. “You’re going to do this, aren’t you? Sooner or later, you are. I can see it in your face. You’re going to put the uniform back on, and you’ll be all proud of yourself, and you won’t care two cents’ worth what happens to Carl and me after you . . . after you get shot.” She burst into tears.

Chester couldn’t even say he wouldn’t get shot. He’d been a young man during the Great War, young enough to be confident nothing could kill him. Where had that confidence gone? He didn’t own it any more. He knew he could die. He’d known it even in brawls with union-busting Pinkertons. If he went back to where they were throwing lead around with reckless abandon . . . Well, anything could happen. He understood that.

He started to tell Rita something reassuring, but gave it up with the words unspoken. He couldn’t be reassuring, not knowing what he knew, understanding what he understood. All he could do was change the subject. He got up and turned on the wireless. A little music might help calm Rita down—and it would make him feel better, too.

He had to wait for the tubes to warm up. Once they did, it wasn’t music that came out of the speaker, but an announcer’s excited voice: “—tial law has been declared in Utah,” the man said. “At present, it is not clear how much support the insurrection commands. There are reports of fighting from Ogden down to Provo. Governor Young has appealed for calm and restraint on all sides. Whether anyone will listen to him may be a different question. Further bulletins as they break.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Chester exclaimed, and turned off the wireless with a vicious click. The Mormons had caused the USA endless grief by rising in the last war. If they were trying it again, they might do even more harm this time.

“I wish you hadn’t heard that,” Rita said in a low voice.

“Why? Are you afraid I’ll run right out to the nearest recruiting station?”

Chester had intended that for sarcasm, but his wife nodded. “Yes! That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” she said. “Every time you go out the door, I’m afraid I’ll never see you again. You’ve got that look in your eye. Ed had it, too, before he joined the Army.” She didn’t mention her first husband very often, and hardly ever by name. More than anything else, that told Chester how worried she was.

He said, “I’m not going anywhere right now.” He’d hoped to make her feel better. The fright on her face told him that
right now
had only made things worse. He started to say everything would be fine and he’d stay where he was. He kept quiet instead, though, for he realized he might be lying.

S
ummer lay heavy on Baroyeca. The sun was a white-hot blaze in the blue dome of the sky. Vultures circled overhead, riding the invisible streams of hot air that shot up from the ground. Every so often, when a deer or a mule fell over dead, the big black birds would spiral down, down, down and feast. And if a man fell over dead under that savage sun, the vultures wouldn’t complain about turning his carcass into bones, either.

Hipolito Rodriguez worked in his fields regardless of the weather. Who would do it for him if he didn’t? No one, and he knew it. But he always wore a sombrero to shield his head from the worst of the sun. And he worked at a pace a man who forgot the weather might have called lazy. If he cocked his head skyward, he could see the vultures. He didn’t want them picking
his
bones.

When the weather was less brutal, he worried about meeting snakes in the middle of the day. Not now. They might come out in the early morning or late afternoon, but they stayed in their holes in the ground the rest of the time. They knew they would die if they crawled very far along the baking ground. Even the scorpions and centipedes were less trouble than usual.

Rodriguez had one advantage the animals didn’t. It was an edge he hadn’t had for very long. He sometimes had to remind himself to use it. When he felt worst, he could go back to the house, open the refrigerator, and pour himself a big glass of cold, cold water. The luxury of that seemed more precious than rubies to him. He wouldn’t drink the water right away. Instead, he would press the chilly, sweating glass against his cheek, savoring its icy feel. And when he did drink, it was as if the water exorcised the demons of heat and thirst at the very first swallow.

He made sure he filled the pitcher up again, too. He could go out to the fields again, come back in a couple of hours, and find more deliciously chilly water waiting for him. It wasn’t heaven—if it were heaven, he wouldn’t have had to go out to the fields in the first place. But the refrigerator made life on earth much more bearable.

Magdalena enjoyed the cold water no less than he did. Once they both paused for a drink at the same time. “Is it true,” she asked him, “that in parts of
los Estados Confederados
they have machines that can make the air cold the same way as the refrigerator makes water cold?”

“I think it is,” Rodriguez answered cautiously. “I think that’s what they call air conditioning. Even in the rich parts of the country, they don’t have it everywhere, or even very many places.”