He had to gather himself before he answered, “You don’t need to know that. You don’t need to know why. The less you know, the better for everybody.”
“So you say,” Scipio replied.
“Yeah. I do. And I say something else, too: you don’t want to mess with me. Anything happens to me, I got stuff written down. You’ll wish you was dead by the time they get through with you—and with your family, too.”
Bathsheba, whom he’d loved since they met at a boarding house in the Terry. Cassius, who had reached the age when every boy—almost a man—was as much a rebel as the Red he’d been named for. Cassius’s older sister, Antoinette, old enough for a husband now—but in these mad times, how much sense did marrying make?
Scipio wasn’t the only one whose life Jerry Dover held in the hollow of his hand. Everything in the world that mattered to him—and if Dover made a fist . . .
“All right, Mr. Dover,” he said, still with those white men’s tones. They helped him mask his feelings, and his feelings needed masking just then. “I shall do what you require of me.”
“Figured you would,” the restaurant manager said complacently. “Talkin’ fancy like that may help you, too.”
But Scipio held up a hand. “I had not finished. I shall do what you require—but you will pay my wife my usual wages and tips while I am away, and—”
“Wait a minute,” Dover broke in. “You think you can dicker with me?”
“Yes,” Scipio answered. “I can bargain with you because I can read and write, too. You have a way to protect yourself against me. That knife cuts both ways, Mr. Dover. I shall do what you require, and I shall carefully note everything I have done, and I shall leave my notes in a safe place. I have those, and they have nothing to do with this restaurant.”
Dover glared at him. “I ought to turn you in now.”
“That is your privilege.” Scipio masked terror with a butler’s impenetrable calm. “But if you do, you will have to find someone else to do your service, someone on whom you do not have such a strong hold.” He waited. Jerry Dover went on scowling, scowling fearsomely. But Dover nodded in the end. He hadn’t intended to end up with a bargain—he’d intended just to impose his will, as whites usually intended and usually did with blacks—but he’d ended up with one after all.
****
Dr. Leonard O’Doull was a tall, thin man with a long jaw and a face as Irish as his name. He worked in a U.S. Army aid station a few hundred yards behind the line in Virginia. A few hundred yards, in this case, was enough to put him on the north side of the Rapidan when the front was on the south side, in the almost impenetrable second-growth country called the Wilderness. He didn’t like that. Getting wounded men back over the river meant delay, and delay, sometimes, meant a death that faster treatment could have stopped.
But there was no help for it. The U.S. bridgehead over the Rapidan was small and under constant assault by air, armor, and artillery. The Confederates were no worse about respecting the Red Cross than their counterparts in green-gray, but there was nowhere in the bridgehead itself that an aid station could hope to escape the evil chances of war.
First Sergeant Granville McDougald waxed philosophical when O’Doull complained: “We do what we can do, Doc, not what we want to do.”
“Yeah, Granny, I know.” O’Doull had an M.D. He’d had a civilian practice up in Rivière-du-Loup, in the Republic of Quebec, where he’d settled after a stint as an army surgeon there in the Great War. McDougald had been a medic in the last go-round, and ever since. O’Doull wasn’t at all sure which of them knew more about medicine. He went on, “Just ’cause I know it doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
“Well, no,” McDougald allowed. “But there’s not a hell of a lot of point to flabbling about things you can’t help.”
O’Doull grunted. Like any doctor, he was an officer—he had a major’s oak leaves on his shoulder straps. Like any long-service noncom, McDougald had ways of subverting the privileges rank gave to officers. Being right most of the time was not the least of them.
Before O’Doull could do anything more than grunt, a flight of northbound shells roared by overhead. The sound put him in mind of a freight train rumbling down the track. Confederate artillery constantly tried to disrupt U.S. supply lines.
Disrupt supply lines. That was a nice, bloodless phrase. What the Confederates were really trying to do was blow up trucks and motorcars and trains, to turn the vehicles into fireballs and the men inside them into burnt, mangled, screaming lumps of flesh. That was what it boiled down to.
Granville McDougald also listened to the shells flying north. “Didn’t hear any gurgles that time,” he said.
“Happy day,” O’Doull answered. And it was a happy day . . . of sorts. Rounds filled with poison gas made a distinctive glugging noise on their way through the air. Mustard gas hardly ever killed quickly. But the blisters it raised on the skin could keep a man out of action for weeks. And the blisters it raised on the lungs could keep him an invalid for years, strangling him half an inch at a time and making all his remaining days a hell on earth.
Nerve agents, on the other hand . . . Get a whiff of those, or get even a little drop on your skin, and the world would go dark because your pupils contracted to tiny dots. Your lungs would lock up, and so would your heart, and so would your other muscles, too—but when your lungs and heart stopped working the rest of your muscles didn’t matter a whole hell of a lot.
Soldiers on both sides carried syringes full of atropine. Anyone who thought he was poisoned with a nerve agent was supposed to stab himself in the thigh and ram the plunger home. If he was right, the atropine would block the effects of the poison gas. If he was wrong, the antidote that would have saved him would poison him instead. That wasn’t usually fatal, they claimed.
All the same, it made for one hell of a war.
“You know,” O’Doull said meditatively, “twenty-five years ago I thought we’d hit bottom. I thought we were doing the worst things to each other that human beings could think of to do.” He laughed—in lieu of sobbing or screaming. “Only goes to show what I know, doesn’t it?”
“Well, I don’t suppose you were the only one with that idea,” McDougald said. “Kind of makes you wonder where we go from here, doesn’t it?”
“Tabernac!” O’Doull said, and Granny McDougald laughed at him. When he didn’t watch himself, he swore in Quebecois French. Why not? He’d spoken it every day for a quarter of a century. English was the rusty language for him. He was surprised it had come back as well as it had. He’d read it all through his time in Rivière-du-Loup, to keep up with medical literature. That had probably helped.
U.S. counterbattery fire answered the C.S. artillery. By the sound of things, the U.S. bombardment had plenty of poison gas in it. Intellectually, O’Doull understood why. The gas would either deny Confederate guns to their gunners or force the men to don masks and heavy, rubberized outfits that covered every inch of them. Those were unpleasant in cool weather. In the summer, there was some question whether gas or protection from it was more lethal.
As far as O’Doull was concerned, though, the intellect had little to do with gas. He loathed it, pure and simple. He’d never known a doctor or a medic who didn’t. How could anyone not loathe stuff made to incapacitate and torment?
People on both sides of the front seemed to have no trouble at all.
Savagely, O’Doull said, “I wish to God they’d test that shit”—he could swear in English, too—“on the people who invent it and the people who improve it and the people who make it. Then they’d be sure they’ve got it just right.”
“Works for me,” McDougald said. “Write up a memo and send it on to the Ordnance Bureau. See what they have to say about it.”
“I’ll be damned if I’m not tempted to,” O’Doull said. “What can they do? Court-martial me and throw me out of the Army? I’d thank ’em and go home, and they’d never see my ass again.”
“Do it,” McDou
gald urged. “I’ll sign it. They want to bust me down to private, I don’t care. I’d be doing the same thing with a lot of stripes or without any, and I won’t get rich on Army pay no matter what grade I’m in.”
Before O’Doull could say anything to that, a shout from outside the aid station brought him back to the real and immediate world of war: “Doc! Hey, Doc! You there? We got a casualty for you!”
“No, I’m not here, Eddie,” O’Doull yelled back. “I went to Los Angeles for the sun.”
“Funny, Doc. Funny like a crutch.” Eddie and another corpsman, a big, burly, taciturn fellow named Sam, carried a stretcher into the tent. Both medics wore smocks with Red Crosses fore and aft, Red Cross armbands, and Red Crosses painted on the fronts and backs of their helmets. Corpsmen on both sides sometimes got shot anyway.
The corporal on the stretcher wasn’t at death’s door. He was, in fact, swearing a blue streak. He had most of one trouser leg cut away, and a blood-soaked bandage on that thigh. His opinion of the Confederate who’d shot him wasn’t far from Sophocles’ of Oedipus.
“Round tore out a big old chunk of meat,” Eddie said. “Missed the femoral artery, though.”
“I guess it did,” Granville McDougald said. “He’d be holding up a lily if the artery got cut.”
O’Doull nodded. A man could bleed out in a hurry if anything happened to his femoral artery. “Let’s get him on the table,” O’Doull said. “I’ll do what I can to patch him up, but he’s going to be on the shelf for a while.” He spoke to the noncom: “You’ve got yourself a hometowner, buddy.”
“Oh, yeah, just what I fuckin’ need,” the corporal said as Eddie and Sam lifted him off the stretcher and onto the operating table. “Got a letter from my sis last week—my wife’s fuckin’ around with the fuckin’ milkman. I go back to fuckin’ St. Paul, I’ll beat the fuck out of her.”
A man of strong opinions but limited vocabulary, O’Doull thought. He nodded to McDougald: “Pass gas for me, Granny.” Before the corporal could editorialize about that, McDougald stuck an ether cone over his face. He got out another couple of blurry four-letter words, then went limp.
“Watch what the fuck you’re doin’ with the fuckin’ scalpel, Doc,” Eddie said.
“Everybody’s a funny man,” O’Doull said mournfully. Eddie wasn’t half so impassioned as the corporal. Of course, he hadn’t just stopped a bullet, either. O’Doull cut away still more of the trouser leg and the wound dressing, too. Had the corporal stopped the bullet, or had it just taken a bite out of him and kept on going? O’Doull would have bet the round was long gone, but he did some probing all the same. You never could tell.
“Anything?” McDougald asked.
“Doesn’t look like it,” O’Doull answered. “They can X-ray him when they get him back to the division hospital, but it sure as hell looks like a hometowner to me. I’m going to try to spread his skin over as much of the wound as it’ll cover, tie off some of the bigger bleeders, dust him with sulfa and bandage him up, and then send him on his merry way.”
“Make sure you don’t tie off the artery when you’re fooling around in there,” McDougald warned.
“I’ll be careful.” O’Doull knew some doctors would have got their noses out of joint at a warning from a mere medic. You wouldn’t make a mistake like that if you were paying attention to what you were doing. But you could if you got careless. Granny helped make sure O’Doull didn’t.
The wound wasn’t pretty after he got done with it, but he thought the corporal had a good prognosis. Whether the noncom’s wife had a good prognosis might be a different story. When O’Doull said as much, McDougald said, “This guy won’t enter the hundred-yard dash in the Olympics any time soon. Maybe she can outrun him.”
“Olympics. Right.” O’Doull turned to Eddie and Sam. “Take him back to division. Tell ’em to keep an eye on his blood pressure, give him plasma if it falls. I don’t think it will—he looks pretty good—but they should monitor it.”
“Right, Doc,” Eddie said. Sam nodded—a paragraph from him.
O’Doull let out a sigh after they carried the wounded corporal away. “Another miracle of modern medicine,” he said.
McDougald clucked at his sarcastic tone. “Hey, you did good, Doc. I think that guy’ll be fine, and he lost a lot of meat off the bone.”
“Only thing I did that a surgeon in the War of Secession couldn’t have was put sulfa powder on the wound,” O’Doull said. “That doesn’t make me feel special, believe me.”
“Leg wounds are what they are,” McDougald answered with a shrug. “Nobody in the War of Secession knew anything about X-rays or plasma, I’ll tell you that. And the old-timers couldn’t do anything about chest or belly wounds—they had to watch people die of shock and blood poisoning. We’ve got a real chance against them—well, some, anyhow.”
“Hot damn.” But O’Doull shook his head. “Sorry, Granny. I’m tired as hell.” He didn’t see that changing any time soon, either.
****
Honolulu was a nervous town these days. With the Japanese holding Midway and with their airplane carrier probing down from the northwest, all of the main Sandwich Islands were nervous these days. The United States had taken them from Britain at the start of the Great War, and it looked altogether too possible that they might change hands again in the not very indefinite future.
George Enos, Jr., understood exactly why the Sandwich Islands were nervous. His destroyer, the USS Townsend, was in dry dock at Pearl Harbor. Japanese carrier aircraft had pummeled her when she poked her nose up too close to Midway. There were no U.S. airplane carriers in the Pacific right now. Sending ships around the Horn wasn’t easy, fast, or efficient—and the fight in the North Atlantic was right at the USA’s front door. U.S. warships and what chunks of the German High Seas Fleet that could get out of the North Sea squared off there against the British, Confederate, and French Navies. The Sandwich Islands? The Sandwich Islands were a long way from anywhere.
The chief of George’s twin 40mm antiaircraft gun owned the rock-ribbed Republican name of Fremont Blaine Dalby. His politics matched his name, which made him a queer bird. The Republicans, to the left of the Democrats and the right of the Socialists, had won few elections since the 1880s.
“You coming into town with us, George?” he asked. The gun crew had got a twenty-four-hour liberty. The whole ship’s crew was getting liberty in rotation while repair teams set the destroyer to rights again.
“I dunno,” George said uncomfortably.
“I dunno.” Dalby mocked not only his indecision but his flat Boston accent, which sounded especially absurd in the petty officer’s falsetto. “Well, you better make up your mind pretty damn quick.”
“Yeah.” George didn’t mind going into Honolulu with his buddies. He didn’t mind drinking with them, even if he got blind drunk. Part of him, though, did mind the idea of standing in line at one of Honolulu’s countless brothels for a quick piece of ass. He was married and had a couple of boys, and he’d never fooled around on Connie. Of course, he’d never been so far from her, either, or had so little chance of seeing her any time soon. When he was out on a fishing run, he made up for lost time as soon as his boat got back to T Wharf. He wasn’t coming back to T Wharf, or even to Boston, maybe for years.
And Fremont Dalby knew exactly what ailed him. The gun-crew chief gave him an elbow in the ribs. “What she don’t know won’t hurt her,” he said.
“Yeah,” George said again. Connie was a long way away. His pals, the men he ate and slept with, the men he fought beside, were right here. He didn’t want them to think he was a wet blanket. And I don’t have to stand in line at a whorehouse, he told himself. That helped salve his conscience. He nodded. “Sure, I’ll come.”
“Oh, boy.” Dalby made as if to bow. “Thank you so much. Well, come on, then, if you’re coming.”
Along with the other ratings given liberty, the gun crew showed their paperwork before leaving the barracks and then headed for the n
earest trolley stop. From the Pearl City stop, they rode east past Custer Field, one of the many airstrips on Oahu. Even as they passed, Wright fighters were landing and taking off. An air umbrella floated over Oahu at all times.
“I wish we’d had some of those guys up over our heads when the Japs jumped us,” George said.
“Would’ve been nice,” agreed Fritz Gustafson, the loader on the twin 40mm cannon. The rest of the men from the gun crew nodded.
“Technically, we were under air cover,” Dalby said. Several people, George Enos, Jr., among them, let out snorts, guffaws, hoots, and other expressions of derision and disbelief. Dalby held up his right hand, as if taking oath in court. “So help me, we were. Fighters could have flown up from here to the ship and got back.”
“Big fucking deal,” George said. Others expressed similar opinions, some even more colorfully.
“Yeah, I know,” Dalby said. “It would’ve taken ’em most of an hour to get there, the fight would’ve been over by the time they did, and they couldn’t’ve hung around anyway, not if they did want to get back. But we were under air cover, by God. That’s how the brass sees it.”
The way George saw it, the brass was full of idiots. He would have found formidable support for that view among ratings—and probably more than he would have imagined among officers as well. Flabbling about it would just have ruined the day, so he made himself keep quiet. The Sandwich Islands were too nice a place to waste time getting upset and fussing for no good reason.
It wasn’t too hot. It wasn’t too cold. From everything he’d heard, it never got too hot or too cold. The air was moist without being oppressively sticky, the way it got in Boston in the summertime. It could rain at any time of the day or night all year around, but it rarely rained hard. The hills north of Honolulu were impossibly green, the sky improbably blue, the Pacific bluer still.
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