Breakthroughs (21 page)

“Look, ‘Cap’n,’ why don’t you forget I ever said anything?” Sam suggested.
And believe me,
he thought,
it’ll be a cold day in hell—a damn sight colder than this—before I open my mouth again.
He retreated from the vision slit and went back toward the breech of the cannon. As long as he stayed at his station and kept his mouth shut, nothing too bad could happen to him—he hoped.

To his relief, Kidde started peering out at the Atlantic. Everybody kept doing that, although there wasn’t anything to see but gray-green ocean. The mines hid below the surface. No one would see them till too late.

Luke Hoskins spoke to Sam in a low voice: “Don’t let Kidde get you down. We’re all edgy these days. We’ve been torpedoed, and we came through it, and we’ve been shelled, and we came through that, too. But if we hit a mine, likely we can’t do nothin’ about it—except sink, I mean.”

“Yeah. Except sink,” Carsten said sourly. “You do so ease my mind, Luke.”

But Hoskins was right. The ship was engaged in hard, slow, dangerous work, work in which the men who served the secondary armament could take no direct part. If all went well, they would live. If not, they would die—and which it would be was not in their hands. No wonder tempers flared.

Kidde turned away from the vision slit. “Things could be worse,” he said, perhaps trying to make amends for ripping into Sam. “We could be in one of those destroyers up ahead of us.”

“Amen.” Everyone in the sponson spoke at the same time, more smoothly than the sailors would have responded to the chaplain of a Sunday morning. Sooner or later, somebody was going to say something more than that. Usually, that somebody would have been Carsten. Not this time. Sam, having been raked once, sulked in his metaphysical tent.

Luke Hoskins said what the whole gun crew had to be thinking: “You’ve got to be crazy to clear mines in a destroyer.”

“Nope.” Hiram Kidde shook his head. “All you’ve got to do is get your orders. Then you say ‘Aye aye, sir!’ and do as you’re told.”

“Crazy,” Hoskins repeated. “Only way to clear the mines you’re supposed to get rid of is to steam past ’em without blowing yourself out of the water.”

“You do lose points if that happens, Luke,” Kidde agreed. “Can’t argue with you there.”

“Goddammit, ‘Cap’n,’ it isn’t funny,” the shell-jerker said. “That damn weighted cable between the four-stackers is supposed to catch on the mines’ mooring cables and yank ’em up to the surface so we can shoot the hell out of ’em. But if they find the mines the hard way, or if they miss ’em…”

His voice trailed away. Nobody said anything for a while after that. Sam knew what kind of pictures he was seeing inside his own mind. The rest of the crew couldn’t have been imagining anything much different.

Turn and turn about: four hours on, four hours off. When the other crew replaced Carsten and his comrades, he hurried to the galley and shoveled down pork and beans and fried potatoes and sauerkraut and lemonade and coffee. He was amazed how much he ate these days, to hold cold and exhaustion at bay. The coffee wouldn’t keep him from sleeping. Nothing would keep him from sleeping, not even the highly charged air in the cramped bunkroom after everybody had been messing on pork and beans and sauerkraut.

Climbing out of his bunk was more like an exhumation than anything else. He shook his head in bewilderment. Hadn’t he just lain down? He put on his shoes and cap, grabbed the peacoat he’d set on top of his blanket, and staggered blank-faced toward the galley for more coffee to help him remember who he was and what the hell he was supposed to be doing.

He went up on deck to let the chilly breeze clear some more cobwebs from his poor befogged brain. Walking forward, he nodded to the two mine-hunting destroyers that cleared the way for the
Dakota
. So far, they’d done their job perfectly: they hadn’t blown up, and neither had the battleship.

That thought had hardly made its slow way through Sam’s still-fuzzy thoughts when one of the destroyers did go up, in a great dreadful gout of smoke and fire. Across half a mile of water, the roar was loud enough to stagger him.

“Oh, sweet Jesus!” he moaned. Half of that was simple horror. The other half was guilt for jinxing the destroyer by thinking how well she’d been doing her job.

She was sinking fast now, going down by the bow, her stern rising higher and higher until, only a couple of minutes after she was hit, she dove for the bottom of the sea. She never had a chance to lower boats. A handful of heads bobbed in the cold, cold water. In water like that, a man might stay alive for an hour, maybe even a little more if he was very strong.

“Rescue party to the boats!” a lieutenant shouted.

Sam stood not twenty feet from one. He was in it, along with several other men, and dangling his way down toward the surface of the Atlantic less than two minutes later. He plied an oar with a vigor that made him sweat even in that nasty weather. His was not the only boat in the water; the
Dakota
had launched several others, as had the destroyer’s partner. They all raced to pick up the scattered survivors.

“Back oars!” Sam called as the boat drew near one feebly paddling man. He dropped his own oar, leaned out, and caught hold of the sailor’s hand. The fellow almost pulled him into the water, but a couple of other men in the boat grabbed him around the waist and also helped him pull in the survivor.

“Thank you,” the sailor said through chattering teeth. “Christ, I reckoned I was dead.”

“I believe you,” Sam said. “Saw you go up. Godawful thing. One second you were just going along, and the next one—”

“Felt just like somebody took a two-by-four and hit me in both feet,” the sailor said. Grimacing, he went on, “Bet something’s busted in there, ’cause they sure as hell hurt. Saw we didn’t have a prayer. Everybody was screaming, ‘Abandon ship!’ Made it to the rail—I was half walking, half crawling. Made it over the side and started swimming hard as I could, on account of I didn’t want to get sucked under when she went down. And I didn’t, not quite. Figured my ticket was punched, but you’ve got to keep trying, you know what I mean?”

“Here, pal. Try this.” Somebody pressed the bottle of brandy the boat carried—nothing near so fine as what Rear Admiral Fiske drank—into the sailor’s hands.

He took a long pull. “Marry me!” he exclaimed blissfully. His rescuers laughed.

He raised the dark bottle to his lips again. “Don’t drink it all,” Sam warned. “We’re going to try and get some of your pals, too.” He pointed toward a man floating on his back not far away, then grabbed up his oar and helped pull the boat toward the other sailor.

The man wasn’t moving. When they got to him, they saw he was dead. “Poor bastard,” somebody said quietly. It was all the memorial service the sailor got.

Sam stood up in the boat to see farther. One of the boats from the other destroyer was already heading toward the last swimming man he spied. The others had either been picked up or had sunk beneath the waves forever.

“Well, we got one,” he muttered—a tiny victory, snatched from the jaws of death. He sat on the bench again, then spoke once more to the sailor he’d pulled out of the South Atlantic: “I take it back, pal. You might as well get drunk.”

“God bless you,” the man from the destroyer said. Instead of drinking, he stuck out his hand. “You ever need anything, I’m your man. Name’s Gus Hardwig.”

“Sam Carsten,” Carsten said, and shook the proffered hand. “Believe me, I was glad to do it. We were all glad to do it.” The men in the boat with him nodded. He pointed back toward the
Dakota
. “Now we’d better take you home.”

They rowed over alongside the battleship, whose cranes effortlessly lifted the boat out of the water. Gus Hardwig put a cautious foot on the
Dakota
’s deck, then jerked it away as if the steel were red-hot. “Can’t make it,” he said.

Orderlies whisked him away in a stretcher. Carsten stood on the deck, staring north. Only a few floating bodies and an oil slick showed where the mine-clearing destroyer had gone down. Sam’s shiver had nothing to do with his wet tunic and the sharp breeze. The mine could have blown up the
Dakota
as readily as it had sunk the escort vessel. That could have been him floating in the water as readily as Gus Hardwig, or more likely him going down with the ship. He shivered again.

Going home. Going home. Going home.
The rails sang a sweet song in Jefferson Pinkard’s ears as the wheels of the train clicked over them. He’d been away too long, too far. He couldn’t wait to see Emily’s smiling face now that he’d finally got himself enough leave time to escape the front and travel back to Birmingham for a few days.

He couldn’t wait to see all of her, every inch, stretched out bare on their bed. He couldn’t wait to feel her underneath him on that bed, or on her hands and knees as they coupled like hunting hounds, or on her knees in front of him, red-gold hair spilling down over her face as she leaned forward and—

He shifted on the hard second-class seat. He was hard himself, and hoped the little old lady reading a sentimental novel next to him didn’t notice. He couldn’t help getting hard when he thought about Emily. Christ, she loved to do it! So did he, with her. When he’d got short leaves in Texas, he hadn’t felt any great urge to visit the whorehouses that did not officially exist. But Emily—Emily was something very special in the line of women.

She’d probably kick his legs out from under him as soon as he walked in the door. She’d gone without as long as he had. From her letters, she might have missed it even more than he did. “Very special,” he muttered. The woman beside him looked up from her novel, realized he hadn’t been talking to her, and began to read again.

Pinkard had the seat closer to the window. He found the Mississippi countryside more interesting than a book. Here, away from the front, the war seemed forgotten. He’d seen that as soon as the first train he’d boarded got more than an hour’s travel away from the trenches. Farmers were plowing in the fields. Actually, more farmers’ wives were in the fields than he would have seen before the war. That was a change, but only a small one when set against the absence of trenches and shell holes and artillery pieces. Everything was so green and fresh-looking, the way a landscape got to be when it wasn’t drastically revised every few days or every few minutes.

When the train rolled through a town, factory smokestacks sent black plumes of smoke into the air. The first time Jeff saw those plumes, he was alarmed; they put him in mind of fires after bombardments. But he quickly stopped worrying about that: industry got to seem normal in a hurry.

Past Columbus, Mississippi, and into Alabama the train rolled. Here and there, Pinkard did note scars on the landscape in this part of the countryside, half-healed ones from the Negro uprisings the year before. This was cotton country, with many Negroes and few whites.

Somebody a couple of rows in front of Pinkard said, “I hear tell the niggers is still shootin’ at trains every now and again.”

“Ought to do some shootin’ at them with the biggest guns we got,” the stranger’s seatmate answered.

Remembering his own train ride into Georgia and the bullets that had slammed into the cars from out of the night, Pinkard understood how that fellow felt. He’d been a new, raw soldier then, his uniform a dark, proper butternut, not faded to the color of coffee with too much cream. The fire from the Red Negroes had seemed intense, deadly, terrifying. He wondered what it would seem like now. Probably not so much of a much.

Darkness fell as the train rattled through the central-Alabama cotton fields. Jeff revised his thinking. If black diehards had fired a couple of belts of ammunition at this train, he would have been terrified all over again. If somebody was shooting at you and you couldn’t shoot back, terror made perfect sense.

He leaned back in the hard, uncomfortable seat and closed his eyes. He was only going to relax for a little while. So he told himself, but the next thing he knew, the conductor was shouting, “Birmingham! All out for Birmingham!”

He pushed past the gray-haired woman, who was going on farther east. As soon as he stepped out on the platform, he knew he was home again. The smoky, sulfurous air that poured from the foundries mingled with the fog that so often stole through Jones Valley to yield an atmosphere with density and character: damp and heavy and smelly, a mud bath for the lungs.

Flame poured from the tops of the chimneys of the Sloss Works, out toward the eastern edge of town. Back before the war—back before the Conscription Bureau had dragged him out of the foundry and into the trenches—he’d thought of that sight as hell on earth. Now that he’d seen war, he knew better, but the memory lingered.

Before he could get off the platform, he showed his papers to a military policeman who had to be counting his blessings at having a post hundreds of miles from the real war. The fellow inspected them, then waved him on. Trolley lines ran close by the station, taking travelers wherever they needed to go in the city. Pinkard stood at the corner and waited for the Sloss Works car he could ride out to the company housing—yellow cottages for white men and their families, primer-red for Negroes—surrounding the Sloss Works themselves. He yawned. He was still sleepy despite the nap, but figured the sight of Emily would wake him up in short order when he got home.

The trolley driver—who’d leaned crutches behind his seat and had one empty trouser leg—worked the brake and brought the car squealing to a halt at the edge of the company town. He nodded to Jefferson Pinkard as the soldier got off. Jeff nodded back. He felt the driver’s eyes on him as he walked away. Did the fellow hate him for his long, smooth strides? How could anyone blame him if he did?

Everything was quiet as Jeff headed home. Most of the cottages were dark, with men away for the war or working the evening shift or asleep if they worked days or nights. Here and there, lamplight yellow as melted butter spilled out of windows. A couple of dogs barked as Pinkard passed their houses. One of them, chained in the front yard, rushed at him, but the chain kept the big-mouthed, skinny brute from reaching the sidewalk.

Jeff turned onto his little lane. He felt swept back in time to the days before the war. How many times he’d walked this way with Bedford Cunningham, his next-door neighbor and best friend, both of them tired and hot and sweaty in their overalls after a long day’s work. Alabama had been dry for a few years, but home-brew beer never got hard to come by. A couple of bottles out of the icebox went down sweet, no doubt about it.

There stood the Cunningham house, dark and still. Pinkard sighed. Bedford had gone to war before he did, and had come back without an arm, as the trolley driver had come back without a leg. A one-armed man could do a lot of things, but going back on the foundry floor probably wasn’t one of them. Bedford and Fanny had hard times. Jeff wondered how long they’d be able to stay in company housing if Bedford wasn’t in the Army and couldn’t work for the company any more.

Lamplight shone from the curtained window of Pinkard’s own house, just past the Cunninghams’. He kicked at the sidewalk in mild disappointment. He’d expected Emily would already be asleep; come morning, she’d have to head downtown toward her munitions-plant job. He’d hoped he could take off his uniform in the front room, slip naked into bed beside her, and startle her awake the best way he knew how.

Even knowing she was awake, he went up the walk on tiptoe. If he couldn’t give her the best surprise possible, he’d still give her the biggest surprise he could. His thumb and palm closed on the doorknob. Gently, gently, he turned it. The door swung open without a squeak. He was glad Emily had kept the hinges oiled. In Birmingham, anything that didn’t get oiled rusted.

The lamplight glinted off Emily’s shining hair. Seeing that before he saw anything else, Jeff began, “Hey, darlin’, I’m…home.” What had started as a glad cry ended as a hiss, like air escaping from a punctured inner tube.

Emily half sat, half knelt on the floor in front of the divan. On the divan, his legs splayed wide, lolled Bedford Cunningham. Neither of them wore any more than they’d been born with. Her face had been in his lap till she pulled away at the sound of Jeff’s voice. A thin, bright line of saliva ran down her chin from a corner of her lower lip.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Cunningham said. “Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ.” The short stump of his right arm jerked and twisted, as if he’d tried to make a fist with a hand he’d forgotten he didn’t have. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

“Close the door, Jeff,” Emily said. Her eyes were wide and staring. She sounded eerily self-possessed, like somebody who’d just staggered out of a train wreck.

Mechanically, Pinkard did. He was stunned, too, and said the first thing that popped into his mind: “You sneak out of Fanny’s bed to come over here, Bedford?”

Cunningham shook his head. “She’s workin’ second shift these days.” His face was pale as skimmed milk. Before he was hurt, he’d been as big and strong and ruddy and bold as Pinkard. Now he looked thinner, older, his face lined as it hadn’t been when he was a whole man.

Jeff’s wits began to work. “Get your clothes on. Get the hell out of here. I ain’t gonna lick a crippled man.” He didn’t say a word about what he’d do, or wouldn’t do, to Emily.

Bedford Cunningham put on drawers and trousers and shirt one-handed with a speed that showed both practice and desperation. He hadn’t been wearing shoes. He darted out the door. A few seconds later, the door to his own cottage opened and closed.

“Why?” Jefferson Pinkard asked the age-old question of the husband betrayed.

Naked still, Emily shrugged. Her breasts, firm and pink-tipped, bobbled briefly. She was, Jeff saw, over the jaundice that troubled some munitions workers who handled cordite too much. “Why?” she echoed, and shrugged again. “You weren’t here. I missed you. I missed
it
. Finally, I missed it so much I couldn’t stand it any more, and so—” Yet another shrug.

“But Bedford—”
My best friend!
was another husbandly howl as old as time.

Emily got to her feet in a smooth, graceful motion Jeff couldn’t possibly have imitated. She walked up to him and took his hands in hers. He knew what she was doing. He could hardly have helped knowing what she was doing. “He was here, that’s all, darlin’,” she said. “If you’d been here, too, I never would’ve looked at him. You know that’s so. But you was in Georgia and Texas and all them damn places, and—” She shrugged one more time. Her nipples barely brushed the breast of his tunic.

No, he could hardly have helped knowing what she was doing. That didn’t mean it didn’t work. His breath caught in his throat. His heart thuttered. He’d missed it, too, but he hadn’t realized—he hadn’t had the faintest notion—how much till she stood bare before him.

She took a step backwards, still holding his hands. He took a step forward, after her. She took another step, and another, leading him back to the divan. When he sat, it was where Bedford Cunningham had sat before him. She sprawled beside him. She had two hands to undo his belt buckle and the buttons of his fly.

She didn’t kiss him on the lips. That might have reminded him where her mouth had just been. Instead, she leaned over and lowered her head. He pressed her down on him, his hands tangling in her thick hair. She gagged a little, but did not pull away.

Moments later, he exploded. He let Emily pull back far enough to gulp convulsively. Then, unasked, she returned to what she’d been doing. He stiffened again, faster than he would have believed he could. When he was hard, she got up on her knees and swung her right leg over him, as if she were mounting a horse. She impaled herself on him and began to ride.

Her cries of joy must have wakened half the neighborhood. Then, throatily, she added, “I
never
made noise like that for Bedford.” Jeff’s hands clutched her meaty buttocks till she whimpered in pain and pleasure mixed. He drove deep into her, again and again. And, as he groaned and shuddered in the most exquisite pleasure he’d ever known, he wished with all his soul he were back in a muddy trench in Texas, under artillery bombardment from the Yankees.

Sweat ran down George Enos’ face. The sun stood higher in the sky than it had any business doing at this season of the year, at least to his way of thinking. The USS
Ericsson
was down in the tropics now, nosing around after the submarines making life miserable for the warships and freighters that were trying to strangle the trade route between Argentina and England.

“What do you think?” he asked Carl Sturtevant. “Are we after English boats, or are the Rebs out here giving their pals a hand?”

“Damned if I know,” answered the petty officer who ran the depth-charge launcher. “Damned if I care, either. Knowing who they are doesn’t change how I do my job. We keep them too busy either going after us or trying to get away from us, they aren’t going to be able to do anything else.”

“Yeah,” Enos said. “Just between you and me, I’d sooner see ’em trying to get away than going after us.”

Sturtevant looked him up and down. “Any fool can see you ain’t a career Navy man,” he said after a brief pause for thought.

“Screw you and the destroyer you rode in on,” Enos returned evenly. “I’ve been captured by a Confederate commerce raider, I’ve sailed on a fishing boat that was nothing but a decoy for Rebel subs and helped sink one of the bastards, I was on the bank of the Cumberland when my river monitor got blown sky-high, and I was right here when the damn
Snook
damn near torpedoed us. To my way of thinking, I’ve earned a little peace and quiet.”