George’s heart drummed in his chest. His breath whistled in his throat. That was what he thought at first, with rotgut half stunning his senses. But he knew the sound of incoming shells in his gut, not just in his head, which wasn’t working very well right then.
He threw himself flat—not on top of the whore, but to the ground. The roar of the explosions stunned him. Mehitabel screamed like a cat with its tail in a door. Dirt flew as shells smashed into the soft ground south of the Cumberland. Great columns of water leaped from shells landing in the Cumberland. And, to George’s horror, two enormous columns of smoke and flame sprang from the Punishment as one shell struck her near the stern, the other square amidships.
More shells walked across the Cumberland toward him. Some of the water they kicked up splashed down onto him and onto Mehitabel, plastering the thin shift to her rounded contours. Enos didn’t care about that. He didn’t care about anything except approaching death and the fate of his crewmates.
The shells stopped falling before they reached the north bank of the Cumberland. He looked out toward the Punishment. The river monitor was burning and sinking fast. A moment later, as flame reached the magazines, it stopped burning and exploded. Mehitabel’s mouth was open as wide as it would go, which meant she had to be screaming, but George couldn’t hear a thing.
The heat of the fireball scorched his face. When at last it faded, twenty feet or so of the bow of the Punishment stuck up out of the river like a tombstone. The rest of the monitor was gone. A couple of bodies and a few pieces of bodies floated in the water, food for the snappers.
Stanley and Albert and Grover came out of the shack where they’d been drinking. They looked as bad as Enos felt. He suddenly realized he wasn’t drunk any more. Horror and terror had scorched the whiskey out of him.
He also realized, looking at his crewmates, that they were the only four Yankee sailors in hostile country, and that none of them carried anything more lethal than a belt knife. Absurdly, he wished he hadn’t wasted so much time on that machine gun when all it turned out to be good for was getting blown up.
“Get into bed this minute, do you hear me?” Sylvia Enos snapped at George, Jr., punctuating her words with a whack on his fanny.
As nothing else would have, that convinced him she meant what she said. “Good night, Mama!” he exclaimed, and planted a large, wet kiss on her cheek. He hurried off into the bedroom, humming an artillery march.
Sylvia looked down at the palm of her hand. It still stung, which meant his behind had to sting, too. He hadn’t even noticed, except that the swat had reminded him of what he needed to do. She stared after him. Was she raising a little boy or training a horse?
Mary Jane had peacefully gone to bed an hour before. By the haggard look on Brigid Coneval’s face when Sylvia had picked up her children, the reason Mary Jane was peaceful in the evening was that she’d raised hell all afternoon, and worn herself out doing it.
It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. An hour to myself, Sylvia thought. I can read a book. I can write a letter. I can just sit here and think about how tired I am. That last sounded particularly good to her.
She’d sat for about five minutes when someone knocked on the door. That should have been the signal for George, Jr., to come bounding out of the bedroom, demanding to know what was going on. But he didn’t: only soft, steady breathing came from there, not a little boy. Well, he’d been raising hell all afternoon, too; he must have run down as soon as his head hit the pillow.
Sylvia laughed to herself as she walked to the door. Try as she would, she had the devil of a time getting any peace and quiet. Here was somebody wanting to borrow some molasses or salt, or to tell her the latest scandal of the apartment house, or to give her some cookies or…a little community in its own right, the building was a busy place.
She opened the door. Standing there was no one she knew, but a youngster a year too young to do a proper job of raising the downy, fuzzy excuse for a mustache he had on his upper lip. He wore a green uniform, darker than the Army green-gray, with brass buttons stamped “WU.” “Mrs. Enos?” he said, and, at her automatic nod, went on, “Telegram for you, ma’am.”
Numbly, she accepted the envelope. Numbly, she signed for it. Numbly, she closed the door as the delivery boy hurried away. And, numbly, she opened the envelope with shaking fingers. It was, as she’d feared, from the Navy Department. REGRET TO INFORM YOU, she read, and a low moan came from her throat, THAT YOUR HUSBAND, ABLE SEAMAN GEORGE ENOS, IS LISTED AS MISSING IN EXPLOSION OF USS PUNISHMENT. NO FURTHER INFORMATION AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. YOU WILL BE INFORMED DIRECTLY SHOULD HE BE FOUND OR CONFIRMED LOST. The printed signature was that of the Secretary of the Navy.
She stared at the telegram till the words were only shapes on paper, shapes without meaning, without sense. But it did not help. The meaning had already been imparted, and lay inside her mind like an icy spear, piercing and freezing everything it touched. She crumpled the flimsy yellow sheet of paper. She felt crumpled, used and used up and thrown away by something bigger than herself, something bigger than the whole country, something eating the world. It was blind and sloppy, and it would not stop until it had its fill.
Her body knew what to do. Her mind did not fight it when it set the alarm on the clock by the bed, undressed itself, and lay down. It tried to make itself go to sleep, too. It knew how tired it was. But her mind had something to say about that, and said it, loud and emphatically.
She lay and lay and lay, mind spinning useless like a trolley wheel on an icy track. Convinced she would not sleep at all, she closed her eyes to look at the darkness inside her eyelids instead of the different darkness of the ceiling. She tried to guess when it was four, when five, when six and time to rise.
She jerked in horror when the alarm went off. She had fallen asleep after all. She wished she’d had a moment’s forgetfulness on first getting up, but no. She knew. As she had after the telegram arrived, she let her body do what needed doing, and roused her children, fed them breakfast, and took them over to Brigid Coneval’s apartment almost without conscious thought.
“Are you all right, dearie?” Mrs. Coneval asked. Her husband was in the Army. “You look a bit peaked, you do.”
“It’s—nothing,” Sylvia said. She kissed her children and left for work. Brigid Coneval stared after her, shaking her head.
Mechanically, Sylvia boarded the trolley. Mechanically, she rode to the right stop. Mechanically, she got off. Mechanically, she punched in. And, mechanically, she headed for her machine.
The mechanism broke when she saw Isabella Antonelli, or rather when her friend saw her. “Sylvia!” Isabella exclaimed, recognizing the dazed, haggard face staring at her for what it was. “Your husband, your Giorgio. Is he—?”
“Missing.” Sylvia forced the word out through numb lips. “I got—the telegram—last night…” She started to cry. She should have been working already. “I’m sorry, but—” She dissolved again.
Isabella Antonelli came over and wrapped her arms around Sylvia, as Sylvia might have done for Mary Jane had her little daughter broken a favorite doll. “Oh, my friend,” Isabella said. “I am so sorry he is gone.”
“Missing,” Sylvia said. “The telegram said missing.”
“I will pray for you,” Isabella answered. She said nothing more than that. Missing was a forlorn hope, and one all too likely to sink on the sea of truth. She knew that. Sylvia knew it, too. She would not have admitted knowing it, not if her own life depended on that admission.
Mr. Winter came limping along to see that the day shift’s run was beginning as it should. When he saw the two women huddled together between their machines, he hurried over to them. “Here, what’s this?” he asked, his voice not angry but not calm, either. For him, the line came first, everything else afterwards. “What’s going on?”
Sylvia tried to answer and could not. Calmly—with the sort of calm that comes from having experienced too much rather than not enough—Isabella Antonelli s
poke for her: “Her husband, he is missing, she hears last night from the Department of Wars.” Sylvia didn’t bother correcting her.
“Oh. I am sorry to hear that,” the foreman said, and sounded as if he was telling, if not the whole truth, then at least most of it. He studied Sylvia. “Do you want to go home, Mrs. Enos?”
“No,” Sylvia answered quickly. If she went home, they would find a substitute for her, and they might keep the substitute, too. But that was not the only reason she spoke as she did: “I’d rather be here, as a matter of fact. It will help me take my mind off, off—” She didn’t go on. Going on would have meant thinking about what she most wanted not to think about.
Mr. Winter gnawed at his mustache. “I dunno,” he said. But Isabella Antonelli gave him such a reproachful look that he softened. “All right, Mrs. Enos; we’ll see how it goes.” Had he not been interested in Sylvia’s friend as something more than an employee, he might have decided differently. Sylvia noted that enough to be amused by it, and then got angry at herself for letting anything amuse her.
She went to her machine and began pulling levers. She hoped desperately to fall into the routine that sometimes overtook her, so that half the day would go by without her consciously noticing it. To her disappointment, it didn’t happen. Her body did what it had to do, pulling her three levers, loading labels, filling the paste reservoir, and her mind ran round and round and round like a pet squirrel in a wheel.
When she went home, she said nothing to Brigid Coneval. The Irishwoman’s green eyes glowed with curiosity, though; surely the whole floor and probably the whole apartment building knew by now that she’d got a telegram in the night. But explaining to Mrs. Coneval would have meant explaining to George, Jr., who, like any little pitcher, had enormous ears. She sometimes marveled that he could hear anything, what with all the noise he made, but here he did. George is only missing, Sylvia told herself fiercely. I don’t have to say anything till I know for certain. Time enough then.
She did her best not to let her demeanor show either of her children anything was wrong. That she was even more tired than usual from having slept so badly the night before probably helped rather than hurt her cause. The evening passed quietly, not too far from normal.
Four days went by like that. Sympathy replaced curiosity in Brigid Coneval’s face. “It’s a brave front you put up, Mrs. Enos,” she said, having drawn her own conclusions. When Sylvia only shrugged, Mrs. Coneval nodded, as if she’d received all the answer she needed.
Sylvia’s mood veered from despair to fury, with many stops in between. She’d expected a second telegram hard on the heels of the first, either letting her know George was well or—more likely, she feared—very much the reverse. Either way, she would have known how to respond. She couldn’t respond to nothing, though. It left her adrift on a chartless sea.
Her work was not all it might have been. Mr. Winter proved more forbearing than she’d expected. “You’re doing the best you can, Mrs. Enos; I can see that,” he told her. Was he saying that because he was a veteran himself, and a widower, too, and so knew what suffering was like, or because he had an ulterior motive if George really was lost? With no way to be sure, she cautiously gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Another four days went by. Sometimes life seemed almost normal. Sometimes Sylvia thought she was losing her mind. Sometimes she hoped she would.
Press, step, press, step, press, go back to the beginning and begin the cycle anew…She had succeeded in immersing herself in the rhythm of her machine when another Western Union delivery boy interrupted her. “Mrs. Enos?” he said, holding out a yellow envelope. “They told me at your apartment house where you was at, ma’am.”
She signed the sheet he had on his clipboard. He got out of there in a hurry—telegraph delivery boys were not welcome visitors, not in wartime. Cans began to stack up as Sylvia pulled none of her three levers.
She opened the envelope. Yes, from the Navy Department—who else? Isabella Antonelli came hurrying over to her. She didn’t notice. Again, she was reading: MY PLEASANT DUTY TO INFORM YOU YOUR HUSBAND, ABLE SEAMAN GEORGE ENOS, CONFIRMED AS UNINJURED SURVIVOR OF LOSS OF MONITOR USS PUNISHMENT. TO BE REASSIGNED, LEAVE POSSIBLE. She read but did not notice the Secretary of the Navy’s name.
“God hears my prayers,” said Isabella, who had been looking over her shoulder.
“Good heavens!” Sylvia exclaimed. “The line!” All at once, life stretched out ahead of her again. Small things mattered. Waving the telegram like a banner, she hurried back to deal with all the cans that had stacked up. Mr. Winter never said a thing.
“This west Texas country would be wonderful terrain for tanks,” Stinky Salley said.
Several of the Confederate soldiers gathered around the campfire looked at him. “You mean barrels, don’t you?” Jefferson Pinkard said at last.
“I prefer to use the name our allies have given them,” Salley said loftily, with his usual fussy precision. “Let the damnyankees call them what they will.”
“Oh, give it up, Stinky,” Pinkard said. “Everybody’s calling the damn things barrels, us and the Yanks both.”
“That does not make it proper,” Salley returned, “any more than it is proper to call me Stinky rather than my given name.”
“Proves my point, doesn’t it?” Jeff said, and got a laugh from his squadmates. Stinky Salley glared, but he spent a lot of time glaring.
“It would be good country for barrels, except only for one thing,” Hip Rodriguez said, holding one finger up in the air.
“What the devil do you know about it, you damn greaser?” Salley said with a snort. “It’s perfect country for tanks.” He kept on using his word, regardless of what anyone else did. Waving a hand, he continued, “It’s flat, it’s wide open—it’s ideal.”
Rodriguez looked at him expressionlessly. “I gonna tell you two things,” he said in his uncertain English. As he had before, he held up one finger. “It ain’t no perfect country for barrels on account of ain’t no train stations close to here nowhere. Barrel got to run by itself, barrel breaks down.”
“Everything I’ve heard about them damn things, he’s right,” Sergeant Albert Cross said. “Bastards break down if you look at ’em sideways.”
“Gracias.” With considerable dignity, the Sonoran soldier inclined his head to the noncom. Then he undid his bayonet from his sheath and made as if to clean his nails with it. Looking straight into Salley’s face, he went on, “I tell you the second thing now. You call me a damn greaser again, I cut your fucking throat.” His voice was flat and emotionless—not so much a threat as a simple statement of how the world would be.
Salley’s pale eyes went wide. His mouth formed a startled O. He turned to Cross. “Sergeant, did you hear that?”
“I heard it,” the noncom answered. “I heard you, too. If I was you, I’d watch the way I ran my big mouth.” He noisily sipped coffee from his tin cup.
Salley stared at Hip Rodriguez as if he’d never seen him before. Maybe he hadn’t, not really. Sonorans and Chihuahuans and Cubans—Cubans without black blood in them, anyhow—had a curious place in the CSA: better off than Negroes, but not really part of the larger society, either, cut off from it by swarthiness, language, and religion. But a Sonoran with a weapon in his hand was not something to take lightly. Stinky Salley kept quiet after that—he made a point of keeping quiet after that.
Instead of making cornmeal into little loaves, Rodriguez wet his share and shaped it into patties he fried in lard and wrapped around his tinned rations. Pinkard and a couple of other soldiers in the squad were doing that, too; beans and beef went down easier and tastier. Pinkard took a bite out of his—tortilla, Hip called a cornmeal patty—then said in a low voice, “You shut him up sharp.”
Rodriguez shrugged. “If you step on a scorpion when he is small, he don’t get no bigger.”
“Yeah.” Jeff’s eyes slid to Stinky Salley. The ex-clerk still didn’t look as if he knew what had hit him. That, Pi
nkard thought, wasn’t so good. Stinky’d done well enough against U.S. soldiers, out at a distance. But when Rodriguez delivered his warning, he’d folded up. In a way, it was just Stinky’s problem. But in another way, it warned of a weakness in the squad, and that was everybody’s problem.
Off in the distance, a rifle barked. Pinkard’s head came up, as a watchdog’s would do at the sound of someone walking past his house. Another shot followed, also a long way off. Then silence. He relaxed.
Rodriguez swigged from his canteen and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He’d already put the bayonet away, having made his point with it. “You know what?” he said to Pinkard. “I miss my esposa. How you say esposa, Jeff? My woman, my—”
“Your wife?” Pinkard said.
“Sí, my wife.” Rodriguez pronounced the word with care. “I go to sleep in the night, I see my wife in a sueño.” Not knowing or not caring that wasn’t English, he went on, “When I wake up, all I see is soldados feos—ugly soldiers.” Sueño was something like dream, Jeff realized. Hip Rodriguez sighed. “I do better, I stay to sleep.” He glanced over toward Pinkard. “You got a wife, yes, Jeff?”
“Yeah. I wish I was home with her, too.” Pinkard was amazed at how little he’d thought of Emily since he got his notice from the Conscription Bureau and reported for duty. Now that she flooded into his mind, he understood why he’d done his best to block the memories—they hurt too much, when set alongside the squalid reality of the life he was living.
Fleas and lice and fear and mutilation and stinks and—He turned away from the campfire, a scowl on his face. If he weren’t here, if he hadn’t got that damned buff-colored envelope, he could have been in Emily’s arms right now, making the bedsprings creak, her breath warm and moist on the skin of his neck, her voice urging him on to things he hadn’t imagined he could do or else rising to a cry of joy that must have made Bedford Cunningham and all his other neighbors jealous. Dear God, she loved to do it!
Courteous as a cat, more courteous than most curious Confederates would have been, Hip Rodriguez left him alone with his thoughts. For a few seconds, Jeff was glad of that. And then, all at once, he wasn’t.
Walk in Hell Page 45