Walk in Hell

XV

“I don’t like it,” Paul Andersen said, peering across no-man’s-land toward the Confederate lines. “Those bastards are too damn quiet.”

“Yeah.” Chester Martin took out his entrenching tool and knocked some bricks that had probably been part of a chimney out of the way. If he had to flatten out in a hurry, he didn’t want to land on them. “One thing about the Roanoke front is, they never give anything up cheap and they always hit back any way they can.”

“You got that right.” Andersen nodded emphatic agreement.

“This past while, though,” Martin went on, “they haven’t been counterattacking, they haven’t been shelling us…much-they’ve just been sitting there. Whenever they do things they haven’t done before, I don’t like it. It’s liable to mean they’ll do something else they haven’t done before, and that’s liable to mean yours truly gets his ticket punched.”

Andersen nodded again. “Two years o’ this shit and hardly a scratch on either one of us. Either I’m leading a charmed life and you’re all right, too, on account of you hang around with me-or else it’s the other way round. You know what? I don’t want to find out which.”

“Yeah, me neither,” Martin said. “We’ve seen a hell of a lot of people come and go.” He scowled. He didn’t want to think about that. Too many men dead in too many horrible ways.

Somebody’s observation aeroplane buzzed overhead. It was too high up for Martin or anyone else on the ground to tell whether it belonged to the USA or the Rebels. That didn’t stop Specs Peterson from raising his Springfield to his shoulder and squeezing off a couple of rounds at it.

“What the hell you doing?” Martin demanded. “What if it’s on our side?”

“Who gives a damn?” Peterson retorted. “I hate all those flyboy bastards. War’d be a lot cleaner if they weren’t up there spying on us. If it’s a Reb, good riddance. If it’s one of our guys-good riddance, too.”

Martin reminded himself the aeroplane was too high for rifle fire to have any chance of hitting it. If Specs wanted to work out some anger by blasting away at it, why not?

And, evidently, it belonged to the CSA anyhow. U.S. antiaircraft guns opened up on it. Puffs of black smoke filled the air all around the biplane. Like every other small boy ever made, Martin had tried catching butterflies in flight with his bare hands. The antiaircraft rounds had about as much luck with Confederate aeroplanes as he’d usually had going after butterflies.

Every once in a while, though, every once in a while he’d caught one. And, every once in a while, antiaircraft guns knocked down an aeroplane. He let out a yell, thinking this was one of those times-something red and burning came out of the aircraft and hung up there in the sky. Then he swore in disappointment.

So did Paul Andersen. “It’s only a flare,” the corporal said.

“Yeah,” Martin said ruefully. “I really thought they’d nailed the son of a bitch.” He eyed the observation aeroplane with sudden suspicion. “What the hell are they doing shooting off flares? They’ve never done anything like that before.”

A moment later, the Confederates gave him the answer. The eastern horizon exploded with a roar that, he thought, would have made the famous Krakatoa volcano sound like a hiccup. One second, everything was quiet, as it had been for so long. The next, hell came down on earth.

Along with everybody else in the trenches, he scrambled for the nearest bombproof he could find. Some limey cartoonist had drawn one where a soldier was saying to his buddy, “Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it.” The Rebs had got the slogan from the limeys, and U.S. soldiers from the Rebs. For anybody on either side who’d ever been in a trench, it summed up what life under fire was like.

Men started banging on empty shell casings, which meant the Rebs were throwing gas along with all their other lovely presents. Trying to fumble a gas helmet out of its canvas case when he was jammed into a dugout with twice as many soldiers as it should have held was not one of the things Chester Martin enjoyed most, but he managed. Somebody who couldn’t manage started coughing and choking and drowning for good air, but Martin couldn’t do anything about that except curse the Confederates. He couldn’t even tell who the poor bastard getting poisoned was.

The bombardment went on for what felt like forever. It covered miles of the front. The Rebs didn’t stick to the trenches right up against the barbed wire, either. They gave it to the U.S. positions as far back as they could reach, and they had more heavy guns firing along with their damned three-inchers than had been so during the first year of the war.

During a lull-which is to say, when the Rebs were going after U.S. guns rather than front-line troops-Martin shouted to Paul Andersen, “Well, now we know why they were so goddamn quiet for so long.”

Andersen nodded mournfully. “They were savin’ it up to shoot off at us all at once.” A couple of miles to the west, something blew up with a thunderous roar loud even through the surrounding din. “There went an ammo dump-stuff we ain’t gonna be able to shoot back at ’em.”

“Yeah, and it’s a shame, too.” Martin frowned. “Next question is, are they just shelling the hell out of us, or are they going to come over the top when all this lets up?”

“That’s a good one,” Andersen said. “No way to know till we find out.”

Before long, Martin became sure in his own mind the Confederates were coming. They’d never laid on a bombardment like this one before. He heartily hoped they’d never lay on another one, either.

Andersen reached the same conclusion. “Get ready for the hundred and forty-first battle of the Roanoke, or whatever the hell this one is,” he said. They both laughed. Back when the war was new, they’d joked about how many battles this valley had seen. They’d seen all of them, small and big alike. Martin had the feeling this was going to be one of the big ones.

Sneaky as usual, the Rebels halted their barrage several times, only to resume a few minutes later, catching U.S. defenders out of their shelters and slaughtering them. The real attack, though, was marked by long bursts of machine-gun fire from the Confederate trenches, supporting the soldiers who were moving on the U.S. lines.

“Up!” Martin screamed. “Up! Up! Let’s get ’em!” He’d come up before, and counted himself lucky not to have been killed. Now he stood in the wreckage of the trench line, blinking like a mole or some other animal not used to the light of day. The barrage had blown most of the parapet to hell and gone, and a lot of the wire that had stood in front of it, too. He could look out across no-man’s-land at the Confederate soldiers running toward him.

If he could see them, they could see him. He dropped to one knee and started shooting. Specs Peterson did the same thing beside him, but then pointed off to the left and hollered, “Barrel!”

A barrel it was, but not a U.S. barrel. Martin hadn’t known the Rebs had any of their own. They were picking a good time to spring the surprise, too. He watched the ungainly contraption go into a trench and climb out the other side. It looked to climb even better than the ones made in the USA, though it seemed to carry fewer guns.

As far as he could tell, the one Specs had spotted was the only one close by. He wondered how many of the stinking machines the Confederates had altogether. Getting up and trying to find out didn’t strike him as the best idea he’d ever had. He shoved a fresh clip into his Springfield, peered over the sights to find a Reb to shoot at, and-

The bullet caught him in the left arm, just below the shoulder. “Aww, shit!” he said loudly. Without that hand supporting it, the muzzle of the Springfield dropped; he fired a round into the dirt almost at his feet.

“Sarge is hit!” Specs Peterson shouted. He quickly wrapped a bandage around the wound, then tugged Martin’s good arm over his shoulder. “Let’s get you the hell out of here, Sarge.”

“Yeah.” Martin knew he sounded vague. Everybody said a wound didn’t hurt when you first got it. As far as he was concerned, everybody lied. His arm felt as if he’d had molten metal poured on it. He knew too many people in Toledo to whom that had happened. He tried to wriggle the fingers of his left hand, but couldn’t tell whether he succeeded or not.

Getting him the hell out of there turned out to be hell of its own kind. The Confederate bombardment had pasted the communications trenches along with everything else. Plenty of other wounded men were trying to get to the rear, too, and plenty of men who weren’t wounded as well. “Jesus,” Peterson said, struggling through the chaos all around. “The whole fucking line is coming to pieces.”

Martin was less interested than he might have been. Putting one foot in front of the other so he wasn’t a dead weight took all the concentration he had. The bandage Specs had slapped on him was red and dripping.

Somewhere back toward the rear, a couple of men with Red Cross armbands took charge of him. “Go back to your unit, Private,” one of them said to Peterson.

“If I can find it,” Specs answered. “If there’s anything left of it. Good luck, Sarge.” He turned around and trotted toward the sound of the fighting before Martin could answer.

He spoke to the stretcher-bearers-who bore no stretcher-instead: “How is it?”

He’d meant his wound, but they had other things on their mind. “It’s a hell of a mess, Sergeant,” one of them answered as they helped him stumble westward, away from the firing. “They drove a hell of a lot of barrels through up to the north and down south of us, too. With those bastards on their flanks, a lot of our infantry just caved in.”

As if to demonstrate the truth of that, several unwounded soldiers trotted past them. A military policeman shouted a challenge. Several shots rang out. Martin didn’t see the panicked soldiers coming back his way, which meant they’d shot first or best and were still running.

“It’s a disaster, is what it is,” the second stretcher-bearer said. “They’re liable to push us all the way back to the river-maybe over it, for God’s sake.” Even through the blazing agony of his wound, that got through to Martin. The USA had spent two years and lives uncounted to drive the Confederates back to the Roanoke River and then over it. If they lost all that in one battle…

He stumbled just then, jarring his arm. He’d only thought he hurt before. The battered landscape turned gray before his eyes. He tasted blood, from where his teeth had bitten down too hard on a scream. Whatever he’d been about to say disappeared, burned away by shrieking nerves.

When they got him to the field hospital, the stretcher-bearers exclaimed in dismay, because it was dissolving like Lot’s wife in the rain. “Evacuation!” somebody yelled. Somebody else added, “We’re gettin’ the hell out before the Rebs overrun us.”

By luck-and maybe because, since he wasn’t on a stretcher, he didn’t take up much room-Martin got shoved aboard an ambulance. Jouncing west over the shell-pocked track toward the river was a special hell of its own. He couldn’t look out, only at the other wounded men shoehorned in with him. Maybe that was a blessing of sorts. He couldn’t see how many Confederate shells were falling on the road, how many others throwing up water from the Roanoke River as they searched for the bridge.

Engine roaring flat out, the ambulance sped across. The driver whooped triumphantly when he got to the other side: “Made it!” He, of course, was still in one undamaged piece. Martin couldn’t decide whether he was glad he hadn’t been blown up or sorry.

Flora Hamburger stood on a little portable stage in front of the Croton Brewery on Chrystie Street. The brewery was a block outside the Fourteenth Ward, but still in the Congressional district, whose boundaries didn’t perfectly match those used for local administration. She thought she would have come here even had it been outside the district. The associations the brewery called up were too perfect to ignore.

“Two years ago,” she called out to the crowd, “two years ago from this very spot, I called on President Roosevelt to keep us out of war. Did he listen? Did he hear me? Did he hear the will of the people, the farmers and laborers who are the United States of America?”

“No!” people shouted back to her, some in English, some in Yiddish. It was a proletarian crowd, women in cheap cotton shirtwaists, men in shirts without collars and wearing flat cloth caps on their heads, not bourgeois homburgs and fedoras or capitalist stovepipes.

“No!” Flora agreed. “Two years ago, the Socialist Party spoke out against the mad specter of war. Did Teddy Roosevelt and his plutocratic backers heed us? Did they pay the slightest attention to the call for peace?”

“No!” people yelled again. Too many of the women’s shirtwaists were mourning black.

“No!” Flora agreed once more. “And what have they got with their war? How many young men killed?” She thought of Yossel Reisen, who hadn’t had the slightest notion of the ideological implications of the war in which he’d joined-and who would never understand them now. “How many young men maimed or blinded or poisoned? How much labor expended on murder and the products of murder? Is that why troops paraded through the streets behind their marching bands?”

“They wanted victory!” someone shouted. The someone was Herman Bruck, strategically placed in the crowd. He’d borrowed clothes for the occasion, the fancy ones he usually wore being anything but suited for it.

“Victory!” Flora exclaimed. Bruck was doing everything he could to help her beat the appointed Democrat. That she had to give him. “Victory?” This time, it was a question, a mocking question. She looked around, as if she thought she would see it close by. “Where is it? Washington, D.C., has lain under the Confederates’ heavy hands since the first days of the war. We have won a few battles, but how many soldiers has General Custer thrown away to get to Tennessee? And how many battles were shown to be wasted when the Confederates, only two weeks ago, drove our forces back to the Roanoke River? How can anyone in his right mind possibly claim this war is a success?”

Applause poured over her like rain. Two years ago, when she’d urged the people here not to throw the United States onto the fire of a capitalist, imperialist war, she’d been ignored or booed even in the Socialist strongholds of New York City. Now people had seen the result of what they’d cheered to the skies. Having seen it, they didn’t like it so well.

She went on, “My distinguished opponent, Mr. Miller, will tell you this war is a success. Why shouldn’t he tell you that? It’s made him a success. He was a lawyer no one had ever heard of till Governor MacFarlane pulled his name out of a top hat after Congressman Zuckerman died, and sent him off to Philadelphia to pretend to represent this district.

“Friends, comrades, you know I wouldn’t be standing here today if Myron Zuckerman were alive. No, I take that back: I might be standing here, but I’d be campaigning for him, not for myself. But I tell you this: if you remember what Congressman Zuckerman stood for, you’ll send me to Philadelphia this November, not a fancy-pants lawyer who’s made his money doing dirty work for the trusts.”

More applause, loud and vigorous. In preparation for her speech, party workers had done a fine job of sticking up election posters printed in red and white on black all over the brewery, the synagogue across the street, and even the school at the corner of Chrystie and Hester. The Democrats had more money and more workers, which meant they usually put up more posters and hired people to tear down the ones the Socialists used to oppose them. Not this time, though.

And no hulking Soldiers’ Circle goons lurked to break up the rally, either. As the fighting heated up, more and more of them-the younger ones-had been called into the Army they so loudly professed to love. And, as the Remembrance Day riots of 1915 slowly faded into the past, the lid on New York City politics slowly loosened. Socialists elsewhere in the country were using government repression in New York as a campaign issue, too. Embarrassment was often a good tool against the minions of the exploiting class.

A couple of caps went through the crowd. Before long, they jingled as they passed from hand to hand. Party workers talked that up: “Come on, folks, give what you can. This is how we keep the truth coming to the American people. This is how we beat the Democrats. This is how we end the war.”

Flora descended from her platform. A couple of men-boys, rather-and a couple of solidly built women who looked like factory workers disassembled it and hauled it off to the wagon on which it had come from Socialist Party headquarters. Conscription had hit the party as hard as anyone else.

Herman Bruck made his way out of the crowd. Flora wondered how and why he’d been lucky enough to stay in gabardine and worsted and tweed and out of the green-gray serge most men his age wore. Her brother David was in green-gray, and, from his latest letter, about to be shipped off to one of the fighting fronts. If the war went on long enough, the same thing would happen to Isaac, who was two years younger.

So how had Herman escaped? It wasn’t as if he had a job in an essential industry. On the contrary-a lot of Socialist activists had been conscripted in spite of employment in industries related to the war. Asking him would have been rude, but she almost asked anyhow. Before she could, he said, “That was a fine speech. Hearing you out in the crowd instead of being up on the platform with you, I see how you came to be our candidate. I think you’ll win.”

She knew he had an ulterior motive-several ulterior motives, some personal, some political-for speaking as he did. But she was no more immune to flattery than any other human being ever born. “Thank you,” she said. “I think I will, too. The bad news in the war does nothing but help us. It reminds the people that we opposed the fighting from the start, and that we were right when we did.”

Bruck’s mouth twisted down. Her record on opposing the war was sounder than his. But then a sly glint came into his eye. “When they do elect you, you’ll have the salary of a capitalist-$7,500 a year. What will you do with all that money?”

Any notion of asking him why he wasn’t in the Army flew out of her head. She’d thought about winning the election and about taking her seat in the House of Representatives. Up till that moment, she hadn’t thought about getting paid for her services. Herman Bruck was right-$7,500 was a lot of money. “I’ll be able to make sure my family doesn’t want for anything,” she said at last.

He nodded. “That’s a good answer. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the families here”-his wave encompassed the entire district-“didn’t want for anything? Nu, that’s why you’re running.” The sly look returned to his face. “And now you’ll have another reason to say no when I ask you out: what would a rich and important lady see in a tailor’s son?”

Flora snorted. “One thing I see in a tailor’s son is someone who nags like a grandmother.”

“If I ask you out, maybe you’ll say no, but maybe also you’ll say yes,” Herman answered. “If I don’t ask you out, how can you possibly say yes?”

She had to laugh. As she did so, she was more tempted to let him persuade her than she had been for a long time. This didn’t seem to be the right place, though, not with the crowd drifting away after the rally. And here came a couple of policemen, looking like old-time U.S. soldiers in their blue uniforms and forage caps. “All right, Miss Hamburger, you’ve had your speech,” one of them said in brisk tones. “No one gave you a bit of trouble during it or before it, and I’ll thank your people not to give me trouble now.”

“No trouble because of what?” she asked warily.

The cop didn’t answer. A couple of his friends came down Chrystie Street, one of them twirling a nightstick on the end of its leather strap. And then a shiny new White truck, the same sort the Army used, pulled to a stop in front of the Croton Brewery. Instead of being green-gray, it was painted red, white, and blue. DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF NEW YORK CITY, said the banner stretched across the canvas canopy. Another, smaller, banner below it read, Daniel Miller for Congress.

Out of the back of the truck jumped half a dozen men in overalls. A couple of others handed them big buckets of paste, long-handled brushes, and stacks of freshly printed posters. On the front of every one was Miller’s smiling face, half again as big as life, and the slogan, HELP TR WIN THE WAR. VOTE MILLER-VOTE DEMOCRATIC.

Into the buckets went the brushes. Matter-of-factly, the work crew went about the business of smearing fresh paste over Flora’s posters that had gone up only the day before. She stared in mute outrage that did not stay mute long. “They can’t do that!” she snarled at the policeman.

“Oh, but they can, Miss Hamburger,” he answered, respectful enough but not giving an inch. “They will. It’s a free country, and we let you have your posters and your speech and all. But now it’s our turn.”

Up went Daniel Miller’s posters, one after another. “Free country?” Flora said bitterly. Some of the last of the crowd she’d drawn were hanging about, watching with anything but delight as her message was effaced. If she shouted to them, they’d resist these paperhangers. New York City had seen political brawls and to spare since the rise of the Socialists. But, after Remembrance Day the year before, could she contemplate another round of riots, another round of repression?

“Don’t even let it cross your mind,” the cop said. He had no trouble thinking along with her. “We’ll land on the lot of you like a ton of bricks, and hell will freeze over before you get yourself another peaceable rally, I promise you.”

“Do you mean we, the police, or we, the Democratic Party?” she demanded. The policeman just stared at her, as if the two were too closely entwined to be worth separating. In fact, that wasn’t as if. Coppers could harass the Socialists, and so could Democratic agitators and hooligans. Her party could return the favor, but only on a smaller scale.

She glanced at Herman Bruck. If he was ready to raise hell to keep the Democrats from silencing her posters, neither his face nor his body showed it. Maybe he’d avoided the Army by the simple expedient of being afraid to fight. Or maybe, she admitted to herself, he’d simply done a good job of figuring out how likely-or how unlikely-they were to succeed here.

“Democrats are free,” she told the policeman. “Socialists and Republicans and other riffraff are as free as the Democrats let them be.” He stared steadily back at her, a big, stolid man doing his job and doing it well and not worrying about the consequences of it, maybe in honest truth not even seeing that those consequences were bad.

Inside half an hour’s time, Daniel Miller’s posters had covered every one of hers.

Flying was beginning to feel like work again. Jonathan Moss’ eyes went back and forth, up and down, flicking to the rearview mirror mounted on the side of the cockpit. He looked back over his shoulder, too, again and again. It was the one you didn’t see who’d get you, sure as hell.

He still felt out of place, flying to the right of Dud Dudley. That was Tom Innis’ slot in the flight, no one else’s. Or it had been. But Tom was pushing up a lily now, with a rookie pilot named Orville Thornley sleeping on the cot that had been his. Thornley got endless ribbing because of his first name, but he didn’t seem to be the worst flier who’d ever come down the pike.

“A good thing, too,” Moss said, his eyes still on the move. The limeys had managed to sneak a few Sopwith Pups across the Atlantic, and, if you were unlucky enough to run up against one of them in a Martin one-decker, odds were the War Department would be sending your next of kin a telegram in short order. A Pup was faster, more maneuverable, and climbed better than the bus he was riding, and the British had finally figured out how to do a proper job with an interrupter gear.

Just thinking about the Pup was plenty to make him grimace. “Good thing they don’t have very many of ’em here,” he said. “It’d be a damn sight better if they didn’t have any at all. Damn Navy, asleep at the switch again.”

That was not fair. He knew it wasn’t fair. He didn’t care. The Atlantic Fleet had been built to close the gate between Britain and Canada, and to help the High Seas Fleet open the gate between Germany and the USA. It hadn’t managed to do either of those things. Among them, the British, the French, and the Confederates made sure none of the Atlantic was safe for anyone at any time, and the Germans remained bottled up in the North Sea. Too bad, Moss thought. Too damn bad.

He looked down. The front over which he flew was quiet now, nobody doing much of anything. The Canucks and the limeys had run out of steam after pushing the U.S. line four or five miles farther from Toronto, and the Army hadn’t yet tried pushing back. It was as if the mere idea of having had to fall back so startled the brass, they hadn’t figured out what to try next.

Dud Dudley waggled his wings and pointed off toward the west. Let’s go home, he meant, and swung his fighting scout into a turn. Moss wasn’t sorry to get away from the line, not if that meant another run where he didn’t meet any Pups. A year before, the enemy had been terrified of the Martins and their deadly synchronized guns. Now, for the first time, he understood how the fliers on the other side of the line had felt.

No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than a single aeroplane dove at his flight from the rear, machine gun spitting flame through the prop disk. He threw the joystick hard over and got the hell out of there. The flight exploded in all directions, like a flock of chickens with a fox in among them.

Tracers stitched their way across Orville Thornley’s bus. It kept flying, he kept flying, and he was shooting back, too, but Jesus, Jesus, how could you keep your gun centered on the other guy’s aeroplane when he was thirty miles an hour faster than you were? The short answer was, you couldn’t. The longer-but only slightly longer-answer was, if you couldn’t, you were dead.

Moss maneuvered now to help his flightmate, trying to put enough lead in the air to distract the limey bastard in the Pup from his chosen prey. He couldn’t keep a bead on the enemy aeroplane. Everything they’d said about it looked to be true. If it wasn’t doing 110, he’d eat his goggles. You couldn’t make a Martin do 110 if you threw it off a cliff.

And climb-The enemy pilot came out of his dive and clawed his way up above the U.S. machines as if they’d been nailed into place. And here he came again. Yes, he still wanted Thornley. He’d probably picked him for easy meat: last man in a flight of four would be either the worst or the least experienced or both.

The kid was doing his best, but his best wasn’t good enough. The Pup got on his tail and clung, chewing at him. Moss fired at the limey, but he was a few hundred yards off, unable to close farther, and he didn’t think he scored any hits.

Thornley’s single-decker went into a flat spin and plummeted toward the ground below, smoke trailing from the engine cowling. Moss didn’t see Thornley doing anything to try, no matter how uselessly, to bring the aeroplane back under control.

No time to worry about that now anyway. The Pup was like a dragonfly, darting everywhere at once, spitting fire at the American aeroplanes from impossible angles. Bullets punched through the canvas of the fuselage. None of them punched through Moss. None of them started a fire, for which he would have got down on his knees and thanked God-but he had no time for that, either.

And then, as swiftly and unexpectedly as it had appeared, the terrible Pup was gone, darting back toward the enemy lines at a pace that would have made pursuit impossible, even had the shaken Americans dared to try. Maybe the bus had run low on fuel. That was the only thing Moss could think of that might have kept it from destroying the whole flight. What would have stopped it? It had the American aeroplanes outnumbered, one against four.

Landing was glum, as it always was after losing a flightmate. “What happened?” one of the mechanics asked.

“Pup,” Moss said laconically.

The fellow in the greasy overalls bit his lip. “They really as bad as that?”

“Worse.” One word at a time was hard enough. More would have been impossible.

Along with Dudley and Phil Eaker, Moss went into Shelby Pruitt’s office. The squadron leader looked up at them. He grimaced. As the mechanic had, he asked, “What happened to Thornley?”

Instead of answering directly, Dudley burst out, “God damn it to hell, when the devil are we going to be able to sit our asses down in an aeroplane that’ll give us half a chance to go up there and come back alive, not one of these flying cart horses that isn’t fast enough to go after the Canucks and isn’t fast enough to run away from ’em, either?” All of that came out in one long, impassioned breath. On the inhale, Dudley added, “Sir.”

Major Pruitt looked down at his desk. The flight leader had told him what he needed to know. “Pup,” he said. It was not a question.

“Yes, sir.” Moss spoke this time. “One Pup against the four of us. Those aeroplanes are very bad news, sir. How many do the Canucks have? Like Dud says, how long till we get something that can stand up to them?”

“They don’t have many,” Pruitt said. “We know that much. They aren’t manufacturing them on this side of the water, either: not yet, anyhow. What do you suggest we do, gentlemen? Only go up in squadron strength so we can mob them when we come across them?”

Moss and his flightmates looked at one another. What that meant was, they weren’t going to get an aeroplane that could stand up to the Pup, not tomorrow they weren’t, and not the day after, either. Slowly, Dud Dudley said, “That might help some, sir. We’d pay a bundle for every one we brought down, but we might bring some down, sure enough. Once they ran out of ’em, things’d be like they were-except we’d be missing a hell of a lot of pilots.”

“I wish I could tell you you were wrong, but I don’t think you are,” Pruitt said, shaking his head. “And it’ll all be wasted effort, too, if the limeys get another shipload of ’em over here. The Germans, now, the Germans have aeroplanes that can match these Pups and whatever the froggies are throwing at ’em. We were supposed to get plans for some of ’em, I hear, but the submersible that set out with them didn’t make it across the Atlantic. These things happen.”

“And how many of us are going to end up dead because they happen?” Moss burst out. The question had no exact answer. It didn’t need one. The approximate answer was quite bad enough.

Eaker said, “What do we need the Germans for, anyway? Why can’t we build our own aeroplanes, good as any in the world? We invented them.”

“I know we did,” Pruitt answered. “Up till the start of the war, ours were as good as anybody’s, too. But the Germans and the French and the British, they’ve all been pushing each other hard as they could, ever since the guns started going off. The Rebs and the Canucks haven’t done that to us, not to where we’ve needed to come up with a new kind of fighting scout every few months because the old ones would get shot down if we kept flying ’em. What do they call it? Survival of the fittest, that’s right.”

“We’ve got to worry about it now,” Dud Dudley said.

“I know we do,” Pruitt answered. “This time next year, if the war’s still going, I expect we’ll have aeroplanes to match anything the Kaiser’s building. Once we know we need to do something, we generally manage.”

“A lot of people are going to end up shot to pieces because Philadelphia was slow getting the message,” Moss said. “Thornley was a good kid. He had the makings of a good pilot-if he’d had a decent bus to fly.” And if the fellow in the Pup had decided to go after me instead of him…

“I don’t even run this whole aerodrome, let alone the Bureau of Aeroplane Production.” Hardshell Pruitt got up from his swivel chair, which squeaked. He led the three survivors of Dudley’s flight to the officers’ club, threw a quarter-eagle down on the bar, and carried a bottle of whiskey over to a table.

As Moss started to drink, he looked over at the photographs of fliers dead and gone. One more to put up, he thought, and then wondered whether Orville Thornley had had a photo taken since he joined the squadron. Moss didn’t think so. Thornley hadn’t been here very long. Moss gulped down his drink. If he tried hard enough, maybe he could stop thinking about things like that. Maybe he could stop thinking at all.

When Lucien Galtier came in from the fields, the sun was going down. As summer slid into fall, it set ever sooner, rose ever later. The air had-not quite a chill, but the premonition of a chill-it hadn’t held even a couple of weeks earlier. Pretty soon, frost would fern across the windows when he got up in the morning.

Marie came bustling out of the farmhouse to meet him before he came inside. She didn’t usually do that. Automatically, he began to worry. Any change in routine portended trouble. A lifetime’s experience and a cultural inheritance of centuries warned him that was true.

So did his wife’s face. “What is it now?” he asked her, and picked the two worst things he could think of: “Have we had a visit from Father Pascal while I was cultivating? Or is that the American, Major Quigley, was here?”

“No, neither of those, for which I thank le bon Dieu,” Marie answered. “But it is, all the same, something of which I wish to speak to you without having any of the children hear.” She looked down to make sure none of their numerous brood was in earshot.

Lucien did the same thing. “Of course, our trying to keep them from hearing but makes them try the more to hear,” he said, again from long experience. “But what is it that you would keep a secret from them?”

“Not from all of them, not quite.” Marie took a deep breath. When she spoke, the words tumbled out all in a rush: “Nicole just came home from the hospital”-she did not look at the big building the Americans had run up on Galtier land; she made a point of not looking at it-“and she, she, she asked permission of me to bring to supper tomorrow night one of the doctors who works there.”

“’Osti,” Lucien said softly. Once, and once only, he stomped a booted foot on the ground. “I knew it would come to this. Did I not say it would come to this? When she went to work at that place”-he not only did not look at the hospital, he refused even to name it-“I knew it would come to this.”

“His name is O’Doull,” Marie said, pronouncing the un-Quebecois appellation with care. “He speaks French, Nicole says, and he is himself a member of the holy Catholic Church-so she assures me.”

“He is himself a member of the United States Army,” Lucien retorted. Since that was manifestly true, Marie could only nod. Her husband went on, “The people in Ottawa-the Protestants in Ottawa-had the courtesy, more or less, to leave us alone. The Americans, merely by their coming, are taking from us our patrimony.”

“I did not tell Nicole yes, and I did not tell her no, either,” Marie answered. “I told her I would tell you, and that you would decide.”

Galtier opened his mouth to declare that he had already decided, and that the answer was and would always be no. Before he did so, though, he cast a quizzical eye on Marie. She knew everything he’d said, and knew it at least as well as he did. More cautiously than he’d expected, he asked, “Why did you not say no on your own behalf?”

Marie let out a long sigh. “Because I fear the Americans will remain here in Quebec for a long time to come, and I do not believe we shall be able to make it as if they do not exist. And because I do not believe that Nicole would come to know any fondness for a man who is wicked, even if he is an American. And because one supper, here in front of the lot of us, is not the end of the world. And it could even be that, seeing this…man O’Doull here in our own place, not at the other one where she works, would be the best way to convince her he is not the proper one.”

Yes, I had good reason to be cautious, Lucien thought. Aloud, he said, “And if I still believe this should not be?”

“Then it shall not be, of course,” his wife replied at once. She was always properly submissive, and she usually got her way.

She would get her way this time, too. “It could even be,” Galtier said in a speculative voice, “that seeing all of her family will have a chilling effect on this Dr. O’Doull.” He smiled, remembering. “This is often true, when a man who is not serious meets a young lady’s family.”

“You have reason,” Marie answered, smiling too. “Let us go in now, and tell Nicole she may bring him, then.”

“Very well,” Lucien said. It wasn’t very well, or anywhere close to being very well, but he seemed to have no good choices whatever. In that, he thought of himself as a tiny version of the entire province of Quebec.

Nicole squealed when Marie told her (Lucien could not make himself do anything more than nod) she might invite the doctor for supper. Georges said, “Ah, so I am to have an American brother-in-law, n’est-ce pas?” Nicole’s face turned the color of fire. She threw a potato at him. It thumped against his ribs. Grinning still, he said, “I am wounded! The doctor must cure me!” and thrashed about on the floor.

Charles, his older brother, said nothing, not with words, but the look he sent Lucien said, Father, how could you? Galtier’s shrug showed how little true choice he had had. Nicole’s three younger sisters couldn’t seem to decide whether to be horrified or fascinated by the news.

Galtier went through the next day’s work as if he were a machine wound up to perform its tasks without thought. His mind had already leapt to the evening, and to the meeting with the American, O’Doull. In his mind, he ran through a dozen, a score of conversations with the man. Whether any of them would have anything to do with reality he had no idea, but he played them out all the same.

He looked up in some surprise to see the sun near setting. Time to go in, he realized, on most days a welcome thought but today one so much the opposite that he looked around for more chores to do. Talking with the American in the privacy of his own mind was one thing. Talking with the man in the real world was a different, far more daunting prospect.

He wiped his boots with special care. Even so, he knew he brought the aromas of the farmyard into the house with him. How could he help it? Knowing he could not help it, knowing he was not the only one on the farm who did it, he thought nothing of it most of the time. Now-

Now, there in the parlor sat a tall, skinny stranger in town clothes; he was talking with Nicole and doing what looked to be his gallant best not to be upset at having her brothers and sisters stare at him. He sprang to his feet when Lucien came in. So did Nicole. “Father,” she said formally, “I would like to introduce to you Dr. Leonard O’Doull. Leonard, this is my father, Monsieur Lucien Galtier.”

“I am very pleased to meet you, sir,” O’Doull said in good French, the Parisian accent with which he’d learned the tongue overlain by the rhythms of the Quebecois with whom he’d been working. Galtier took that as a good sign, a sign of accommodation. He could not imagine Major Quigley sounding like a Quebecois if he stayed in this country a hundred years.

O’Doull’s hands were pale and soft, but not smooth. The skin on them was chafed and reddened and cracked in many places, some of those cracks looking angry and inflamed. Doctors had to wash often in corrosive chemicals to keep their hands free of germs.

As for the rest of the doctor, he looked like an Irishman: fair skin with freckles, sandy hair, almost cat-green eyes, a dimple in his chin so deep a plow might have dug it. He was unobtrusively sizing up Galtier as the farmer examined him. “I do thank you very much for letting me come into your home,” he said. “I know it is an intrusion, and I know it is a”-he cast about for a word-“an awkwardness for you as well.”

He was frank. Lucien liked him the better for that. “Well, we shall see how it goes,” he said. “I can always throw you out, after all.”

“Father!” Nicole exclaimed in horror. But one of O’Doull’s gingery eyebrows lifted; he knew Galtier hadn’t meant that seriously. Again, against his will, Galtier’s opinion of the doctor went up.

Marie served up potatoes and greens and ham cooked with prunes and dried apples. Lucien got out a jug of applejack he’d bought from one of the farmers nearby. He hadn’t expected he’d want to do that. O’Doull, though, even if he was an American, seemed a man of both sense and humor. He also made appreciative noises about Marie’s cooking, which caused her to fill up his plate once more after he’d demolished his first helping. The second disappeared as quickly.

Georges made a show of looking under the table. “Where does such a scrawny fellow put it all?” he asked.

“I have a secret pocket, like a kangaroo,” O’Doull answered gravely. Georges blinked, unused to getting as good as he gave.

When supper was done and the womenfolk went off to wash and dry, the American handed cigars to Lucien and Charles and Georges. Lucien poured more apple brandy for them all. “Salut,” he said, raising his glass, and then, experimentally, before drinking, “Je me souviens.”

I will remember: the motto of Quebec in the face of many difficult times, this one more than most. He was not surprised to see that Leonard O’Doull understood not only the words but also the meaning behind them. The American doctor drank the toast, then said, “I understand how hard this is for you, and I thank you again for being so hospitable to an outsider.”

Galtier had had enough applejack by then to loosen his tongue a little. He said, “How can you understand, down deep and truly? You are an American, an occupier, not one of the occupied.”

“My homeland is also occupied,” O’Doull answered. “England has done more and worse for longer to the Irish than she ever did to Quebec.” He spoke now with absolute seriousness. “My grandfather was a starving boy when he came to the United States because all the potatoes died and the English landowners sold the wheat in the fields abroad instead of feeding the people with it. We are paying back the debt.”

“The Irish rebellion has not thrown out the English,” Galtier said.

“No, but it goes on, and ties down their men,” O’Doull replied. “It would be better if the U.S. Navy could bring more arms to them, but boats do put in at little beaches every now and then, in spite of what the British fleet can do to stop them, and machine guns aren’t so big and bulky.”

“You say this here, to a country that might rise in revolt against the United States as Ireland has against England?” Even with applejack in him, Lucien would have spoken so openly to few men on such brief acquaintance: fewer still among the occupiers. But while the doctor might disagree, Lucien did not believe he would betray him to the authorities.

O’Doull said, “You will be freer with the United States than you ever were in Canada. It has proved true for the Irish; it will prove true for you as well. This I believe with all my heart.”

Charles, who usually kept his own counsel, said, “Few countries invade their neighbors for the purpose of making them free.”

“We came into Canada to beat the British Empire,” O’Doull answered, blowing a smoke ring. “They and the Rebels stabbed us in the back twice. But I think, truly, you will be better off outside the Empire than you were in it.”

“If we left Canada, if we left the British Empire, of our own will, then it could be you are right,” Lucien said. “Anyone who forces something on someone and then says he will be better for it-you will, I hope, understand me when I say this is difficult to appreciate.”

“It could be you said the same thing when your mother gave you medicine when you were small,” O’Doull replied.

“Yes, it could be,” Lucien said. With dignity, he continued, “But, monsieur le docteur, you are not my mother, and the United States are not Quebec’s mother. If any country is, it is France.”

“All right. I can see how you would feel that way, M. Galtier.” O’Doull got to his feet. “I do thank you and your wife and your enchanting family for the fine supper, and for your company as well. Is it possible that I might come back again one day, drink some more of this excellent applejack, and talk about the world again? And we might even talk of other things as well. If you will pardon me one moment, I would like also to say good-bye to Nicole.”

She was one of the other things the American would want to talk about, Galtier knew. He felt the pressure of his sons’ eyes on him. Almost to his own surprise, he heard himself saying, “Yes, this could be. Next week, perhaps, or the week after that.” Until the words were out of his mouth, he hadn’t fully realized he approved of the doctor in spite of his country and his ideas. Well, he thought, the arguments will be amusing.

“’Nother day done. Praise de lord,” Jonah said when the shift-changing whistle blew. “I see you in de mornin’, Nero.”

“See you then,” Scipio agreed. He was very used to his alias these days, sometimes even thinking of himself by it. He wiped his sweaty forehead on the coarse cotton canvas of his shirt. Another day done indeed, and a long one, too. The white foreman stuck his card in the time clock to punch him out of work. He trudged from the factory onto the streets of Columbia, a free man.

Even after three months or so at the munitions plant, he had trouble getting used to that idea. His time was his own till he had to get back to work in the morning. He’d never known such liberty, not in his entire life. As house servant and later as butler at Marshlands, he’d been at the white folks’ beck and call every hour of the day or night. As a member of the governing council of the Congaree Socialist Republic, he’d been at Cassius’ beck and call no less than at Miss Anne’s before. Now…

Now he could do as he pleased. If he wanted to go to a saloon and get drunk, he could. If he wanted to chase women, he could do that. If he wanted to go to a park and watch the stars come out, he could do that, too-though Columbia still had a ten o’clock curfew for blacks. And if he wanted to go back to his apartment and read a book, he could also do that, and not have to worry about getting called away in the middle of a chapter.

He walked into a restaurant not far from the factory, ordered fried chicken and fried okra and cornbread, washed it down with chicory-laced coffee, and came out full and happy. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody cared who he was. Oh, every now and then he still saw wanted posters for the uncaptured leaders of the Congaree Socialist Republic, and his name-his true name-still appeared among them, but that hardly seemed to matter. It might have happened a lifetime before, to someone else altogether.

Had Cassius understood that desire to escape the revolutionary past, it probably would have been enough for him to want to liquidate Scipio. Out in the swamps by the Congaree, Cassius and his diehards kept up a guerrilla war against Confederate authority even yet. Every so often, the newspapers complained of some outrage or another the rebels-the papers commonly called them bandits-had perpetrated.

But the papers talked much more about the bill to arm Negroes under debate up in Richmond. People talked about it, too, both white and black. The talk had only intensified once it cleared the House and got into the Senate. More than half of the black men Scipio knew were for it. As best he could judge, fewer than half the whites in Columbia were. How much his judgment was worth, he had trouble gauging.

When he got back to his apartment building, he let out a heartfelt sigh of relief. Now that he no longer had to pay half his salary to the white clerk who’d hired him, he could afford something better than the dismal flophouse where he’d endured his first nights in Columbia. The place was shabby but clean, with gas lights and a bathroom at the end of the hall. It had cockroaches, but not too many, and his own astringently neat habits gave them little sustenance.

Coming up the corridor from the bathroom, the mulatto woman who had the apartment across the hall from his smiled. “Evenin’, Nero,” she said.

“Evenin’, Miss Sempronia,” he answered. He thought she was a widow, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t pry into the business of others, not least because he couldn’t afford to have anyone prying into his. That smile, though, and others he’d got from her, made him think he wouldn’t have to run very fast if he decided to chase her.

He went into his own apartment and closed the door after him. It was getting dark early these days; though he’d left the drapes open, he had to fumble to find the matches he’d set on the shelf near the gaslight. He struck one and got the lamp there going. That gave him the light he needed to start the lamp above his favorite chair.

Since the apartment boasted only one chair, that made the choice easier than it would have been otherwise. But it was comfortable, so he didn’t complain. If the upholstery was battered, well, so what? This wasn’t Marshlands. “I am, however, not the tiniest bit dissatisfied with my present circumstances,” he said softly, in the starchy white-folks’ voice he hadn’t used more than a couple of times since the Red uprising broke out. He smiled to hear himself. Now that he wasn’t used to it any more, that accent struck him as ridiculous.

On the rickety pine table beside the chair lay a battered copy of Flaubert’s Salammbo he’d picked up for a nickel. He opened it almost at random and plunged in. He wondered how many times he’d read it. More than he could count on his fingers, he was sure of that. Most literate Negroes in the CSA had read Salammbo a good many times. The story of the revolt of the army of dark-skinned mercenaries against Carthage after the First Punic War struck a chord in the heart of the most peaceable black man.

He grimaced and sighed. That revolt had failed, too. He kept reading anyhow.

When the cheap, loudly ticking alarm clock he’d bought said it was a little past nine, he carried a couple of towels and a bar of soap down to the bathroom. One thing years of being a butler had done: made him more fastidious than most factory hands, white or black, in the CSA. The weather was still warm enough for him to find a cold-water bath invigorating. How he’d feel about that when winter came around, he didn’t want to think.

Next morning, the alarm clock’s clatter got him hopping out of bed, heart pounding as if Confederate soldiers were bombarding the apartment house. He dressed, made himself coffee, breakfasted on bread and jam, and made a sandwich of bread and tinned beef to throw in his dinner pail. Thus fortified, he walked the half a mile to work, the dinner pail brushing his left thigh with every step he took.

A lot of black men in overalls and collarless shirts and heavy shoes were on the street; he might have been invisible among them. Some, like him, went bareheaded; some wore homemade straw hats, as if they still labored in the fields; some wore cloth caps like most white factory hands. Not many white factory hands were left, though: supervisors, youngsters not yet ripe for conscription, wounded veterans no longer fit for the front, and a few others with skills or pull enough to keep them out of butternut.

Here and there, men who worked in his plant waved to him and called out his nom de travaille. “Mornin’, Nero.” “How you is, Nero?” The broader he made his Congaree patois in answer, the happier the other workers seemed. He’d seen that back at Marshlands, too. It saddened him-his fellows were locking themselves away from much that was worthwhile-but he also understood it.

Greetings flew thick and fast as he lined up to punch in. He’d made his own place here, and felt no small pride at having done so. “Mornin’, Solon,” he said with a wave. “How you is, Artaxerxes? A good mornin’ to you, Hadrian.”

The foreman said, “Apollonius already took off, Nero, so I reckon you got yourself a few crates to haul there.”

“I’ll do it,” was all Scipio said, to which the white man nodded. The fellow who worked the night shift slid out of the factory as fast as he possibly could every morning. One day he’d slide out too fast, and have the door slammed in his face when he came back. It wasn’t as if the bosses couldn’t find anyone to replace him.

Sure enough, several crates of empty shell casings waited to be hauled to the belt that would take them to the white women who filled them and installed their fuses and noses. Scipio loaded two onto a dolley and pushed it over to Jonah, who stood waiting to receive it. When he hurried back to do more, Jonah shook his head. “Dat Apollonius, he one lazy nigger,” he observed. “You, Nero, you does yo’ work good.”

“T’ank you,” Scipio said. Jonah, as usual, sounded faintly surprised to admit that, no doubt because he remembered Scipio from his soft-handed days as a butler. None of the then-field hands had ever realized how much work Scipio actually did at Marshlands because so much of it was with his head rather than his hands or his back. He was ready to admit headwork was easier, but it was still work.

Back and forth, back and forth. He got no credit for the dolly, but it helped. Lift, carry, push, lift, carry, push. His hands and his muscles had hardened; he didn’t go home every night shambling like a spavined horse any more. He knew a certain amount of pride in that. He was stronger than he had been, and sometimes tempted to get into fights to show off his new strength. He resisted that temptation, along with most others. Fighting might make him visible to the whites of Columbia, which was the last thing he wanted.

Working with his body left his mind curiously blank. He listened to what was going on around him, to the clatter of the lines, to the chatter of the people working them, and, after a while, to the foreman out front: “Are you sure you want to go back there? It’s a dirty, smelly place, and parts of it are dangerous, too, what with the explosives and fuses and such-like.”

The words weren’t far out of the ordinary. The tone was. The foreman, normally master of all he surveyed here, sounded deferential, persuasive. That more than what he was saying made Scipio notice his voice in the first place. A moment later, he understood why the foreman sounded as he did. The reply came with the unquestioning, uncompromising arrogance of a Confederate aristocrat: “I am a stockholder, and not a small stockholder, in this corporation. I have the right to see how its operations function. You may guide me, or you may get out of the way and let me see for myself. The choice is yours.”

Scipio dropped at Jonah’s feet the crate he was hauling; the shell casings clanked in their plywood-partitioned pigeonholes. “Do Jesus!” Scipio exclaimed in a horrified whisper. “Dat are Miss Anne!”

“I knows it,” Jonah answered, looking at least as discomfited as Scipio felt. Regardless of what his passbook had said he could do, Jonah had left Marshlands for his factory job two years earlier. His position was less desperate than Scipio’s, but far from what he would have wanted.

Before Scipio could make up his mind whether to hope he wasn’t recognized or to flee, Anne Colleton came in, the foreman trailing after her and still trying ineffectually to slow her down. As Scipio knew, anyone who tried to slow her down was bound to be ineffectual. “This area here, ma’am,” the foreman said, still not grasping how outgunned he was, “is where the casings come off the line over yonder and go to get filled over here.”

“Is it?” Anne said. She nodded to the Negro laborers. “Good day, Scipio, Jonah.” Then, without another word, she headed off into the filling area. The two Negroes looked at each other. She knew who they were-she knew and she hadn’t done a thing about it. That worried Scipio more than anything else he could think of.

Sylvia Enos knew how drunk she was. She rarely touched whiskey, but she’d made an exception tonight. She was ready to make exceptions about lots of things tonight. She giggled. “Good thing I’m not going anywhere,” she said, and giggled again. “I couldn’t get there.”

“Not going anywhere at all,” her husband agreed. George had drunk more than she had, but showed it less. The whiskey wasn’t making him laugh, either. It was just making him very certain about things. His certainty had swept her along, too, so that she lay altogether naked beside him even though the children couldn’t have been in bed more than fifteen minutes themselves.

If George, Jr., came in right now-well, that would be funny, too. Whiskey was amazing stuff, all right. Sylvia ran her hand over George’s chest, the hair there so familiar and so long absent. From his chest, her hand wandered lower. Ladies didn’t do such things. Ladies, in fact, endured it rather than enjoying it when their husbands touched them. If George gets angry, I’ll blame it on the whiskey, she thought as her hand closed around him.

“Oh,” he said, more an exhalation than a word. Nor was that the only way he responded to her touch.

“Is that what you learned in the Navy-how to come to attention, I mean?” she said. He laughed. Then, without even being asked, she slid down and took him in her mouth. Ladies not only didn’t do such things, they didn’t think of such things. A lot of ladies had never heard of or imagined such things. Since she had…His flesh was smooth and hot. The whiskey, she thought again. Being inexperienced in such things, she bore down more than she should have, and had to withdraw, choking a little.

If they hadn’t been married, if she hadn’t wanted him as much as he wanted her, what followed would have been a rape. As it was, she wrapped her arms and legs around him while he plunged above her, and whispered endearments and urged him on.

He shuddered and groaned sooner than she would have liked, which was, she supposed, a disadvantage of doing as she’d just done. Instead of pulling free, though, he stayed in her. In an amazingly short time, he was hard again. The second round was almost as frantic as the first, but, kindled by that first time, she felt all thought go away just as he spent, too.

“Always like a honeymoon, coming back to you after I’ve been away at sea,” he said, a smile in his voice. “I’ve been at sea a long time this time-and I never even saw the ocean.”

Sylvia didn’t answer right away. She felt lazy and sated, at peace with the world even if the world held no peace. But the body had demands other than those of lust and love. “Let me up, dear,” she said, and, regretfully, he rolled off her. She regretted it, too, when he came out. Nothing good ever lasts, that seemed to say.

She pulled the chamber pot out from under the bed and squatted to use it. Some of his seed ran out of her, too. That she did not mind; it made getting pregnant less likely. She got back into bed. George stood and used the chamber pot, too, then lay down beside her in the darkness once more.

“I got the telegram that said you were missing,” she said, “and-” She didn’t, couldn’t, go on with words. Instead, she clutched him to her, even tighter than when his hips had pumped him in and out of her as if he were the piston of a steam engine and she the receiving cylinder.

He squeezed her, too. “I hid in the woods with my pals till another boat got down there to see if anybody had lived through the explosion. They were the brave ones, ’cause the Rebs had that spot zeroed. None of the shells hit, though, and we rowed out to them and they got us away from there.”

“Four,” she said wonderingly. “Four, out of the whole crew.”

“Luck,” George answered. “Fool luck. We were up at this colored fellow’s shack on the riverbank. Charlie White would have killed anybody who kept a place that dirty, and they made the whiskey right around there. You drank it, you could run a gaslight on your breath. I had a glass, and some food-place was dirty, yeah, but they cooked better than anything our galley turned out-and I had some more whiskey, and then I went outside, and then…the Rebels dropped two, right on the Punishment.” Remembering made him shiver.

“What did you go outside for?” Sylvia asked.

She meant the question casually. To stand next to a tree was the answer she’d expected, or something of that sort. George stiffened in her arms, and not in the way she’d found so enjoyable. “Oh, just to get a breath of air,” he said, and she knew he was lying.

“What did you go outside for?” she repeated, and tried to see his face in the darkness. No good: he was only the vaguest blur.

He stayed unnaturally still a little too long. Was that the glitter of his eyes opening wide to try to see her expression, too? “It wasn’t anything,” he said at last.

Where the whiskey had made her giddy and then randy, now it made her angry. “What did you go outside for?” she said for the third time. “I want you to tell me the truth.”

George sighed. When Sylvia breathed in as he breathed out, she could smell and taste that they’d been drinking together. Sober, he might have found a lie she would believe, or else might have been able to keep his mouth shut till she got sick of asking questions. He’d managed that, every now and then.

He sighed again. “There was another place, next to this saloon or tavern or whatever you call it. I was going over there, but I never made it. I hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps that way when the shelling started.”

“Another place?” she echoed. George nodded, a gesture she felt instead of seeing. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” she demanded. “What kind of place was…?” All at once, she wanted to push him away from her as hard as she could. “You were going to a-” Her hiss might have been more deadly than a shout.

“Yeah, I was.” He sounded ashamed. That was something, a small something, but not nearly enough. He went on, “I didn’t get there. Sylvia, I swear to you it’s the only time I was gone that I was going that way. I’d been away so long, and I didn’t know when I’d be back or if I’d ever be back.” He laughed, which enraged her till he went on, “I guess God was telling me I shouldn’t do things like that even once.”

“And I let you-” Her voice was cold as the ice in the hold of a steam trawler. She hadn’t just let him touch her, she’d wanted him to touch her, she’d wanted to touch him. She couldn’t say that; her body had fewer inhibitions than her tongue did. Her tongue…She’d had that part of him in her mouth, and she thought she’d throw up. She gulped, as if fighting back seasickness.

“Nothing happened,” George said.

She believed him. She wanted, or part of her wanted, to think he was lying; that would have given her all the more reason to force him away from her. Had he been telling the truth when he said that was the only time he’d gone to-or toward-such a place? Again, she thought so, but she wondered if it mattered when you got down to the bottom of things. Still in that frozen voice, she said, “Something would have happened, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, I guess it would,” he answered dully.

He wasn’t trying to pretend. That was something, too. Try as she would, she had trouble keeping the flame of her fury hot. Being apart from him had been hard on her, too, and she’d known he wasn’t a saint before she married him. “You were pretty stupid, do you know that?” she said.

“I thought so myself,” he answered, quickly, eagerly, a man splashing in the sea grabbing for a floating spar. “If I hadn’t had that second glass of whiskey, I never would have done it.”

“Whiskey gets you into all sorts of trouble, doesn’t it?” she said, not quite so frosty now. “Makes you go after women you shouldn’t, makes you talk too much when you’re with the woman you should-”

He laughed in relief, feeling himself slide off the hook. His thumb and forefinger closed on her nipple; even in the dark, he found it unerringly. Sylvia twisted away: he wasn’t that forgiven yet.

“I was plenty stupid,” he said, which not only agreed with what she’d just said but had the added virtue of likely being truer than I’m sorry.

“I hope to heaven this terrible war ends soon, so you can come home and spend the rest of your days with me,” Sylvia said. And, she added to herself, so I can keep an eye on you. She’d never thought she’d need another reason for wishing the war over, but George had given her one.

He understood that, too. “I hope they’ll really send me out to sea this time,” he said. “Then I’ll be away from everything”-everything in a dress, he meant-“for months at a time.”

Sylvia nodded. George didn’t mention what happened when sailors came into a port after months at a time at sea. Maybe he was trying not to think about it. Maybe he was hoping she wouldn’t think about it. If so, it was a forlorn hope. Boston was a Navy town. More than one sailor had accosted Sylvia on the street. She did not imagine her husband was a great deal different from the common lot of men. Had she so imagined, he would have taught her better.

He clutched her to him. “I don’t want anybody but you,” he said.

Now you don’t, she thought. He gave proof with more than words that he did want her. With a small sigh, she let him take her. He was her husband, he had come home alive out of danger, he hadn’t (quite) (she didn’t think) been unfaithful to her. So she told herself. But, where only the speed of his explosion the first time had kept her from joining him in joy, where she had done just that the second time, and been as eager, even as wanton, then as ever in her life, now, though she tried, though she strained, though she concentrated, pleasure eluded her.

George didn’t notice. Somehow that hurt almost worse than anything he’d told her. In a while, she supposed, he’d want a fourth round, too. “Have we got any more whiskey?” she asked.