A puff of breeze from the west brought the smell of the Great Salt Lake to his nostrils. Ogden lay in a narrow stretch of ground between the lake and the forest-covered Wasatch Mountains. Larssen had grown used to the tang of the sea in his grad school days out in Berkeley, but the Great Salt Lake’s odor was a lot stronger, almost unpleasant.
He’d heard you floated there, that you couldn’t sink even if you wanted to. Wish I could throw Yeager in, and find out by experiment, he thought. And that waitress, too. I’d hold ’em under if they didn’t drown on their own.
He stowed the chain, swung up onto his bike, and started pedaling north up Washington. He rolled past City Hall Park and the three-story brick pile of the Broom Hotel, with its eighteen odd, bulging windows. Another three-story building, at the corner of Twenty-fourth Street, had the wooden statue of a horse atop it, complete with a tail that streamed in the breeze.
He had to stop there to let a convoy of wagons head west down Twenty-fourth. While he waited, he turned to a fellow on horseback and asked, “You live here?” When the man nodded, Jens went on, “What’s the story of the horse?” He pointed to the statue.
“Oh, Nigger Boy?” the man said. “He was a local racehorse, and he’d beat critters you couldn’t believe if you didn’t see it. Now he’s the best weather forecaster in town.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jens said. “How’s that?”
The local grinned. “If he’s wet, you know it’s raining; if he’s covered with snow, you know it’s been snowing. And if his tail’s blowin’ around like it is now, it’s windy out.”
“Walked into that one, didn’t I?” Jens said, snorting. The last wagon of the convoy creaked by. He started rolling again, and soon passed Tabernacle Park. The Ogden Latter Day Saints Tabernacle was one of the biggest, fanciest buildings in town. He’d seen that elsewhere in Utah, too, the temples much more the focus of public life than the buildings dedicated to secular administration.
Separation of church and state was another of the things he’d taken for granted that didn’t turn out to be as automatic as he’d thought. Here in Utah, he got the feeling they separated things to keep outsiders happy, without really buying into the notion that that was the right and proper way to operate.
He shrugged. It wasn’t his problem. He had plenty of his own.
Just past the city cemetery, a concrete bridge took him over the Ogden River. By then, he was just about out of town. The scrubby country ahead didn’t look any too appetizing. No wonder the Mormons settled here, he thought. Who else would be crazy enough to want land like this?
He lifted one hand to scratch his head. As far as he was concerned, what the Mormons believed was good only for a belly laugh. Even so, he’d never felt safer in all his travels than he did in Utah. Whether the doctrines were true or not, they turned out solid people.
Is that what the answer is? he wondered: as long as you seriously believe in something, almost no matter what, you have a pretty good chance of ending up okay? He didn’t care for the idea. He’d dedicated his career to pulling objective truth out of the physical world. Theological mumbo-jumbo wasn’t supposed to stack up against that kind of dedication.
But it did. Maybe the Mormons didn’t know a thing about nuclear physics, but they seemed pretty much content with the lives they were living, which was a hell of a lot more than he could say himself.
Putting your faith in what some book told you, without any other evidence to show it was on the right track, struck him as something right out of the Middle Ages. Ever since the Renaissance, people had been looking for a better, freer way to live. Jesus loves me/ This I know/ ‘Cause the Bible/ Tells me so. Jens’ lip curled derisively. Sunday school pap, that’s what it was.
And yet … When you looked at it the right way, accepting your religion could be oddly liberating. Instead of being free to make choices, you were free from making them: they’d already been made for you, and all you had to do was follow along.
“Yeah, that’s what Hitler and Stalin peddle, too,” Larssen said as he left Ogden behind. Thinking was what he did best; the idea of turning that part of him over to somebody else sent the heebie-jeebies running up and down his spine.
People looked up from whatever they were doing when he rode past. He didn’t know how they did it, but they could tell he didn’t belong here. Maybe somebody’d pinned a sign to him: I AM A GENTILE. He laughed, partly at himself, partly at Utah. Hell, even Jews were gentiles here.
Up ahead on US 89, a fellow was riding a buckboard that had probably been sitting in the barn since his grandfather’s day. As Jens put his back into pedaling and whizzed past the gray mule drawing the buggy, the man called out to him: “You headin’ up toward Idaho, stranger?”
Stranger. Yeah, they could tell, all right. Larssen almost kept going without answering, but the question hadn’t sounded hostile or suspicious. He slowed down and said, “What if I am?”
“Just that you oughta be careful, is all,” the man on the buckboard answered. “Them Lizard things, there’s some of ’em up there, I hear tell.”
“Are there?” Jens said. If he wanted to abdicate responsibility for his life, that would be the way to do it. He had enough reasons for thinking it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, either. He owed so many people so much … “Are there? Good.” He turned on the heat, and left the fellow in the buggy staring after him.
The only way Mutt Daniels had ever wanted to see the south side of Chicago was to bring in a big-league team to play the White Sox at Comiskey Park. He’d learned, though, that what you wanted and what life handed you all too often weren’t the same thing.
Take the gold bars he wore on his shoulders. He hadn’t even changed shirts when he got ’em, because he had only one shirt. He’d just taken off the stripes with somebody’s bayonet and put on lieutenant’s insignia instead. People from his old squad still called him Sarge. He didn’t care. He felt like a sergeant, and the platoon he was leading now had taken enough casualties that it had only two squads’ worth of guys, anyway.
One nice thing about turning into an officer was that he got his orders with one less layer of manure on top, and that they gave him a bigger picture of what was going on. As now: Captain Sid Klein (who’d been Lieutenant Klein till Captain Maczek got hit) drew in the dirt between the ruins of what hadn’t been fancy apartment buildings even before the Lizards came, saying, “It may not look that way, boys, but the brass says we’ve got these scaly bastards right where we want ’em.”
“Yeah, an’ we retreated through half of Illinois to get ’em here, too,” Mutt said.
The captain was half his age; damn near everybody in the Army, seemed like, was half his age. Klein said, “You may think you’re joking, but you’re not. When it comes to maneuver, they got us licked. Their tanks and trucks are faster than ours, and they’ve got those goddamn helicopters to give it to us in the rear when we’re bent over the wrong way. But that doesn’t count for much in city fighting. Here it’s just slugging, block by block, body by body.”
Mutt’s opposite number for the company’s first platoon was a skinny midwesterner named Chester Hicks. “Puts a lot of bodies underground,” he observed.
“Lord, you can say that again,” Daniels said. “I did some of that block-by-block stuff last fall, and it’s ugly. Even for war, it’s ugly.”
Captain Klein nodded. “You bet it is. But the brass don’t think the Lizards can afford that kind of slugging any more. When the Germans were blitzing across Russia in ’41, they got their noses bloody when they went into the towns, not out on the plains. Maybe it’ll be the same way here.”
“And if it ain’t, so what, ‘cause the Lizards drove us back here anyways,” Mutt said.
“You’re right about that.” Captain Klein sighed and ran a hand through his short, curly red hair. “We gotta do all we can, though. Go on back to your boys and give ’em the word.”
Mutt’s platoon was defending a couple of blocks of East 111th Street. Off to the
west was the Gothic ornateness of the Morgan Park Military Academy. Daniels wondered if the cadets were in the line somewhere, the way the boys from the Virginia Military Institute had marched out and fought during the States War. He didn’t see anybody who looked like a cadet, but he knew that didn’t mean anything. It was a hell of a big fight.
To the east was an American strongpoint on the high ground of Pullman, and then, east of that, the marsh around Lake Calumet. If the Lizards dislodged his boys, he aimed to fall back to the east if he could. North of 111th Street stood the low, ornate buildings that housed the Pullman car shops. He’d fought through blocks of factories before. That was even worse than the trenches had been back in France, but Captain Klein was right about one thing: digging determined troops out of a warren like that would cost the Lizards plenty.
Some of the platoon’s foxholes and bits of trench were on the south side of 111th, some on the north. Some were literally in the middle of the street; bombs and shells had torn big holes in the asphalt.
Dracula Szabo waved to Daniels as he came up the broken sidewalk. Szabo was wearing the chevrons Mutt had cut off his own sleeve; Mutt’s old squad belonged to him now. Mutt was sure the men would get on better than most: as long as there were supplies to scrounge, Dracula would figure out how to scrounge them.
Now he said, “Took ya long enough to get back, Sarge—uh, I mean, Lieutenant. You’re lucky we still got more o’ what I came up with.”
“Not more fancy booze?” Mutt said. “I told you a dozen times, if it ain’t beer or bourbon, I ain’t interested—not real interested, anyways,” he amended hastily.
“Better’n booze,” Dracula said, and before Daniels could deny that anything was better than booze, he named something that was, or at least harder to come by: “I found somebody’s stash o’ cigarettes: ten bee-yoo-tee-full, lovely cartons of Pall Malls.”
“Goddamn,” Mutt said reverently. “How’d you manage that one?”
“C’mere an’ I’ll show ya.” Proud of his exploit, Szabo led Daniels to one of the battered houses on the south side of 111th Street, then down into the basement. It was dark down there, and full of cobwebs. Mutt didn’t like it worth a damn. Dracula seemed right at home; he might have been in a Transylvanian castle.
He started stomping on the floor. “It was somewhere right around here,” he muttered, then grunted in satisfaction. “There. You hear that?”
“A hollow,” Daniels said.
“You betcha,” Szabo agreed. He flicked on his Zippo, lifted up the board, pointed. “Lined with lead, too, so it don’t get wet in there.” He reached in, pulled out a couple of cartons, and handed them to Mutt. “Here, these are the last ones.”
The precious tobacco had disappeared into Daniels’ pack by the time he went outside again. He didn’t know whether Dracula was telling the truth, but if he tried putting the arm on him this time, he was liable never to see any more bounty.
“I want to jam a whole pack in my face all at once,” he said, “but I figure the first drag’ll be enough to do for me—or maybe do me in, I ain’t had one in so long.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Szabo said. “It’s been a while even for me.” Mutt gave him a sharp stare at that—had he been holding out on other finds?—but Szabo just gazed back, bland as a preacher. Mutt gave up.
Suddenly he grinned and headed off to a brick cottage a few hundred yards north of the front lines. The house had a big red cross painted inside a whitewashed circle on the roof and a red cross flag flying on a tall pole above it to show the Lizards what it was.
Before Mutt got halfway there, the grin evaporated. “She don’t even smoke,” he muttered to himself. “She said as much.” He stopped, kicking a stone in irresolution. Then he pressed on, even so. “I know what to do with ’em just the same.”
Perhaps because of the warning tokens, the house that held the aid station and several around it were more or less intact, though cattle could have grazed on their lawns. Here and there, untended zinnias and roses bloomed brightly. A medic on the front steps of the aid station nodded to Daniels. “Morning, Lieutenant.”
“Mornin’.” Mutt went on up the stairs past the tired-looking medic and into the aid station. Things had been pretty quiet the past couple of days; the Lizards didn’t seem any too enthusiastic about the street fighting they’d have to do to take Chicago. Only a handful of injured men sprawled on the cots and couches packed into every available inch of floor space.
Lucille Potter bent over one of those men, changing a wound dressing. The fellow sucked in his breath to keep from crying out. When he was able to drive some of the rawness from his voice, he said carefully, “That hurt some, ma’am.”
“I know it did, Henry,” she answered, “but we have to keep the wound as clean as we can if we don’t want it to get infected.” Like a lot of nurses, she used the royal we when talking to patients. She looked up and saw Daniels. “Hello, Mutt. What brings you here?”
“Got a present for you, Miss Lucille,” Daniels said. Henry and a couple of the other guys in the aid station laughed. One of them managed a wheezing wolf whistle.
Lucille’s face froze. The look she gave Mutt said, You’re going to have to stay after school, Charlie. She figured he was trying to get her into the sack with whatever his present turned out to be. As a matter of fact, he was, but he was smart enough to figure out that sometimes the indirect approach was the only one that stood a chance—if any approach stood a chance, which wasn’t nearly obvious.
He shrugged off his pack, reached into it, and pulled out one of the cigarette cartons. The wounded dogface who’d let out the wolf whistle whistled again, a single low, awed note. Mutt tossed the pack underhanded to Lucille. “Here you go. Share these out with the guys who come through here and want ’em.”
Flesh clung too close to the bony underpinnings of her face for it to soften much, but her eyes were warm as she surehandedly caught the carton of Pall Malls. “Thank you, Mutt; I’ll do that,” she said. “A lot of people will be glad you found those.”
“Don’t give me the credit for that,” he said. “Dracula found ’em.”
“I might have known,” she answered, smiling now. “But you were the one who thought to bring them here, so I’ll thank you for that.”
“Me too, sir,” Henry said. “Ain’t seen a butt—uh, a cigarette—in a he—heck of a long time.”
“Got that right,” the whistler said. “Ma’am, can I have one now, please? I’ll be a good boy all the way till Christmas if I can, I promise.” He drew a bandaged hand over his chest in a crisscross pattern.
“Victor, you’re impossible,” Lucille said, but she couldn’t keep from laughing. She opened the carton, then opened a pack. The wounded men sighed as she took out a cigarette for each of them. Mutt could smell the tobacco all the way across the room. Lucille went through her pockets. Her mouth twisted in annoyance. “Does anyone have a match?”
“I do.” Mutt produced a box. “Good for startin’ fires at night—and besides, you never can tell when you might come across somethin’.”
He handed the matches to Lucille. She lit cigarettes for her patients. The aroma of fresh tobacco had made his nose sit up and take notice. Real tobacco smoke, harsh and sweet at the same time, was almost too much to bear.
“Give the lieutenant one, too, ma’am,” Victor said. “Hadn’t’ve been for him, none of us’d have any.” The other wounded soldiers agreed loudly. A couple of them paused to cough in the middle of agreeing; after you hadn’t smoked for a while, you lost the knack.
Lucille brought the pack over to him. He took out a cigarette, tapped it against the palm of his hand to tamp down the tobacco, and stuck it in his mouth. He started to reach for the matches, too, but Lucille had already struck one. He bent down over it to get a light.
“Now this here’s livin’,” he said, sucking in a long, deep drag of smoke: “gettin’ your cigarette lit for you by a beautiful woman.”
The GIs wh
ooped. Lucille sent him an I’ll-get-you-later look. He ignored it, partly on general principles, partly because he was busy coughing himself—the smoke tasted great, but it felt like mustard gas in his lungs. Spit flooded into his mouth. He felt dizzy, light-headed, the same way he had when he first puffed on a corncob pipe back in the dying days of the last century.
“Cigarettes may be good for morale,” Lucille said primly, “but they’re extremely unhealthful.”
“What with everything out mere that can kill me quick or chop me up, I ain’t gonna worry about somethin’ that’s liable to kill me slow,” Mutt said. He took another drag. This one did what it was supposed to do; his body remembered all the smoke he’d put into it after all.
The wounded soldiers laughed again. Lucille sent him that narrow-eyed stare again; if they’d been by themselves, she would have tapped her foot on the ground, too. Then a smile slowly stole across her face. “There is something to that,” she admitted.
Mutt beamed; any concessions he managed to get from her made him feel grand. He brought his right hand up to the rim of his helmet in a sketched salute. “I’m gonna get back to my platoon, Miss Lucille,” he said. “Hope those cigarettes last you a good long time, on account of that’ll mean not too many guys gettin’ hurt.”
“Thank you for your kindness, Mutt,” she answered. The soldiers echoed her. He nodded and waved and went outside.
The cigarette was still hanging out of the corner of his mouth, but the medic taking a break on the front steps didn’t notice till he caught the smell of smoke. When he did, his head came up as if he were a bird dog taking a scent. He stared in disbelieving envy as Mutt smoked the Pall Mall down to where the coal singed his lips, then stubbed out the tiny butt on the sidewalk.
Everything stayed pretty quiet as Mutt made his way back to his unit. Off in the distance somewhere, artillery rumbled like far-off thunder. A couple of plumes of smoke rose, one over toward Lake Calumet, the other way off in the west. But for somebody who’d seen more close combat than he wanted to think about, that kind of stuff was hardly worth noticing.
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 138
