“I ain’t gonna argue with you,” the noncom said. “But the whole goddamn world sucks on coffin nails these days.” He smoked in quick, harsh drags, and ground out his cigarette on the callused palm of his left hand.
Cade took more time between puffs. He didn’t want to start puking his head off. His hands were hard, as any soldier’s had to be, but not hard enough to do duty for an ashtray. He killed his cigarette with the sole of his boot.
“Here ya go, sir.” Klein tossed him the opened pack. “I got plenty more.”
“Thanks—I think,” Cade said. The sergeant laughed, for all the world as if he were joking.
Behind the lines, more American guns started going off. Those were 155s, with plenty of range to strike the smaller Chinese pieces. As the 105s had before them, they stopped firing sooner than Cade would have liked. Yes, ammunition here was in short supply. Everything here was in short supply—everything except Red Chinese soldiers. With that on his mind, Cade warily lit another cigarette.
—
Marvin Finch had a swimming pool in his back yard. Even in Southern California, that was an uncommon luxury. When Aaron Finch took Ruth and Leon over to visit his brother’s family, he looked at that pool with a proprietary air. And well he might have. When he moved in with Marvin right after the war, digging that pool was part of his rent.
He still had the shovel he’d used. About a third of the blade was worn away. He intended to keep it as long as he lived, as a reminder of the hard work he’d done.
Marvin was a couple of inches shorter than he was, and stockier, too. He had a double chin and a comfortable little pot belly. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and smoked a pipe. He had a million schemes, none of which had paid off the way he’d wished they would. He could talk anybody into anything…for a little while. After that, his charm wore thin. Aaron reflexively liked him—they were brothers, after all—but he’d learned to keep a hand on his wallet when Marvin started charming.
“No hatchet today, hey?” he said when he opened the door to let in Aaron and Ruth and Leon.
“I dunno. Got any wood you need chopped?” Aaron didn’t let on that Marvin irked him. The accident was forty years old now, and Marvin hadn’t forgotten it. He never forgot anything anybody did to him.
He squatted down in the front hall and tickled Leon. Leon giggled. He thought Marvin was great. Of course, he wasn’t quite two, so his judgment left something to be desired.
“Hello, Aaron. Hello, Ruth,” Sarah Finch said. Olivia’s mother was a washed-out woman in her early forties. She’d been a Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Arkansas. Then she met Marvin, fell in love with him…and vanished into his shadow. If you gave him half a chance, he’d do that to you.
“Hi, Sarah,” Aaron said. He liked Marvin’s wife. By all the signs, he liked her better than Marvin did. Of course, he didn’t sleep in the same bed with her.
He squeezed Ruth’s hand. If he hadn’t been living with Marvin, he never would have met her. That made him more forgiving than he would have been otherwise.
“Is Roxane here yet?” Ruth asked Marvin. Roxane Bauman was her first cousin, the gal who’d introduced her and Aaron. She was married to a working but not enormously successful actor named Howard Bauman. Their politics were very pink, almost if not altogether red.
Aaron hadn’t seen them since the war started. Just before it did, Bauman had had to testify in front of the Un-American Activities Committee. Aaron wondered what they thought of Stalin now. That ought to be interesting…one way or another.
While Aaron wondered, his brother nodded. “They’re out back by the pool,” Marvin said. “I made a pitcher of martinis.”
Odds were he’d fixed martinis more because they were in than because he particularly liked them. As far as Aaron knew, he didn’t, but that was his style. Aaron drank beer because he liked beer. Ruth didn’t drink a whole lot of anything, but when she did it was beer or scotch.
There was beer in the icebox. Marvin didn’t go out of his way to be a bad host; sometimes it just happened. Aaron opened one for himself. He looked a question at his wife. She nodded, so he got her one, too. That she felt the urge probably said something or other.
They went out to the back yard. Olivia had outgrown the swing set there. Leon was just getting old enough to enjoy it when somebody big pushed him.
Caesar ran up, barking. Leon shrank back against Ruth. Ducks and chickens were okay, but Caesar scared him. Well, the dog outweighed him at least two to one. Caesar was a German shepherd who seemed in training to turn wolf. He had a mouthful of large, pointed teeth, and liked showing them off. He wasn’t mean—he’d never bitten or anything—but he wasn’t exactly friendly, either.
Aaron petted him. He deigned to wag his tail and trotted off, satisfied that he’d protected the household. Aaron and Ruth and (cautiously) Leon walked back toward the pool.
Howard Bauman was swimming. Aaron thought he was nuts, or else part polar bear. May or not, that water was cold. Roxane stretched out on a chaise longue. She had the same narrow chin and black hair as Ruth, but the rest of her face didn’t look much like her cousin’s. She had a higher opinion of her own cleverness than Aaron thought she’d earned.
She greeted him with, “How does it feel to be a hero to the plutocrats?”
“Give me a break,” he said. “I caught the Russian when he parachuted down in front of me. What do you think I should’ve done? Run him over?”
“Maybe you could have helped him,” she said.
“I did help him. I gave him to the cops. He didn’t get lynched the way some of their flyers did.” Aaron knew that wouldn’t do him any good. When Roxane said helped, she meant bought him a ticket to Moscow.
“Terrible violation of the Geneva Convention,” she said. “I don’t want to think about what our police have done to him.”
“Chance you take when you drop an A-bomb on somebody,” Aaron said dryly. “You and Howard are lucky you’re still here to give the Ivans a big hand.” The Baumans lived in Hollywood—luckily for them, on the western edge of Hollywood. Their apartment building hadn’t fallen down, and they hadn’t got a lethal dose of radiation.
“We started dropping the atom bombs,” Roxane said.
“They invaded South Korea,” Aaron said. “None of the rest of this would have happened if that didn’t.”
“Our puppet government there is full of people who collaborated with the Japs,” Roxane retorted. “They should have gone to jail. Instead, they were running a country—well, we called it one, anyway.”
“Can we talk about something else?” Ruth asked. She couldn’t stand arguments, which made Aaron wonder why she’d ever come to visit Marvin.
Aaron didn’t say anything back at Roxane. For a wonder, she let it go, too. Howard Bauman came out of the pool and, dripping, made a beeline for the martini pitcher. It stood in a big bowl of ice, so the martinis would stay cold without getting diluted. Howard poured himself about half a liver’s worth of booze. He was good-looking in a not especially Jewish way; he had a head of brown hair so thick, it was almost a pelt.
“How’s it going, Aaron?” he asked. He had his politics, too, but, unlike Roxane, he didn’t always try to ram them down your throat.
“Not as much work as I’d like,” Aaron answered.
“Boy, I hear that,” Howard said.
“I guess you do.” Aaron didn’t feel like quarreling. He had trouble getting as much work as he wanted because Blue Front was hurting as much as any other outfit that tried to sell things to people these days. Howard had trouble because he just wasn’t that great an actor. Pointing out the difference might have influenced some people, but it wouldn’t have won Aaron any friends. He kept his mouth shut.
Marvin came out and poured himself a martini almost as generous as Howard Bauman’s. “Is everybody having a good time?” he asked.
“No,” Leon said. He was still doing that. This time, it made all the grown-ups laugh.
Howard Bauman
stood there drinking and dripping on the concrete deck (which Aaron had poured and leveled). No, the breeze off the hills wasn’t what anyone would have called warm. Some of the refugees from the bomb were living in tents up there, getting by by hunting and begging and stealing.
“How come you’re not turning into an ice cube yourself?” Aaron asked Howard.
“Antifreeze.” Bauman raised the martini glass and made sure his radiator wouldn’t boil over. He wasn’t shivering. His teeth didn’t chatter. Maybe he even meant it.
VASILI YASEVICH SMILED when he walked into the teahouse. “What do you know, Mei Ling?” he said when the pretty serving girl came over to him.
“I know you’re a nuisance,” she answered, but she was smiling, too. “What can I get you this afternoon?”
“Tea and some buckwheat noodles,” he said. The Japanese had introduced those noodles to northeastern China when they ran things here. People kept eating them even though the Japanese were long gone. They were tasty and cheap at the same time: the perfect combo.
She brought them back splashed with soy sauce and garnished with chopped scallions and leeks. Vasili handled chopsticks as if he’d used them all his life—which he had. He held the bowl up to his face and slurped away. He wasn’t always neat, but neither were the Chinese. Neat eating was for aristocrats, the last thing you wanted to look like in Mao’s People’s Republic.
Mei Ling giggled behind her hand. “What’s so funny, toots?” Vasili asked, though he already had a good idea of the answer.
Sure enough, she said, “It’s just strange, watching a round-eye eat like a regular person. I always laugh when I see that.”
“I am a regular person.” Vasili used the same northeastern dialect of Mandarin she did. Why not? Hadn’t he grown up in Harbin himself? After another slurp and a gulp, he went on, “I’m a regular person who has round eyes, that’s all. How many other round-eyes have you watched eating like this?” His right hand shoveled more noodles into his mouth.
“A few,” she said. “There aren’t as many round-eyes here as there used to be. And the ones who come over from Russia, they want knives and forks. Where am I going to get knives and forks?”
“Beats me,” Vasili said. One or two surviving Russian eateries still had some for people who wanted them. A few Russian old-timers might use them at home. Vasili knew how; his mother and father had preferred them. But he couldn’t remember the last time he’d picked up a fork. He really was a regular person: a fair-skinned, big-nosed regular person with a thick beard and round blue eyes.
People in some countries didn’t all have the same general coloring and cast of features. Some looked like Vasili, some like Chinese; he supposed some were even Negroes (except for a few pictures, he’d never set eyes on one). China, though, wasn’t like that. Everybody here looked Chinese…except for Vasili and a few other relics of bygone days.
Mei Ling said, “Even though you’re a round-eyed barbarian, you talk and you act like a civilized person.”
That was what she meant. What she said was like a man from the Middle Kingdom, which was China’s name for itself. To Chinese, only Chinese could be civilized. Everybody else was a barbarian, somebody unlikely to speak the language (very unlikely to read it) and all too likely to make messes on the floor.
For hundreds of years, China had been the big wheel in the Far East. Japan, Korea, Indochina, Thailand, Burma…They all pretty much followed China’s lead in style and culture. None of them got ahead of China. And the occasional Europeans were oddities when they weren’t nuisances.
Then they turned into dangerous nuisances, nuisances who could do things the Chinese couldn’t. For one of the rare times in history, foreigners ordered Chinese around, and had the strength to make their orders stick. Russians, Englishmen, French…even the Japanese started doing it. That had to be doubly humiliating, as if a wayward son beat up a proud but weak father.
So of course the Chinese distrusted foreigners. Vasili understood it no matter how much trouble it caused him. “I hope I am like a civilized person,” he said. “I hope I am enough like a civilized person to keep you company every now and then.”
Mei Ling giggled some more. “Well, maybe,” she said, and then, tartly, “Took you long enough to get around to asking.”
“Sorry,” Vasili muttered. One of the few things he knew about Negroes was that white people often made rules against getting too friendly with them. Chinese sometimes felt the same way about whites. Knowing that had made him shy—but not too shy.
He left money on the counter and walked out whistling. He was as happy as he had been since the atom bomb fell, maybe as happy as he had been since his parents killed themselves instead of letting the Chekists take them back to the workers’ and peasants’ paradise of the USSR. They’d thought death was better than that. From the stories they’d told, Vasili could see why.
He stayed happy for about ten minutes: the time he took to walk from the teahouse to his own shanty. He rounded the last corner on his little alleyway—and stopped, and drew back. A jeep was parked there, probably one seized from Chiang Kai-shek’s forces during the civil war. He wouldn’t have thought the alley wide enough to let it squeeze through, but there you were—and there it was.
The men who’d come in it would be in the shack now, tearing it to pieces. He didn’t need to see them to know that. They’d be looking for…for opium, of course. “Yob tvoyu mat’,” Vasili whispered, aiming the obscenity at the official Wang’s wife had sent his way. He should have known the son of a bitch would want to get even. Dammit, he had known.
Now what am I going to do? he wondered. Here he was, a fair round-eye in a land full of golden-skinned, black-haired people. He was as conspicuous as a snowball in a coal cellar. Running away seemed unlikely to do much good.
But he couldn’t walk up to those policemen or whatever they were and go Here I am! He knew what would happen if he did: the kinds of things that would have happened to his father and mother had they got dragged back to the Soviet Union. Mao’d learned a lot from Stalin. He had native talent, too.
So, while running wasn’t a good choice, plainly it was the best one he had. They might not catch up with him for a while. If he headed north, he’d stay in country that had some idea what Russians were. Maybe he could slip across the border. Being without proper papers in Russia was deadly dangerous. His parents had made that clear. He had Chinese papers. But if all they showed was This man is wanted!, that was even worse.
He headed for the abandoned blacksmith’s shop. If they were after him for selling opium, he might as well start doing it for real. They couldn’t kill him much deader for an actual crime than for an invented one. And selling the drug would get him more cash. He’d need that. They’d surely already stolen what he had in the shack.
He would have done better to have got some gold from the commissar with the craving. But Mao was so ferocious with anyone who had anything to do with opium, he hadn’t had the nerve. So here he was, on the run.
As a matter of fact, he strolled along as if he had not a care in the world. Looking scared was the dumbest thing you could do. As long as he acted the way he usually did, people here took him for granted. If he started skulking or sprinting, they’d wonder why. They would till they added two and two and got four, anyhow.
He did glance around—as casually as he could—before slipping into the old blacksmith’s shop through the hole in the side wall. Even after all these years, the place smelled faintly of horse. The odor was in the straw on the floor, and in the dirt. For all he knew, it had soaked into the planks of the walls.
He breathed a sigh of relief when he picked up the broken brick and found the apothecary’s jar still under it. On the chance that other people had also used the place to hide things, he did some more searching after he retrieved it. And he found two tarnished trade dollars—some people called them Mex dollars—that had probably been there longer than he’d been alive. He took them, too. Silver was silver.
Should I rest here for a while? he wondered. The idea of sleeping on horse-smelling dirt didn’t excite him. But neither did the idea of rushing out there and getting nabbed. He lay down. His jacket made a good enough pillow.
It was dark when he woke—the dark of a blacked-out city. He yawned, but didn’t try to sleep any more. Time to get moving. He might be able to swap town for countryside by the time the sun came up.
—
Out in the kolkhoz’s fields, horses pulled plows. The tractors sat idle for lack of fuel. Sowers with bags of seed planted wheat and barley seeds in the furrows. Ihor Shevchenko was one of them.
The work was long and tedious, but he didn’t mind. The black earth that made the Ukraine famous smelled as rich as some of the chops he’d cut from Nestor’s loin. When you got a whiff of that newly plowed ground, you thought you could eat it instead of the crops that sprang from it.
Plenty of Ukrainian peasants must have tried that when Stalin starved them into collectivizing. They’d died, so it didn’t work, even if it smelled as if it should. You had to do the rest of the work.
Ihor cast seeds here and there. He wasn’t especially careful about it. Why bother? The fields were communal. He wouldn’t get anything extra if they yielded a lot of wheat. If they yielded only a little, the kolkhoz chairman would lie to the people in charge of this area. They would lie to their superiors, and life would go on.
One of the other sowers waved an empty seed sack. A kid tore across the field with a full one. You weren’t supposed to have used up all the grain in a sack so soon. It wasn’t as if Bohdan cared, though. All he cared about was getting through the day so he could start drinking.
Petro Hapochka stood watching the workers from the edge of the field. He would have joined the sowing himself, or perhaps guided the horses up and down, if not for his missing foot. Ihor wondered if he’d give Bohdan hell for screwing around. He ought to, but Ihor doubted he would.
Ihor paused to light a Belomor cigarette. The White Sea name celebrated the canal dug from Lake Vygozero to the arm of the Arctic Ocean. One of the guys who used to live at the kolkhoz had helped dig it: he was one zek among countless others. From what he said, the idea was more to use up political prisoners than to make a useful canal. He hadn’t had any idea how many died from overwork or hunger or cold. He’d pegged out himself, just after Ihor came home from the Great Patriotic War. The guy’d lived through his stretch in the gulag, but not with his health.
Bombs Away Page 39
