Blood and Iron (57 page)

Nellie knew that didn’t necessarily prove anything. Some of the men she recalled from her own sordid past had seemed ordinary enough on the outside. But she didn’t hate Grimes on sight, as she’d thought she would.

He said, “I think I’m the luckiest man in the world. Edna may have told you, ma’am, I lost my wife to the influenza. I never thought I’d fall in love with another woman again till I met your daughter. She showed me I was wrong, and I’m ever so glad she did.”

Edna looked as if she would have lain down on the floor for him then and there if Nellie hadn’t been in the coffeehouse. Nellie did her best to hide her disgust. Grimes
had
asked Edna to marry him. He hadn’t got her in a family way, either, as Edna’s father had before he married Nellie.

“Where are your people from, Mr. Grimes?” Nellie asked. “What do they do?”

“I was born in New Rumley, Ohio, Mrs. Jacobs,” Grimes answered, “the same town that saw the birth of the great General Custer. My father runs the weekly newspaper there: the
New Rumley Courier
. His father ran it before him; I reckon my brother Caleb’ll take it on when the time comes.”

“Why aren’t you still back there yourself?” What Nellie meant was,
If you were still back there, you wouldn’t be rumpling my daughter’s clothes.

Merle Grimes could hardly have missed that, but it didn’t faze him. He said, “I wanted steady work. The newspaper business is a lot of things, but it’s not steady. You go to work for the U.S. government, you know you’ve got a paycheck for the rest of your days. I won’t get rich, but I won’t go hungry, either.”

Nellie didn’t know what sort of answer she’d thought she would get, but that wasn’t it. “You seem a steady enough young fellow,” she said, an admission she hadn’t looked to make.

“I try to be,” Grimes said—steadily.

“Isn’t he the bulliest thing in the whole wide world, Ma?” Edna said.

She was thinking with her cunt, a phrase that hadn’t come to Nellie’s mind since her days in the demimonde. But Merle Grimes did look to be a much better bargain than Nellie had expected. “He may do,” she said. “He just may do.”

Engine roaring, the barrel bounded across the Kansas prairie north of Fort Leavenworth. Colonel Irving Morrell stood head and shoulders out of the turret, so he could take in as much of the battlefield as possible. The test model easily outran and out-maneuvered the Great War machines against which it was pitted.

Morrell ducked down into the turret and bawled a command to the driver in the forward compartment: “Halt!” And the driver halted, and it was not divine intervention. With the engine separated from the barrel’s crew by a steel bulkhead, a man could hear a shouted order. In a Great War barrel, one man could not hear another who was screaming into his ear.

At Morrell’s order, the gunner traversed the turret till the cannon bore on the barrel he had chosen. The old-style machines were trying to bring their guns to bear on him, too, but they had to point themselves in the right direction, a far slower and clumsier process than turning the turret.

“Fire!” Morrell yelled. The turret-mounted cannon roared. A shell casing leaped from the breech as flame spurted from the muzzle. It was only a training round, with no projectile, but it made almost as much noise as the real thing, and getting used to the hellish racket of the battlefield was not the least important part of training. The loader passed a new shell to the gunner, who slammed it home.

An umpire raised a red flag and ordered the barrel at which Morrell had fired out of the exercise. Morrell laughed. This was the fifth or sixth lumbering brute to which he’d put paid this afternoon. The Great War barrels hadn’t come close to hurting him. Had it been a prizefight, the referee would have stopped it.

But, in the ring or on the battlefield, he who stood still asked to get tagged. Morrell ducked down again and shouted, “Go! Go hard! Let’s see how many of them we can wreck before they make us call it a day.”

He laughed. This was as close to real combat as he could come. He might have enjoyed going up to Canada with a few companies of barrels, but he knew General Custer didn’t really need his services. The Canucks had been pretty quiet lately. The Confederate States were still licking their wounds, too. So he would pretend, as he’d pretended before the Great War, and have a dandy time doing it, too.

The barrel up ahead had the name
PEACHES
painted on its armored flanks. That made Morrell laugh, too. Since the earliest days of barrels, men had named them for girlfriends and wives and other pretty women. Peaches belonged to Lieutenant Jenkins; Morrell could see him standing up in the cupola. He saw Morrell, too, and sent him a gesture no junior officer should ever have aimed at his superior. Morrell laughed again.

Jenkins tried to keep him off by opening up with his rear and starboard machine guns. They fired blanks, too. Not only was that cheaper, but live ammunition would have torn through the thin steel of the test model’s superstructure. This time, Morrell’s chuckle had a predatory ring. It wouldn’t do Jenkins any good. This machine was assumed to be armored against such nuisances.

But an umpire raised a flag and pointed at Morrell. Morrell started to shout a hot protest—sometimes the umpires forgot they were supposed to pretend his barrel was properly armored. But then he realized the officer was pointing not at the barrel but at himself. He could not argue about that. His own body was vulnerable to machine-gun fire, even if that of the barrel was supposed not to be.

It was, in fact, a nice test of his crew. He bent down into the turret one last time. “I’m dead,” he said. “You’re on your own. I’ll try not to bleed on you.” He started to tell them to nail Jenkins’ barrel, but decided he’d used up enough “dying” words already.

The men made him proud. His gunner, a broad-shouldered sergeant named Michael Pound, said, “If you’re dead, sir, get the hell out of the way so I can see what I’m doing.” As soon as Morrell moved, Pound peered out of the turret and then started giving orders with authority a general might have envied. They were good orders, too, sensible orders. Maybe he couldn’t have commanded an entire brigade of barrels, but he sounded as if he could.

And he went straight after the barrel that had “killed” his commander. Morrell knew he couldn’t have done a better job himself. In short order, Pound shelled Jenkins’machine from the side: fire to which its main armament could not respond. An umpire soon had to raise a flag signaling the Great War barrel destroyed.

“Bully!” Morrell shouted, and smacked Pound on his broad back. “How did you learn to command so well?”

“Sir, I’ve been listening to you all along,” his gunner answered, “and keeping an eye on you, too. I copied what you’d do and what you’d say.”

“At least you didn’t copy my accent,” Morrell said. Pound laughed. His voice had a northern twang to it that made him sound almost like a Canadian. Morrell went on, “It’s still your barrel, Sergeant. What are you going to do next?”

Sergeant Pound went barrel hunting as ferociously as Morrell could have wanted. When the umpires finally whistled the exercise to a halt, one of them approached the test model. “Colonel, you were supposed to have been killed,” he said in the fussily precise tones that failed to endear umpires to ordinary soldiers.

“Captain, on my word of honor, I did and said nothing at all to fight this barrel after your colleague signaled that I’d been hit,” Morrell answered. He climbed out onto the top of the turret, then called down into it: “Sergeant Pound, stand up and take a bow.” Pound did stand up. When he saw the captain with the umpire’s armband, he came to attention and saluted.

As if doing him a favor he didn’t deserve, the captain returned the salute. Then he gave Morrell a fishy stare. “I have a great deal of trouble believing what you just told me, Colonel,” he said.

That was the wrong tack to take. “Captain, if you are suggesting that I would lie to you on my word of honor, I have a suggestion for you in return,” Morrell said quietly. “If you like, we can meet in some private place and discuss the matter man to man. I am, I assure you, at your service.”

U.S. Army officers hadn’t dueled since before the War of Secession. Morrell didn’t really have pistols at sunrise in mind. But he would have taken a good deal of pleasure in whaling the stuffing out of the officious captain. He let that show, too. As he’d expected, the captain wilted. “Sir, I think you may have misunderstood me,” he said, looking as if he wished he could sink into the churned-up prairie.

“I hope I did,” Morrell said. “I also hope Sergeant Pound’s outstanding achievement will be prominently featured in your reports of the action. He deserves that, and I want to see him get it.”

“He shall have it,” the umpire said. “You may examine the report as closely as you like.” He wasn’t altogether a fool, not if he realized Morrell would be reading that report to make sure he kept his promise. He still came too close to being a perfect fool to make Morrell happy.

Pound said, “Thank you very much, sir,” as Morrell climbed down into the turret once more.

“Don’t thank me,” Morrell said. “You’re the one who earned it. And now, let’s take this beast back to the barn. We keep showing them and showing them that we can run rings around every other barrel in the United States. If that won’t make them build more like this one, I don’t know what will.”

Odds were, nothing would make the Socialists build new, improved barrels. The political fight back in Philadelphia at the moment had to do with old-age pensions, not the War Department. Morrell was convinced he’d have a better chance of living to collect an old-age pension if the Army got better barrels, but he had no friends in high places, not in President Sinclair’s administration.

After the barrel returned to the shed that sheltered it from the elements—and at whose expense the quartermasters had grumbled—Morrell climbed out and headed for the Bachelor Officer Quarters. Then he stopped, did a smart about-face, and went off in the other direction. As he went, he shook his head and laughed at himself. He’d been married only a little more than a month, and the habits he’d acquired over several years died hard.

The cottage toward which he did go resembled nothing so much as the company housing that went up around some factories. It was small and square and looked like the ones all around it. It was also the first time Irving Morrell had had more than a room to himself since joining the Army more than half a lifetime before.

Agnes Hill—no, Agnes Morrell; the habit of thinking of her by her former name died hard, too—opened the door when he was still coming up the walk. “How did it go today?” she asked.

He kissed her before waggling his hand and answering, “So-so. We blew a bunch of Great War barrels to smithereens, the way we always do, but I got shot in the middle of the exercise.”

To his surprise, Agnes looked stricken. She needed a few seconds to realize what he meant. Even when she did, her laugh came shaky. “An umpire decided you got shot,” she said, sounding as if she needed to reassure herself.

Morrell nodded. “That’s right. See? No blood.” He did a neat pirouette. When he faced Agnes again, she still wasn’t smiling. Now he had to pause to figure out why. When he did, he felt stupid, not a feeling he was used to. Her first husband had died in combat; was it any wonder she didn’t find cracks about getting shot very funny? Contritely, Morrell said, “I’m sorry, dear. I’m fine. I really am.”

“You’d better be.” Agnes’ voice was fierce. “And now come on. Supper’s just about ready. I’ve got a beef tongue in the pot, the way you like it—with potatoes and onions and carrots.”

“You can spend the rest of the night letting out my trousers, the way you feed me,” Morrell said. Agnes laughed at that with real amusement. However much Morrell ate—and he was a good trencherman—he remained skinny as a lath.

After supper, Morrell stayed in the kitchen while his wife washed dishes. He enjoyed her company. They chatted while she worked, and then while she read a novel and he waded through reports. And then they went to bed.

Though he’d hardly been a virgin before saying “I do,” Morrell’s occasional couplings with easy women had not prepared him for the pleasures of the marriage bed. Every time he and his wife made love, it was as if they were getting reacquainted, and at the same time learning things about each other they hadn’t known before and might have been a long time finding out any other way. “I love you,” he said afterwards, taking his weight on elbows and knees while they lay still joined.

“I love you, too,” Agnes answered, raising up a little to kiss him on the cheek. “And I love—this. And I would love you to get off me so I can get up and go to the bathroom, if that’s all right.”

“I think so,” he said. Agnes laughed and poked him in the ribs. When she came back to bed, he was nearly asleep. Agnes laughed again, on a different note. She put on her nightgown and lay down beside him. He heard her breathing slow toward the rhythms of sleep, too. Feeling vaguely triumphant at staying awake long enough to notice that, he drifted off.

Anne Colleton had always fancied that she had a bit of the artist in her. Back before the war, she’d designed and arranged the exhibition of modern art she’d put on at the Marshlands mansion. Everyone had praised the way the exhibit was laid out. Then the world went into the fire, and people stopped caring about modern art.