by James Philip
Judy felt cold all over every time she thought about that day they left; they had been among the last people to get out before the barricades blocked every road. The looting and the killing had begun by then.
The Canadians had closed the border to US citizens within a week of the war; if Sam had not coached her to claim to be a Canadian national trying to get home with her husband, and that they had been robbed on the road and lost all their documents, they would never have got across the border alive. That was just ten days after the war; within a few days it became clear the most of the members of Judy’s extended, somewhat distant family in the Fraser Valley around Chilliwack were dead or missing, and that a winter in a tented refugee camp in British Columbia was going to be a desperately miserable, likely unsurvivable trial. Again, it was Sam who had decided that they had to move on.
‘The longer we stay here the harder it will be to get out of Canada,’ he had said and this time she had not argued. Among the refugees in the camps along the US-Canadian border the mood was one of desperation, desolation and terrifying paranoia. They were all ‘on the beach’ waiting for the end of the World; disease was taking its first dreadful toll of the old, the young, the sick and the injured. Most of the injured with severe burns had died in the first weeks. Those blinded by airbursts who were without friends or family members or somebody who was prepared to reduce their own chances of survival to care for them, wandered the camps or lay on filthy camp beds waiting to die, wasting away. There was no scope in the camps for caring for strangers; it was all one could do to go on living; for Judy and Sam to look after each other, no matter how heart-breaking it was to see the suffering and death all around. Such was the reality of the homeless survivors of the American North-West.
Canadian ships attempting to get past the US Navy blockade needed to be ‘repatriating’ Americans. In those weeks after the war there was no talk of the United States allowing in the destitute and the starving unless it was solemnly obligated, and so Judy had become again a native of Washington State. There were no civilian flights south, they had tried and failed to get on one of the occasional US Air Force shuttles out of Vancouver to Portland. Eventually, they had camped out in the docks for nearly a fortnight before talking themselves onto a rusty steamer running down to Tacoma. The ship almost sank in a storm and took four days to make the short passage down the coast, and when at last they arrived there had been no welcome in the land of the free. At Tacoma Judy and Sam had been herded into a displaced persons camp; if they had allowed themselves to be separated they would probably never have seen each other again, such was the chaos, and such was the morbidity among the inmates of the South Seattle camps. They had become savages in that camp, ready to fight or run at a moment’s panic. Sam had smashed a man’s skull one night with a hammer; the man had been one of three attempting to rape Judy. He had probably killed that man, he had shattered a second man’s arm with a flurry of swinging blows, screaming like a madman before the third had finally backed away and together, she and Sam had found another place to hide in the darkness. They had never talked again of that night. Everybody they met on the road, everybody they spoke to had a nightmare tale of woe and regret, of friends and family lost, of the unending tragedy of the age.
Lately, their fraught little odyssey had become the source and inspiration for a slew of songs in Sam’s burgeoning self-penned repertoire as he plied the clubs and bars of the Sunset Strip. Their time on the run had been a living nightmare which by rights, they ought never to have survived. A woman alone would certainly not have survived.
Over a year after the war the mood of the times was both odd and contrary, Judy reflected. Once she and Sam had found safe haven at Gretsky’s and he had set about re-connecting with ‘the scene’, she had quickly got used to the otherness of life in the canyon, and almost overnight the loss and disaster of the October War had faded into her personal background. Sitting on the veranda of Gretsky’s with Sabrina while Sam picked strings and played with melodies, singing quietly in that unschooled, attention-grabbing way of his, she felt herself to be a different person, a stranger to the woman who until last fall had been obsessed with paying the mortgage to keep a home her husband – whom she had stopped loving years ago – was never coming back to. The California weather was a revelation; she adored wearing thin, lightweight flowing cotton dresses, and luxuriated in the dry wind and the warmth that seemed to permeate her northern soul. She was so used to the rain and the cold, and to the wintery sunshine of the North-West, that the cool of the hills overlooking West Hollywood was like some temperate Shangri-La, and the Canyon, a dream world.
“Who are you writing to, babe?” Sam asked, stifling a yawn as he shuffled sleepily into the big room at the back of Gretsky’s. His dark hair fell to his shoulders. He had shaved off his beard a week ago, but not shaved since and he was barefoot in faded jeans and a gaudy unbuttoned shirt. He leaned over Judy and they kissed in that intimately lazy, unselfconscious way lover’s do, regardless of witnesses. He rested his hand on Judy’s belly.
“I’m writing your Ma a letter,” she informed the man.
Sam sank onto the old sofa beside Judy.
“I’ll send it when the baby comes.”
“Oh, right.” Sam rubbed his eyes. It was nearly two months since Judy had persuaded him to write to his parents in Boston and ‘come clean’ about her. He ought to have told his folks about Judy and the fact that she was ‘the one’ before but somehow, so much had happened in the last year that the only way he could really tell the story was in verse and songs. The business of writing it down chronologically or of coherently attempting to communicate it all was a constant struggle. But he had written to his folks, done the deed, felt good about it afterwards and hoped his Ma and Pa would forgive him for not writing to them sooner, other than to say that he was still alive and where he could be mailed. All things considered things were going so well he did not want to do anything to risk breaking the spell.
Sam did not know how to interpret ‘I’ll send it when the baby comes,’ and his eyes briefly clouded with concern.
“I’m perfectly fine,” Judy scolded him gently. “But it will be nice to be able to tell your Ma what her grandson or granddaughter’s name is, don’t you think?”
Sam yawned, reassured.
“Doug wants me to meet some guys from Columbia Records this afternoon,” he explained, trying to make it sound like a throwaway remark and failing dismally.
Doug Weston was the immensely tall, irrepressible and sometimes manic owner of The Troubadour at 9081 Santa Monica Boulevard. Doug had opened the club first as a sixty seat coffee house on La Cienega Boulevard, and moved into the current venue – which could hold as many as four hundred people – in 1961. Doug thought he was bigger deal than he actually was but he knew what he liked and he was not subtle about how he went about getting it. He and Sam had hit it off from day one back in the old pre-war World; and when Sam had walked back through the door of the Troubadour in March he had been welcomed like the prodigal returned. In his absence – trying to stay alive and then to get out of the American North-West – Doug had been playing the demo of his song Brothers Across the Water, a rites of passage ballad about the last time he saw his brother Walter before he headed west, to all and sundry. In Doug Weston, Sam had acquired a self-appointed and somewhat possessive ‘promoter’ in Los Angeles. That was the problem with Doug, once he discovered you he thought he owned you. But Sam could live with that. The money from his residency at The Troubadour was never going to make him a rich man but he had responsibilities now and a foot on the ladder was priceless. A lot of people had heard him at The Troubadour, word of mouth mattered and other gigs at other clubs kept him circulating and more than paying his and Judy’s way at Gretsky’s. The weirdest thing was that since the October War, people had acquired a real appetite for his stuff. It was as if even here in LA, on the surface thriving and untouched by the war, people were deeply, indelibly scarred just under the skin and badly needed to i
f not empathise, then at least know what it was like for the people and places farther north that were blighted forever.
“I sang The Ladies of the Canyon for the first time last night,” Sam confessed. He had honestly believed it was a coy little song, a little cheesy, a lullaby. “Weirdest thing,” he added enigmatically.
“How so?”
“There were women crying,” he confessed, a little perplexed.
Judy said nothing.
Often when she was alone she would hum and sing snatches of the songs she had listened to her lover developing and crafting, endlessly practicing; always, she came back to The Ladies of the Canyon. Sam readily confessed that the song was about her, and about Sabrina and the other women he had known before the war, a song about discovering what love really was. Sam claimed he was misunderstood, that his lyrics were exactly what they seemed to be, that there were no deep insights, meanings or passions buried in the rhymes. He always said a thing ‘was what it was’ for people to make of it whatever they would.
Miranda dreams of kinder days...
Sabrina walks on down to Catalina...
Sisters lost in other years...
Paint a picture gold and silver...
Judy’s eyes in the morning light...
The Ladies of the Canyon ever bright...
Every verse seemed to have a line that stuck in one’s head the very first time one heard a song like The Ladies of the Canyon.
Sabrina had finally told Judy all about Miranda Sullivan. Chapter and verse, basically. Judy also knew that Sabrina and Sam had been casual lovers up to a few months before the war and while she was curious – only a little - about the other women in Sam’s songs; she was not so curious that she ever wanted to talk to him about it. Sam was a kind, gentle smart, handsome guy and everywhere he went he carried a guitar. What was there not to like? He could get laid pretty much when he wanted and she did not own him. She had met Sam at a peculiar time – in hindsight her own state of mind had been unsettled as if she had sensed the impending disaster – and they had got to know each other during the worst of times, and built the sort of bonds that were not about to get broken any time soon. Sam had killed for her; and she would have killed for him if it had come to it.
“Meeting guys from Columbia Records has to be good?” Judy asked, breaking from her introspection.
“Maybe,” Sam grinned. “Record company guys are sharks. The ones who work for the big companies are twenty times worse than little pricks like Johnny Seiffert.”
Judy hoped this was an exaggeration.
Johnny’s Parties was the ‘joke song’ in Sam’s normal set. In it the eponymous Mr Seiffert – the meanest of mean ‘music hall shysters’ – was pilloried with a cruel and damming irony that she had never previously suspected her lover capable.
“These dudes are bad news,” Sam sighed. “Doug’s a tool if you cross him but the stiffs in suits are something else!”
“You and Doug are like brothers,” she reminded him wryly.
“Don’t get me wrong, babe,” Sam rowed back. “It’s just the way the business is. Doug thinks I might make it someday so he wants as big a piece of the action as he can get. The only difference between him and Johnny Seiffert is that Doug is a great guy to be around most of the time.”
“You might make it big,” Judy teased him softly.
The man chuckled, gently patted her belly.
“I’ll settle for making it big as in someday being able to afford to put junior here,” he retorted, “through college if the World still exists by the time he gets there.”
Judy giggled.
“Have a little faith, sweetheart,” she smiled fondly, “the World will still be here; it’s just people who’ve got the problem!”
Chapter 21
Friday 29th November 1963
SUBRON Fifteen Command Compound, Alameda California
Lieutenant Walter Brenckmann tried not to let the dissonances of the morning’s visit to Berkeley blur his judgement. He had a report to write and a mountain of paperwork that made War and Peace look like an abridged novella. There was a firm rat-a-tat knock at his open office door.
“Come!” He directed absently, looking up only as an afterthought. Recognising the man who walked into the room he jumped to his feet and mad a grab for his cap.
Commander Troy Simms, the skipper of the Gold crew of the USS Sam Houston (SSBN-609) seemed pleased to have caught the junior officer unawares. He was a big man for a submariner, six feet tall and built like the college wide receiver he had been twenty years ago. His blond hair was thinner, his face more lined but he was one of those men who had never really shrugged off his younger self’s mischievous streak. He enjoyed the momentary unease of the USS Theodore Roosevelt’s former Torpedo Officer without dwelling on it overlong.
Walter straightened respectfully.
“Relax, Lieutenant,” the older man grunted, shutting the office door at his back. “Is the real story about Admiral Braithwaite and his wife as bad as scuttlebutt says it is?”
Walter Brenckmann did not know Simms very well, by reputation he was a gung ho, no nonsense commanding officer who was extremely good at his job and destined for higher command sooner rather than later.
“I am not really that involved in the FBI or the likely SIB investigation, sir,” he apologised, “but I spoke to the only witness of the killing earlier today and it was a,” he shrugged, “brutal thing. The Admiral and Mrs Braithwaite were both shot multiple times at very close range with a twenty gauge shotgun.”
Commander Simms had perched on the corner of a desk and indicated for Walter to do likewise.
“When was the last time Rear Admiral Braithwaite communicated personally with COMSUBPAC?”
Walter Brenckmann raised an eyebrow.
Where was this interview going?
As a matter of course he had checked Braithwaite’s diary for the last week and his personal communications log for the same period. He had also spoken to members of the command staff, ostensibly to verify the accuracy of the diary entries and the communications records.
“Last Friday, sir. I believe Rear Admiral Braithwaite spoke at length with Rear Admiral Clarey at Pearl Harbour at least once a week.”
The post October War reorganisation of the Polaris SSBN fleet – and the decision not to base SUBRON Fifteen at Guam – had been implemented so rapidly that the command structure of the United States Pacific Fleet had yet to catch up with the changed strategic and tactical realities. As the reorganisation went forward the Rear Admiral commanding SUBRON Fifteen had found himself subordinate to the Commander, Submarine Forces, US Pacific Fleet based in Hawaii, another Rear Admiral, fifty-one year old Iowan-born Bernard Ambrose Clarey, like Braithwaite a World War II veteran submariner. Clarey had been promoted Rear Admiral in July 1958, four months after Braithwaite, making him junior to his new subordinate at Alameda. Only the fact that the two men had been firm friends for over two decades, and Clarey’s meticulously professional courtesy and diplomacy had made the situation tolerable for either man.
“Nothing since then?” Commander Simms demanded.
“Not that I am aware of, sir.”
The older officer’s stare was suddenly hard.
“For your ears only the story about the Sam Houston accidentally touching bottom is baloney,” he said quietly.
For a moment Walter Brenckmann stared at the skipper of the USS Sam Houston like a rabbit trapped in the headlamps of an onrushing truck.
“I turned the boat around,” Troy Simms went on, affecting the air of a man discussing a minor technical defect, “and brought her home at Admiral Braithwaite’s command shortly after I opened my Command Pack forty-eight hours out at sea.”
Walter Brenckmann did not need to be a mind reader to know that what he was about to be told was going to be frightening, and that it might also be devastatingly injurious to both his continuing welfare and to his career prospects.
He remained silent.
/> Command Troy Simms respected that. When next he spoke it was as one brother submariner to another.
“My operations orders required the Sam Houston to operate in a patrol area centred on Lord Howe Island.”
Walter Brenckmann felt the hairs standing up on the back of his neck.
His eyes must have briefly been as large as saucers.
The Lord Howe Islands were a group of volcanic outcrops three hundred and seventy miles east of Port Macquarie. In itself this was so bizarre he hardly knew where to begin to quantify the intrinsic madness of the orders which had somehow got into the hands of the commander of the USS Sam Houston because Port Macquarie was a small coastal town at the mouth of the Hastings River some two hundred and forty miles north of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia! The specified median-point of SSBN-609’s patrol area was just four hundred and sixty miles south east of Brisbane, the capital of the Australian State of Queensland. The Australian cities of Melbourne and Adelaide, respectively the capitals of the States of Victoria and South Australia, as well as the Australian capital, Canberra would have all been several hundred miles within the maximum range envelope of the USS Sam Houston’s sixteen UGM-27 Polaris A2 submarine launched ballistic missiles, each tipped with a W-58 warhead with an explosive yield equivalent to over a megaton of Trinitrotoluene (TNT)!
Notwithstanding that the Australian Government had been so appalled by the destruction of Cuba and the subsequent ‘holocaust’ of the ‘nuclear exchange’ with the USSR; that its dissatisfaction and anger had actually made the news in the United States in the weeks after the October War, Australia was neither an enemy or any conceivable kind of military threat to the North American continent. More to the point, the USS Sam Houston had been tasked to patrol an area over four thousand miles beyond the effective range of its Polaris A2 missiles to its nearest remotely legitimate ‘war target’, Vladivostok in the Primorsky Krai region of the far east of the Soviet Union close to the Chinese border.
