Black Bear Blues

by Stephen Wishnevsky

  It was not real cold today, people were gathered in little huddles, impromptu groups of four or six, feeling each other out, making tentative tunes as a way to strike up friendships, I suppose. One gathering might have a fiddle, a trombone, some sort of a Chinese drum and a triangle, while the next would be composed of obviously Oriental instruments put to uses they were never intended for. Some of it sounded decent, others were flatly horrible, but there was a lot of energy, people sawing away on all sorts of Mongol fiddles, or whatever they might have snagged from wherever. There did seem to be a lot of bowed instruments of one kind or another, mostly another.

  That gave me and idea; I walked back up the platform to one of Camouflage Corps workshop boxcars, and they were all hard at it, trying to make playable instruments out of the driftwood of war. It was much finer work then they were used to, but stage hands are the original jacks of all trades, they can do more with less than any other group of people I know of. Mix and match with hoboes and poor rural people, and you are looking at some serious improvisors. I looked in and saw that Woody and Bob Weeks poring over the remnants of a much-battered bull fiddle, a certain amount of cussing was underway.

  “Well, I can glue the bastard back together, even patch the bullet holes, but I have no idea where we can get strings for this abortion.”

  “Rope, I reckon. Or sheep guts. These people out here use up every part of a sheep but the damn ‘baaa.’ You can see that plain, if you just look. Poor people are the same the world round, I reckon.”

  “Your plan, you take care of it. Get one of our boys, Wang or Jim Li to interpret for you and see what you can find, Woody.”

  “On my way, Bob. Anything else you need?”

  “Some kind of wire, thin wire, and some more of that hide glue. See if you can find some leather thin enough for drum heads, too, while you are out. Jim will know. You need some cash?”

  “I’m good.” And off he took, without another word. Nice to see something was being accomplished, because my crew was doing fuck Jim. Nothing much was coming in, so we had nothing to put out. It was like the whole world was holding its breath, waiting for word from this peace conference. And, we were getting no word. It was Thursday, on toward dark, prime radio listening time, so I headed back to my alleged job. I had just reached the steps to the Radio Car, nodded to Conductor Earl, when somebody cut loose with a tommy-gun right behind me and stitched a line of .45s right down the length of the car, right above my head. I threw myself down between the platform and the tracks, Earl was right next to me. You never forget how to take cover.

  All I had was my Colt, but it was in my hand without conscious thought. Earl had the same, we had pistols but no targets. A lot of feet pounding the floor above us, as people took cover, grabbed rifles and tried to figure out what the fuck was going on.

  Whoever it was changed magazines and hosed us down with another fifty, and he was joined a second later with a ragged fusillade of shots from the falling darkness. There were scattered buildings and junk in front of us, typical railroad clutter, but I could see no enemies. Then I could.

  A couple dozen assholes with those stupid white rags tied around their heads left the shelter of a coal bin, and ran for us, screaming something that was supposed to scare us. One of them even had a flag. I shot at him first. Not a chance in hell of hitting him at this range with a pistol, but somebody up in the car had the same idea, they were firing back now, and he went down on his face. I took a look under the deck, the platform was raised up above the ground a couple of feet, so our bellies were exposed to fire. I slapped Earl good and hard, he got the message, and we crawled up to where there was a little embankment where they had dug out for the timbers. We hunkered down, changed magazines and proceeded to fuck these idiots up. A few other of our guys slipped out of the cars and slithered under the platform to join us. Frankie was the first, then Lupo and Felipe, both with tommy guns. That was just about it for the bad guys. They were brave, they kept coming, for all the good it did them. Bravery is for idiots. One time only.

  By the time the last one of them went down, the real Army had arrived, and our problem then was not getting shot by the good guys. Another bunch of people, Chinese in khaki, came running around the front end of the train, and nearly got shot to shit for their trouble. There was a lot of screaming and posturing, with a few interpreters trying to make sense of all this confusion, but eventually we sorted out that these were the Nationalists, and the rag-headed attackers were some rival warlord’s people, who were aiming to sneak up on the next train over, the Kuomintang Express, but got all hasty, and shot us up by mistake. That was their story and they were sticking with it.

  We had only a few people nicked by flying glass, so we were not too upset, and let ourselves be bullshitted into acceptance. Eventually, everybody went home, we went to late dinner, and I was lying in bed, trying to un-lax when Babs made it home to soothe my fevered brow. Or something like that.

  “I heard you had a bit of a shoot up, I was worried about you, so I sneaked out to make sure you were all right. Frankie said nobody was hurt badly. You look a little frazzled.”

  “Not too bad. More excitement than I really needed. I would like to see if you can actually die of boredom. I could give that a shot. Maybe two shots.”

  “The good news is that this incident has induced the Soong sisters to stop haggling for the last crumb of advantage, and come to a deal. The attackers were some small-time warlord, but they can take a hint. This reconciliation is going to be very tricky, all sorts of power blocks want pieces of the pie, and are willing to use threats and force to get what they want. I could tell you who these people were, but I suspect you won’t care very much.”

  “Not a whit. Not a single jot or tittle, whatever a tittle might be.”

  She knew, of course. “A tittle is a stroke of the pen to indicate missing letters in a manuscript. Quite archaic. Olde English.”

  “Fine. Now, then, college girl, if you would kindly come over closer, I could demonstrate what I thought a tittle might have been.”

  “You are quite incorrigible.”

  “At least I am not insatiable. Not if you put your mind to the problem.”

  “I shall essay to endeavor. As one of Mark Twain’s characters said.” She smiled one of those female smiles that bodes well for somebody.

  “In Connecticut Yankee, if I remember correctly.” Which was the last bit of literary commentary for the night.

  >>>>>>>>

  Even though they had a deal, there was a lot of backing and filling, details to be tweaked, lines drawn on maps that would be ignored on the ground. But there was nothing us round-eyed bastards could do about that; it was their goddamn country, and they had this idea that they could do what they wanted to do with it. And if any damn foreigner wanted to disagree, they would be glad to unite and hand him his bloody ass on a silver platter. Which suited the Japanese well enough, and us just fine.

  All we wanted to do was be shut of the whole mess, and tend to our impossibly Quixotic business. The Japanese had their own plates full, they were in sudden possession of an empire, and had no real plan for coping with the reality and the responsibilities. They were like some hermit who won the lottery, inherited a big company. Their wildest dreams had come true, and now they had to exploit this windfall for their own safety if nothing else. I was just glad I wasn’t in charge.

  They held a lot of conferences, had things that resembled elections in some places, sharp punitive wars in others. It jelled out that they were willing to let the hillbillies, the inland people like the Afghans, go to hell at their own speed, and concentrated on sea-lanes, ports, and something that resembled free trade. Obviously, the Navy had won the internal never-expressed battle, and the Army was left to civilize the heathen, mostly in India, Bengal, and Burma. Which was enough of a contract for anybody.

  The powers that be relaxed censorship of the radio channels, and we started getting start-up stations in dozens of languages all over Southe
ast Asia. The Aussies, the Filipinos and the South Africans were left alone, Malaysia and the Dutch East Indies were the center of Japan’s Empire, and if conditions were harsh there, nobody ever heard a peep from the locals.

  A broadcast from Radio Persia English put all that in perspective and showed us all what the new rules were going to be. SMS Ostfriesland, a five-hundred-foot long Dreadnaught that had survived the Battle of Jutland fourteen years ago, had been caught on the Suez Canal by Imperial Navy dive bombers, and had been sunk in one of the narrowest spots in the canal. Want to play choke points? I see your Panama and raise you a Suez. No one was saying, but the bombers had probably been launched from zeppelins, and picked up the same way. No evidence, no attackers shot down, the crews were probably leaning over the rails, watching the camels in the desert when the bombs hit. There was a lot of glee coming in from other stations, mostly the Portuguese in Africa. That clogging of the Suez Canal gave their colonies in the east of Africa some breathing space, if nothing else.

  The Ostfriesland sank, but the Suez Canal is so shallow, no sailors were killed after the dive bombing. The Canal is sea level all the way, there are no locks, and the canal had recently been widened to allow ships that wide, nearly a hundred feet beam. The Ostfriesland had been the first, word was that they had it all covered with flags and bunting, a big celebration. The Germans had rushed the widening project through to allow battleships to reach the Japanese Indian Ocean fleet. So, that plan was come a cropper, and the IJN was uncontested on the west coast of India and the east coast of Africa for the time being. You could just bet that the Imperial Navy was building bases and coastal defense fortifications as fast as concrete could be poured.

  It was also not hard to figure that all the naval guns Admiral Epstein was salvaging were finding new homes all up and down the shores of the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. The thing about Coastal Defense guns, is that they do not have to actually work to be effective. They just have to be there and be known to be there. Anybody who wants to find out if they are effective has to find out the hard way. Which can be pretty damn expensive if you figure wrong.

  In any case, that one shot had changed all the rules again. The Chinese were simultaneously afraid the Germans would have more men to throw at them, and overjoyed that the Germans had a real enemy attacking them at a vulnerable spot. It might have been a wash, but Bradley was wiring Hodges that Fat Hermann was pushing for a speedy conference to end the Trans-Siberian War, the inference being that Africa was more important to the Fatherland than a bunch of desert and tundra lost in Central Asia some damn place. Which only made sense; Africa had been exploited for a couple hundred years, the mines and plantations had been long established, just had to be reopened under new management. The Africans could probably care less what particular brand of white bastards they were forced to work for, they had a shitty deal no matter what language the bosses spoke.

  Not to mention that Cossacks and Mongols and Turkmen and all those other wild-ass bastards were a hell of a lot harder to control than a bunch of poor dirt farmers and herders in Africa. The Maasai might have been brave lion-killers and all that, but in the final analysis, they were a bunch of barefoot guys with spears while the nomads of Central Asia had warfare in their genes for thousands of years. And now, thanks to us, they had copious supplies of guns, ammo, and motor vehicle parts to play land pirate with. Over the couple of weeks it took to get our conference hammered into shape, we got reports of battles and skirmishes all over the surrounding deserts. A lot of old scores were being settled, was the best we could tell what was happening. A clear case of “Mind your own business, and you won’t get hurt.”

  We took it easy, as much as we could, ramped up our defenses, slapped some plate steel on the outside of our railroad cars, made sure everybody was checked out on all the available firearms. We called it a honeymoon, at least when Barbara was not busy taking notes or hammering out drafts. They call journalism “the first draft of history,” but she was doing the real deal.

  >>>>>>>>

  Woody and Alde were thick as thieves, which they greatly resembled when it came to their procurement tactics. Anything that wasn’t nailed down was the operative restraint, if that. But they held try-outs and practices every day and night, and shows at the Grange for the three Fridays it took to make all the factions happy, wrangling over commas and such. Worse than editors, I say. At least editors are not so heavily armed, not even at the “Tombstone Epitaph.”

  The Admirals were the first to leave, Epi first, then Yamamoto. It was not hard to figure they had used this opportunity to cut a series of side deals, some of which hopefully pointed a way to us getting the fuck out of here. None of us said anything, of course; hope is too painful an emotion to talk about after all we had been through.

  Beria and his humorless Russkis were the next to go. They had not been happy to come here; they were less happy to leave. It was fairly obvious that they got none of what they came for, and left with nothing but a bug in each ear. They had no power, were the guests of the Chinese Reds, and were entirely surplus to requirements. They could go play in the taiga or whatever it was called, the endless Siberian forests, and good riddance. They were not worth the trouble of hunting down and eradicating, somebody had to pretend to be the government up there, and it might as well be them as anybody. I thought I saw Cookie, Aja whatever her fucking name was, in his entourage when they enplaned to go back to where-ever and do whatever.

  Whatever it was, certainly, whoever we left over here of our people would not want that contract, and the Chinese had other fish to fry, or whatever they did with fish. We used to say we used every part of a pig but the squeal, but these guys had whole industries based on uses for pig squeals. A lot of us that thought we were dirt poor before we came over here and saw the reality of life in the Celestial Kingdom.

  So, that left the Reds, the Kuomintang, Ivan Hodak, Aneko as the mouthpiece for the Japanese interests, and our generals at the table. Stilwell seemed to be as much in charge as anyone, which figured, he had a long-standing interest in China, and great facility with languages. It was common knowledge that he was the best French speaker in his class at West Point, and had been leaning Mandarin “for the fun of it.”

  He and Barbara hit it off well, she was amused by his vitriolic wit, and deeply in awe of his intellect. They could make asides to each other in a fractured pig-Chinese, which nobody else on earth could understand. “He is really a funny man, he has a plaque on his wall, ‘Illegitimi non Carborundum,’ which gives him great amusement. It is very bad Latin for, ‘Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down’.” I might have been jealous, but he was twenty years older than me, better than twice her age, and fuck it. I either trusted her, or I didn’t. I decided to count my blessings, and trust her.

  Speaking of untrustworthy people, Aneko and Yelena, Isis, were much in evidence, if in the second row of the big swindle. Yamamoto had left a team of gold-braided flunkies, but somehow they all seemed to look toward Aneko for the wink or the nod or the frown. Not for the first time I wondered who the exact fuck she was. But looking at her, I remembered I was supposed to be building a shortwave propaganda station. Or Bob Weeks was. I excused myself from my seat next to Barbara, and hiked my ass back to the train, and hunted up Bob.

  He was deep in consultation with a bespectacled little guy with solder-burned fingers and Signal Corps Flags on his collar. He barely looked up from the tangle of wires and tubes on his workbench. “Miles. This is Will. Will Honeycutt. From Spokane. He’s the Ham from Hell. If anybody can make this pile of shit work, he can.”

  Will didn’t even look up from the joint he was soldering. “Yeah. We salvaged every crap piece of crap in this whole city, trying to find tubes that still have some life in them. You believe in prayer and all that crap, go for it.”

  “Fuck that. I believe in people. Some people. Some of the time. Want me to come back later?”

  “Nah, you are just in time. Hang five and we will see wha
t we shall see.” A few more joints, a few things lashed together and screwed down to the chassis, plug screwed on to the wires, that was the only part I understood. He pushed the plug into a wall socket, threw a switch. Pow! A spark flew, Will cussed, threw the switch back, wrapped a wire with black tape, threw the switch again. “It’s always the simple crap that fucks you up.”

  Nothing happened, this time, except the tubes started to glow red. I hoped that was a good sign. Will waited a good long time, then reached over and tapped a microphone in front of him, in the back of the cluttered work bench. Across the room, a speaker went “Thump, thump,” and a big round meter jumped into the red. Will sank back into his seat, sighed, “That calls for a drink. You may kiss my ass, Bob, I am a genius.”

  >>>>>>>

  Drinks were had, perhaps in excess. We were still at it, when Babs came home, she was inclined to mild outrage, but was easily placated. Men, you know. You can’t expect all that much from the ruffians. Alde was more incensed, Will had cannibalized her public-address system for his radio lash-up, but once it was explained to her that she now had exchanged a local audience for a worldwide one, she too was induced to celebration. That soon turned into a party so wild it had to be removed to the band car, musicians became inebriated, and thinks got out of control.

  I did not so much regain my senses as I was dragged off to bed, kicking and screaming, well, dancing and singing, by the long-suffering Babs. She had drunk enough to propose marriage, even before we made it into bed, and I had no good reason to deny her. I was flattered, as a matter of fact. “Are you sure? You are drunk, you know?”

  “I am drunk,” she said, soberly, “but I am sure. Are you going to marry me? I think I am pregnant.”

  “Fuck. Really?”

  “Yes. Fucking really. You know we have not been using protection. Our baby needs a name.”

  “Kapusta is a stupid name. It means cabbage. It was an insult. A joke.”