American Front (34 page)

“Routine,” Sam Carsten said. “Just routine.”

Hiram Kidde laughed out loud. “Ain’t one damn thing about it that’s routine,” the gunner’s mate said. “Wearin’ summer whites in February,
sweatin
’ in summer whites in February, bein’ in the Sandwich Islands at all…” His grin was broad and delighted. “Still can’t believe we caught the limeys with their drawers down.”

“Might as well believe it,” Carsten answered. “It’s true.”

He waved to show what he meant. The two off-duty sailors strolled along the grounds on the eastern side of the entranceway to Pearl Harbor. When the British ruled the Sandwich Islands, they’d built a parade ground there, so their Marines could get in the drill they needed. The parade ground was somewhat the worse for wear after the American invasion of the islands, but Marines still paraded on it: U.S. Marines in uniforms of forest green, several shades darker than Army men wore.

“Eyes—right!” the Marine drill sergeant shouted, marching along with his men. “Sing out—let me hear it, you birds!”

“One, two, three, four,” the men sounded off. “Miss Maggie’s why we’ll win the war!”

Not even a Marine drill sergeant, as fearsome a creature as any ever born, could make the young men ignore the spectacular woman who came out to the parade grounds several days a week to watch them march—and to be watched. The sergeant, a man of sense, didn’t even try. He stared at Maggie Stevenson, too. And so did Sam Carsten and “Cap’n” Kidde.

Maggie Stevenson had been in business for herself when the Union Jack flew over Honolulu, and the recent change of ownership hadn’t fazed her a bit. Indeed, because there were more American sailors, soldiers, and Marines here now than there had been Englishmen before, her business was better than ever.

“There’s one limey I’d like to catch with her drawers down,” Carsten said reverently.

“Limey?” Kidde said. “I hear tell she’s from Nebraska.”

“‘Cap’n,’ with Maggie it’s not what you hear, it’s what you see.”

Kidde nodded reverently. There was a lot of Maggie to see. She was within an inch of Carsten’s height, and was probably even fairer, but on her it looked good. She shielded her face from the sun with a broad-brimmed straw hat. Like a lot of women in Honolulu she wore a
holoku
, a baggy, native-style dress that covered her from neck to ankles. Hers, though, wasn’t cotton or linen. It was green silk, somewhere between translucent and transparent. When she stood between men and the sun, as she made a point of doing, you could see there was a hell of a lot of woman under there.

After thorough and judicious study, Hiram Kidde said, “Sam, I don’t think she’s
wearin
’ drawers.” He shook his head. “And you can get right there, too, just for the asking.” He sighed. “Amazing.”

“Not quite just for the asking,” Carsten said. “For the paying. If she’s not the richest gal in these islands, it ain’t for lack of effort.”

“Effort?” Kidde laughed. “There’s coal-heavers down in the black gang don’t work as hard as she does, I hear tell. You know about the setup dear Maggie’s got?”

“Tell me,” Carsten said. “Beats hell out of thinking about cleaning out a five-inch gun, that’s for damn sure.” He winked. “’Course, you only got a five-inch gun, Miss Maggie ain’t gonna want anything to do with you.”

Kidde had been inhaling to say something, which meant he choked when he started to laugh. Sam Carsten pounded him on the back. “You got to watch that,” he wheezed when he could talk again.

“I
was
watching that,” Sam said, watching Maggie Stevenson, who was watching the Marines watch her.

“Shut up,” Kidde said. “What the hell was I talkin’ about? Oh, yeah—her place. They say she’s got this big room with four, maybe five, Pullman-sized compartments in there, nothin’ in any of ’em ’cept a red couch and a horny guy on it, and she just goes from couch to couch to couch, long as she can walk.”

“No wonder she’s rich,” Carsten said, with the genuine respect a professional in one field gives a professional in another.

“Yup,” Kidde agreed. “And she’s got ’em lined up for every damn compartment, too, even if she does charge thirty bucks a throw.” His hard, blunt face grew dreamy for a moment. “She must be a piece of ass and a half.”

“Yeah, reckon so,” Carsten said. “But most of a month’s pay—hell, more than a month’s pay if you’re just an ordinary seaman—for five minutes, ten tops? That’s a lot to spend just to get your ashes hauled.”

“She’s got a lot—” the gunner’s mate started.

“Of satisfied customers,” Sam said, beating him to the punch line. “Yeah.” They both laughed. Carsten scratched the angle of his jaw. “I dunno. You can take yourself to just an ordinary everyday crib and lay one o’ them Jap girls or a Filipino for a couple-three bucks. Maggie can’t be that much better…can she?” But he was still watching the undisputed queen of Honolulu’s ladies of the evening.

“You can get drunk on that
olikau
popskull the natives cook up here, too,” Hiram Kidde observed. “If gettin’ drunk is the only reason you’re drinkin’, fine. But every now and then, don’t you banker after some real sippin’ whiskey?”

Carsten scratched his jaw without answering. Whiskers rasped under his fingers. He needed a shave. He had a razor back on the
Dakota
, but you could give a dime to one of the Chinese barbers in the little shops all around Pearl Harbor, and he’d shave you closer and smoother than you could do it for yourself. He got shaved a lot these days. His meals and his hammock were taken care of, so he didn’t have a hell of a lot to spend his money on.

The drill sergeant led the marching Marines back toward the British barracks they were occupying. They were too well disciplined to go with really laggard step, but their footwork showed less mechanical precision than usual. A few sailors weren’t enough of an audience for Maggie Stevenson to keep herself on display. She retreated to her carriage. The driver, a little, dark Oriental sweating in top hat and cutaway, flicked the reins. Two perfectly matched black horses bore her away. Carsten and Kidde both watched till the carriage was out of sight.

Sam went and bathed, then headed to one of the barbershops and paid a couple of cents extra for a splash of bay rum. The British had set up an electric trolley between Pearl Harbor and Honolulu, though the motormen who took your nickel were uniformly Japs. Carsten wasn’t the only military man who got out at the Kapalama stop, east of downtown. Some of the men in white or green acted as if they knew exactly where they were going. He followed them.

The half-timbered house might have been transplanted from London, though it wouldn’t have had palm trees around it there. From what “Cap’n” Kidde had said, Carsten had expected to see a line around the block. He didn’t. Then the Oriental driver waved him and the rest of the newcomers around to the back. The line was there.
Discreet
, he thought.

In the Navy, you got used to lines. What was waiting at the end of this one was better than any of the other things for which he’d lined up. He shot the breeze with some of the other guys there. A couple of them seemed too embarrassed about being where they were to say much. Most, though, like him, took it for granted.

When he got up to the back door, another slanteye in formal wear took his money. The fellow wore a pistol, concealed not quite well enough in a shoulder holster. Carsten didn’t blame him, not a bit. If Maggie Stevenson’s place didn’t keep as much cash around as your average bank, he’d eat his hat.

Still another Oriental, also armed, stood at the doorway to the big room Kidde had talked about. “You go Number Three,” he said, pointing. Sure enough, the little compartments had brass numbers on the doors, as if they were hotel rooms. Carsten went into Number 3. Inside were a mirror on one wall, a red couch, a pitcher and basin and a cake of soap on a stool, and some hooks on which to hang his clothes.

Sam used the hooks, then lay back on the couch to wait. The noises coming from one of the other cubicles were highly entertaining. Maggie Stevenson worked her way through the other three—there were four in all, not five—and then opened a door on the far side of his compartment. She came in wearing nothing but a smile and a light sheen of sweat. Carsten stared and stared. “
Hell
of a woman,” he muttered; what you could see through even the most diaphanous
holoku
barely gave you a clue.

“Hello, sailor,” she said, her voice English, sure enough. She lathered up the soap and washed Sam’s privates. “All part of the service,” she said, smiling. Then she bent down and kissed him there, right on the tip, as if it were the end of his nose. “Now—what would you like?”

“You get on top,” he said. “I want to see you, too.”

“All right.” And she did. Those perfect, pink-tipped breasts hung like ripe fruit, inches from his face. He squeezed them and kissed them and licked them. His hands clenched her meaty backside tight.

He wanted to make it last as long as he could. But he hadn’t had any in a while, and Maggie made her money by having lots of customers on any one day, so she tried hard to hurry him along. She knew just what she was doing, too. Try as he would to hold back, he bucked and jerked and came, hard enough to leave him dizzy for a moment.

“Hope I see you again, sailor,” Maggie said. She leaned over him for a second, just far enough that her nipples brushed against the hair and skin of his chest. Then she got off him and off the couch and headed for the next little cubicle.

Sam got dressed and left, too. One more Oriental in fancy dress showed him the way out. He was whistling as he walked back to the trolley stop. It had been a hell of a good time. Was it worth thirty bucks, worth coming back again? He didn’t think so, not really, but he wasn’t sorry he’d done it once.

Three or four guys in uniform were walking up the other side of the street toward Maggie Stevenson’s place. One of them, he saw with amusement, was a spruced-up Hiram Kidde. He started to wave, then stopped. Later on, maybe, he’d find out if the “Cap’n” thought he’d got his money’s worth.

IX

Cincinnatus and his wife Elizabeth were getting ready for bed when someone knocked on the back door. It wasn’t that late, but, ever since Elizabeth had found out she was going to have a baby, she’d been tired a lot of the time, even more tired than her domestic’s work usually made her. “Who is that?” she said in some irritation. “I don’t want visitors.”

“You’d think visitors would come to the front of the house,” Cincinnatus said as he headed out of the bedroom toward the kitchen. From the hall, he added over his shoulder, “One thing—it ain’t U.S. soldiers. They don’t just come to the front of the house, they go and break down the door, you don’t let ’em in fast enough.”

The knock came again. It wasn’t very loud, as if whoever was out there didn’t want the neighbors to notice. Cincinnatus frowned, wondering if it was a strong-arm man trying to trick him into opening the door. Crooks were having a field day. The Yankees didn’t seem to care what people in Covington did to one another, so long as they left U.S. troops alone.

If it was a strong-arm man, Cincinnatus vowed to give him a hell of a surprise. He plucked a heavy iron spider out of the draining rack by the sink. Clout somebody upside the head with that and he’d forget about everything for a good long while.

Spider in his right hand, he opened the back door with his left. When he did, he almost dropped the frying pan. “Mistuh Kennedy!” he exclaimed. “What the devil you doin’ here?”

Even in the dim light of the lamp from the kitchen, Tom Kennedy looked as if the devil had indeed brought him to his present state. He was haggard and skinny and dirty, and his eyes tried to move every which way at once, the way a fox’s did when hounds were chasing it. “Can I come in?” Cincinnatus’ former boss asked.

“I think maybe you better,” Cincinnatus said. “What you doin’ out, anyways? Curfew’s eight o’clock, and I know it’s past that.”

“Sure is,” Kennedy said, and said no more.

That made Cincinnatus ask the next question: “What are you doin’
here
, Mr. Kennedy? You don’t mind me sayin’ so, this ain’t your part of town.” If that wasn’t the understatement of 1915, it would do till a better one came along. Why the devil would a white man come into the colored part of Covington after curfew? The only thing Cincinnatus was sure about was that it wasn’t any simple, ordinary, innocent reason.

“Who is it?” Elizabeth called from the bedroom.

“It’s Mr. Tom Kennedy, sweetheart,” Cincinnatus answered, trying to sound as ordinary and innocent as he could, and knowing he wasn’t having much luck.

Kennedy’s hunted look got even worse. “Don’t say my name so loud,” he hissed urgently. “The fewer people who know I’m here, the better off everybody will be.”

Elizabeth came into the kitchen. She’d put on a quilted cotton housecoat over her nightgown. Her eyes got wide. “It
is
Mr. Kennedy,” she said, and then, determined to be a good hostess no matter what the irregular circumstances in which she found herself, “Shall I put on some coffee for you?”

Kennedy shook his head, a quick, jerky motion. “No, nothing, thanks. I’ve been running on nerves for so long, coffee would just make things worse.”

“Mr. Kennedy,” Cincinnatus said with a mixture of deference and annoyance that struck him odd even at the time, “what
are
you doing here after curfew?”

“Can you hide me for a couple of days?” Kennedy asked. “I won’t tell you any lies—I’m on the dodge from the damnyankees. They catch up with me, it’s a rope around my neck or a blindfold and a cigarette—except I don’t think they’d bother with the cigarette.”

“You’re in real trouble,” Cincinnatus said quietly. A moment later, he realized that meant he was in real trouble, too. The U.S. authorities didn’t take kindly to people who harbored fugitives from what they called justice. Elizabeth’s eyes widened again. She must have figured out the same thing at the same time. Cincinnatus clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Why’d you come here?” he asked, directing the question as much to the world at large as to Tom Kennedy.

“Yes, I’m in real trouble,” Kennedy said. “My life is in your hands. You want to holler for the patrols, I’m a goner. They’ll put money in your pocket, too. Up to you, Cincinnatus. All depends on how you like living under the USA, because I’m doing everything I can to throw the damnyankees out of Kentucky. That’s why they’re after me, in case you haven’t worked it out.”

“Oh, I worked it out, Mr. Kennedy,” Cincinnatus said, softly still. “I’m studyin’ what I should oughta do about it, is all.” He had no reason to love the CSA; what black man did? But the men from the United States hadn’t shown him his lot was better with them in charge, not even close.

He glanced over to Elizabeth. Her belly hadn’t started to swell, certainly not to the point where anyone could notice it when she was wearing clothes. He was acutely aware of her pregnancy all the same. It made him less willing to take chances than he would have been a few months before, and far less willing to take chances than he would have been before he got married.

And so he said, “What did you do, Mr. Kennedy? How come the damnyankees are after you so bad?”

“I don’t want to tell you,” Kennedy answered. “The more things you know, the more they can squeeze out of you if they ever take a mind to.”

That made a certain amount of sense. Most times, Cincinnatus would have accepted it without argument. Now—He felt a curious sense of reversal. For what might well have been the first time in his life, he had the upper hand in a conversation with a white man. Even though he did, he used it cautiously, deferentially: “I don’t know why they want you, suh, I don’t know whether I should oughta help you or help them get you. You understand what I’m sayin’?”

“You won’t buy a pig in a poke, not even from me,” Kennedy said. Cincinnatus nodded—that was it, in a nutshell. Tom Kennedy sighed. He recognized the reversal, too. “All right, have it your way. I haven’t broken any little old ladies’ legs with a crowbar or stolen from the church poor box or anything like that. But I’m in the hauling and moving business, Cincinnatus, right? Some of the things I’ve hauled into Covington aren’t the ones the U.S. Army’s real happy to have here.”

He meant guns. He had to mean guns, and maybe explosives, too. Under U.S. military law, the penalty for that kind of thing was death. Soldiers had nailed up placards saying as much, all over Covington. Warnings appeared in the newspapers about twice a week. And if you harbored a gun runner, you got the same thing he did. Those warnings were in the papers, too.

“You don’t make it easy, Mr. Kennedy,” Cincinnatus said. He came close to hating his former boss for putting him in a spot like this—not just his neck on the line now, but Elizabeth’s and the coming baby’s, too. If he turned him out into the street without saying anything to the authorities but Kennedy got caught later, he’d be in just as much trouble as if he’d concealed him. The only way not to be in trouble with the U.S. authorities was to hand Kennedy over to them now. He didn’t have the stomach for that. As white men went, Kennedy had been pretty decent to him—far better than that screaming U.S. lieutenant who bossed him nowadays.

He had just reached that conclusion when Elizabeth said, “Here, come on with me, Mistuh Kennedy. I got a good place to put you.”

That relieved Cincinnatus, because he hadn’t come up with any good place to hide Kennedy. He didn’t want him under the bed, and the Yankees would be sure to look behind the couch and down in the storm cellar. He’d been wondering if he could take Kennedy over to his mother’s or some other relative’s, but he wasn’t enthusiastic about involving them in the danger the white man had brought to him.

Elizabeth opened the door to the pantry by the stove. It was full of sacks of potatoes and beans and black-eyed peas. Cincinnatus didn’t feel the least bit guilty about hoarding. No matter how bad things got, he and his wouldn’t starve.

When Elizabeth started taking out the sacks, he quickly moved her aside and did it himself. That wasn’t something he wanted his wife doing, not when she was in a family way. The sacks took up a surprising lot of room, all spread out on the kitchen floor.

Once he had them all out, he saw that several boards at the back of the pantry were rotten at the bottom. He hadn’t noticed that before, but Elizabeth had. He stepped into the little cramped space and pulled at the boards. They came out with squeaks and squeals of nails, revealing a black opening behind them.

“God bless you both,” Tom Kennedy said, and squeezed into the opening. Cincinnatus replaced the boards as well as he could by hand. He hoped Kennedy would be able to breathe with them back. One thing seemed pretty clear, though: if U.S. soldiers caught up with Kennedy, his former boss wouldn’t be breathing much longer. Still muttering to himself, Cincinnatus put back the produce sacks; Elizabeth swept up a few beans that had escaped from one of them.

When she was done, she and Cincinnatus looked at each other. They both shook their heads. “Let’s go to bed,” Cincinnatus said, though he didn’t think he was going to sleep much, no matter how tired he’d been.

“All right.” By her tone, Elizabeth was thinking the same thing. If they didn’t sleep like the dead tonight, they’d shamble like the living dead tomorrow. Nothing to be done about that, not now.

After he’d blown out the lamp in the bedroom, Cincinnatus said, “We can’t keep him in there long. He go crazy, cooped up like that. An’ we didn’t even think to give him a thundermug or nothin’.”

“I’ll take care of that in the morning,” Elizabeth answered around an enormous yawn. Cincinnatus felt himself fading, too. Now that he was horizontal, he suspected sleep might sneak up on him after all.

Sure enough, the
wham! wham! wham!
in the middle of the night woke him out of deep, sound slumber. At first, groggy and confused, he thought it was hail pounding on the roof. Then he realized that, while it certainly was pounding, it was all coming from one direction: that of the front door.

“Soldiers,” he whispered to Elizabeth. She nodded. He felt the motion rather than seeing it.
Wham! Wham! Wham!
He groped for a match, found the box, struck a light, and lighted the lamp he’d blown out. Carrying it, he went out and opened the front door.

An electric torch blazed into his face, blinding him. “You just saved your door, nigger,” a Northern voice said. “We were gonna break it down.”

“What you want?” Cincinnatus asked. He didn’t have to struggle very hard to sound stupid, not as tired as he was. Fright came easy, too.

The Yankee officer, hard to see past that powerful torch, said, “You know a white man name of Tom Kennedy, boy?”

“Yes, suh,” Cincinnatus admitted. If they’d come here, they already knew he knew Kennedy. A lie would have got him in deeper trouble than the truth.

“You seen him any time lately?” the officer demanded.

Cincinnatus shook his head. “No, suh. Sure ain’t, not since jus’ a little while after de war start. He run out o’ town, I hear tell, ’fore you Yankees come.” He laid the Negro accent on with a trowel; it would help make the U.S. soldiers think he was stupid. He’d have done that for Confederates, too.

“Wish to Jesus he had,” the officer said, so feelingly that Cincinnatus blinked; he hadn’t thought any damnyankees took Jesus Christ seriously. The fellow went on, “He’s been seen in Covington, and he’s been seen not far from right here, so what we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna search this shack.” He waved to the soldiers with him.

In they came. Cincinnatus got out of the way in a hurry. If he hadn’t, they would have trampled him, or maybe bayoneted him. The U.S. troops turned his tidy little house—he bristled at hearing it called a shack—upside down and inside out looking for Tom Kennedy. They stabbed those bayonets into the sofa and into his mattress through the sheets. Had Kennedy been in there, he would have regretted it. As things were, Cincinnatus did the regretting, for his bed linen and the upholstery. Elizabeth, watching with round eyes, made distressed noises. The Yankees ignored her.

One of the soldiers got down on hands and knees to peer under the stove, though a midget would have had trouble hiding there. Another one flung open the pantry door. The officer—short, skinny, with gold-rimmed spectacles and a mean look—shone that torch in there. Cincinnatus’ heart thumped—
had
he got those boards back well enough? He did his best not to show what he was thinking.

“Nothin’ but a pile of beans,” the officer said disgustedly, and slammed the pantry door. He turned to Cincinnatus. “All right, boy, looks like you were tellin’ the truth.” He dug into his pocket, pulled out a silver dollar, and tossed it to the Negro. “For the damage.” He raised his voice. “Come on, men. We got other places to search.”

Cincinnatus stared down at the coin he’d automatically caught. It wasn’t enough, but it was a dollar more than he’d expected to get. He set it on the counter. When the U.S. soldiers were gone, he opened the pantry door and asked quietly, “You all right, Mr. Kennedy?”

The disembodied voice floated back from behind the wall: “Yes, thanks. God bless you.”

“We take better care of you come mornin’,” Cincinnatus promised, and went off to see if he could get some rest. He sighed. He wasn’t even close to sure he’d done the right thing in hiding Kennedy. But that didn’t matter now. Right or wrong, he was committed. He’d have to see what came of that.

Nellie Semphroch sighed wearily as she carried the big cloth grocery bag back toward the coffeehouse. The bag itself was lighter than she’d wished it would be; the grocers had trouble keeping things in stock. But she was tireder than she thought she should have been, and felt old beyond her years. Winter always wore at her, and this year it wasn’t just winter, it was Rebel occupation, too.

She slipped, and had to flail her arms wildly to keep from falling: the sidewalk was icy in spots. Across the street, Mr. Jacobs came out of his shop with a Confederate soldier wearing one pair of boots and carrying another. The Reb strutted up the street as if he owned it, which, in effect, he did. As far as he was concerned, Nellie wasn’t worth noticing.