Drive to the East

by Harry Turtledove

  “Take us with you!” somebody behind Scipio shouted. In an instant, everyone was yelling it: “Take us with you! Take us with you!”

  “Hell, I would if I could,” Dover said. “I don’t think that’ll happen, though.”

  The clamor went on all the same. Scipio understood why: if these black men were busy cooking for soldiers and serving them, they’d be less likely to go to a camp. Anything—anything at all—seemed better than going to a camp.

  “I don’t want anybody to get in trouble for being out too late,” Dover said after a while. The response to that was angry and profane. This was a night of license, and would have been even if not fueled by booze. Whatever the restaurant staff did short of burning the place down, he would let them get away with it.

  Aurelius tapped Scipio on the arm. “How you like bein’ an old man at a young men’s fling?” the other veteran waiter asked.

  “Long as I’s here,” Scipio answered. “Long as I’s anywhere.”

  “Amen,” Aurelius said.

  Scipio beckoned him off to one side. Once the two old men had put a little distance between themselves and the rest of the staff, Scipio said, “Tell you what I was afeared of. I was afeared of a people bomb. I done been through two auto bombs. Don’t reckon I’d las’ if somethin’ else blow up around me.”

  “Auto bombs is nasty business,” Aurelius said. “People bombs . . . People bombs is worse.” He shuddered. “How you walk in somewhere, knowin’ you got ’splosives strapped on you? All you got to do is click the switch or whatever the hell—and then you is splattered all over the walls.”

  “Way things is nowadays, lotta niggers reckon they gots nothin’ to lose,” Scipio said.

  Aurelius nodded. “I know that. I don’t like it. If it ain’t a judgment on the Confederate States of America, I dunno what would be. But still, no matter how bad things is, is they ever bad enough to blow your ownself up?”

  “Dat nigger in Jackson done thought so,” Scipio said. “Damn nigger was a waiter, too. My tips ain’t been the same since he done it.”

  “Your tips ain’t all that’s hurtin’,” Aurelius reminded him. “They put all the niggers in Jackson on trains an’ ship ’em off to camps. All of ’em, jus’ like that.” He snapped his fingers. “An’ the Freedom Party don’t try to hide it or nothin’. Hell, the Freedom Party braggin’ to beat the band.”

  “Not too long after de Great War end, I’s in de park takin’ de air, an’ who should come make a speech but Jake Featherston?” Scipio shuddered at the memory, even if it was almost a quarter of a century old. “Everybody reckon he nothin’ but a crazy man. I reckon de same thing back then. But he scare de piss outa me even so.”

  Aurelius looked around to see if anyone was listening to them. Once he was satisfied, he said, “That Featherston, he ain’t nothin’ but a crazy man.”

  “No.” Regretfully, Scipio shook his head. “He a crazy man, sho’, but he ain’t nothin’ but a crazy man. You hear what I’s sayin’? Nobody who’s nothin’ but a crazy man kin do as much harm as Jake Featherston.”

  Aurelius considered that. He also considered his glass, which was empty. When he too shook his head, Scipio wasn’t sure whether he mourned the empty glass or the Freedom Party’s devastation. Then he said, “Well, you is right, an’ I wish you wasn’t.” He could do something about getting more whiskey. Nobody on the North American continent had had much luck doing anything about Jake Featherston.

  Scipio and Aurelius reeled back to the Terry together. No explosions marred the night. No automobiles going up in fireballs threw jagged metal and blazing gasoline in all directions. No desperate Negroes threw nails and chunks of themselves every which way. Except for a whip-poor-will’s mournful call, everything was peaceful and quiet.

  “You damn coons are late,” grumbled the cop who opened the gate for them. “Even for y’all, you’re late.”

  “Sorry, suh,” Scipio slurred. “We was sayin’ good-bye to our boss. He goin’ into de Army.”

  The cop’s left hand had only the thumb and index finger. You didn’t notice straight off, probably because he kept that hand in his pocket whenever he could. “Good luck to him,” he said. “You spooks don’t know when you’re well off. You don’t got to worry about shit like that.”

  Was he right? Scipio didn’t think so. If Negroes had the same privileges and rights as whites, wouldn’t they be glad to pick up rifles to help defend the Confederacy? It looked that way to him. But if they had all those privileges and rights, the Confederacy they were defending would be a very different place. Just for openers, it would be a place where Jake Featherston could never get elected, and neither could anyone like him.

  Well, it wasn’t like that, and it never would be. The thump of the gate behind Scipio and Aurelius proved as much, and proved it all too well.

  He did have a headache when he got up. Cassius scowled at him. “How can you have a good time sayin’ so long to a damn ofay?” his son demanded.

  With a sigh, Scipio answered, “It ain’t as simple as you think it is.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Cassius said scornfully—he’d got to the point where he would quarrel with anything Scipio said just because Scipio said it. “How come?”

  “On account of I be dead if Jerry Dover don’t want me alive an’ workin’ there,” Scipio said. “On account of you an’ your sister an’ your mama go to a camp—or else you jus’ end up dead, too.”

  “Jerry Dover still a damn ofay,” Cassius said.

  “Fine.” Scipio didn’t feel like arguing with him, especially not with a head pounding like a drop forge. He took a couple of aspirins. They made his stomach sour, but after a while his headache receded.

  He hated walking through the cleaned-out parts of the Terry on his way to work that afternoon. Lawns grew tall and untended and full of weeds. Lots of houses had broken windows. Quite a few had doors standing open. A skinny dog trotted out of one of them and gave Scipio a hard stare. If it were a little bigger, it might have gone for him. Stray dogs scrounged whatever they could. So did stray people. The cleanouts hadn’t missed many. If not for Jerry Dover, they wouldn’t have missed Scipio and his family.

  And now Dover was in the Army. Scipio shook his head, dreading what would come next. He’d got to the age where he feared any kind of change. It was too likely to be change for the worse.

  A white man waited just inside the kitchen entrance to the Huntsman’s Lodge. “Are you Xerxes or Aurelius?” he asked.

  “I is Xerxes, suh,” Scipio answered. The new manager was younger than he’d expected—in his early forties. He had a thin, sharp, clever face and cold blue eyes. Scipio didn’t wonder why he wasn’t in the Army: he sat in a wheelchair, his legs thin and useless inside his trousers.

  “My name’s Willard Sloan,” he said, and tapped the arms of the chair with his own arms, which seemed fine. A moment later, he explained why: “Stopped a damnyankee bullet with my back in 1917. I used to be a hell of a football player, you know? So much for that.” His mouth twisted. Then he went on, “Jerry Dover says you’ve been here since dirt. If I need to know anything special, I’m supposed to ask you.”

  “I tells you anything I knows, suh.” Scipio meant it. He didn’t expect the white man to like him. It might end up happening, but he didn’t expect it. If Sloan found him useful, that would do almost as well.

  “All right. If I have to pick your brains, I’ll holler. For now, you just go on about your business the way you always have. I’ll keep an eye on things, cipher out how they are, before I decide what works good and what needs tinkering.”

  “Fair enough, suh. Dis place been de bes’ in town a long time. Sure enough want to keep it dat way,” Scipio said. He and the rest of the staff would be judging Willard Sloan as he judged them. The only trouble was, his judgment carried more weight than theirs.

  He did start well. When the cooks were unhappy with some of the beef they got, he used the telephone like a deadly weapon. “You bastard, you rec
kon you can screw me over on account of I ain’t Dover?” he screamed at the butcher. “You reckon I don’t know Chet Byers? You reckon I won’t do business with him from here on out if you ever pull this shit on me again? Make it right in fifteen minutes, or I blacken your name all over town.” New beef—of the proper quality—got there in twelve minutes flat. Jerry Dover couldn’t have done better, and there was no higher praise than that.

  XVII

  AUTUMN WAS when the leaves turned red and gold and then fell off the trees. It was when the weather got crisp, so your cheeks also turned red and tingled after you’d stayed outside a while. If you were a fisherman on the North Atlantic, it was when the ocean started tossing you around, not knowing—or caring—your boat was out there.

  George Enos, Jr., was used to the rhythms of the changing year. A Massachusetts man had to be. In the Sandwich Islands, the year didn’t change much. The sun still rode high in the sky, if not quite so high. Days remained warm. Everything stayed green.

  Bigger swells did start rolling in out of the north. The Townsend would slide up over a crest and then down into a trough. That didn’t seem enough to get excited about.

  When George said so out loud, Fremont Dalby laughed at him. “Christ, Enos, haven’t you had enough excitement for a while?” the gun chief said. “Far as I’m concerned, I can stay at my station and gather dust for a while, because that’ll mean nobody’s trying to strafe the ship or drop a bomb on her or stick a torpedo up our ass.”

  “Japs are out there somewhere,” George said.

  “I know, I know. You don’t got to remind me,” Dalby said. “But I don’t like thinking about it every goddamn minute, you know what I mean?”

  “Sure, Chief.” George didn’t want to get the CPO ticked off at him. Getting any CPO ticked off at you was a bad idea. When the man in question happened to be your boss, it was four times as bad.

  They kept station with three other destroyers and with the Trenton. The escort carrier hadn’t taken too much damage in her last brush with the Japanese. Her airplanes had given out more than she’d got. That was the first real naval victory the USA had had in the islands around the Sandwich Islands for quite a while.

  U.S. fighters buzzed overhead. They flew a dawn-to-dusk combat air patrol. The Townsend’s Y-ranging antenna went round and round. Y-ranging gear could spot incoming enemy aircraft while they were still well out to sea. The other destroyers and the carrier all had sets, too. Whatever else happened, the Japs wouldn’t be able to get in a sucker punch at the little flotilla. The Trenton would be able to scramble all her fighters. The destroyers would start throwing up as much anti-aircraft as they could. And after that, what could you do but pucker your asshole and hope?

  Fritz Gustafson pointed off to starboard. The loader didn’t bother with words when one finger would do. Fremont Dalby wasn’t shy about words, though. “Dolphins!” he said with a smile. “They’re supposed to be good luck. Here’s hoping, anyway.”

  George enjoyed the dolphins for their own sake. They were swift and graceful and, as always, they looked as if they were having a good time out there. “I wonder what they make of us,” he said. “Till we got ships like this, they were some of the biggest, toughest things in the ocean.”

  “They figure we’re good for a handout, anyway,” Dalby said, which was true. They would follow ships for scraps and garbage. Sometimes, though, they would track ships for what looked like nothing more than the hell of it. Were they skylarking? Did they really have the brains to play? More to the point, did they have the brains not to want to work? For their sake, George hoped so.

  Four hours on, four hours off. When the other crew for the twin 40mm mount replaced Dalby’s, George went below, grabbed himself a couple of sandwiches and some coffee, and then found his hammock. He laughed as he climbed up into it. “What’s so funny?” asked another sailor about to grab some shut-eye.

  “Used to be I couldn’t sleep for beans in one of these goddamn things,” George answered. “Used to be I couldn’t hardly get into one without falling out on my ear. But now I don’t even think about it.”

  “That’s ’cause you’re a real Navy guy now,” the other sailor said, getting up into his hammock as nimbly as a chimp might have. “You know how to do shit. You aren’t a little lost civilian anymore, looking for somebody to hold your hand and tell you what to do.”

  Was I really that green? George wondered, wiggling to get comfortable. He supposed he had been. He knew the sea from his fisherman days, but knowing the sea and knowing the Navy weren’t the same thing—not even close. He settled his cap over his eyes. Two minutes later, he was snoring.

  Standing watch and watch wore on a man. He felt groggy, almost underwater, when he slid out of the hammock and down to the deck again. He got rid of some of the coffee he’d drunk just after he came off the last watch, then went back to the galley for more. It might help keep him conscious, anyway.

  Fremont Dalby was at the gun when he got there. The CPO looked fresh and fit. Maybe Dalby didn’t need to sleep. George yawned. He damn well did, and he hadn’t done enough of it. “All quiet?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Dalby answered. “We’re getting up toward Midway, too.”

  “Uh-huh.” George looked north and west, as if he expected the atoll to come over the horizon any minute now. He didn’t; they weren’t that close, not by three or four hundred miles. “Anything from the Y-range?”

  “Quiet as a mouse, far as I know,” Dalby said. “Way it looks to me is, the Japs haven’t got a carrier operating south of the island.”

  “Makes sense,” George agreed. “If they did, they would’ve figured out we’re around by now. Hell, we’re almost close enough for land-based air from Midway to spot us.”

  “Almost is the word,” the gun chief said. “And if they don’t have a carrier operating south of Midway, we really have made them pull in their horns. Us coming up here is a lot better than them bombing the crap out of Oahu.”

  “You better believe it,” George said. “It’d be good if we could push ’em off Midway, too. Where would they go then?”

  “Wake,” Fremont Dalby replied at once. “It’s another pissant little bird turd of an island southwest of Midway. But I’ll be damned if I’d want to hop from island to island across the whole stinking Pacific toward Japan.”

  “Oh, good God, no!” George shuddered at the very idea. “You’d have to be crazy to try something like that. You’d have to be crazy to want to. As long as they get out of the Sandwich Islands and stay away, that’s plenty. This is a big goddamn ocean. There’s room enough for us and them.”

  “That’s how it looks to me, too,” Dalby said. “Of course, how it looks to Philadelphia is anybody’s guess. The big brains back there can screw up anything if they put their minds to it. Minds!” He rolled his eyes. “If they had any, we’d all be better off.”

  “Treason,” Fritz Gustafson said. “Off with your head.”

  Dalby suggested that the loader lose some other organ important for happiness, if not absolutely necessary for personal survival. Gustafson didn’t say another word. He’d got his lick in, and he was content.

  George’s watch passed quietly. No warning shouts of approaching Japanese airplanes came from the loudspeakers. The hydrophones didn’t pick up telltale noises from lurking Japanese submersibles. No torpedoes from lurking submersibles the hydrophone hadn’t picked up arrowed through the water toward the Townsend.

  When the other crew took over the gun, George went down to the galley for more sandwiches and coffee. He felt as if he’d done the same thing just a few hours earlier. Of course, he had done the same thing, so no wonder he felt that way. These sandwiches were ham on wheat, not corned beef on rye. Other than that, he might have been running the film over again. Standing watch and watch made time blur. George tried to come up with the name of the artist who’d painted the pocket watch sagging and melting as if it were left out in the rain. It was something foreign, that was all he c
ould remember.

  Yawning, he headed for his hammock. “Here we go again,” he said as he climbed up into it.

  The sailor he’d talked with the last time he sacked out laughed. “We gotta stop meeting like this,” he said. “People will get suspicious.”

  George laughed, too, a little nervously. Was that just a joke, or did something faggoty hide underneath it? Aboard ship, you always wondered. The Townsend went back to Oahu often enough to let the crew get their ashes hauled on Hotel Street, but you wondered anyway. Some guys were flat-out queers, no two ways about it, and they couldn’t have cared less about the floozies on Hotel Street.

  But you couldn’t call somebody on what was probably nothing but a harmless joke. If the other guy didn’t make another like it, George figured he would forget about this one. If he did . . . I’ll worry about that later. With another yawn, an enormous one, George decided to worry about everything later, and went to sleep.

  Night had fallen when he came back up on deck with another mug of coffee. It was cool and quiet: no CAP after dark. Fremont Dalby got to the 40mm mount with a mug of his own. He nodded to George and said, “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

  Him, too? “Uh, yeah,” George said. He could imagine a lot of things, but the gun chief as a homo? Never in a million years.

  “Should be a little easier this time through,” Dalby said. “We don’t have airplanes coming at us with bombs or torpedoes during the night.”

  “Or trying to crash into us, either,” George put in.

  “Yeah, that was fun, wasn’t it?” Dalby said. Fun wasn’t the word George would have used. He didn’t know which one he would have used, but it wasn’t one he would see in any family newspaper.

  “All we gotta worry about now is submarines,” Fritz Gustafson said. As usual, the loader didn’t talk much. Also as usual, he got a lot of mileage out of what he did say.

  Fremont Dalby’s suggestion about what submarines could do was illegal, immoral, and impossible. George stared out over the black waters of the Pacific. Starlight glittered off the sea, but the moon was down. A dozen submersibles could have been playing ring around the rosy half a mile from the Townsend and he never would have known it. Out in the tropical Atlantic, a Confederate boat had sneaked up on his father’s destroyer and sunk it in the middle of the night. The same thing could happen to him. At times like this, he knew it much too well.