Anne Colleton didn’t rise to the bait. She just nodded. “I know they do. But if they didn’t have any choice, they’d do what needs doing. If we had another war, we could even make them feel patriotic about doing what needs doing.”
At first, Potter thought that was one of the most monstrously cynical things he’d ever heard, and he’d heard some doozies. Then he realized that, no matter how cynical it was, it probably wasn’t wrong. He leaned over and kissed her. “Do you want to write that down and pass it on to the president, or do you want me to do it?” he asked.
“Whichever you please,” she answered. “But what do you want to bet he’s already thought of it himself?”
Clarence thought it over. He didn’t need to think very long. “I won’t touch that one,” he said. “You’re bound to be right.” Featherston was plenty cynical enough to use patriotism to get people to do what he wanted—and plenty good enough at leading to get them to follow.
“One of us ought to do it,” Anne said, “just on the off chance it hasn’t occurred to him.”
“I’ll take care of it, then,” Potter said, knotting his butternut tie. “Unless you really want to, I mean.”
“No, it’s all right. Go ahead.” Anne laughed. “The funny thing is, here we are, both trying to give him good advice, and he doesn’t trust either one of us as far as he can throw us.”
“We’ve known him too long, and we’ve known him too well, and at one point or another we’ve both stood up and told him no,” Potter said. “That doesn’t happen to him very often, and he doesn’t much like it.”
“True.” Anne laughed again, on a lower, less amused, note. “And now we’re both following his orders even so. Everybody follows his orders these days.”
“He’s the president.” Potter set his shiny-peaked officer’s cap on his head. “He’s the president, and he’s been right. How do you lick a combination like that? As far as I can see, you’re better off joining him.”
Would he have said that before Jake Featherston brought him back into the Army? He knew he wouldn’t. But that was almost four years ago now. And in serving Featherston, he also served his country. His country counted most. So he told himself, and told himself, and… .
George Enos carefully coiled the last line that had held Sweet Sue to T Wharf. The fishing boat’s diesel rumbled under his feet. Pungent exhaust poured from the stack. The Sweet Sue began to move, although for the first few seconds it seemed more as if the boat were standing still and the wharf sliding away from it. But then there could be no doubt. The fishing boat was leaving Boston and Boston harbor behind. George let out a slightly hung-over sigh of relief.
He’d been putting to sea for his entire adult life, almost half of his thirty years, but he’d never been so glad to watch his home town slide below the horizon as he had this past year and a little more. If he didn’t have to look at Boston, he didn’t have to be reminded—so much—of the place where that writer son of a bitch had shot his mother and then shot himself. He’d told her Ernie was no goddamn good for her, told her and told her. His sister had told her the same thing. Fat lot of good it did.
I shouldn’t have just talked, he thought for the thousandth time. I should have kicked the crap out of that bastard. His fists clenched. his jaw knotted. His teeth ground. He hadn’t done it, and it was too late now. It would always be too late.
He was so lost in his own gloom, he jumped when somebody clapped him on the back. “How you doin’ Junior?” Johnny O’Shea asked.
“I’m all right, Johnny,” George answered. It wasn’t really true, but the older man couldn’t do anything about what ailed him. Nobody could, not even himself.
“You looked a little green there,” O’Shea said, fiddling with one upturned end of his old-fashioned gray Kaiser Bill mustache. He was a wiry little fellow whose strength and endurance belied his sixty years. He and a few other old-timers who’d known George’s father were the only ones who called him Junior. George didn’t mind. Anything that helped him connect to his old man was welcome. George had only vague memories of him. He’d been just seven when that Confederate submersible sank the USS Ericsson. Before that, his father had been in the Navy or on a fishing boat most of the time.
If the Sweet Sue sinks tomorrow, my kids won’t remember me at all. They’re too little. That was a hell of a cheerful thought with which to put to sea.
He realized he hadn’t answered Johnny. “A little too much beer last night, that’s all,” he said. “I’ll be all right.” Talking about the other would have shown weakness. He refused.
O’Shea’s laugh showed missing teeth, a few stubs stained almost the color of tobacco juice, and a plug of chewing tobacco big enough to choke a Clydesdale. “A little too much beer?” he said. “A little? Sweet Jesus Christ, what a milk-and-cookies lot we’ve raised up to take our places when we’re gone. When I was your age and I’d be going out to sea the next morning, I’d drink till I couldn’t see and fuck till I couldn’t get it up for a month afterwards and let the skipper worry about having me on board when we got going. If you’re gonna do these things, for God’s sake do ’em right.”
George had made sure Connie had something to remember him by, too. That was one of the reasons he hadn’t drunk too much to excess. If you didn’t know who you were, your John Henry wouldn’t know who he was, either.
He was damned if he felt like talking about what he’d done in the bedroom, though. Instead, his voice sly, he asked, “How about last night for you, then?”
“Oh, I got drunk,” O’Shea said. “Take enough aspirins, drink enough coffee, and that ain’t so bad the next day. And I found me a a girl, too. But I’ll tell you something, Junior, and it’s a goddamn fact. Enough fucking so you can’t get it up for the next month is a hell of a lot less when you’re my age than it is when you’re yours.” He spat a stream of tobacco juice into the sea.
A lot of men would have sounded bitter saying something like that. Johnny O’Shea thought it was funny. He slapped George on the back and went off to chin with one of the other fishermen.
He got even less in the way of response from Carlo Lombardi than he had from George. Aspirins and coffee might have been enough to beat Johnny’s hangover, but Carlo looked as if he’d been ridden hard and put away wet. Under his perennial five-o’-clock shadow, his face was fishbelly pale. He had a hat jammed down low over his eyes to shield them from the sun, and they were nothing but bloodshot slits. He answered O’Shea in monosyllables, and then stopped answering him at all. Johnny thought that was funny, too. George didn’t. He’d been where Carlo was a few times—well, maybe more than a few times—and he hadn’t enjoyed it a bit.
A couple of the other fishermen looked as much the worse for wear as Lombardi. By the time they got out to the Grand Bank, they’d be sober enough. The only liquor aboard the Sweet Sue was a bottle of medicinal brandy under lock and key in the galley. Every so often, Captain Albert would dole out a nip as a reward for a job well done. Davey Hatton, whose territory the galley was, had also been known to pour out a little brandy every now and then, but that was unofficial, even if the skipper winked at it.
Back in George’s father’s day, most fishing boats leaving T Wharf had made for Georges Bank, about five hundred miles offshore. Some still did, but Georges Bank had been fished so hard for so long, it didn’t yield what it had. The Grand Bank, though, out by Newfoundland, seemed inexhaustible. Some people said Basque fishermen had been taking cod and tuna there since before Columbus discovered America. George Enos didn’t know anything about that one way or the other. He did know there were a hell of a lot of fish left.
Boston sank below the edge of the sea. He wasn’t sorry to see it go, or all the little islands that marked the way into the harbor. A couple of miles off to port, a U.S. Navy minesweeper—not a very big warship, but a giant when measured against fishing boats—opened up with its guns. A few seconds later, a big column of water rose from the Atlantic. The flat, harsh crack of the explosion took ten or twelve seconds to reach the Sweet Sue. When it did, Carlo Lombardi looked as if he wished his head would fall off, or maybe as if it just had.
George felt the blast in his teeth and sinuses, too. Even so, he nodded in satisfaction. “There’s one mine we won’t have to worry about any more,” he muttered. During the war, the USA had mined the approaches to Boston harbor to a faretheewell, to make sure Confederate and British raiders and submarines couldn’t sneak in and raise hell. And the Confederates had sown mines to give U.S. shipping a hard time.
Some of those mines still floated in place. Some of the ones that had been moored came loose with the passage of years and drifted free, a menace to navigation. Fishing boats and the occasional freighter blew up and sank with all hands. Finding mines and disposing of them had kept the Navy hopping since the end of the war.
And how long would it be before the Navy stopped sweeping for mines and started laying them again? George didn’t like the headlines coming out of the states that had changed hands between the CSA and the USA. President Smith was loudly declaring he’d removed the last reasons for war on the North American continent. George hoped he was right. As far as he could see, everybody hoped the president was right.
Gulls glided along overhead. They always followed fishing boats, hoping for handouts from the garbage and offal that went over the side. They did better when the boats were farther out to sea and actually fishing, but that didn’t keep them from being optimistic whenever they saw fishermen.
George stopped in the cramped little galley for a mug of coffee. He took it up to the Sweet Sue’s bow and drank it there. The hot, sweet, creamy brew and the fresh breeze from the fishing boat’s passage helped submerge the last of his headache. His cure wasn’t so drastic as Johnny O’Shea’s, but he hadn’t hurt himself so badly the night before, either.
Going out to the Grand Bank was a long haul. Once the ocean surrounded the Sweet Sue on all sides, she might not have been moving at all. No landscape changed to prove she was. Every so often, she would pass an inbound fishing boat. Captain Albert would get on the wireless then, doing his best to find out exactly where the fish were biting best.
When my old man went to sea, his boat didn’t even have wireless, George thought. He remembered his mother saying his father hadn’t know that crazy Serb had blown up the Austrian archduke till he got back to T Wharf after a fishing trip. And when a Confederate commerce raider captured him and sank his boat, his skipper back then hadn’t been able to yell for help. He’d been interned in North Carolina for months before the Confederates finally let him go.
On George’s first night in the tiny, cramped bunk up at the bow, he tossed and turned and slept very badly. He always did his first night at sea. He’d got used to a bed that didn’t shift under him, to one where he could roll over without falling out, to one where he could sit up suddenly without banging his head—hell, to one with Connie in it, sweet and warm and mostly willing. He knew he’d be all right tomorrow, but tonight was tough.
More coffee persuaded his eyes they really did want to stay open the next morning. He poured in the cream as if there were no tomorrow. So did everybody else. Even on ice, it wouldn’t stay fresh through the cruise, so they enjoyed it while they could. By the same token, Davey Hatton did up enormous plates of scrambled eggs for the fishermen.
“By God, Cookie, yesterday I’d’ve puked these up,” Johnny O’Shea said. “This morning, they’re goddamn good.” He shoveled another forkful into his face.
Hatton was a round, red-faced man with a barbed wit. “If somebody’d lit a match under your nose yesterday, he could’ve used your breath for a blowtorch,” he replied. “Today you’re on your way to remembering your name.”
“Fuck you,” Johnny said sweetly.
The cook nodded. “There—you see? I knew that was it.” The men in the crowded galley laughed. Even Johnny laughed—he knew he’d lost that round.
When the Sweet Sue finally got out to the Grand Bank, there was little more time for laughter. Boats from the USA, the CSA, the Republic of Quebec, occupied Canada and Newfoundland, Britain, Ireland, France, and Portugal bobbed here and there on the ocean. Captain Albert found a place at the edge of one pack of boats and started fishing.
George lost track of how many big hooks he baited with frozen squid. The process was as automatic as breathing for him. If he’d thought about it, he probably would have stuck himself. Every so often, somebody did. Then it was the nasty business of pushing the barb through and snipping it off, the even nastier business of iodine, and, if a man hadn’t had one in a while, a tetanus shot from the first-aid kit. And, with his hand bandaged, he’d go back to fixing hooks.
But when the lines came in … when the lines came in, work really started. Gaffing a wriggling tuna that weighed as much as a man, gutting it, kicking the offal over the side, and getting the fish into the ice in the hold went on hour after hour. Sometimes it wouldn’t be a tuna—it would be a tuna head, proof that a shark had found the fish first. Off the hook, over the side. Sometimes a shark would be on the hook. Gaff him, gut him so he stayed dead, and pitch him overboard.
The endless fishing went on for the next three weeks. By then, the Sweet Sue had more than twenty tons of tuna in her hold and rode noticeably lower in the water than she had when she set out from T Wharf. George still didn’t know how good a trip it was. He wouldn’t till the skipper sold the tuna. But he knew he was finally ready to head back to Boston. After all, he had to remind his kids who he was.
Brigadier General Abner Dowling was not a happy man. He felt betrayed not only by the War Department—which would have been nothing tremendously unusual—but also by the entire government of the United States. Having the whole government gang up on him didn’t happen every day.
But Dowling certainly felt it had happened here. He’d come to Covington to help keep Kentucky in the United States. He’d got a good start on doing just that, too. And then Al Smith had jerked the rug out from under him by going to Richmond and agreeing to a plebiscite. The only way the USA could win that plebiscite would be for Jesus Christ to appear in Louisville and curse Jake Featherston with words that glowed like burning coals—and even then it would be close.
Now, ironically, what Dowling was watching over was the presidential election campaign. Up till Al Smith said there would be a plebiscite after all, he couldn’t have got elected dog catcher in Kentucky. Now Red Socialist posters were everywhere in Covington. They showed Smith’s face and the slogan, THE HAPPY WARRIOR—HE’S KEPT US OUT OF WAR. More went up all the time, too.
The Democrats were running Senator Bob Taft—son of longtime Congressman William Howard Taft—from across the river in Ohio. In a normal year, he would have scored well in conservative Kentucky. This wasn’t a normal year, nor was Kentucky a normal state. The Freedom Party had ambushed the local Democrats from the right, and the Freedom Party, taking its cue from Richmond, was loudly for Smith.
Besides, Taft had denounced the plebiscite. Like most Democrats, he remained in favor of holding on to the gains the USA had made in the Great War. That would have doomed him here anyway.
“Isn’t it grand?” Dowling said at supper one evening. “Kentucky will vote Socialist in February, and then it’ll vote Freedom in January. Tell me how that makes sense.”
All the officers with whom he was eating were junior to him, of course. None of them ventured to claim that it didn’t make sense, or that he was worrying too much. A major did say, “At least the Freedom Party is on its best behavior from now until January.”
“Bully!” Dowling exploded, which made the younger officers look at one another. He caught the looks, and knew why they made them. They didn’t say bully, and they thought only dinosaurs—anyone who remembered the nineteenth century certainly qualified—did. Dowling was too exercised to care. He went on, “Of course those bastards will be on their best behavior. They don’t have to blow things up any more to get what they want. All they have to do is wait. Wouldn’t you be on your best behavior, too?”
“Uh, yes, sir,” the major replied. “The only trouble is, their being quiet goes a long way toward making our presence here irrelevant, wouldn’t you say?”
“Like hell I would,” Dowling growled. “If we weren’t here, if we weren’t doing the job we’re supposed to do, how much worse would things be?”
The major, being only a major, did not presume to contradict. That helped ease Dowling’s mind—a little. He kept up a bold front not least for the sake of the men he commanded. He wasn’t about to admit he thought his presence in Kentucky was irrelevant. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone but himself, anyhow.
When he looked at the name of the man with whom he had his first appointment the next morning, it rang a bell. He went through some files and nodded to himself. The homework he’d done before taking command in Covington had paid off. “Good morning, Mr. Wood,” he said when the man strode into his office. “And what can I do for you today?”
Lucullus Wood held out his hand. Dowling reached out and shook it with, he hoped, no noticeable hesitation, even if he wasn’t used to treating a Negro as his social equal. Wood was in his early or mid-thirties: a wide-shouldered man, blocky rather than fat, with high cheekbones and an arched nose that argued he might have a little Indian blood in him. Without preamble, he said, “Kentucky got troubles, General.”
“Yes, indeed.” Dowling’s voice was dry. “Do you aim to stop them or cause more?”
Before answering, Wood sat down across from Dowling. Dowling hadn’t invited him to, but he didn’t say anything. When the black man smiled, he looked like a predatory beast. “Depends on for who you mean,” he answered, adding, “Reckon you know who I am, then.”
“When I got here, they told me you made the best barbecue in town,” Dowling said. “I’ve tried it. They were right.”
“Hell they was.” Lucullus Wood sounded affronted. “I make the best barbecue in the whole goddamn state. So did my old man.”
Dowling looked down at the notes he’d taken. “Your father was … Apicius Wood. I hope I’m saying that right.” He waited for the Negro to nod, then went on, “And one after the other, you and he have been the two biggest Reds in town. Or are you the two biggest Reds in the whole goddamn state?”
Woods blinked at that. After a moment, he decided to laugh. “Maybe he was. Maybe I is. Maybe we ain’t never been,” he said. “Folks who talk about that stuff, they don’t always do it. Folks who do it, they don’t always talk about it.”
“Well, if you don’t do it, if you’ve never done it, why am I wasting my time talking to you?” Dowling asked. “Tell me what you’ve got on your mind, and we’ll see if we can do some business.”
Lucullus Wood blinked again. “You ain’t what I reckoned you would be,” he said slowly.
Abner Dowling’s shrug made his chins quiver. “Life is full of surprises. Now come on, Mr. Wood. Piss or get off the pot.”
“Come January, a lot of colored folks is gonna want to git the hell out of Kentucky,” Wood said. “Reckon you got some notion why.”
“We won’t stop them,” Dowling answered. “They’re U.S. citizens. We will respect that. Some whites will want to leave the state, too.”
“Some. A few.” Wood spoke with dismissive scorn. “Some colored folks, though, some colored folks is gonna stay. Dunno how many, but some will. Some damn fools in every crowd, I suppose.”
“If I were a Negro, I wouldn’t stay in Kentucky,” Dowling said.
Wood’s eyes went to the shiny silver star on the right shoulderboard of Dowling’s green-gray uniform. “Don’t suppose they lets no damn fools turn into generals,” he remarked.
As far as Dowling was concerned, that only proved the colored man didn’t know as much about the U.S. Army as he thought he did. Custer, for instance, had worn four stars, not just one. But Custer, while doubtless often a fool, had been a very peculiar kind of fool, and so… . With an effort, Dowling tore his thoughts away from the man he’d served for so long. “Fair enough,” he said to Lucullus Wood. “I’m sure you’re right about what will happen. Some Negroes will stay here. Some people don’t know to get out of a burning building till too late, either. But if the U.S. Army has to leave Kentucky after the plebiscite, what concern to us are they?”
“If we was white folks, you wouldn’t talk like that about us.” Wood didn’t try to hide his scorn. Dowling wondered if a Negro had ever reproached him like that before. He didn’t think so. He hadn’t dealt with a whole lot of Negroes—not many people in the USA had—and the ones he had dealt with were all in subordinate positions. After a deep, angry exhalation, Wood went on, “You reckon the niggers in Kentucky gonna like all them damn white bastards runnin’ around yellin’, ‘Freedom!’ all the goddamn time?”
“I wouldn’t,” Dowling answered. If he’d called Negroes niggers, Lucullus Wood might have tried to murder him. Being one himself, Wood could use the label. But then that thought slipped away and another took its place: “What do you suppose they’ll want to do about it?”
Anger dropped away from Wood like a discarded cloak. “No, General, you ain’t no damn fool. You got to understand, I ain’t in love with the USA. Revolution comin’ to y’all, too. But we gots to make a popular front with whoever’s on our side even a little when it comes to them Freedom Party cocksuckers.”
“How much of a nuisance do you think your people can be, and how much help do you want from the United States?” Dowling asked. “The more we can set up before the plebiscite, the better off we’ll be.”
“More we kin set up before the plebiscite, better off the USA’ll be,” Wood said cynically. “Ain’t gonna be no more good times for the niggers here after that. But I figure we kin raise some kind of trouble for the Confederates when they comes marchin’ back in here.”
“It would be nice if you could arrange as much for them as the Freedom Party fanatics did for us here and in Houston,” Dowling said.
“Be nice for y’all, yeah, but don’t hold your breath, on account of it ain’t gonna happen,” Wood said. “Lots mo’ white folks here and down there than there is niggers. Revolutionary, he got to swim like a fish in the school of the people. Us blackfish, we is a smaller school.”
He didn’t sound like an educated man. But when it came to the business of revolution, he spoke with an expert’s authority. Abner Dowling found himself nodding. “I suppose you’re right,” he said regretfully. “But if you people just happened to find some wireless sets and rifles and explosives lying around, you might figure out what to do with them, eh?”
“We might.” Lucullus Wood nodded, too. “Yes, suh, General, we just might cipher out what they’s for.”
I ought to get War Department authorization for this, Dowling thought. He rejected the notion the minute it occurred to him. The War Department might not want to get officially involved in resisting Confederate occupation. Then again, some of the people in the War Department might just get cold feet. I’m here. They put me in charge. I’ll take care of things, God damn it.
“All right, then,” he said. “We’ll see to that. And I know you’re not doing us any special favors. But what works against the CSA works for the USA. That’s how things are.”
Wood nodded again. “That’s how things is,” he agreed. “We is fellow travelers on this here road for a while, even if we’s goin’ different places.”
“Fellow travelers.” Brigadier General Dowling tasted the phrase. “Yes, I can live with that.”
“You been fair to me, General, so I be fair to you,” Wood said. “Come the revolution, we go different ways. Come the revolution, I reckon I try an’ kill you. Nothin’ personal, you understand, but you is one o’ the ‘pressors, and you got to go to the wall.”
“Fair is fair,” Dowling said, “so I’ll tell you something, too. You want to be careful about threatening a man with a weapon in his hand. He has a nasty habit of shooting back.” With a sour smile, he too added, “Nothing personal.”
“Sure enough,” the Negro said imperturbably. “Them Freedom Party fellas, they done found that out down further south. Reckon mebbe we teach ’em some new lessons here in Kentucky. Is that a bargain?”
“That’s a bargain.” Dowling heaved himself to his feet and held out his right hand once more. Lucullus Wood took it. The Negro dipped his head and sauntered out of Dowling’s office. Dowling looked down at his own right palm. Had he ever shaken a colored man’s hand before today? He didn’t think so. Kentucky was proving educational in all sorts of ways.
“Sorry, kid.” The man who shook his head at Armstrong Grimes didn’t sound sorry at all. He sounded as if he’d said the same thing a million times before. He doubtless sounded that way because he had. “I can’t use you. I want somebody with experience.”
Armstrong had heard that a million times since finally escaping high school. His temper, which had never been long, snapped. “How the hell am I supposed to get experience if nobody’ll hire me on account of I don’t have any?”
“Life’s tough,” the man in the hiring office answered, which meant, To hell with you, Jack. I’ve got mine. He lit a cigarette, but didn’t quite blow smoke in Armstrong’s face. Maybe his first long drag made him feel a little more like a human being, because he unbent enough to say, “One way to do it is to odd-job for a while. Sometimes you can get hired by the day even if somebody doesn’t want you for keeps.”
“Yeah, I’ve tried some of that,” Armstrong said. “But it’s a day on and a week off. It’ll take me forever to do enough of anything to get the experience to make anybody want to take me on for good, and I’ll starve to death in the meantime.”
The man looked him over. “Other thing you could do is join the Army. You’re a big, strong fellow. They’ll take you unless you just got out of jail—maybe even if you just got out of jail, the way things are nowadays. You can sure as hell learn a trade in there.”
“Maybe,” Armstrong said. His father had made the same suggestion—made it loudly and pointedly, in fact. That would have prejudiced him against the idea even if he’d liked it to begin with. “They don’t pay you anything much in the Army, and you’re stuck there for three years if you volunteer.”
“Have it your way, pal. You think I give a rat’s ass about what you do, you’ve got another think coming.” The clerk behind the desk looked up at the line of poor, hungry men desperate for work. “Next!”
Seething, Armstrong stormed out of the hiring office. If he hadn’t thought the clerk would sic the cops on him, he would have whaled the stuffing out of the bastard. Sitting there like a little tin Jesus, who the hell did he think he was? But the answer to that was mournfully obvious. He thinks he’s a man who’s got a job, and the son of a bitch is right.
Armstrong inquired at a furniture factory, a trucking company, and a joint that made Polish sausages before heading for home. No luck anywhere. His old man wanted him out there trying—insisted on it, as a matter of fact. If he didn’t pound the pavement, he wouldn’t get fed. Merle Grimes had been most painfully clear about that. Armstrong wished he thought his father were bluffing. Since he didn’t …
When he got home, he found his mother in tears. He hadn’t seen that since Granny died. “What happened?” he exclaimed.
Without a word, she held out an envelope to him. His name was typed on it. The return address was printed in an old-fashioned, hard-to-read typeface:
Another, smaller line below that said:
“Oh,” he said. It felt like a punch in the breadbasket. He’d known it was possible, of course, but he hadn’t thought it was likely. “Oh, shit.”
Edna Grimes nodded. “That’s what I said, too, Armstrong, when I saw the damn thing. But there’s nothing you can do about it. If they conscript you and you pass the physical, you’ve got to go.”
“Yeah.” Armstrong nodded glumly. From some of the things he’d heard, the only way to flunk the physical was not to have a pulse, too. He did his best to look on the bright side of things: “If they conscript me, it’s only for two years. That’s a year less than I’d spend if I joined up on my own.”
“I know. But still …” His mother gave him a hug of the sort he hadn’t had from her in years. “You’re my baby, Armstrong. I don’t want you going off to be a soldier. What if we have another war?”
Being his mother’s baby didn’t appeal to Armstrong. Fighting a war did—if you were going to be a soldier, what point was there to being one when nothing was happening? None he could see. That he might get hurt or killed never crossed his mind. He was, after all, only eighteen. But he was smart enough to know that, if he told his mother what he really thought, she’d pitch a fit. So, as soothingly as he could, he said, “There won’t be any war, Ma. We’re giving the Confederates those pleb-whatchamacallits, so they’ve got nothing left to fight about.”
“Jesus, I hope you’re right,” his mother said. “Some people, though, if you give ’em an inch, they’ll want to take a mile. The way the Freedom Party carries on, I’m afraid they’re like that.”
Armstrong’s little sister met the news that he was going to go off and be a soldier with complete equanimity. “So long,” Annie said. “When do you leave?”
“Not tonight, you little brat,” he said. She stuck out her tongue at him. He wanted to belt her a good one, but he knew he couldn’t. She’d just go yelling to their mother, and then he’d end up in trouble. Annie was almost as big a pest as Aunt Clara, who would no doubt hope he never came back when he went off to wherever they’d ship him for training.
When his father got home and found out, though, he slapped Armstrong on the back and poured him a good-sized slug of whiskey, something he’d never done before. “Congratulations, son!” Merle Grimes said. “They’ll make a man out of you.”
Since Armstrong was already convinced he was a man, that impressed him less than it might have. To show what tough stuff he was, he took a big gulp of the whiskey. He hadn’t done a lot of drinking. The hooch felt like battery acid going down the pipe, and exploded like a bomb in his stomach. “That’s good,” he wheezed in a voice that sounded like a ghost of its former self.
“Glad you like it,” his father answered gravely. If he knew that Armstrong had just injured himself, he was polite enough not to let on. That was more discretion than he was in the habit of showing. He took a smaller sip from his own glass and asked, “When do you go in for your preinduction physical?”
“Next Wednesday,” Armstrong said. “I can hardly wait.”
He meant that ironically, but Merle Grimes took it seriously. “Good,” he said. “That’s real good. You ought to be eager to do something for your country. It’s been taking care of you all along.”
“Right,” Armstrong said tightly. He could have done without his father sounding like a goddamn recruiting poster.
Next Wednesday, naturally, rain poured down in buckets. Armstrong had to walk three blocks from the trolley stop to the building where the government doctors waited to get their hands on him. He was half soaked by the time he made it inside. Seeing several other guys his own age who were just as bedraggled as he was made him feel a little better. More fellows with wet hair and pimples came in the door after him, too.
A pair of clerks marched into the room. At the same time as one was saying, “Line up in alphabetical order by last name,” the other declared, “Line up according to height.”
After some confusion, alphabetical order won. Armstrong would have ended up about the same place either way. As a G, he was fairly close to the head of the line but not right at it. He was also taller than most of the young men there for their physicals, but not a real beanpole, either. He had a chance to look things over before the system got to work on him.
First came the paperwork. He would have bet money on that. His old man made a living pushing papers around for the government, and had plenty to do. Armstrong filled out about a million forms and carried them with him to the eye chart, which came next. The fellow in front of him had some trouble. “I can see the little bastards just fine,” he told the guy in the white coat in charge of the test. “Only thing is, I can’t no way read ’em.”
“Let me see your paperwork,” the man in the white coat said. Armstrong got a glimpse of a couple of pages, too. Just about everything was blank. The man in charge of the test frowned. “You’re illiterate?” Seeing the puzzled look on the young man’s face, he tried again: “You can’t read and write?”
“ ‘Fraid not,” the youth said. “I can sign my name. That’s about the size of it.”
“Didn’t you go to school?”
“A couple years. I never was much good, though. I been workin’ ever since.”
“Well, uh, Slaughter, no matter how good a name you’ve got for a soldier, you need to be able to read and write to enter the Army. You’re not even in the right place in line. You’ll be excused from conscription. I don’t know if your exclusion will be permanent or if they’ll class you as fit for service in an emergency. But we won’t take you now.” He glanced towards Armstrong Grimes. “Next!”
Armstrong thought about pretending he couldn’t read, too. Too late, though—he’d already filled out his paperwork and done it right. He stepped up to the line and went down the chart as far as he could, switching eyes when the man in the white coat told him to.
“Give me your papers,” the man said, then nodded. “You’ve passed here. Proceed to the next station.”
He saw even more guys in white coats than he had at the Polish sausage works where he’d tried to get a job. They measured and weighed him. One of them listened to his heart. Another one took his blood pressure. Another one—this one with a brand new pair of rubber gloves—told him to drop his pants, turn his head to one side, and cough. As he did, the man grabbed him in some highly intimate places. “No rupture,” he said, and wrote on Armstrong’s papers. “Now bend over and grab your ankles.”
“What?” Armstrong said in alarm. “You’re not going to—”
But the man in the white coat was already doing it. That was a lot less pleasant than being told to turn his head and cough. “Prostate gland normal,” the man said. He took off the gloves and tossed them into a corrugated-iron trash can. Then he wrote on the papers again. As soon as he gave them back, he started putting on a fresh pair of gloves.
“You must go through a lot of those,” Armstrong said. He pulled up his pants in a hurry, still stinging a little.
“You bet I do, sonny,” the man in the white coat agreed. “All things considered, would you rather I didn’t?” Armstrong hastily shook his head. “Well, neither would I,” the man said. “Go on to the next station.”
They drew blood there. A big, strapping fellow passed out just as Armstrong arrived. The fellow with the hypodermic syringe put it down in a hurry and managed to keep the big young man from banging his head on the floor. He dragged him off to one side and glared at Armstrong. “You’re not going to faint on me, are you? This guy was the third one today. Roll up your sleeve.”
“I don’t think I am,” Armstrong said. “What do you need to do this for, anyway?”
“See if you’re anemic. See if you’ve got a social disease. See what your blood group is for transfusions. Hold still, now.” The man swabbed the inside of his elbow with alcohol. The needle bit. Armstrong looked away as the syringe filled with blood. He felt a little queasy, but only a little. The man yanked out the needle, stuck a piece of cotton fluff on the puncture, and slapped adhesive tape over it. He wrote on Armstrong’s papers. “That’s it. You’re done.”
“Did I pass?” Armstrong asked.
“Unless you’re anemic as hell or you’ve got syphilis, you did,” the man replied. “You’re healthy as a horse. You’ll make a hell of a soldier.”
“Oh, boy,” Armstrong said.