Walk in Hell gw-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “T’ank you,” Scipio said. “I do dat.” It would get him fed and let him save what little money he had left. And it meant-Lord, how he hoped it meant! — Jonah wasn’t going to turn him in to the Confederate authorities. He picked up another clanking crate of shell casings. It hardly seemed to weigh a thing.

  The hall was packed. The hot, muggy air would have been thick enough to slice even had it been empty. A small, forlorn electric fan did overmatched battle against the heat of too many bodies, against the fact that a lot of those bodies hadn’t bathed quite so recently as they might have, and against enough cigar, cigarette, and pipe smoke to make Flora Hamburger think of poison gas.

  Coughing a little, she turned to Maria Tresca. “They’ve come out, no two ways about it,” she said.

  Maria nodded. “That works for you, not against you,” she said. “The regulars would sooner see Herman Bruck with the nomination, even after Remembrance Day.” She sniffed; the smoky air turned the sniff into a cough louder than Flora’s. “They’re reactionaries, that’s what they are. How can they be reactionaries and Socialists at the same time? My sister Angelina never was.”

  “When they think of it, they’re progressive,” Flora said with a shrug. “You have to think about your ideology; if you don’t think about it, you haven’t got one. But if you don’t think about your social attitudes, it’s not that you don’t have any, it’s just that yours are the same as your neighbor’s.” She sighed. “And if your neighbors are petty bourgeoisie and proletarians who aspire to the petty bourgeoisie-”

  Maria Tresca’s face darkened into a frown. “In that case, they might as well be Democrats.”

  “No.” Flora shook her head. “That’s not the problem. The problem is making them think about social issues. When they do think instead of feeling, they’re sound enough. They have to stop taking those concerns for granted, that’s all.”

  “Or else the revolution, when it comes, will sweep them away with it,” Maria said. “Sometimes I think you’re too gentle, Flora. My sister was the same way, and look what it got her.” Angelina Tresca had died in the Remembrance Day riots the year before. “If they cannot adapt, they deserve to be swept away.” Maria was as full of revolutionary consciousness as anyone Flora knew: frighteningly full sometimes.

  “Sometimes the uprising comes too soon,” Flora said. “Look at the Confederacy. The proletariat failed there-nothing but banditry left now.”

  “Race mystified the white proletarians, splitting the laboring class,” Maria returned. “That won’t happen here in the United States. When the workers rise up against the trusts and the capitalists, they’ll all rise together and overthrow the rotten system.” She sounded messianically certain.

  Up on the platform at the front of the hall, the chairman rapped loudly for order. Slowly, Saul Masliansky got some small semblance of it. When it didn’t come fast enough to suit him, he rapped again, this time as if firing a gun. “Be quiet, there!” he shouted, first in Yiddish, then in English. “Do you want to caucus, or do you just want to talk?”

  “With this crowd, that’s about even money,” Flora said with a smile.

  “You should have accepted somebody besides Masliansky,” Maria Tresca said, not smiling back. “He favors Herman.”

  “I know. Everyone who could chair this caucus favors Herman, as far as I can tell,” Flora answered. “But Saul is honest. When he sees what the people want, he won’t thwart them.”

  “Ha!” Maria said darkly. “He’s assistant editor for the Daily Forward. He’s going to go right on favoring Bruck, because Herman got everything he knows about Socialism straight out of the newspaper.”

  That was so unfair, and at the same time so delicious, that Flora couldn’t help giggling. She’d expected to be too nervous here to see straight, let alone to speak well, and now she wasn’t any more. She hoped the delightful, flighty feeling would last. “He’s honest,” she said again. “I’ve seen him admit he’s wrong. How many others who might have done the job can you say that about?”

  “We’re not going to have a caucus if you people can’t keep quiet,” Saul Masliansky said, like a schoolteacher confronting a classroom full of hooligans. He didn’t look like a teacher, or like an editor, either. With an embroidered vest and a high, pale forehead, what he looked like was a professional gambler. He played his trump card with the air of a gambler pulling an ace out of his sleeve, too: “Do you want to hear the candidates? We’ve agreed we’re all going to support whichever one we choose, so picking the better one strikes me as a pretty good idea. Anybody who thinks different can go outside to talk.”

  “Anyone who thinks different can geh in drerd,” Maria Tresca said. Flora laughed again. Maria had acquired an excellent, often scurrilous command of Yiddish.

  “Mr. Chairman,” somebody called, “I move that, when we pick, we pick by secret ballot.”

  “Second!” Herman Bruck shouted.

  “You keep quiet,” Masliansky barked at him. “Candidates aren’t members of the caucus. You can’t second. You talk to us, and that’s all. Do I hear a proper second?” He did, a moment later. The motion passed on a voice vote.

  Member or not, Flora shouted against it. “If you can’t stand up and be counted at a caucus, when can you?” she demanded.

  “You’re right-and you’re wrong,” Maria said. “Herman thinks secrecy will work for him, but I think he’s wrong. More people will go against the bigwigs if they aren’t looking over their shoulders.”

  “Maybe,” Flora said.

  Saul Masliansky plied his gavel once more. “Will the contenders please come forward?” he said.

  “There he goes, selling his paper again,” some wit shouted, and got a laugh.

  Flora made her way up to the platform. So did Herman Bruck, in a dark gray suit that shouted respectability at the world. Had Flora been respectable in the same sort of way, she wouldn’t have presumed to seek the Congressional nomination in the first place.

  Herman nodded to her. He took her more seriously than he had before her Remembrance Day speech, but not so seriously as he would have taken, say, Saul Masliansky. Masliansky, after all, was a man, not someone he’d pestered to go to the cinema with him.

  The chairman said, “We tossed a coin to see who would talk to you when. Our esteemed comrade, Mr. Herman Bruck here, won the toss. He chose to speak first. Herman Bruck!”

  “Friends, Myron Zuckerman gave our district the best years of his life,” Bruck said, and won sympathetic applause from everyone who revered Zuckerman’s memory-which meant from everyone in the hall. “I aim to go to Philadelphia to do my best to fill his shoes, to keep the Fourteenth Ward as it has been, at the forefront in the fight against the trusts, and, I hope-alevai-to work with the next president of the United States of America, Senator Eugene V. Debs of Indiana!”

  The Socialists’ national convention wouldn’t come until next month, but Debs’ nomination to face TR was a forgone conclusion. Again, Herman Bruck got loud cheers. Flora did her best not to let that worry her. He’d been applauded for invoking Zuckerman’s name, and again for invoking that of Debs. She wondered when he’d say anything about himself that deserved cheers.

  As far as she was concerned, he never did. That didn’t mean he didn’t get applause, only that he was breathtakingly conventional in every position he took. He might as well have said, I agree with what all the other Socialists think, half a dozen times and then sat down.

  After a while-after what seemed to Flora a very long while-he did sit down. Saul Masliansky said, “And now, Miss Flora Hamburger will tell you why she thinks Herman Bruck has been talking nonsense for the past twenty minutes.” He grinned at her.

  It wasn’t quite the introduction she’d expected, but it would serve. She could make it serve, though that meant junking the opening she’d worked out in advance. She decided to take the chance: “Herman Bruck doesn’t talk nonsense. He’s a good Socialist. If you choose him, I will support him-that’s what the caucus
is all about. But-”

  She took a deep breath. “Herman Bruck is safe. Is being safe what the Socialist Party, the party of revolution, stands for? I don’t think so. He tells you what we’ve done in the past. He tells you what he’ll do in the future if you choose him as your candidate. The one is just the same as the other. If we elect people who will go on doing the same things, are we radicals or are we reactionaries?” The talk with Maria before she’d come up here was paying dividends-an alarmingly capitalistic thought for a would-be Socialist candidate.

  “If you want life to go on as it always has, if you don’t want to work for radical change in this country, if you don’t want peace between us and our neighbors, you might as well vote for a Democrat. If you want to let Teddy Roosevelt know we don’t intend to let war mean unending oppression of the proletariat, you’ll choose me.”

  She embroidered on that theme for a while, then returned to the other: “As I say, Herman Bruck is a sound man. He is a safe man. I think he’s sound and safe enough to lose this November. If you want someone to run hard and do everything she can to get this seat out of TR’s clutches, you’ll vote for me today and you’ll vote for me again in the fall.”

  She stepped back. She thought she got as much applause as Herman Bruck had. More? She couldn’t tell. Saul Masliansky said, “Now we fight it out. We have a waiting room for the two of you. We have two waiting rooms, in fact, if you’d rather-?”

  “It’s all right,” Flora said. “We aren’t enemies.” Herman Bruck nodded.

  They didn’t say much to each other in the waiting room. Flora sat in a hard chair under one of the electric lamps hanging from the ceiling. Bruck smoked a cigarette, and another, and another. Through the closed door, Flora listened to the shouts from the caucus. She wished she were out there. She and Bruck weren’t members, so she couldn’t be.

  After what seemed like forever, the door opened. She and Herman Bruck both sprang to their feet, facing Masliansky with the same eager anxiety fathers in a hospital maternity-ward waiting room showed when the doctor came in. But only one of them would get to keep this baby; like the one in the biblical story of Solomon, it was indivisible.

  “Mazeltov, Flora,” the caucus chairman said.

  Bruck stubbed out his last cigarette under the heel of his gleaming shoe. “Mazeltov,” he echoed. “Anything I can do, you know I will.” He managed a joke, something rare for him: “That’s true, even though you won’t go out with me.”

  “Thank you.” Flora felt light-headed. “Talk like that more often, and I might. But now”-she could hardly believe it-“let’s put this seat back where it belongs.”

  “I am godalmighty sick of troop trains,” Jefferson Pinkard announced to anybody who would listen as the one on which he was riding rumbled west through Texas toward the front line, which lay somewhere east of Lubbock.

  Nobody said anything. As best Jeff could tell, nobody had the energy to say anything. It was hot and muggy outside. That meant it was hotter and muggier on the train. Every window that would open was open. The breeze that came in was like the breath of hell, the occasional cinder or tiny bit of coal blowing in with the breeze only adding to the resemblance.

  Pinkard looked outside. Texas, as far as he could see, was nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles. It had been green and lush when the troop train pounded out of Arkansas. Some of the men who sounded as if they knew what they were talking about said parts of it were as swampy and wet as Louisiana, full of alligators and who could say what all else.

  This part of Texas wasn’t like that. If God had taken an iron about the size of South Carolina and pressed everything here down flat, that might have given the countryside its look. It was as hot as if it had just been ironed, too. They called it prairie, but wasn’t the prairie supposed to be green with grass? This was yellow at best, more often brown.

  “I never left home till they conscripted me,” Jeff went on after a while. “Way things look here, I ain’t never going to leave again once the war’s over, neither.” He sighed. “Birmingham, now, Birmingham is green all the time. Even in winter, most of the grass stays green. Does it ever even get green here?”

  “I don’t know why you complain so much, amigo,” Hip Rodriguez said from the seat behind him. “This land here, this is better than what I was farming.”

  “Better?” Pinkard awkwardly turned around to stare at the little Sonoran. “How in blazes could this be better than anything?”

  “It is very easy.” As Rodriguez made his points, he ticked them off on his fingers. “It is good flat land, not mountains like where I come from. It has not so much calor-heat. It gets more water-you can see.”

  “Maybe you can see,” Pinkard said stubbornly. “Looks dry as the desert the Israelites walked through to me.”

  Rodriguez laughed in his face. “You do not know what a desert is, if you call this a desert.” Only two things kept Jeff from starting a fight then and there. One was that he was in the Army, so he’d get in trouble. The other was that he really didn’t know what a desert was like. Next to Alabama land, what they had here was pretty appalling. He tried to picture in his mind the kind of land that would make west Texas look good.

  Mountains he could imagine. But land that was hotter and drier than this? If this wasn’t hell, that would have to be.

  The train chugged to a stop outside a little town called Post. To Jeff Pinkard’s jaundiced eye, the town, as they rolled through it, seemed as sunbaked and defeated as the country surrounding it. The wooden buildings hadn’t been painted or whitewashed for years, and most of the timber was more nearly gray than brown or yellow. Even the bricks seemed faded from their proper, bright oranges.

  When Pinkard, grunting and sweating under the weight of his kit, came out of the car in which he’d been ensconced so long and so uncomfortably, he heard artillery off in the distance. When he’d been fighting the Negroes of the Black Belt Socialist Republic, that had been an encouraging sound: his side had the guns, and the enemy didn’t. It wasn’t going to be like that here.

  Captain Connolly addressed the formed-up company: “We are going to stop the damnyankees, men. Not only are we going to stop them, we are going to throw them back into New Mexico where they belong.” That got a few yips and cheers from the men, but not many. It was too hot. They were too tired.

  Connolly went on, “This isn’t going to be the kind of fighting they have on the other side of the Mississippi. Too many miles for that, and not enough men filling them. If we dig trenches, they go around, and the same the other way. Not a lot of railroads around here, either. Nobody can keep big armies supplied away from the tracks. So we’re going to drive the Yankees back toward Lubbock, and we are going to have detachments out to make sure they don’t get around us while we’re doing it. That last is what the particular task of this company will be. Any questions?”

  Nobody said anything. The captain didn’t even give the order to march. He just started marching, and the men followed: not only the company, but a couple of regiments’ worth. Pinkard and his companions were somewhere in the middle of the column. The dust was of a slightly redder shade than the butternut of his uniform. It got in his nose. It got in his eyes. It got in his mouth, so his teeth crunched whenever they came together.

  He wasn’t sure whether this had been a road before the war started. It was a road now, a road defined by marching men and by the ruts of wagons and those of motor trucks. It led to a bridge over a river that didn’t look wide or deep enough to need bridging.

  “If that poor thing was in Alabama,” he said to Stinky Salley, “they’d ship it back to its mama, on account of it’s too little to show itself in public.”

  “We’re not in Alabama any more,” Salley replied with his usual annoying precision. “Or maybe you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Oh, put a sock in it, Stinky,” Pinkard answered, too weary even to threaten doing any of the drastic things Salley so richly deserved. The captain came by just then, making sure ev
erybody in the company-less a couple of men who’d passed out, overcome by the heat-was in good shape. Jeff called to him: “Sir, what river is this?”

  “Unless the map they gave me is a liar-and God knows it’s possible, way the hell out here-this is the Double Mountain fork of the Brazos,” Connolly answered. Answering the next question before Pinkard could ask it, he went on, “From what they say, it’s supposed to have a lot more water in it in the wintertime.”

  “Couldn’t hardly have much less,” Pinkard said.

  The bridge, when he got to it, looked to have been there a while; it wasn’t a recent erection by the Confederate Army Engineering Corps. That argued the road had been there a while, too. He wondered where it ended up going. As far as he could tell, it was a road to nowhere.

  They camped a little north of the Double Mountain fork. Try as he would, Jeff couldn’t see the mountains that were supposed to have given the fork its name. The ground was a little higher up ahead, but so what? He supposed that, in these parts, anything high enough to serve as a watershed got reckoned a mountain.

  Night fell. It didn’t get any cooler, not so far as Pinkard could tell. He ambled over to a chow wagon. The Negro cook was serving up stale bread, tinned beef, and coffee. “Reckon I’d do just about anything for some of Emily’s fried chicken right about now,” he said mournfully, examining the unappetizing supper.

  “Hey, soldier, you’ve got food,” said Sergeant Albert Cross, a veteran with the ribbon for the Purple Heart above his left breast pocket. “Believe me, time’ll come when you’re glad you’ve got anything. Ever carve a steak off a mule three days gone?”

  He didn’t sound as if he was joking. He didn’t look as if he was joking, either. Sergeants seemed to have had their sense of humor surgically removed when they were children. Pinkard ate what was set before him. He unrolled his blanket and lay down on top of it. The next thing he knew, the sun was shining in his face.

  The force of which he was a part resumed their march not long after sunrise. “We’ll take that high ground,” Stinky Salley declared in his best impression of the Secretary of War, “and then we’ll defend it from the damnyankees when they show up.”