As far as Chester was concerned, that was just as well. “Let’s go back to the explosives shed,” he said. “I want my captain to know you found out we weren’t pulling your leg.”
“Still can’t hardly believe it. And the President bought a plot?” The Confederate shook his head. “Holy fuckin’ shit!”
He could cuss as much as he pleased. Chester had his weapon. He remembered the Navy guys who’d got torpedoed after the cease-fire in the Great War. Thank God he hadn’t gone that way himself!
George Enos, Jr., was thinking of his father as the Oregon steamed toward the surfaced Confederate submarine. That bastard of a sub skipper hadn’t wanted to quit when the Great War ended, so he’d fired one last spread of torpedoes—and little George grew up without a man around.
This submersible was playing by the rules. It had surfaced and broadcast its position by wireless. Now it was flying a large blue flag in token of surrender. Men in dark gray uniforms stood on the conning tower and on the deck, though nobody went near the deck gun. Taking on a battlewagon with that little excuse for a weapon was closer to insane than anything else, but you never could tell.
A lieutenant with a bullhorn strode up to the Oregon’s bow. “Ahoy, the Confederate sub!” he bawled. “Do you hear me?”
On the sub, a fellow in a dirty white officer’s cap raised a loudhailer to his own lips. “I hear you,” he answered. “What are your instructions?”
“Have you jettisoned your ammunition?”
“Yes,” the Confederate answered.
“Have you removed the breechblock from your gun?”
“Done that, too.”
“Are the pistols out of your torpedoes? Are the torpedoes rendered safe?”
“Yes. We’ve followed all the surrender orders.” The enemy officer didn’t sound happy about it.
“Do you have any mines aboard?” asked the lieutenant on the Oregon.
“No—not a one.”
“All right. We are going to send an officer and a CPO to inspect your boat before we give you your sailing instructions for Baltimore. Stand by to receive a boarding party.”
“Very well,” the Confederate skipper said. “But if the surrender order didn’t tell us we had to do exactly what you tell us, I would have something different to say to you.”
“You would be trying to sink us, and we would be dropping depth charges on your head,” the U.S. lieutenant said. “Things are what they are, though, not what you wish they were.”
“And ain’t that the sad and sorry truth?” the sub skipper said. “We will receive your boarders—we won’t repel them.” That made George think of pigtailed sailors with bandannas and cutlasses, and of clouds of black-powder smoke. No more, no more.
The officer who crossed to the submersible was barely old enough to shave. The chief might have been his father, as far as years went. George knew what would happen. The ensign would write up the inspection report, and the chief would tell him what to say.
They came back after a couple of hours. The ensign was nodding and grinning, but George kept his eyes on the CPO. When he saw that the senior rating seemed satisfied, he relaxed. Nobody on that sub would give the U.S. Navy any more trouble.
After talking with the ensign (and also glancing at the chief ), the lieutenant picked up his bullhorn again. “You are cleared to proceed to Baltimore. Keep flying your blue flag by day, and show your navigation lights at night.”
“Understood,” the C.S. skipper said.
As if he hadn’t spoken, the lieutenant went on, “Remain fully surfaced at all times. Report your position, course, and speed every eight hours. All wireless transmissions must be in plain language. A pilot will take you through the minefields. Obey any instructions you may receive from U.S. authorities.”
“We’ll do it,” the Confederate replied. “Is there anything else, Mommy, or can we go out and play now?”
Several U.S. sailors snickered, George among them. The lieutenant went brick red. “No further instructions at this time,” he choked out.
The C.S. skipper doffed his cap in sardonic salute, then disappeared down the hatch into the submarine. It moved off to the northwest, in the direction of Chesapeake Bay.
The lieutenant was still steaming. “If I ever run into that son of a bitch on dry land, I’ll punch him in the nose,” he ground out.
“Take an even strain,” said the chief, who’d gone aboard the Confederate submarine. “We won. They lost. Let him talk as big as he wants—it doesn’t change what really matters.”
“No, but it makes me look like a jerk. All I was doing was making sure he understood the surrender terms. We don’t want the kind of trouble we had the last time around.”
“I should say we don’t.” The CPO looked this way and that till he spotted George. “Here’s Enos. He knows more about that kind of shit than you and me put together. His old man was on the Ericsson, and his ma’s the gal who went down to the CSA and plugged the skunk who put her on the bottom.”
“Really?” The lieutenant, unlike the chief, didn’t know George by sight. At a quick gesture from the CPO, George took half a step away from the twin 40mm mount. The lieutenant said, “You’re Sylvia Enos’ son?”
“Yes, sir.” George was always pleased when somebody remembered his mother’s first name.
“I read her book,” the officer said. “It was one of the things that made me decide to join the Navy. I thought I ought to help do things right, so people like her didn’t have to pick up guns and take care of it themselves.”
“Yes, sir,” George repeated, less enthusiastically this time. Whenever he thought about I Shot Roger Kimball, he couldn’t help also thinking about the hard-drinking hack who did the actual writing. His mother should have known better than to have anything to do with Ernie except for the book. She should have, but she hadn’t, and so she was dead, and so was he. And if Ernie hadn’t shot himself, George would gladly have killed him.
The lieutenant seemed to run out of things to say, which might have been a relief for him and George both. “Well, carry on, Enos,” he said, which was strictly line-of-duty. He hurried back toward the Oregon’s towering bridge. George returned to the gun mount.
Some of the men on the gun crew already knew who he was and who his mother had been. Unlike the lieutenant, they also knew better than to make a fuss about it. “Officers,” one of them said sympathetically.
“Yeah, well…” George spread his hands. “What can you do?”
“Jack diddly,” the other sailor said. “Put up with ’em the best way you can. Try not to let ’em fuck you over too bad.”
“They’re like women,” a shell-jerker said. “You can’t live with ’em, and you can’t live without ’em, neither.”
“Nope.” George shook his head. “If you could get pussy from officers, they’d be good for something. Way things are, too many of ’em are—”
“Good for nothing!” Three guys on the crew said the same thing at the same time. They grinned at one another, and at George. The banter about what officers would be like if they were equipped the way women were went on and on. It got louder and more hilarious and more obscene with each succeeding joke as each sailor tried to top the fellow who’d gone before him.
George’s grin stretched wider and wider. It wasn’t just that the guys were funny. Everybody was all loosey-goosey. Unless some Confederate diehard hadn’t got the word, nobody would be shooting at the Oregon or bombing her or trying to torpedo her. They’d made it through the war.
“Now all we got to worry about is the crappy cooks in the galley,” George said.
“See? They should be broads, too,” one of the other guys put in. “Then they’d know what they were doin’.”
“And if they did feed us somethin’ shitty, they could really show us they was sorry,” somebody else said. It went on from there.
They spotted another surfaced submarine later that day. This one flew the Union Jack, not a blue surrender flag like the Confederate boat. �
��I have no quarrel with you gentlemen,” the captain called through a loudhailer, “but I will not go to one of your ports. I have received no such orders. We have an armistice with Germany and you, but we have not surrendered.”
“We can blow you out of the water,” warned the U.S. officer with whom he was parleying.
“No doubt,” the British sub skipper replied politely. “But we have done nothing provocative, and have no intention of doing any such thing. Are you really so eager to put the war on the boil again?”
Muttering, the young U.S. officer got on the telephone to the bridge. He was muttering louder when he hung up. “You may proceed,” he told the Royal Navy officer.
“Thanks ever so.” The limey actually tipped his cap. “May we meet again—and not in our professional capacities.”
“We ought to blow him up anyway,” the U.S. officer growled—but not through the bullhorn.
Sailors in the British submarine were bound to be thinking the same thing about the Oregon. As long as the boat stayed surfaced and didn’t aim either bow or stern at the battleship, George figured he wouldn’t flabble. If the submarine dove…
It didn’t, not till it was out of sight. George hoped the Oregon’s Y-ranging set watched it even farther than that. Since no Klaxons hooted, he supposed everything stayed hunky-dory. Thinking about women officers was a lot more fun than worrying about getting sunk.
“I bet the limeys never do surrender, not the way the Confederates did,” Wally Fodor said. The gun chief went on, “I bet they just bail out of the fight on the best terms they can, same as they did in the last war. Long as they got their navy in one piece, they’re still a going concern.”
“Till somebody drops a superbomb on their fleet, anyway,” George said.
“Yeah, but the Kaiser’s got to be sweating about how big Japan’s getting. Hell, so do we,” Fodor persisted. “The Japs don’t have the superbomb yet, so England’s the only one who can give ’em a hard time—unless we want to go through the Pacific one goddamn island at a time.”
Nobody at the twin 40mm mount wanted anything like that. George, who’d already had a long tour in the Sandwich Islands, really didn’t want anything like that. He’d paid all the dues against Japan he felt like paying.
“Tell you one thing,” he said. “All this bullshitting is a lot better than sweating out bombs and torpedoes for real.”
“Amen!” That went up from several sailors at once.
“We licked Jake Featherston, and the limeys look like they’ve had enough, anyway,” George went on. “Pretty soon, we’ll be able to get our old lives back again.” Did he look forward to going after cod from T Wharf? He wasn’t so sure about that, but coming home to Connie more often sounded mighty good.
XIV
Dr. Leonard O’Doull donned a professional scowl and glared at the unhappy young PFC standing in front of him. “That’s one of the most disgusting chancres I’ve ever seen,” he growled. It was red and ugly, all right, but he’d run into plenty just like it. The kid didn’t have to know that, though.
Quivering, the PFC said, “Sorry, sir.” He looked as if he was about to cry.
“Were you sorry while you were getting it?” O’Doull asked.
“Uh, no, sir.” The youngster in green-gray turned red.
“Why the hell didn’t you wear a rubber?”
“On account of I didn’t figure I needed to. She was a nice girl, dammit. Besides, it feels better when you’re bareback.”
It did. O’Doull couldn’t quarrel about that. He could ask, “And how does it feel now?” The PFC hung his head. O’Doull went on, “Do you still think she was a nice girl?”
“No, sir,” the kid said, and then, apprehensively, “What are you going to do to me, sir?”
“Me? I’m going to fix you up, that’s what.” O’Doull raised his voice: “Sergeant Lord! Let me have a VD hypo of penicillin.”
“Coming up, Doc.” Goodson Lord produced the requisite syringe.
The PFC stared at it with something not far from horror. “Jeez Louise! You could give an elephant a shot with that thing.”
“Elephants don’t get syphilis. Far as I know, they don’t get the clap, either.” O’Doull nodded to the kid, who wasn’t far wrong there, either—it was a big needle. “Bend over.”
Most unwillingly, the U.S. soldier obeyed. “Shit,” he muttered. “I went through the last year and a half of the war. I got a Purple Heart. And I’m more scared of your damn shot than I was of the screaming meemies.”
He wasn’t the first man to say something like that. With bullets and shells and rockets, you could always think they’d miss. When somebody aimed a hypodermic at your bare ass, he’d damn well connect.
And O’Doull did. The PFC let out a yip as he pressed home the needle and pressed in the plunger. “You get one on the other side three days from now. If you don’t show up, you’re in a lot more trouble than you are for coming down venereal. You got that?”
“Yes, sir,” the kid said miserably. “Can I go now, sir?”
He really did want to escape if he was that eager to return to the clutches of his regular superiors. O’Doull couldn’t do anything but stick him, but they could—and would—give him hell. Still, he wasn’t quite finished here. “Not yet, son. You need to tell me the name of the woman you got it from, where she lives, and the names of any others you’ve screwed since. We don’t want ’em passing it along to any of your buddies, you know.”
“Oh, hell—uh, sir. Do I gotta?”
“You sure do. VD puts a man out of action just as much as a bullet in the leg does. So…who was she? And were there any others?”
“Damn, damn, damn,” the PFC said. “There’s just the one, anyway. Her name is Betsy, and she lives a couple of miles from here, on a farm outside of Montevallo.”
Montevallo was a pissant little town south of Birmingham. It boasted a small college for women; O’Doull had wondered whether the soldier got his disease from a student with liberal notions. Evidently not. Montevallo also boasted a large oak called the Hangman’s Tree, which had come through the war undamaged. The doctor wondered whether the tree and the college were related. The PFC wouldn’t know about that, though.
“You have a last name for Miss Betsy?” O’Doull asked. The soldier shook his head. O’Doull sighed. “One of the things you’ll do between now and when I stick your ass again is take some men and get her and bring her back here so we can treat her, too. Got that?”
“Yes, sir.” It was hardly more than a whisper.
“You’d better have it. And now you can go,” O’Doull said. The PFC slunk away. O’Doull sighed. “Boy, I enjoyed that.”
“I bet,” Sergeant Lord said. “Still, it beats the crap out of trying to take out a guy’s spleen, doesn’t it?”
“Well, yeah,” O’Doull admitted. “But damn, we’ve had a lot of venereals since the shooting stopped.” He sighed one more time. “Don’t know why I’m so surprised. The guys can really go looking for pussy now, and the Confederate women know they’ve lost, so they’d better be nice to our troops. But I keep thinking about Donofrio, the medic you replaced. VD isn’t the only thing that can happen to you.”
“You told me about that before,” Lord said, so politely that O’Doull knew he’d told him at least once too often. The medic went on, “I’m not going to make a fuss about any silly bitch down here.”
“Well, good,” O’Doull said, and wondered if it was. Would Goodson Lord make a fuss about a silly boy instead? O’Doull hoped not. If the sergeant was queer, he seemed to be discreet about it. As long as he stayed that way, well, what the hell?
Betsy came in the next day, cussing out the soldiers who brought her in a command car. She was about eighteen, with a barmaid’s prettiness that wouldn’t last and a barmaid’s ample flesh that would turn to lard before she hit thirty. “What do you mean, I got some kind of disease?” she shouted at O’Doull.
“Sorry, miss,” he said. “Private, uh, Eubanks”
—he had to remember the soldier’s name—“says you left him a little present. We can cure you with a couple of shots.”
“I bet he didn’t catch it from me. I bet the dirty son of a bitch got it somewhere else and gave it to me!” she screeched.
From the freshness of the U.S. soldier’s chancre, O’Doull doubted that. Out loud, he said, “Well, you may be right,” which was one of the useful phrases that weren’t liable to land you in much trouble. It didn’t matter one way or the other, anyhow. “I’m going to need to examine you, maybe draw some blood for a test, and give you a shot, just in case.”
“What do you mean, examine me? Examine me there?” Betsy shook her head, which made blond curls flip back and forth on either side of her face. She would have seemed more alluring—to O’Doull, anyway—if she’d bathed any time lately. “You ain’t gonna look up my works, pal, and that’s flat, not when I never set eyes on you till just now. What kind of girl d’you reckon I am?”
Had O’Doull told the truth there, he would have had to listen to more screeching. “This is a medical necessity,” he said. “I’m a doctor. I’m also a married man, in case you’re wondering.”
Betsy tossed her head in splendid scorn. “Like that makes a difference! I know you’re just a dumb damnyankee, but I didn’t think even damnyankees were that dumb.”
O’Doull sighed. It didn’t make any difference; he’d seen as much plenty of times in Rivière-du-Loup. He wished he were back there now. Better—much better!—sweet Nicole than this blowsy, foul-mouthed gal. “Get up on the table, please,” he said. “No stirrups, I’m afraid. It wasn’t made with that in mind.”
“Stirrups? What the hell are you talkin’ about?” Betsy said. “And I done told you I don’t want to get up there.”
O’Doull’s patience blew out. “Your other choice is the stockade,” he snapped. “Quit fooling around and wasting my time.”
“Oh, all right, goddammit, if I gotta.” Betsy climbed onto the table and divested herself of her drawers. O’Doull put on rubber gloves. He felt as if he needed them more here than with most of the ordinary war wounds he’d treated. “Having fun?” she asked him as he got to work.
In at the Death Page 49