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 ENCAMPMENT ADMINISTRATION 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 f
ree. 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.
Sure enough, the guards went through the count four times before they were satisfied. Then the wreckers hurried to the kitchen. Everyone got a chunk of brown bread. In New York City, Mike would have turned up his nose at the coarse, stale stuff. After days of worse, it made him think of manna from heaven.
Once they’d grabbed their bread, the inmates walked past cooks who ladled stew into their mess tins. “Hey, Phil,” John said to one of the men: like the rest, an inmate himself. “Give my pal Mike here something good, okay?”
“Natch,” Phil said. “Just like the fuckin’ Waldorf.” He filled Mike’s tin, then jerked his thumb toward the rough tables. “Gwan, get outa here.”
Mike gobbled the bread. He spooned up the stew. The gravy was thin and watery. In it floated bits of potato and turnip and cabbage and a few strings of what might have been meat. He would have stomped out of any place that dared charge even a penny for it. Right here, right now, it seemed terrific.
He’d got his tin almost perfectly clean before he thought to wonder, “What kind of meat was that, anyway?”
John Dennison was eating more slowly. “Some questions here, you don’t ask. You don’t ask what somebody did to wind up here. He can tell you if he wants to, but you don’t ask. And you don’t ask what the meat is. It’s there, is what it is—when it is there. If you knew, maybe you wouldn’t wanna eat it. And you gotta eat here, or else you fold up and die.”
“Okay,” Mike said. All kinds of interesting possibilities went through his mind. Bear? Coyote? Skunk? Squirrel? Stray dog? He wouldn’t have ordered any of those at a greasy spoon back home. But he wasn’t about to pick them out of his tin, either. He tried another question: “Can I ask you what you did for a living before you got here?”
“Oh, sure. I was a carpenter.” John chuckled. “I know the wood a hell of a lot better now than I did then. I know it with the skin on, I guess you’d say. How about you?”
“I wrote for a newspaper,” Mike said.
“Did you?” John Dennison chuckled again. “Then I bet I don’t have to ask how you wound up here.” He held up a hasty hand. “And I’m not asking. You don’t got to say anything if you don’t feel like it.”
“I don’t care,” Mike said. “That’s what happened, all right. I bet I’m a long way from the only reporter here.”
“Won’t touch that one. I’d lose,” Dennison said. “Me, I got drunk and stupid and I told off Joe Steele. I think the bastard who turned me in was the guy who wanted my building, only he couldn’t get it from me. So he ratted on me to the Jeebies, and I won my five to ten, plus a big old knot on the side of my head. They still do that when they grab you?”
“Oh, hell, yes. I already told you I got blackjacked.” Mike rubbed his own bruise, which was sore and swollen yet. “Sort of a welcome-to-the-club present.”
“Welcome-with-a-club present, you mean,” John said. Of all the things Mike hadn’t expected to do in a labor encampment, laughing his head off stood high on the list. He did it now, though.
* * *
Charlie had to call Stella back and tell her he couldn’t do anything for Mike. She burst into tears. “What am I gonna do without him?” she wailed. He didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t think anybody could say anything to that.
And, just to make his joy complete, he had to call his folks and tell them he couldn’t help Mike. His mother answered the telephone. Bridget Sullivan didn’t take the news well. “Why didn’t you stop him?” she demanded bitterly. “Why didn’t you keep him from writing that stuff about the President? Then he wouldn’t have got in trouble.”
“What was I supposed to do, Mom? He’s a grown man. Should I have held a gun to his head? Or maybe an ether cone over his nose?”
“I don’t know,” his mother said. “All I know is, you didn’t stop him, and now he’s in one of those horrible places people don’t come back from.” She started crying, too.
He got off the phone as fast as he could, which wasn’t nearly fast enough. Then he walked into the kitchen, pulled an ice-cube tray from the freezer, put rocks in a glass, and poured three fingers of bourbon over them. “Boy, that was fun,” he said, coming back to the front room.
“Sounded like it,” Esther said.
He took a healthy swig. “Whew! That hits the spot! Good for what ails me, all right.” He looked from the glass to his wife and back again. “Sorry, hon. I’m being rude and crude. Want I should fix you one, too?”
“No, thanks,” she said. “Bourbon hasn’t tasted good to me lately.”
“What do you mean? It’s Wild Turkey, not the cheap stuff they scrape out of the barrel and have to fight into a bottle with a pistol and a chair.”
“It hasn’t tasted good anyway,” Esther answered. “Coffee doesn’t taste right, either, or even tea. Must be because I’m expecting.”
“Exp—” Charlie got half the word out, and no more. He wasn’t astonished—he knew when her monthlies were due, and they hadn’t come. But it was still a big thing to hear officially, as it were.
She nodded. “That’s right. We wanted to. Now we’re going to. I did a little thinking when I decided I was sure I was going to have a baby. If I worked it out right, Junior will be in the high school class of 1956. Can you believe that?”
“Now that you mention it, no,” Charlie said after trying and failing. “He’ll probably fly to school in a rocket car, carry his phone in his shirt pocket, and go to the Moon for summer vacation.”
Esther laughed at him. “I think you let that Flash Gordon serial last year soften your brain.”
“Maybe—but maybe not, too,” Charlie said. “Look where we were twenty years ago. Nobody had a radio. Model T’s were as good as cars got. People had iceboxes—when they had iceboxes—not refrigerators. You put out a card to tell the iceman how much to leave. Airplanes were made out of wood and cloth and baling wire. Can you imagine what they would’ve thought of a DC-3 if you stuck one in a time machine and sent it back?”
“Flash Gordon,” Esther said again, but this time her tone was thoughtful, not amused and mocking. She changed the subject: “What do you want to name it?”
“If it’s a boy, not Charlie, Junior,” he said at once. “Let him be whoever he is, not a carbon copy of his old man.”
“Okay,” Esther said. “I was thinking the same thing. Jews don’t usually name babies for someone who’s still alive. I would’ve gone along with it if you wanted to, but I’m not sorry you don’t.”
“How about if it’s a girl?” Charlie said.
“Sarah? After my mother’s mother?”
“Hmm . . .” He savored the name. “Sarah Sullivan. That might be okay, even if it sounds like it’s out of Abie’s Irish Rose.”
“We’re out of Abie’s Irish Rose, only with him and her turned around,” Esther said. “You could fill the Polo Grounds four or five times with all the couples out of Abie’s Irish Rose. And the ones who aren’t are Jewish and Italian or Italian and Irish or Russian and Irish or, or anything under the sun. The New York Mutts, that’s us.”
“Sounds like a pretty good ballclub.” Charlie snapped his fingers. “Now I gotta call my folks again. They’ll be glad to hear from me this time, I bet. Hey, Ma? Guess what? You’re gonna be a grandma! Yeah, she’ll go for that. And you gotta call yours, too. We’ll run up the bill, but who cares?”
He dialed th
e long-distance operator once more. When the call went through, his mother started yelling at him again. He might as well not have left the line. She started crying again, too.
Finally, he went, “Mom, will you just—hold on a second?” You couldn’t tell your mother to shut up, however much you wanted to. Well, you could, but you wouldn’t make yourself popular if you did.
“Why should I?” she wailed.
“So I can get a word in edgewise and let you know you’re gonna be a grandmother, that’s why.”
“But you let them take your own—” His mother wasn’t the swiftest at shifting mental gears. The stop, when it came, must have lasted for ten or fifteen seconds. Then she asked, “What did you say?”
“I said you’d be a grandmother. Esther’s going to have a baby.”
More tears. More yelling. They were happy tears and joyful yells. She said they were, anyway. They sounded pretty much the same to Mike. She shouted for his father, so he got congratulated twice. Then Pete Sullivan said, “You still have to fix things for your brother, Charlie.”
“I’m doing everything I know how to do, Pop. I can’t make them do what I tell ’em, you know.”
Like his mother, his father knew nothing of the sort. Charlie got off the line as fast as he could. Esther sent him a sympathetic look. “You did your best,” she told him.
“Yeah, and a fat lot of good it did me. They listened to me the same way Mikoian did. If I’d told ’em that, they would’ve hit the roof. It’s true anyhow.” He gestured invitingly toward the telephone. “Your turn now. Your folks will be glad to get the news.”
While she made the call, he went back to the kitchen and fixed himself another drink. He understood why his parents felt the way they did. He felt that way himself. Nobody wanted to see a loved one carted off to a labor encampment. He blamed himself even more than his mother and father blamed him. He didn’t need them to shovel guilt down on top of him. He already felt plenty guilty. Did they understand that? Did they understand anything?
Joe Steele Page 21