by John Barnes
They stared at me, and I thought for one long instant that I’d blown it; then suddenly they were taking turns shaking my hand. “Then—you were at Gettysburg?”
Maybe I had just taken a hard hit on the head in that parking garage … but I played along. “Captured just after.”
“Damn! Then you almost …” and his voice dropped to a whisper … “you almost made the boat.”
I shrugged.
“You don’t talk much, do you? You do stay over in Berkeley, it’s all vets and poets and baxters, isn’t it? Feel more at home there?”
I nodded. I suspected that if my hair and lack of tie had made that kind of difference, then I probably would have felt more at home in Berkeley.
“Well, we’ll get you back there. Jeez, if the regular cops got you, they’d spend an hour kicking you just to stay in practice. No wonder he can’t get work, Wim. His permit must be stamped that he’s only employable as a last resort … and the last I knew the Black Mark guys were getting two cups of dry oatmeal, a cup of beans, and a vitamin pill per day from the Dole. When was the last time you had meat, son?”
“Couple days ago,” I said, which was true, subjectively anyway. “Somebody gave me dinner.”
They glanced at each other. “Well, you’re getting a haircut, a hamburger, and bus fare back to Berkeley,” Bob said. “And after that, don’t come this way again. Your best bet, no kidding—I’ve known one or two this worked for—get a freight out of town and get out to the fields. Lose your papers and get another freight. Walk into a forced labor camp and act shell-shocked. It’s three hard years, but they’ll feed you, and at the end you’ll come out as a John Doe, and you can get a job as a janitor or something. Beat the hell out of the way you’re living now. And it works as long as you don’t get caught.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
“Repeat it back to me.”
I did. He nodded, satisfied. “There’s a train out of Oakland with a lot of empty boxcars most mornings, about four A.M. Catch it soon, pal. If you’d been one block over, you’d have found yourself a real Nazi for a Good Neighbor, and you’d be spitting out your teeth right now. Maybe on your way back to be extradited and put in another Stalag. There’s plenty of folks over here who’d love to give you work and food, but they got to keep their heads down; most of ’em are like me, we never miss the VOA, but we sure don’t take any chances about it. Maybe it’ll all be different when the ship comes in.”
Wim grinned. “When the ship comes in, Bob, I’m going to have to lock you up.”
“Sure, if you let me shoot my boss first. I swear that’s what keeps a lot of us hoping, is the thought that we can dispose of all these petty weiners that Reconstruction left in place.”
It was all gibberish to me, but the point was that they were going to help me get to somewhere where I could be less conspicuous. And though I wasn’t ready to give up the fight, I’d at least learned from them how I could make myself fit into this world if I needed to, and that was good to know—because I just might need to.
So without much further ado, Wim shaved my head, and Bob went out and came back a bit later with a hamburger, a huge basket of fries, a big slice of apple pie, and a thermos of coffee. He said it was compliments of a “guy up the street that was at the Azores,” which at least gave me another battle to refer to.
I’m not bad at geography. The Azores are eight hundred miles west of Portugal; the Axis got nowhere near them in the World War II I knew. And I had about figured out why they were referring to Gettysburg … battles tend to happen in the same places over and over. The pass of Megiddo (or Armageddon) is up in the mountains of northern Israel, and the author of Revelations picked it as the site of the final battle because, probably, it had already been the site of so many battles. The same passes, river crossings, roads, and forests are attacked and defended again and again.
The reason Americans are less aware of this is because most of our continent has been at peace most of the time … but armies move on pathways dictated by terrain, and they run into each other in the same places century after century. Gettysburg is where an army moving north out of Virginia or the Chesapeake is apt to collide with one coming south from New York or Philly, or one coming east from the Ohio Valley. Pretty clearly Patton had made some kind of last-ditch stand there … and obviously, whether he’d won or not, it hadn’t worked out.
All these thoughts were hitting me as I stuffed the food in; the other thought crossing my mind was that in an occupied nation—were they still occupied? It didn’t quite sound like it—like the United States of this world, I would have to try not to get into any firefights. There were probably a substantial number of good guys like Bob and Wim around, and I didn’t want to kill any of that kind.
The burger was great, the fries were great, the pie was great. Appetite is the best sauce, and so forth. I wish I could say the same for the coffee, but it was cut so heavily with chicory that I could taste no coffee at all in it. I realized, somewhere in my second cup, that the “chick houses” of Berkeley were pretty clearly not the massage parlors one might have thought.
Raw chicory … a guy would have to spend a while getting used to it.
Finally Bob took me down to the end of the street and handed me fare for a bus; he showed me one coming along that had a long list of destinations, Berkeley among them. “Just stay quiet till you get home,” he said, and turned and went. I didn’t get a chance to thank him.
And a good thing, too. When I got on the bus, the driver said, “where to?” and pointed to a schedule of rates when I seemed puzzled. I said “Berkeley Main,” figuring that whatever that was it had to be somewhere reasonably close.
“You can take this bus all that way, but why don’t you take the direct route? About six blocks and that way—half the fare and a third of the time.”
The direction he pointed in was downhill, away from Bob’s block … something seemed slightly funny. “I don’t know the bus system at all well,” I admitted.
There were about six riders on this one and they all looked pretty bored; the driver shrugged. “This is a featherbed route, bud. They have me driving long distances just so’s I can finish out my time before retiring. The bus runs empty for most of the route, and I got no schedule to make. I get most of the way down to San Jose before I turn around and head the other way; the only regular riders I get are the cops coming off duty at the National Security station down by Moffet Field. I generally pull up there empty … and then it’s a long time till I get back to Berkeley.”
A bell went off in the back of my head. “Six blocks that way—”
“Is a bus that’ll get you there in less than an hour. Pay one price. This thing ain’t even good sight-seeing.”
I thanked him, got off the bus, watched him pull away, then moved quickly and quietly into an alley across the street. San Francisco is kind of a tangle, but anyone who’s learned to get around in Pittsburgh is hard to confuse about directions from then on. I got to the place he was talking about without poking my head out much, except occasionally to cross a busy street.
It occurred to me that good old Bob and Wim had learned a fair amount about me, that the food had delayed me a long time, that Bob had had plenty of time to make a phone call. And I found myself thinking … if a vet was discriminated against, how did one end up as a Home Guard? There was a sort of obvious answer.
Whether Wim was in on it or not, I couldn’t say. I never did find out. But I would bet he was … it’s pretty hard to avoid knowing that your friend is a fink.
But there was a news broadcast on continuously on that bus, and just as it pulled up to Berkeley Main (which turned out to be one of the buildings on the old campus—now a set of office buildings and small shops, kind of a giant mall—)I heard that the police were looking for a man in a red-and-blue-striped tie and a navy blue jacket who had somehow escaped from a bus on its way to the National Security facility. There was a brief congratulations to Robert Christian, an alert
Good Neighbor, for having spotted the man, and the news that the driver was being detained for questioning.
The red-and-blue tie went from my neck into the shopping bag of a lady getting off. I couldn’t take off the jacket without making my personal arsenal a bit more obvious, but there were plenty of blue jackets around. And despite the impression I’d gotten as I got off the bus at Berkeley Main, I noted most of the crowd was shaveheads like me.
If I could find someplace to lie low for a bit, things might blow over.
Good old Bob. He’d seemed like every regular guy you met back home. He probably was—but this place wasn’t anything like back home.
Checking menus in restaurant windows I figured out that I had the cash for two or three meals left over from that bus fare. If the ratio was what it was like back home, I could probably get things like bread and canned soup and so forth at groceries and stretch it out a few days.
I also had done a little more thinking and realized that if there were people looking for it, there was probably an underground to be looked for. The fact that they talked about my “just missing the boat” was extremely promising, too. There might even be somewhere to catch a boat to.
I needed to know a lot more, and the trouble was, I wasn’t sure where to look for the additional knowledge.
Berkeley was different—everywhere was different, but Berkeley more so. I realized there had probably been a lot of fighting down here, because so much of the area had been razed; the kind of charm that it had had was about two-thirds gone, with most of it replaced with big ugly block apartment buildings.
Still, there were signs that Berkeley was still Berkeley. I passed three chick houses, and all of them had notes for “poetry reading” and “American folk culture nights.” There was some odd graffiti on the walls; “1789!” was popular (I figured that was the year the Bill of Rights passed …) along with “BWRY—AA!” with the A’s intertwined. That took me a long time to figure out, till I saw another bit of graffiti with the intertwined A’s attached to the phrase “All American” and the word NO and a swastika below—so the AA meant “all American” and was a subversive slogan. Another anagram appeared on another building:
Y
RED
BLACK
L
O
WHITE!
Got it. The abbreviation was “Black White Red Yellow—All American!” Pretty clearly there was not only an underground around here, but one that was almost out in the open, at least a little bit. Moreover there was an enclosing arrowhead drawn around the top words, and that explained the little “bent arrow” shapes I’d seen in several spots.
That made me feel a little better, though no safer. There was an anti-Nazi underground, and one they weren’t suppressing very successfully. But I hadn’t found it yet, and I still had nowhere to sleep.
The other thing I noticed down here was that there were substantial numbers of men without ties, a few even wearing blue jeans, and some women with straight hair down to their shoulders and no makeup. There were also practically no cars on the street … probably nobody here could afford one.
A girl of maybe twenty-five walking by, hair to her shoulders, baggy sweater, dress not ironed, and sneakers, gave me a little smile, and I smiled back. At least she didn’t look like the robot people over on the other side of the Bay. She looked like she might speak to me—
Then an old school bus came around the corner, and people started giving shrill shepherd’s whistles and running into alleys. The girl turned and ran; I stayed for a second longer and saw the bus pull up.
It was a Boy Scout troop bus. On its side was a troop number, and what I guessed must now be the Boy Scout emblem—an American eagle on a trefoil, just as it was in my timeline, but here the American eagle gripped the twin lightning bolts of the SS.
The kids piling out of the bus looked like any other Boy Scouts, but they carried wooden sticks, what looked like pieces of inch-and-a-half dowel rod about two feet long. They were yelling at everyone as they came out, and they headed right for the stragglers—though not for me, it was pretty clear they were mostly after women and old people.
I froze for a second—I really didn’t want to get mixed up in anything, with no valid papers, and anyway I suspected what they were doing wasn’t illegal, but stopping them might be.
I turned as they went by me. The girl who had smiled at me had tripped over a curb, and before she could get to her feet, five of the boys jumped her, beating her buttocks with their sticks, whooping and hollering, grabbing at her to pull up her skirt.
Without thinking I waded in. None of them could have been older than thirteen; I noticed in an abstract way that they and all the other kids were screaming “Jooger, jooger, jooger!” at the people they were beating.
I grabbed the first one by the back of his shirt and the second by his scrawny neck, and slammed their heads together hard. They both fell down yelling with pain; the others jumped up in shock, and I treated myself to a trick roundhouse kick, getting all three kids in the face. All five of them ran screaming back toward the bus; apparently people hitting back was not in the script.
The girl jumped to her feet, glanced behind me, shouted something. I turned.
The bus driver—a guy who had “Scoutmaster” written all over him, one of those big hale-and-hearty types that you find with car dealerships or as school board members in small towns, was coming out of the bus with an electric cattle prod. Apparently he was the reinforcements.
He did not seem pleased with me. All around, the Boy Scouts were stopping to watch, and the people they had been beating on were getting away, so I guess I had accomplished something useful.
Mr. Scoutmaster Sir was striding along toward me, the prod half-extended, and I could tell he figured I’d break and run. Of course, I knew I had the .45, and he didn’t.
But I didn’t want to waste a round, and the way he was coming on I didn’t have to. When he reached out with the prod, I had already lunged inside his guard, and I slapped the prod to the side. He had just time to look surprised before I kicked him in the balls, giving it everything I had. He dropped the prod and fell groaning to his knees; I brought both hands up over my head, clenched together in a fist, and whipped them overhead and down to the back of his head as I brought my knee up, trapping his head in the smashing blow and shattering his nose and teeth.
That seemed to be a signal; the streets were suddenly boiling with angry people, all closing in on the Scouts. If I hadn’t seen the little bastards in action before, I might have felt sorry for them—but I had, and I enjoyed the spectacle of their being cornered and kicked bloody. Apparently these little defenders of public order and the New American Way had never found out about people hitting back.
The girl was at my elbow. “You’ve got to run. Come with me.”
She was obviously right, so I followed her down several streets, zigging, zagging, and backtracking till we were far enough away so that we didn’t see anyone else running or acting like anything was unusual. Then she took my hand and said, “Try to look like you’re in love.”
We walked slowly up the street together, then made an abrupt left into a small, older cottage that had a sign on the door: “Berkeley Free Library.”
The inside of the front room was lined with books, with shelves visible through the doorways to the other rooms, and there was a big wraparound desk in the middle. The chairs and tables didn’t even come close to matching each other, and there was just one person in there, a short, slightly built guy, shaveheaded but not wearing a tie, in a pink shirt and baggy gray pants. He looked to be about thirty; he could have been a mildly eccentric professor back home.
“Anybody been in while I’ve been gone?” the girl asked.
“Nope, Sandy, nobody. As usual, nobody wants to read what you have. But I see you’ve found yet another partner for your life of sleazy abandon.”
“Glad to hear there was nobody—this time. Then we were never gone, and my friend here
was with me the whole time.”
The little guy whistled. His glasses were pretty thick, and they slid down to the tip of his big nose easily, revealing large dark eyes, so he looked sort of like a bewildered owl. “Yeah, what did he do? And what did you do?”
“Oh, the Boy Scouts were pogging Berkeley again. This guy decked the Scoutmaster, maybe hard enough to kill him. Started this medium-level riot … probably there’ll be reprisals. Thought we better get him under wraps.”
The little guy scratched his head vigorously. “Easier said than done, kid. Buddy, you wouldn’t by any chance be the guy that escaped off a bus a while back this afternoon?”
“My name is Mark,” I said. I’d gotten tired of being called buddy and pal; it was too much like hanging out with my father’s friends. “And yep, I probably am. While I’m at it I had something to do with the warehouse fire over on the other side, too.”
“You mean the one that all the cops went to, and there was a denial on the radio that there had been a fire, or in fact that there had ever been a building there? Anyone ever tell you you cause trouble wherever you go?”
I liked his voice—it was a little nasal, maybe, but there was something in it that told you he was tough underneath—he could look at anything and report it honesty, could be killed but not intimidated, didn’t know how to see with any eyes but his own.
“I’ve heard that,” I said. “What’s our next step?”
He sighed. “Well, I’d like to make you wait three hours while I keep working here. I have a pile of notes I should make about Walt Whitman, if I’m ever going to get my little book about him done. Somebody’s got to keep the torch of American scholarship alight … but then of course somebody’s also got to keep the American resistance going. If I didn’t have Sandy to run the library, I’d collapse under the load entirely.”
