Breakthroughs (50 page)

Sergeant Cross said, “Damn me to hell and toast my toes over the fire if it ain’t gonna feel good not to get shot at for a while.”

“Sí, es verdad,”
Hip Rodriguez said.
“Muy bueno.”

“Yeah,” Pinkard said, because Rodriguez expected him to say something like that. He didn’t mean it, though. He suspected his pal knew he didn’t mean it. Rodriguez had enough tact for any other dozen soldiers Jeff had ever met. Jeff wanted to be in the trenches. He wanted to be in the Yankee trenches, killing Yankees. When he was doing that, he didn’t have to think about anything else.

Replacements came forward to fill the trenches Pinkard and his comrades were leaving. It was a black unit, with white noncoms and officers moving the men along.
“Mallates,”
Rodriguez said, shaking his head. “You know, down where I was living, I didn’t hardly never see no niggers, not till I come into the Army.”

“Isn’t like that in Alabama,” Jeff said. “ ’Bout as many of ’em back home as there are white men.”
Didn’t have to bring niggers down into Sonora, with greasers there already.
But he didn’t say that out loud, and hoped Hip didn’t know he thought it. Rodriguez was a good soldier and a good guy—a good friend—even if he was a greaser.

On they trudged, toward the tiny hamlet of Grow, Texas, whose dusty main street, all of two blocks long, made a liar of the cockeyed optimist who’d named the place. Most of the buildings along those two blocks had been turned into saloons. Texas was officially dry. Where soldiers were involved, people looked the other way.

Some of the barmaids—most of the barmaids—sold more than beer and whiskey, too. Up above every saloon were several small rooms in constant frantic use. That sort of thing did not officially exist, either. Jeff had never felt the urge to go upstairs in any place like that, of which he’d seen a good many. A few shots of whiskey, maybe some poker—that had been plenty.

He didn’t know what the hell he’d do now. Along with most of his pals, he went into a saloon that called itself the Gold Nugget. When they got inside, Sergeant Cross said, “They should have named this place the Cow Pie.” He didn’t walk out, though. None of the other dives in Grow was any different. Sawdust on the floor, a bouncer with a bludgeon on his belt and a sawed-off shotgun by his chair, the stink of sweat and booze and the barmaids’ cheap perfume…they all came with saloons in Grow and in any of scores of little towns behind both sides of the line from the Atlantic to the Gulf of California.

Somebody from another unit got out of a chair while Jeff was standing by it. He threw his backside into it before anyone else could. A barmaid wiggled through the crowd of soldiers trying to crowd up to the bar. Their hands roamed freely till she almost decked one of them with a roundhouse slap.

“I ain’t apples, boys,” she said. “You got to pay before you pinch the merchandise.”

She spoke good English, but her accent reminded Pinkard of Hip Rodriguez’s. So did her chamois-colored skin and black, black eyes. Most of the barmaids were of Mexican blood. A few were black. Jeff didn’t see any white women at the Gold Nugget, though some did work in the other saloons in Grow.

When the barmaid finally got over to him, he ordered a double shot of whiskey and gave her a dollar, which would have been outrageous before the war and was too damned expensive now. Pinkard wasn’t one of the ones who groused about that, though—what the hell else did he have to do with his money except spend it on hooch and whatever other pleasures he could find?

He knocked the whiskey back in a hurry after the barmaid—Consuela, some of the guys were calling her—brought it to him. It wasn’t the sort of whiskey to sip and savor. It tasted like kerosene and went down his throat as if it were wearing shoes with long, sharp spikes. But once it got to his stomach, it made him hot and it made him stupid, and that was the point of the exercise.

He waved his empty glass, a signal that he wanted a full one to take its place. Eventually, he got one. He drank it and peered around. The Gold Nugget looked cleaner. The kerosene lamps looked brighter. He wondered what the devil the barkeep was putting in the whiskey.

When he waved the glass again, Consuela brought him another refill. She looked better, too. A moment later, she plopped herself down in his lap. Coyly, she spoke in Spanish:
“Te gustaría chingar?”

He had a pretty good idea what it meant.
Chinga tu madre
was one of the things Hip Rodriguez yelled at the Yankees when he ran out of English. To leave Jeff in no possible doubt, Consuela wrapped her arms around his neck and gave him a big kiss. He wondered whom else she’d kissed lately—and where. After a few seconds, though, his blood heated and he stopped worrying.

“We go upstairs?” she asked, coming back to English. Then her voice got amazingly pragmatic: “Ten dollars. You have a hell of a good time.”

Ten dollars was at least five dollars too much. With three doubles sloshing around inside him, Jefferson Pinkard wasn’t inclined to argue. “Upstairs,” he agreed, surprised at the way his tongue stumbled inside his mouth. “Ten dollars. Hell of a good time.”

Going up the stairs took longer than it would have if he’d been sober. The cubicle to which Consuela led him was cramped and humid and smelled as if someone should have taken a hose to it a long time before. She held out a hand for the money, then shucked out of her clothes with nonchalant aplomb.

He had a little trouble rising to the occasion. “I’ll fix,” Consuela said, and started to lower her head.

“No!” Jeff exclaimed. She looked up at him in surprise; she probably hadn’t had anybody refuse that offer lately. But instead of Consuela’s face, Jeff saw Emily’s, her eyes glowing, on the night he’d caught her with Bedford Cunningham. She’d lowered her head that same way. The mixture of pleasure and pain was too strong for him to want to repeat it.

He spat on his palm and played with himself instead till he was stiff enough to go into Consuela. She shrugged and did her best to hurry him along once he was inside her. The second after he spent himself, he wished he hadn’t bothered. That was too late, of course.

Hip Rodriguez came out of a little cubicle two doors down from the one he’d used. The little Sonoran looked drunk and sad, too. “Ah, Jeff,” he said, “I do this, it feels good, and I still miss my
esposa
. Maybe I miss her more than ever. Where is the sense in this? Can you tell me?” He was drunk, all right, and drunkenly serious.

“Sense?” Jefferson Pinkard shook his head. “Damned if I see any of that anywhere at all.” He wondered if he missed Emily. He supposed he did. When an opium fiend couldn’t get his pipe, he missed it, didn’t he? That was how Jeff missed his wife. He wanted her. He longed for her. And he wanted her and longed for her even though he knew she wasn’t good for him.

Downstairs, the bouncer and a couple of military policemen were breaking up a brawl. The military policemen looked like men going about their business. The bouncer looked like someone having a hell of a good time. Pinkard wouldn’t have wanted to tangle with him, and he was a big man who’d been a steelworker before going into the Army. He wondered why the bouncer wasn’t wearing a uniform himself. Maybe they didn’t make one wide enough through the shoulders to fit him. Had a tent had sleeves, that might have worked.

Consuela didn’t waste much time upstairs. Pretty soon, she was down on the floor of the saloon again, hustling drinks. And pretty soon again, she was going up the stairs with another soldier.

“Look at that,” Jeff said. “Just look at that. If she does that kind of business every day, she’ll end up owning half of Texas by the time the war’s over.”

“Yes, and the Yankees will own the other half,” Rodriguez said. “And do you know what else, Jeff? I will not be sorry. Sonorans have no love for Texans. More than anyone else in the CSA, Texans treat Sonorans like niggers. Let the Yankees have Texas.
Hasta la vista. Hasta luego.
” He waved derisively.
“Adiós.”

“But you’re fighting in Texas,” Pinkard pointed out. “Never heard you talk like this here before.”

“Yes, I am fighting in Texas,” Rodriguez agreed sadly. “
Mala suerte
—bad luck. You never hear me talk like this?” His smile was oddly sweet. “I am not so drunk before, I think, when we talk of Texas.”

“I don’t give a damn about Texas myself any more,” Pinkard said. “Hell, we’ve lost the damn war. Like you say, the damnyankees are welcome to the place. All I want to do is go back home.”

“You no say, ‘Go back home to my wife,’ like you used to,” Rodriguez said. “You didn’t used to go up with the
putas
, neither, when they take us out of line.”

“Leave it alone, Hip,” Jeff said. “Leave it the hell alone. Whatever happened back there happened, is all. It ain’t anybody’s business but mine.”

Rodriguez looked at him with large, liquid eyes. He realized he’d never before admitted anything out of the ordinary had happened back in Birmingham. The Sonoran said, “I hope it turns out well for you, whatever it is.”

“I got my doubts, but I hope so, too,” Jeff said, and fell asleep in his chair.

Even out in the middle of the ocean, Sam Carsten kept a weather eye peeled for aeroplanes whenever he came out on the USS
Dakota
’s deck. He was still amazed at how much damage a bomb explosion could do; the one from the Argentine-based aeroplane had caused at least as much harm as a hit from a battleship’s secondary armament.

Hastily welded sheets of steel covered the destruction the bomb had wrought; they looked as out of place as bandages covering a wound on a man’s body. Because the patches were neither painted nor smooth, they drew the wrath of petty officers merely by existing. Sam laughed when he had that notion—he was a petty officer himself these days, even if he did still think like an ordinary seaman.

Hiram Kidde came up beside him. Kidde had been one of the exalted for a long time now; Carsten waited for some snide comment about the way the
Dakota
looked with a steel plate in her head, or at the least a grumble over the repairs’ not having been neater.

He got nothing of the sort. What Kidde said was, “It’s a good thing those limey sons of bitches didn’t have an armor-piercing nose on that bomb, the way we’ve got armor-piercing shells. Otherwise, that one little bastard would’ve done even worse than it did.”

Carsten considered that. After a couple of seconds, he nodded. “You’re likely right, ‘Cap’n,’ ” he said. “This was only a first try, though. I expect they’ll get it right, or we will, or somebody will, pretty damn quick.”

Kidde gave him a look that was anything but warm. “You know what you’re saying, don’t you?” he demanded. “You’re saying we might as well melt the
Dakota
and all the other battlewagons in the whole damn Navy down for tin cans right now, on account of by the time the next war rolls around, aeroplanes’ll sink ’em before they get within five hundred miles of where they’re going.”

“Am I saying that?” Sam did some more thinking. “Well, maybe I am. But I tell you what—maybe we don’t melt ’em down for cans till after this here war is over, because I don’t figure the aeroplanes’ll sink too many battleships this time out.”

“Real white of you,” the gunner’s mate said. “
Real
white. You make me feel like a guy in the buggy-whip business, going broke an inch at a time because people are buying Fords instead of buggies these days.”

“Hell of a big buggy whip we’re sailing on,” Sam observed after letting his eye run along the
Dakota
from bow to stern.

“Don’t talk stupid,” Hiram Kidde snapped. “You know what I’m talking about. You’re a squarehead, yeah, but you never were a dumb squarehead.”

“Goddamn, ‘Cap’n,’ you say the sweetest things,” Carsten said, and they both laughed. After one more pause for thought, Carsten went on, “Maybe we’ll get some use out of battleships in the next war after all.” He didn’t doubt there would be a next war; there would always be a next war.

Kidde got a cigar going, then held it in his mouth at an angle that made his dubious look even more dubious. “Wait a minute. You’re the same guy who was just saying somebody’d have armor-piercing aeroplane bombs long about day after tomorrow, or next week at the latest. Soon as that happens, the jig is up, right?”

“Maybe,” Sam said. “Maybe not, too. It’s up if the aeroplanes get to drop the bombs on the ships, sure as hell. But if our side has aeroplanes, too, to shoot down the other fellow’s bombing aeroplanes, the battleships can get on with the job they’re supposed to be doing, right?”

Now Kidde stopped and did some thinking. “That sounds good,” he said when he came out of his own study, “but I don’t think it works. You squeeze enough, you might be able to mount two or three aeroplanes on a battleship, maybe one or two on a cruiser. That won’t be enough to hold off all the aeroplanes the other bastards can throw at you from dry land.”

“Mmm,” Carsten said—an unhappy grunt. “Yeah, you’re right. A fleet’d need a whole ship stuffed full of aeroplanes, and there is no such animal.”

“See?” Hiram Kidde said. “You got to keep your head on your shoulders, or else you go flying off every which way.” He walked down toward the stern, puffing contentedly on his cigar.

Carsten stuck his thumbs in his trouser pockets and slowly mooched after the gunner’s mate. His idea had been pretty foolish, when you got down to it. He had a picture of the Navy, whose business was ships, building a ship to take care of aeroplanes. It hung in his mental gallery right alongside the portrait of the first Negro president of the Confederate States.

The
Dakota
swung through a turn toward the west, toward the Argentine coast. Sam knew what that meant: it meant that, aeroplanes or no aeroplanes, the flotilla was going to bore in and see what they could do to the British convoys scuttling along in or near Argentine territorial waters.

He supposed that made sense. It sure as hell made dollars and cents. This attack had surely cost millions to fit out, and as surely hadn’t worked near enough devastation to be worthwhile. Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske either had wireless orders from Philadelphia to do something worth doing, or else he was going to try to do something big to keep from getting wireless orders from Philadelphia telling him to sail his command back to Valparaiso and forget about marauding in the South Atlantic. Carsten had no way of knowing which of those was true, but he’d been in the Navy long enough to be pretty sure it was one or the other.