Joe Steele (23 page)

“Thank you, Charlie. God bless you!” Stella said. “I'm gonna go light a candle in church right now.”

“Can't hurt.” Charlie feared it was liable to do as much good as he could with Kagan or Scriabin or Mikoian.

He said his good-byes with Stella and stumped back to the bedroom. Esther had turned on the lamp on her nightstand, so he didn't injure himself during the return trip. “Was that . . . ?” she began. She didn't go on, or need to.

“Yeah, that's what that was.” Charlie made a fist and hit the mattress as hard as he could. Then he hit it again. It didn't accomplish anything, but it made him feel a tiny bit better. Darwin had it straight—men were only a small step from apes banging on stumps with branches. “They've got Mike.”

“Can you do anything about it?”

“I told Stella I'd try. I'll go to the White House when it gets light. I'll go hat in hand. I'll wear dark glasses and wave a tin cup around. In the meantime, turn out the lamp again, okay?”

“Sure.” As she did, she asked, “Do you think you'll go back to sleep?”

“No, but I'll give it a shot.” He lay down on his back and stared up at the blackness under the ceiling. He tried to count sheep. In his mind, they all turned to mutton chops and legs of lamb. Eventually, after what seemed a long time and no doubt was, he did drop into a muddy doze that left him almost more tired than if he'd stayed awake.

When the alarm clock clattered, for a bad moment he thought it was Stella on the phone again. He'd never killed it with more relief. Esther set something on the table in front of him. He ate breakfast without noticing what it was. He did realize she kept his coffee cup full, and her own. He went on yawning in spite of all the help the java could give him.

He visited AP headquarters before heading for Pennsylvania Avenue. People were quietly sympathetic when he told them where he had to go. They knew Mike had gone after Joe Steele with brass knucks. They also knew what happened to anyone who did something so foolhardy. Talking about such things was bad manners, but everybody knew.

Even the guard outside the White House expected Charlie. “Mr. Mikoian told me you'd likely stop by this morning, Mr. Sullivan,” the Spanish-American War veteran said. “You go straight to his office. He'll see you.”

Charlie went straight to Mikoian's crowded little office. He had to cool his heels outside, but only for fifteen minutes. The Assistant Secretary of Agriculture came out with a worried look on his well-bred face.

Charlie stuck his head in. “Come on, sit down,” Stas Mikoian told him. “Close the door behind you.”

“Thanks.” Charlie did. After he sank into his chair, he said, “I got a call from my sister-in-law in the middle of the night. They arrested Mike and took him away. I don't like to beg, Stas, but I'm begging. If there's anything you can do, please do it. I'll pay you back some kind of way.” If that meant writing fawning stories about Joe Steele for as long as he stayed President, Charlie would do it, and count the cost later.

But Mikoian shook his head. “I'm sorry. There isn't anything I can do.” He actually did sound sorry, where Kagan would have said the same thing with indifference and Scriabin might have gloated. Shaking his head again, he went on, “My hands are tied. The boss says he's taken enough fleabites from your brother. He made his bed. Now he can lie in it.”

“Will he . . . talk to me?” Charlie had to lick dry lips halfway through the question. He didn't want to have to talk to Joe Steele, not about anything like this. But Mike was his brother. For flesh and blood, you did things you didn't want to do.

“No,” the Armenian answered. “He knew you'd be coming around. He keeps track of everything, you know. He has for as long as I've worked for him, since right after the war. I don't know how he does it, but he does. He told me to tell you this was once too often. And he told me to tell you that if he didn't care for what you did it would have been once too often a long time ago now.”

“If I can guarantee that Mike will keep quiet—”

“You know you can't. Keeping that kind of promise isn't in him, any more than a drunk keeps promises to sober up. Your brother would fall off the wagon in a month, tops.”

No matter how much Charlie wanted to call him a goddamn liar, he
couldn't. Mikoian was too likely to be right. Voice dull with hopelessness, Charlie asked, “What am I supposed to tell Stella?”

“Tell her you did everything a brother could. You know I have a brother in California. There are wreckers among the engineers and scientists, too. I understand your trouble. Right now, it's the country's trouble. We'll be better for it in the end.” Mikoian seemed to mean that, too. Charlie wondered how.

The train wheezed to a stop. They were somewhere west of Livingston, Montana. Mike had seen the sign announcing the name of the town through the shutters the guards had put over the windows. He was convinced that wasn't because they didn't want the prisoners seeing out. No—it was because they didn't want ordinary people looking in and seeing what they were doing with the men they'd arrested for wrecking.

He'd thought this car had been crowded when he stumbled into it under Penn Station. Well, it had been, and it got more and more so. You couldn't go to another car to use the toilet. They had honey buckets in here. By now, the buckets were overflowing. Nobody'd bathed. There was barely enough water to drink, let alone to use for getting clean. The stink of unwashed bodies warred with that from the buckets.

There hadn't been much food, either. They gave out stale chunks of bread and crackers and sheets of beef jerky hard enough to break a tooth on. All of it was like the free lunch at a saloon just inside hell's city limits. It made everybody in the car thirstier—not that the guards cared.

Some men simply couldn't take it. They gave up and died. The prisoners had passed the guards two bodies at different stops. From the way the air was starting to smell, somebody else had cashed in his chips, too, and was going off. If the guards wanted to let the prisoners know that nobody
cared any more about what happened to them, well, they knew how to get what they wanted.

A guard banged on the locked and barred door at the front of the car. He kept banging on it till the cursing, moaning prisoners quieted down some. Then he shouted, “My buddy an' me, we got Tommy guns with full drums. We got reinforcements, too. We're gonna open this door. You fuckers come out slow, in good order.
Slow
, you hear? You all come chargin' out at once, we're gonna kill a whole bunch o' you. Nobody'll give a shit if we do, neither. So do like we tell you or get ventilated. Them's your choices.”

He waited to let that sink in. Then, slowly and cautiously, he did open the door. As slowly and cautiously as they could, the wreckers came out: hungry, thirsty, whiskery, frightened men. Mike was angry as well as scared. He would have bet some of the other prisoners were, too. But the guards hadn't been lying about their firepower. Charging Tommy guns with your bare hands was just a way to kill yourself, and maybe not quickly.

Sunlight made him blink and set his eyes watering. It had been gloomy in the car after they mounted those shutters. Montana. What did they call it? Big Sky Country, that was the name. It deserved the handle, too. The sweep of sky was wider and bluer than anything Mike had seen back East. The train stood on a siding in what could have been the exact middle of nowhere. A four-lane blacktop road paralleled the tracks. Not a car coming, not a car going.

“Line up in rows of ten!” a guard with a Tommy gun yelled. “Stand at attention if you know what that is. If you don't, pick somebody who looks like he does and do like him.”

Mike took his place in one of those rows. All his other choices seemed worse. A drill sergeant would have cussed him out for his stand at attention—stab at attention would have been closer. But as long as the wreckers stood up straight and held still, the Jeebies didn't fuss.

A breeze tugged at Mike's uncombed, sweat-matted hair. It felt dry, and smelled of pine and grass. The mercury couldn't have been over seventy-five. Along with everything else, he'd left New York City's heat and humidity behind.

“Fuck!” somebody in back of him said softly. It sounded more like a prayer than an obscenity. The word dropped into a spreading pool of silence and disappeared. No traffic noise. No elevators going up and down in the building—no buildings, not as far as the eye could see. No radios blatting. No nothing.

More and more wreckers stumbled out of more and more train cars and formed more and more rows of ten. Along with the rest of them, Mike stood there, trying to stay on his pins while he waited to see what happened next.

He didn't see it. He heard it. Some of the men at attention didn't turn their heads to the left as soon as they caught the noise, for fear of what the guards would do. Others did, either taking the chance or not knowing better than to move without permission while at attention. When they got away with it, the rest, Mike among them, also looked.

A convoy of khaki-painted Army trucks was rumbling up the road toward them. Wherever they were going next, it was somewhere the railroad didn't run. Mike wondered if there'd be any food and water at the end of the truck trip. All he could do was hope.

“Board the trucks till they're full. I mean
full
!” a guard shouted after the big snorters stopped. “Don't get cute. It's the last dumb thing you'll ever do. Somebody
will
be watching you at all times.”

Mike scrambled into the back of a truck. A canvas canopy spread over steel hoops kept out the sun and prying eyes. Pretty soon, the truck got rolling again. Out the back, he could see a little of where he'd been, but not where he was going.

“We oughta jump and run,” said the mousy little man shoehorned in next to him.

“Go ahead,” Mike answered. “You first.”

The mousy guy shook his head. “I don't have the nerve. I wish I did. This is liable to be nothing beside whatever we're going to.”

“It's a labor encampment. They'll work us. How bad can it be?”

“That's what I'm afraid of—how bad it can be.”

Since Mike had no answer to that, he kept quiet and looked out the back of the truck. From a sign facing the other way, he discovered they were
on US 89. He saw half a dozen cranes standing in a field near the road. They looked even bigger than the herons that hunted in pools and streams in Central Park. There was something wrong about a bird as tall as an eleven-year-old.

After half an hour or so, the trucks turned off the road and onto a dirt track. It went up into the mountains. Mike's ears popped several times. It got colder as they climbed, too. He began to wish for something heavier than the jacket he'd grabbed when the GBI goons got him.

Pines crowded close to the track. Every so often, branches would swish against the canvas canopy. They weren't going fast at all now. You might be able to jump out without ruining yourself. But if you did, could you get back to civilization before you starved or froze or got eaten by a bear—or did wolves prowl these mountains? Mike didn't try to find out. Neither did the mousy little man or anyone else.

At last, the trucks stopped. “Everybody out!” someone shouted. “On the double!” The wreckers were too worn from their journey to move on the double, but out they came.

Behind Mike was the pine forest through which they'd been driving. The trucks had stopped near the edge of a clearing hacked out of the woods. Ahead of them lay the camp where they'd stay.

It put him in mind of the prisoner-of-war stockades he'd seen in books of photos about the Great War. There was the same barbed-wire entanglement around the square perimeter. Guard towers stood at the corners and near the middle of each side. He could see machine guns atop some of the towers, and didn't doubt that the others also held them.

Inside the perimeter, the barracks and other buildings were made of the local pine, and so new the wood's bright yellow hadn't begun to fade. One of the buildings was a sawmill. Mike could hear a big saw biting into logs. A raven flew off a rooftop, grukking hoarsely.
Nevermore to you, too,
Mike thought.

Men ambled about within the barbed wire. Their clothes were shapeless and colorless. More than a few of them wore beards. One waved at the truck convoy. Whether that was greeting or sarcasm, Mike couldn't have said.

He didn't wave back. He didn't want to do anything the guards might not like. He hadn't been a prisoner long, but he'd learned that lesson in a hurry.

Armed guards in uniforms that weren't quite military but weren't what cops would wear, either, moved prisoners away from the gate by gesturing with their weapons. Then they opened it. “Go on in!” one of the GBI men who'd ridden with the convoy barked. “I hope you rot in there, you fucking wreckers!”

Not too far from the front of one line, Mike inched ahead, up into a building with E
NCAMPMENT
A
DMINISTRATI
ON
over the door. In due course, he came before a clerk who said, “Name and number?” in a tone that announced he couldn't care less.

“Sullivan, Michael, NY24601.” Giving them that way was another thing Mike had learned fast.

“Sullivan . . .” The clerk flipped through an alphabetical list. “Here you are. Five to ten, is it?”

“Yes.” Mike didn't show what he thought of that. Showing anything you didn't have to was dangerous.

“Okay, Sullivan NY24601. Go out that door and turn right. They'll tend to you further in the infirmary.”

“Huh? What about food?” Mike asked. The clerk just pointed. Mike went.

In the infirmary, he bathed with a dozen other men in an enormous tin tub whose steaming water stank of disinfectant. As soon as he was dry, though still naked, a barber in those shapeless, colorless quilted clothes—a wrecker himself, Mike realized: his number was IL15160—snatched him bald and hacked off his sprouting beard.

“Go to the building next to this one and get your camp duds,” the barber said when he finished. The slash-and-burn didn't take long.

“What do I do with the stuff I wore on the way here?” Mike had those clothes under his arm.

“Hang on to it. Try not to let anybody steal it,” the wrecker answered. “It gets cold at night now. Pretty soon, it'll be cold all the goddamn time. You'll be glad for whatever you've got. Now get moving—somebody's behind you.”

Mike got moving. They issued him a cotton shirt, a quilted jacket, long johns, quilted pants, wool socks, and boots as hard as iron. Nothing except the boots fit well. They did give him the right size with those, but he had no idea how long the boots would take to break in. For all he knew, his whole term. They also gave him a tin mess kit.

They used stencils and black indelible ink to mark NY24601 on the front and back of the jacket and on the seat of his pants. Then one of them said, “Go to Barracks Seventeen. Find a bunk there. Get used to it. You'll be in it one fucking long time.”

Everyone in the encampment seemed to take profanity for granted, the way cops and soldiers did. Mike came out of the supply building and went looking for Barracks 17. Each building was plainly marked, so he didn't need long to find it. He walked inside.

The bunks were four high. You slept on wooden slats—no mattress, no sheet, no blanket. In the center of the hall was an open space around a potbellied iron stove out of a Currier and Ives print. The stove burned wood. Billets of chopped pine were piled near it.

All of the bunks closest to the stove had old clothes or boots or something on them to show they belonged to somebody. Mike wondered what would happen if he moved someone's stuff and put his own in its place. He didn't wonder long—chances were he'd have a fight on his hands.

Not wanting one, he threw his junk on the best-sited empty bunk he could find. Some other new wreckers wandered in and staked their own claims. Mike lay down. The bunk was barely long enough for him, and he wasn't tall. After the trip across the country in the jammed railway car, he didn't complain. He sure had more room here than he'd had there.

Using his wadded-up slacks for a pillow, he fell asleep, mattress or no mattress. He hadn't slept more than a few minutes at a time on the train. Who could have? It wasn't much more than luck that they hadn't handed him out to the guards feet first. He was hungry, too, but he would worry about that again when he woke up.

When he did wake, it was with a start. He almost banged his head on the slats of the bunk above his. More people were coming into the barracks. Their talking was what had roused him. The light had shifted. Night was
coming on. It wasn't dark yet, but even a city fellow like him could tell it wouldn't be long.

“We got us some new scalps here,” said a man standing in the narrow aisle near the bunk. He nodded to Mike. “How the hell are ya, scalp?” His voice had a Western twang. The number on his jacket was WY232. Wyoming didn't hold many people, but the GBI hadn't wasted any time getting its hands on him.

“I'm hungry. I'm thirsty. I'd murder somebody for a cigarette. My head still hurts from where they blackjacked me. Leave all that out, and I'm fine,” Mike said. “How the hell are
you
?”

“I'm okay,” the other man answered. “Wasn't a bad day today. Nobody in the work gang got hurt or anything. We did what they told us to do, and now we're back. Lineup soon, then supper. They call me John.”

“I'm Mike, Mike Sullivan.” Mike's mouth twisted. “Sullivan, Michael, NY24601.”

“Dennison, Jonathan, WY232.” John shrugged. “Mostly we don't bother with any o' that shit 'cept for first names.” He was in his early thirties, a few years younger than Mike. He wasn't a scalp—he had longish brown hair and a gingery beard with a few white hairs in it. His forehead was wide, his chin narrow. If he hadn't seen everything, his pale eyes didn't admit it. He pulled a small suede drawstring pouch from a trouser pocket. “Let's find some paper. You can get a smoke, anyways.”

The paper came from a six-month-old newspaper. Mike had never rolled his own before. With unflustered patience, John showed him how. Mike suspected nothing came for free. He wondered what Dennison would want from him. Right now, he had nothing to give. He'd worry about that later, too. He smoked like a drowning man coming up for air.

“That was
wonderful
,” he said.

“Glad you liked it,” John answered easily. “You'll learn the ropes quick, believe me. C'mon outside now. They have to count us before they feed us, make sure nobody's run off. With all you new scalps here, they'll screw it up a few times before they get it straight.” He spoke with calm, resigned certainty.