“Do Jesus!” All his weariness and strain came out in the two words.
Then Bathsheba asked him the question he’d known she would: “Where you learn to talk dat way? Ain’t never heard you talk dat way before.”
“Reckoned I better,” Scipio said: an answer that was not an answer.
It didn’t distract his wife. He’d hoped it would, but hadn’t expected it to. Bathsheba said, “I never knew you could talk like that. You didn’t jus’ pull it out of the air, neither. Ain’t nobody could. You been able to talk dat way all along. You got to’ve been able to talk dat way all along. So where you learn?”
“Long time gone, when I was livin’ in South Carolina,” he said. That much was true. “Never did like to use it much. Nigger git in bad trouble, he talk like white folks.” That was also true.
True or not, it didn’t satisfy Bathsheba. “You got more ‘splainin’ to do than that. What other kind o’ strange stuff you gwine come out with all of a sudden?”
“I dunno,” he answered. Bathsheba put her hands on her hips. Scipio grimaced. Her curiosity promised to be harder to escape than the race riot still wracking the Terry.
New York City. The Lower East Side. Tall tenements blocking out the sun. Iron fire escapes red with rust. Poor, shabbily dressed people in the crowd, chattering to one another in a mixture of English and Yiddish and Russian and Polish and Romanian. Red Socialist posters on the walls and fences, some of them put up where Democratic posters had been torn down. A soapbox that wasn’t even a soapbox but a beer barrel.
Flora Blackford hadn’t felt so much at home for years.
She’d been a Socialist agitator in the Fourteenth Ward twenty years before, at the outbreak of the Great War. She’d argued against voting the money for the war. Her party had disagreed. She still wondered whether they’d made a mistake, whether international proletarian solidarity would have been better. She would never know now. What she did know was that the war had cost her brother-in-law his life, that her nephew had become a young man without ever seeing his father, that her brother David had only one leg.
And she knew she couldn’t talk about the war today, not to this crowd. She’d represented this district for years before marrying Hosea Blackford, before becoming first the vice president’s wife and then the First Lady. Now her husband was a private citizen again, trounced by the Democrats when Wall Street collapsed and dragged everything else down with it. Now she wanted her old seat back, and hoped she could take it from the reactionary who’d held it for the past four years.
She pointed out to the crowd, as she had from a different beer barrel twenty years before. “You voted for Democrats because you thought doing nothing was better than doing something. Do you still think so?”
“No!” they shouted, all except for a few heckling Democrats who yelled, “Yes!”
Hecklers Flora could take in stride. “Herbert Hoover has been president for almost two years now. He’s spent all that time sitting on his hands. Are we better off on account of it? Are the lines at the soup kitchens shorter? Are the Hoovervilles any smaller?” She refused to call the shantytowns where down-and-outers lived Blackfordburghs after her husband, though everybody else did. “Are there more jobs? Is there less misery? Tell me the truth, comrades!”
“No!” the crowd shouted again. This time, it drowned out the hecklers.
“That’s right,” Flora said. “No. You know the truth when you hear it. You’re not blind. You’re not stupid. You’ve got eyes to see and brains to think with. If you’re happy with what the Democrats are doing to the United States, vote for my opponent. If you’re not, vote for me. Thank you.”
“Hamburger! Hamburger! Hamburger!” They remembered her maiden name well enough to chant it. She took that as a good sign. She’d long since learned, though, that you couldn’t tell much from crowds. They came out because they wanted to hear you. They were already on your side. The rest of the voters might not be.
Herman Bruck held up a hand to help her descend from her little platform. “Good speech, Flora,” he said. Did he hang on to her hand a little too long? Back in the old days, he’d been sweet on her. He was married himself now, with children of his own. Of course, who could say for sure how much that meant?
“Thank you,” she answered.
“My pleasure.” He tipped his fedora. As always, he was perfectly turned out, today in a snappy double-breasted gray pinstripe suit with lapels sharp enough to cut yourself on them. “I think you’ll win in three weeks.”
“I hope so, that’s all,” Flora said. “We’ll find out about how people feel about Hoover—and about Congressman Lipshitz. If I win, I go back to Philadelphia. If I lose …” She shrugged. “If I lose, I have to find something else to do with the rest of my life.”
“Come back to Party headquarters,” Bruck urged. “A lot of the old-timers will be glad to see you, and you’re a legend to the people who’ve come in since you represented this district.”
“A legend? Gottenyu! I don’t want to be a legend,” Flora said in real alarm. “A legend is somebody who’s forgotten things she needs to know. I want people to think I can do good things for them now, not that I’m somebody who used to do good things for them once upon a time.”
“All right.” Herman Bruck made a placating gesture. “I should have put it better. I’m sorry. People still want to see you. Can you come?”
“Tomorrow,” she answered. “Tell everyone I’m sorry, but I don’t think I ought to go over there today. Heaven knows when I’d get home, and I want to go back to the flat and see how Hosea is doing. This cold doesn’t seem to want to go away.” She hoped she didn’t show how worried she was. The difference in their ages hadn’t seemed to matter when she married him, but now, while she remained in vigorous middle age, he was heading toward his seventy-fourth birthday. Illnesses he would have shrugged off even a few years before hung on and on. One of these days … Flora resolutely refused to think about that.
Bruck nodded. “Sure. Everybody will understand that. Give him our best, then, and we hope we’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll drive you back to your block of flats.”
She eyed him. Would he cause trouble in the auto? No. He had better sense than that. “Thanks,” she said again. He hurried off to get the motorcar from a side street. The De Soto bespoke prosperity but not riches.
New York City traffic was even crazier than Flora remembered: more motorcars and trucks on the street, more drivers seeming not to care whether they lived or died. This in spite of the subways, she thought, and shuddered. Earlier in the year, she and Hosea and Joshua had been living in Dakota. New York City had five or six times as many people as the big state, and by all appearances had fifty or sixty times as many automobiles.
She let out a sigh of relief at escaping the De Soto. The doorman tipped his cap when she went into the block of flats. The building where she’d lived with her parents and brothers and sisters hadn’t boasted a doorman. It hadn’t boasted an elevator operator—or an elevator—either. Not having to walk up four flights of stairs whenever she went to the flat was pleasant.
Hosea Blackford greeted her with a sneeze. His nose was red. His face, always bony, had lost more flesh. His white hair lay thin and dry across his skull. This wasn’t death’s door—little by little, he was getting well—but the way he looked still alarmed her. After another sneeze, he peered at her over the tops of his reading glasses and brandished the New York Times like a weapon. “Another round of riots down in the Confederate States,” he said. “If that’s not reactionary madness on the march down there, I’ve never seen nor heard of it.”
“Has anyone protested yet?” Flora asked.
Her husband shook his head. “Not a word. The Confederates are saying it’s an internal matter, and our State Department is taking the same line.”
She sighed. “We’d sing a different song if the Freedom Party were going after white men and not Negroes. The injustice, the hypocrisy, are so obvious—but nobody seems to care.”
“A lot of whites in the Confederate States despise Negroes and come right out and say so,” Hosea Blackford said. “A lot of whites in the United States despise Negroes, too. They keep their mouths shut about it, and so they seem tolerant when you look at them alongside the Confederates. They seem tolerant—but they aren’t.”
“I know. I saw that when we were both still in Congress,” Flora said. “It’s not just Democrats, either. Too many Socialists wouldn’t cross the street to do anything for a black man. I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know if we can do anything about it.”
Hosea nodded. “Even Lincoln said the War of Secession was about trying to preserve the Union, not about the Negro or about slavery. He couldn’t have made anybody march behind his banner if he’d said the other—and even as things were, he failed.” He coughed again. “I wish I would have asked him about that when I met him on the train. I wish we would have talked about all kinds of things we never got to touch.”
“I know,” Flora said. That chance meeting had changed his life. He talked about it often, and ever more so as he got older.
Now he laughed a bitter laugh. “We’re two peas in a pod, Lincoln and I: the two biggest failures as president of the United States.”
“Don’t talk like that!” Flora said.
“Why not? It’s the truth. I’m not a blind man, Flora, and I hope I’m not a fool,” Hosea Blackford said, words that might have come right from her speech. “I had my chance. I didn’t deliver. The voters chose Coolidge instead—and then got Hoover when Cal dropped dead. I don’t know what we did to deserve that. God must have a nasty sense of humor.”
Flora didn’t think of God as having a sense of humor at all. She also didn’t care to be sidetracked. “We can’t just turn our backs on the Negroes in the CSA,” she said.
“That’s true,” Hosea said. “But you’d be a fool if you said so in your next speech, because sure as anything it would make people vote for Lipshitz.”
She winced. That was bound to be true, no matter how little she liked it. Turning away from him, she said, “I’d better get to work on that next speech. The election’s another day closer.”
The speech went as well as such things could. After it was done, she went to the Socialist Party headquarters across the street from the Centre Market and above Fleischmann’s kosher butcher shop (now run by the son of the original proprietor). Some of the workers in the headquarters looked implausibly young. Others were implausibly familiar. There sat Maria Tresca, typing away as if the past ten years hadn’t happened. She almost certainly spoke better Yiddish than any other Italian woman in New York City. She was also as thoroughgoing a Socialist as anyone in the Party, and had paid a heavy price for holding on to her beliefs: her sister had been killed by police in the Remembrance Day riots of 1915. Flora had been with them when it happened. The bullet could have struck her as easily as Angelina Tresca.
“How does it feel to come back?” Maria asked.
“Coming back here feels wonderful,” Flora said, which brought smiles all around. “I hope I can come back to Congress in November. With you people helping me, I’m sure I can.” That brought more smiles.
On the night of November 6, she and Hosea and Joshua came back to Party headquarters to find out if she had won. Her husband was still coughing and sneezing, but he had got better. Her parents were there, too, and her brothers and sisters and their families. Yossel Reisen, her sister Sophie’s son, was nineteen years old and six feet tall. In the next election, he’d be able to vote himself. That seemed impossible.
These days, a blaring wireless set brought results faster than telegrams had the last time she’d waited out a Congressional election. The more returns that came in, the better things looked, not just here in the Fourteenth Ward but all across the country. Hoover remained in office, of course, but he would have to deal with a Socialist Congress for the next two years.
At a quarter past eleven, the telephone rang. Herman Bruck answered it. A big grin on his face, he ceremoniously held out the mouthpiece to Flora. “It’s Lipshitz,” he said.
“Hello, Congressman,” Flora said.
“Hello, Congresswoman.” The Democrat sounded worn, weary, wounded. “Congratulations on a fine campaign. May you serve the district well.”
“Thank you. Thank you very much.” Politely, Flora tried to hold excitement from her voice. She was going back to Philadelphia!
The tinny ring of a cheap alarm clock bounced Jefferson Pinkard out of bed. He lurched into the bathroom and took a long leak to get rid of the homebrew he’d poured down the night before. Alabama was a dry state, but a man who wanted a beer or three could find what he was looking for.
Bloodshot eyes stared at Jeff from the mirror over the sink. He was a ruddy, beefy man in his early forties, his light brown hair pulling back at the temples, his chin a forward-thrusting rock whose strong outline extra flesh was starting to obscure. “Do I need a shave?” he asked out loud. He lived alone—he was divorced—and had fallen into the habit of talking to himself.
Deciding he did, he lathered up, then scraped his face with a formidable straight razor. He muttered curses when he nicked himself just under his lower lip. A styptic pencil stopped the bleeding, but stung like fire. He didn’t mutter the next set of curses.
When he put on his gray jailer’s uniform, the high, stiff collar bit into his neck and made his face redder than ever. After two cups of snarling coffee and three eggs fried harder than he cared for—he’d always been a lousy cook—he left his apartment and started for the Birmingham jail.
Newsboys hawked the Birmingham Confederate and the Register-Herald at almost every street corner. No matter which paper they waved, they shouted the same thing: “Supreme Court turns thumbs down on damming our rivers! Read all about it!”
“Screw the Supreme Court,” Pinkard muttered as he paid five cents for a copy of the Confederate. That was the Freedom Party paper in Birmingham. He wouldn’t waste his money on the Register-Herald. One of these days before too long, he suspected something unfortunate would happen to the building where it was written and printed.
The Confederate quoted President Featherston as saying, “Those seven old fools in black robes think they can stop us from doing what the Confederate people elected us to do. This is a slap in the face at every honest, hard-working citizen of our country. If the Supreme Court wants to play politics, they’ll find out that floods can wash away more than towns.”
“Damn right,” Jeff said, and chucked the paper into an ashcan. He didn’t know what the president could do about the Supreme Court, but he figured Jake Featherston would come up with something. He always did.
Two cops on the steps of the Birmingham city jail nodded to him as he climbed those steps and went into the building. One of them wore a Party pin on his lapel. The other one, though, was the one who said, “Freedom!”
“Freedom!” Pinkard echoed. He had a Party pin on his lapel, too. Not long after the war ended, he’d heard Jake Featherston speak in a Birmingham park. He’d been a Freedom Party man ever since.
In the jail, he had a desk in a cramped office he shared with several other jailers. The one he was following onto duty looked up from his own desk, where he was filling out some of the nine million forms without which the jail could not have survived a day. “Mornin’, Jeff,” Stubby Winthrop said. “Freedom!”
“Freedom!” Pinkard said again. “What’s new?”
“Not a hell of a lot,” Winthrop answered. As his nickname implied, he looked like a fireplug with hairy ears. “Couple-three niggers in the drunk tank, white kid in a cell for stabbing his lady friend when he found out she was this other fella’s lady friend, too. Oh, I almost forgot—they finally caught that bastard who’s been stealing everything that ain’t nailed down on the south side of town.”
“Yeah? Swell!” Pinkard said, adding, “About time, goddammit.” Like a lot of jailers, he was convinced the police who hunted down criminals couldn’t find a skunk if it was spraying their leg. Unlike a lot of men in his line of work, he wasn’t shy about saying so. His years at the Sloss Foundry had left him with the strength to back up talk with action if he ever had to. He asked the question Stubby Winthrop hadn’t answered: “What about the politicals?”
“Well, of course.” Winthrop looked at him as if at an idiot. “They drug in another twelve, fifteen o’ them bastards, too.” He poked at the papers with a short, blunt finger. “I can tell you exactly how many if you want to know.”
“Don’t worry about it now,” Jeff said. “I can find out myself before I do my morning walk-through—long as the paperwork’s there.”
“It is, it is,” Stubby assured him. “Think I want the warden reaming out my ass on account of messed-up papers? Not likely!”
“Cool down. I didn’t mean anything by it. Twelve or fifteen, you say?” Jeff asked. Winthrop nodded. Jeff let out a pleased grunt. “We are starting to clean up this town, aren’t we?”
“Bet your butt,” Winthrop said. “Anybody forgets who won the goddamn election, we teach the fucker a little lesson. Ain’t no such thing as a fit night out for Whigs or Radical Republicans, not any more there ain’t.”
Belonging to a political party other than the Freedom Party wasn’t against the law. Pinkard thought it ought to be, but it wasn’t. But anybody who raised his voice against the Party regretted it, and in a hurry. Disturbing the peace. resisting arrest, criminal trespass, inciting to riot, and possession of alcoholic beverages were plenty to get a man into jail. And, once he was in, he might be—he probably would be—a long time coming out again. Most judges, like anybody else, knew which side their bread was buttered on and went along with Freedom Party instructions. A couple of holdouts in Birmingham had already suffered mysterious and most deplorable accidents. Their replacements were more cooperative. So were the other judges. A few mysterious and most deplorable accidents could make anybody thoughtful.
Pinkard said, “Hell with me if I know what we’re going to do with all these stinking politicals. We’ve stuffed so many of ’em into cells, we don’t hardly have room for real crooks any more.”
“Ain’t my worry,” Stubby said. “And you know somethin’ else? There’s a fuck of a lot of worse problems to have.” Pinkard nodded again. He couldn’t very well argue with that. Winthrop went on, “Matter of fact, this whole goddamn jail is your baby for the next eight hours. I’m gonna get outa here, grab myself some shuteye. Freedom!” He headed out the door.
“Freedom!” Jeff called after him. Among Party men—and more and more widely through the CSA these days—the word replaced hello and good-bye.
The heavy armored door crashed shut behind Stubby Winthrop. Pinkard looked at the clock on the wall. The prisoners would just be getting breakfast. He had time to find out precisely what he needed to know about changes since yesterday before making his first walk-through of the day. He didn’t love paperwork, but he did recognize the need for it. He was conscientious about keeping up with it, too, which put him a jump ahead of several of his fellow jailers.
He’d just finished seeing what was what when the door to the office opened. The prisoner who came in had a trustie’s green armband on the left sleeve of his striped shirt. “What’s up, Mike?” Pinkard asked, frowning; this wasn’t a scheduled time for a trustie to show up.
But Mike had an answer for him: “Warden wants to see you, sir, right away.” His voice, like those of a lot of trusties, held a particular kind of whine. It put Pinkard in mind of the yelp of a dog that had been kicked too many times.
Whine or not, though, a summons from the warden was like a summons from God. Pinkard did his best not to evade but to delay, saying, “Can’t I take my morning walk-through first, anyways?”
“You’re a jailer—you can do whatever you please,” Mike said, which only proved he’d never been a jailer. Then he added, “But I don’t reckon the warden’d be mighty pleased,” which proved he had a good idea of how things worked anyhow. Pinkard grunted and decided the walk-through would have to wait.
Warden Ewell McDonald was a heavyset man with a mustache that looked like a gray moth on his upper lip. He was close to retirement age, and didn’t much care whose cage he rattled. “Come in, Pinkard,” he said, staring at Jeff over the tops of the half-glasses he used for reading.
“What’s up, sir?” Jeff asked warily.
“Come in,” the warden repeated. “Sit down. You ain’t in trouble—swear to God you ain’t.” Still cautious, Pinkard obeyed. McDonald went on, “That stuff on your record, how you set up that prisoner-of-war camp down in Mexico during their last civil war, that’s the straight goods?”
“Hell, yes,” Pinkard answered without hesitation. He was telling the truth, too, and knew other Confederate veterans—Freedom Party men—who’d gone down to the Empire of Mexico to fight for Maximilian III against the Yankee-backed republican rebels and could back him up. “Anybody says I didn’t, tell me who he is and I’ll kill the son of a bitch.”
“Keep your shirt on,” McDonald said. “I just wanted to make sure, is all. Reason I’m asking is, we’ve got more politicals in jail these days than you can shake a stick at.”
“That’s a fact,” Jeff agreed. “Stubby and me, we were just talking about that a little while ago, matter of fact.”
“It’s not just Birmingham, either—it’s all over Alabama. All over the country, too, but Alabama’s what counts for you and me. We’ve got to keep those bastards locked up, but they’re a big pain in the ass here in town,” McDonald said. “So what we’ve got orders to do is, we’ve got orders to make a camp out in the country and stow the politicals in it. We save the jail for the real bad guys, you know what I mean?”
Jefferson Pinkard nodded. “Sure do. Sounds like a good idea, anybody wants to know what I think.”
McDonald inked an old-fashioned dip pen and wrote something on the sheet of paper in front of him. “Good. I was hoping you were going to say that, on account of I aim to send you out there to help get it rolling. Your rank will be assistant warden. That’s good for another forty-five dollars a month in your pocket.”
It wasn’t the sort of promotion Jeff had expected, but a promotion it definitely was. “Thank you, sir,” he said, gathering himself. “You don’t mind my asking, though, why me? You got a bunch of guys with more seniority than I have.”
“More seniority in the jail, yeah,” McDonald answered. “But a camp out in the open? That’s a different business. Only fellow here who’s done anything like that is you. You’ll be there from the start, like I said, and you’ll have a lot of say about how it goes. We’ll get the barbed wire, we’ll get the lumber for the barracks, we’ll get the ordinary guards, and you help set it up so it works… . What’s so goddamn funny?”
“Down in Mexico, I had to scrounge every damn thing I used,” Pinkard answered. “I cut enough corners to build me a whole new street. You get me everything I need like that, it’s almost too easy to stand.” He held up his hand. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you.” In Mexico, he’d been glad to land that job riding herd on prisoners because it meant nobody was shooting at him any more. He’d never dreamt then how much good it would do him once he came home to the CSA.
Without a doubt, Sam Carsten was the oldest lieutenant, junior grade, on the USS Remembrance. That was what he got for being a mustang. He’d spent close to twenty years in the Navy before making officer’s rank. No one could tell if he had gray hair, though, not when it had started out platinum blond. He was the next thing to an albino, with blue eyes and transparent pink skin that would sunburn in the light of a candle flame.
The North Pacific in December wasn’t a bad place for a man with a complexion like that. Even here, he’d smeared zinc-oxide ointment on his nose and the backs of his hands before coming out onto the ship’s flight deck. It wouldn’t help much. Nothing ever helped much.
He shifted his weight to the motion of the aeroplane carrier without noticing he was doing it. Most of the crew stood on the deck with him. Only the black gang down in the engine room and the men at the antiaircraft guns weren’t drawn up at attention, all in neat ranks, to hear what Captain Stein had to say.
“Gentlemen, it is official at last,” the captain said into a microphone that not only amplified his words for the sailors on deck but also carried them to the crewmen still at their posts. “We have received word by wireless from Philadelphia that the United States of American and the Empire of Japan are at peace once more.”
Sam kicked at the flight deck. He was standing only a few feet from a big patch in the deck, a patch that repaired the damage a Japanese bomb had done. He couldn’t help wondering whether the fight had been worthwhile.
Captain Stein went on, “The terms of the peace are simple. Everything goes back to what the diplomats call the status quo ante bellum. That just means the way things were before the shooting started. We don’t give anything to the Japs, and they don’t give us anything, either.”
Behind Carsten, a sailor muttered, “Why’d we fight the goddamn war, then?”
In one way, the answer to that was obvious. The Japanese had been feeding men and money into British Columbia, trying to touch off another Canadian uprising against the USA, and the Remembrance had caught them at it. That was when the shooting started. If a torpedo from one of their submersibles hadn’t been a dud, the carrier might not have come through it.
In another sense, though, the sailor had a point. The U.S. and Japanese navies had slugged at each other in the Pacific. The Japanese had tried to attack the American Navy base in the Sandwich Islands (more than twenty years ago now, Sam had been in the fleet that took Pearl Harbor away from the British Empire and brought it under U.S. control). Aeroplanes from a couple of their carriers had bombed Los Angeles. All in all, though, Japan had lost more ships than the USA had—or Sam thought so, anyhow.
He’d missed a few words of Stein’s speech. The captain was saying, “—at battle stations for the next few days, to make sure this message has also reached ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy. We will continue flying combat air patrol, but we will not fire unless fired upon, or unless attack against the Remembrance is clearly intended.”
Somewhere out here in the Pacific, a Japanese skipper was probably reading a similar announcement to his crew. Wonder what the Japs think of it, went through Carsten’s mind. He didn’t know what to think of it himself. There was a lingering sense of … unfinished business.
“That’s the story from Philadelphia,” Captain Stein said. “Before I turn you boys loose, I have a few words of my own. Here’s what I have to say: we did everything we could to teach the Japs a lesson, and I suppose they did all they could to teach us one. I don’t believe anybody learned a hell of a lot. This war is over. My guess is, the fight isn’t. From now on, we stay extra alert in these waters, because you never can tell when it’s going to boil over again. Remember the surprise attack they used against Spain when they took away the Philippines.” He looked out over the crew. So did Carsten. Here and there, heads bobbed up and down as men nodded. Stein’s point had got home. Seeing as much, the skipper gave one brisk nod himself. “That’s all. Dismissed.”
Chattering among themselves, the sailors hurried back to their stations. Sam didn’t much want to go to his. His post was in damage control, deep down in the bowels of the ship. He’d done good work there, good enough to win promotion from ensign to j.g. All the same, it wasn’t what he wanted to do. He’d come aboard the carrier as a petty officer when she was new because he thought aviation was the coming thing. He’d wanted to serve with the ship’s fighting scouts or, that failing, in his old specialty, gunnery.
As often happened, what he wanted and what the Navy wanted were two different beasts. As always happened, what the Navy wanted prevailed. Down into the bowels of the Remembrance he went.
Lieutenant Commander Hiram Pottinger, his nominal boss, got to their station at the same time he did, coming down the passageway he was coming up. In fact, Sam knew a lot more about the way damage control worked aboard the Remembrance than Pottinger did. His superior, who’d replaced a wounded officer, had spent his whole career up till the past few months in cruisers. Sam, on the other hand, had had two long tours on the carrier. He automatically thought of things like protecting the aeroplanes’ fuel supply. Pottinger thought of such things, too, but he took longer to do it. In combat, a few seconds could mean the difference between safety and a fireball.
Quite a few of the sailors in the damage-control party wore the ribbon for the Purple Heart above their left breast pockets. Several of them had won other decorations, too. The Remembrance had seen a lot of hard action—and taken more damage than Carsten would have wished.
A rat-faced Irishman named Fitzpatrick asked, “Sir, you really think them goddamn Japs is gonna leave us alone from now on?”
He’d aimed the question at Sam. Instead of answering, Sam looked to Lieutenant Commander Pottinger. The senior officer had first call. That was how things worked. Pottinger said, “Well, I expect we’re all right for now.”
Several sailors stirred. Carsten didn’t much like the answer himself. He didn’t and wouldn’t trust the Japanese. So far, their trials of strength with the USA had been inconclusive: both in the Great War, where they’d been the only Entente power that hadn’t got whipped, and in this latest fight, which had been anything but great.
But then Pottinger went on, “Of course, God only knows how long the quiet will last. The Japs keep bargains for as long as they think it’s a good idea, and not thirty seconds longer. The skipper said as much—remember the Philippines.”
Sam relaxed. So did the ordinary sailors. Lieutenant Commander Pottinger wasn’t altogether naive after all.
Everybody stared at corridors painted in Navy gray, at bulkheads and hatchways, at hoses that shot high-pressure salt water, at the overhead pipes that meant a tall man had to crouch when he ran unless he wanted to bang the top of his head, at bare light bulbs inside steel cages: the world in which they operated. Most of the Remembrance lay above them. They might have been moles scurrying through underground tunnels. Every once in a while, a claustrophobe got assigned to damage control. Such men didn’t last long. They started feeling the whole weight of the ship pressing down on their heads.
Not without pride, one of the sailors said, “We could do our job in the dark.”
“Could, my nuts,” Fitzpatrick said. “We’ve fuckin’ well done our job in the dark. You don’t need to see to know where you’re at. The way noise comes back at you, where you bump up against fittings, the smells … Difference between us and the rest of the poor sorry bastards on this floating madhouse is, we really know what we’re doing.”
Almost in unison, the other men from the damage-control party nodded. The fighting had given them a fierce esprit de corps. Carsten’s head wanted to go up and down, too. And it would have, had he not known that every other unit on the ship was just as proud of itself and just as convinced the Remembrance would instantly founder if it didn’t do what it was supposed to. Nothing wrong with that. It was good for morale.
Pottinger said, “Here’s hoping we don’t have to do what we do for a hell of a long time.”
More nods. Sam said, “Long as we’re hoping, let’s hope we head back to Seattle and get some leave.”
That drew not only nods but laughter. Pottinger gave Carsten a hard look, but he ended up laughing, too. Sam had always been able to get away with saying things that would have landed someone who said them in a different tone of voice in a lot of trouble. He could smile his way out of bar scenes that usually would have brought out broken bottles.
Seaman Fitzpatrick, on the other hand, was deadly serious. “How long before we need to start worrying about Confederate submersibles again?” he asked.
“We’ve already worried about Confederate subs,” Sam said. “Remember that passage between Florida and Cuba we took on the way to Costa Rica? We didn’t spot anything, but God only knows what those bastards had laying for us there.”
“That’s their own waters, though,” Fitzpatrick protested. “That isn’t what I meant. What I did mean was, how long before we have to worry about them out here in the Pacific? And out in the Atlantic, too—don’t want to leave out the other ocean.”
This time, Carsten didn’t answer. He looked to Lieutenant Commander Pottinger again. The commander of the damage-control party said, “We’ve already got Jap subs here in the Pacific, and maybe British boats coming up from Australia and New Zealand toward the Sandwich Islands. We’ve got British boats and German boats and French ones, too, in the Atlantic. Enough of those sons of bitches running around loose already. What the hell difference do a few Confederate subs make?”
Now he got a laugh. Sam joined it, even though he didn’t think Pottinger had been kidding. “Back when I started out in the Navy, all we worried about was surface ships,” he said. “Nobody’d ever heard that aeroplanes were dangerous, and submarines were still half toys. Nobody had any idea what they could do. It’s a different world nowadays, and that’s the truth.”
“You betcha,” Seaman Fitzpatrick said. “Nobody ever thought of a funny-looking thing called an aeroplane carrier, neither.”
“Damage control is damage control,” Pottinger said. “Something hurts the ship, we patch it up. That’s what we’re here for.”
Sailors nodded once more. Carsten didn’t argue with his superior, not out loud. But it was more complicated than that. Shells did one kind of damage, torpedoes another, and bombs a third. Bombs had the potential to be the most destructive, he thought. Unlike shells and torpedoes, they weren’t limited in how much explosive they could carry. And explosive was what delivered the punch. Everything else was just the bus driver to get the cordite to where it did its job.
Sam didn’t care for that line of reasoning. If bombs could sink ships so easily, what point to having any surface Navy at all? He’d first wondered about that during the war, when an aeroplane flying out from Argentina had bombed the battleship he was on. The damage was light—the bombs were small—but he thought he’d seen the handwriting on the wall.
Maybe a carrier’s aeroplanes could hold off the enemy’s. But maybe they couldn’t, too. Down in the warm, humid belly of the Remembrance, Sam shivered.