Black Bear Blues

by Stephen Wishnevsky

  “I hope to, I just got off the boat.” He was wearing ragged civvies, the suit looked to have been pretty nice a month or so ago. Tailored, not off the rack.

  “So what’s the word from the States?”

  “One word? Fucked.” He drank. I tossed coins on the bar, his drink was replaced instantly. I guess they had been at this a while. “The fucking Hoovers have shut down the press, everything not owned by Luce and Hearst is just flat out gone. I was working for the Daily News, it’s gone. The Times is still there, but they are afraid to say boo. Same with the Washington Post. Everything else is Hearst. That son of a bitch, he was losing money all this time, especially because he kissed German ass so enthusiastically, but the end of the war and the New Order have put him right back in the driver’s seat.”

  “New Order? I don’t like that at all.”

  “The Hoovers are ‘purifying’ the country, getting rid of the unnaturals, the socialists, the impure, all of that. Us, in other words.”

  “The impure?” I knew what he meant, but I had to hear the words.

  “Mixed bloods, mongrels, you know. Jews.”

  “Yeah. Figures. And the Mexican War?”

  “A cluster fuck. They say we are winning constantly, but somehow we never can get off the coast. The mountains are brutal, the Mexicans don’t have shit, all they have is sandals made out of tires, sombreros, and old worn-out rifles, but it is their fucking country, and they can shoot. And they are pissed. We are playing cowboys and Indians, and this time the Indians have guns too.”

  I had to agree, just to hold up my end of the conversation. “Yeah, figures. Fucking Patton has a holy mission to piss off everybody in the world, and is doing a really good job of it.”

  “I’ll drink to that.” He did. I didn’t.

  What I said was, “More power to them. Viva los fucking Indios.” I waved for more booze, left mine sitting. “Look, Stan, you want a job?”

  “I was hoping to find work with Arthur here. I’m a newspaper man.”

  “I was too, but now I run the Recon Office. Sort of a half-assed Intelligence Service. Not like the IB, we don’t give a skinny fuck about racial purity, your sex life, all we do is we interpret air photos, intercept radio communications, that sort of thing. We try to keep track of all enemies, foreign and domestic. Clear? You run a camera?”

  “Sure. Piece of cake, Leica, Speed Graphic, anything they make. Darkroom too. No problem.” He sounded more alive than he had been a minute ago. He set his drink down to listen. Good sign.

  “You might be working with a woman, Maggie White. I lost track of her, she may be with the Air Service, you know her?

  “I heard the name. She’s good. From out west some place?”

  “Ohio, I think. She was deported with a shipload of unnaturals, got here a few months ago.”

  “Deal me in. I can do that.”

  “Fine. When you get sober in the morning, come see me, we are upstairs above the Air Service HQ. We will settle you in, advance you a few bucks for uniforms and kit. Don’t get lost. Recon Office.”

  That made Arthur look at me sideways. “You are not drinking? You sick?”

  “I’m sick of wasting time in a stupor. I have serious business to attend too. People are getting killed all around me, and I find that extremely boring. Extremely. It needs to stop.”

  “I thought we were here to kill Germans?” Arthur asked.

  “Two days ago, I saw enough dead men to last me for a while. Germans and Pathans. They smelled the same after a few hours in the hot sun. And they just get worse. Meat is meat. You two ever in the AEF?” People who don’t know, just don’t know.

  “No,” Marx said, “I have asthma, got a bad eye.”

  “I’m just too lumpy. You see me naked,” Stan admitted, “and you would see why the Draft Board let me go. Best thing that ever happened to me.”

  “You got that right, Stan. See you in the morning.” Their leave-taking was more somber than their welcome. I guess they had been listening to me.

  >>>>>>

  Lupo was deep in conference with a bunch of his people, the Spanish was flying like hail on a tin roof, but Isis, Yelena was sitting on a bit of crumbled wall with a few other women, talking quietly. “How’s it going?”

  “These are my new friends, Doris, Cathy, and Brimley. They are all from New Orleans, looking for situations. Ladies, this is my…” Significant pause. “...boss, Miles.”

  “Pleased to meet you. Can any of you type?” They all nodded, made affirmative noises. Doris was mulatto, or lighter, Brimley pure black, and Cathy was a redhead, hair severely cropped, all wearing issue trousers and civvie flannel shirts, too warm for this time of year. Grab-bag clothes. They didn’t have brassieres on, and Brimley needed one, for sure. “We need more people, so let’s go. Isis, I’m had it, I need to rest a little. You want me to get a bottle?”

  Brimley was the biggest, if bony, probably the leader. “Booze is what got us into this mess. That and our goddamn brown skins. I’ll pass.”

  “So how did you run afoul of the New Order?”

  “The bastards are turning New Orleans into the main port for the Mexican War. This son of a bitch, Huey Long, the governor, the one they call the Kingfish, he took it on himself to run all us low-class trash out the city. We got caught celebrating Cathy’s birthday down in the Quarter, took too drunk to run, and here we are.”

  “Welcome to Hell, ladies. Let’s go.”

  Isis asked, “Want to find Doyle and Lupo?”

  “They are big kids; they can find their way home on their own.” We all crammed into the LaSalle, and putted home in time for dinner. Of course, Su-mi cooked twenty-four hours a day, for all I could tell. We were out of rooms, nearly out of floor space, but worry about that in the morning. All this crap had caught up with me, I could feel it hovering overhead like a black cloud full of bricks. I realized I wasn’t making a whole lot of sense, so took my aged ass to bed. Twenty-eight going on a hundred. And I had missed a birthday party too, last month sometime. Fuck it. Bed.

  >>>>>>>>

  The morning came early, there had been a big battle for Urum-Chi, turned out Karamay had held out, was still an airbase, so the Germans and their tribesmen were pinned and forked, the Persian cavalry, mechanized to some extent with looted trucks, was coming up the Silk Road chasing the krauts, so they were trapped. We ran the dials of all our radios, there was no Persian State Radio, there was no Persian State, unless one was being formed right the hell now, but there were a few Ham outfits. Persian was not one of Isis’s languages, but she could identify it when she heard it. The best we could do. Log it, and move on.

  The British Colonial stations were saying nothing, the BBC and the German official stations were quiet too, so there was no information, except for a few hints from the South African Radio League, another bunch of Hams, that were self-organizing into a network. They didn’t seem to know much, and cared less, they had their plates full anyway.

  We did hear from Maggie White, she came by to drop off a sheaf of photos, and express condolences about Maeve. I would accept them from her, we had made a flight or two together with Maeve piloting, and they had done a lot more together. Pilots have respect for each other, nobody else really gets it. Maggie didn’t fly the plane, but she worked just a few pieces of tin away from the same machinegun bullets as the real air crew. Stan had shown up by then, I sent them off together, told him he was liaison with the Air Service, and to try not get his ass shot off. I guess we needed our own pilot again, but all I could handle was to go downstairs and talk to the local Major, Robert Cotton, he also expressed his sorrow, although he had many more pilots to mourn. Half-trained men and women, new planes with amateur maintenance and so on. There seemed to be a war. Carry on.

  Cotton did mention that he was pushing everything that would fly west to stop the thrust up the Silk Road, I wished him luck with that little project. He just winked. But he did tell me that all his planes and people were coming through Dalny,
“Qinang-dao is being used to capacity by the USMRR.”

  “The who?”

  “US Military Railroad. Quartermaster Corps. They are building a rail line out to Jiu-quan, at least.”

  “Oh.” That was all I could say. “Holy shit!” is unprofessional. A thousand-mile railroad in a country we didn’t own? Looks like we were here to stay, then. “What about Vlad?”

  “Tanks and troops for the Line.” The Trans-Siberian. The main battle. I wondered when Patton and all his stars would show up to officiate over the great victory. Not until it was well in the bag, I guessed. I knew from army scuttlebutt that he thought himself a great warrior, talked up a good fight, but had only been in one actual battle back in ‘18, disobeyed orders and got himself bravely shot in the noble ass for his troubles. His place in battle was in front of the cameras. All of us cannon fodder were well aware of his bullshit. That was one of the reasons we were over here getting our asses shot off. Or burned off, in my case.

  The next thing Major Cotton said snapped me out of my woolgathering. “You know that Hodges is moving up, don’t you?”

  “I have been gone all week, had a rough time out there. What did I miss?”

  “Patton has exiled another general, George Marshall, he ran the Infantry School at Benning. I hear he told the brass not to invade Mexico. Repeatedly.”

  “And here he is.”

  “Or soon will be. Exactly right. I guess you seen this movie too. But Bradley and Hodges studied under him, Stilwell too, and so Hodges and Stilwell are getting Armies, so Marshall is going to organize the Rear Echelon. He is a good man for that job.”

  “What is he like, do you know?”

  “Another poor boy like Hodges and Bradley. Not an aristocrat, Hard worker, completely unemotional. Colorless, some say.”

  “So Patton hates him.”

  “You did not hear me agree with you.”

  “Yeah, I get it. Sorry. A slip of the tongue. So, what does that mean for us?”

  “I stay here and shovel planes and pilots out to Xilin Gol. You? If Hodges wants you to do something…”

  “He will tell me. Got it. Thanks.”

  “No problem. You lost your photo-plane?”

  “Yeah. Enemy action in Karamay. On the ground.”

  “I’ll facilitate you a couple more, three to be sure, with pilots and crews. Is that enough?”

  “I have two photogs, I will round up a few more. Patton and the Hoovers have shut down any opposition press, so people who can snap a shutter are a drug on the market.” I thought I heard him growl a comment, but when I asked, “What?” he just shook his head and walked away. Right. Point taken.

  >>>>>>>>

  I turned around, and there was Ray Reynolds, Hodges’ contact man, patiently waiting for me to stop blathering and get down to business. “Sorry about Maeve,” he condoled. “She was good for you.”

  “I seem to have wound up with a volunteer wife, remember Isis?”

  “Colonel Akhtiorskaya? We just received an order transferring her to your command.”

  “Command? There’s a happy thought.” I wondered out loud. Now, how would I get her to believe it?

  “You are due a couple of promotions too, if you want them. You can be a civilian if you would rather.”

  “I better stay in civvies, it makes life a lot easier. Vinegar Joe never misses a trick, does he?”

  “He better not. No room for error in this game.” He looked me over again. “You heard that the General has been given an army?”

  “Moving pretty fast aren’t we? And what army? Stilwell scraped up a division, and that was a miracle. They survived their first battle, that was another miracle.”

  “Well, there you have it. If you want to be pedantic about it, these will be Army Corps, two or more divisions under one command. Stilwell has one division in place…”

  “The 33rd.”

  “General Remus has that one. And another on the way. This one is formed around Ruby and her people. The 34th.”

  “An all-female division?”

  “Mostly female. Come to find out definitions are a little more fluid than I had ever expected back in the States. Hodges has a cadre of another solid division, Spanish Americans exiled here…”

  “Like Lupo.”

  “Exactly. That’s the 35th, And another one, 36th, under Delany, remember him?”

  “Brigadier Delany? Wonders never cease, but more likely than Colonel Remus, I suppose. Industrial Workers of the World and American Federation of Labor guys?”

  “Yes, of course. Good men, they know the score. We will be based at Urum-chi, and will be tasked with striking up into Kazakhstan, into Russia proper.”

  “You need a bigger army.”

  “You do understatement well.” He almost smiled. “But we have more armies, Stilwell will have five Chinese divisions, and at least one more of mixed Co-Prosperity Sphere troops.”

  “We saw the flags on the way here. A lot I didn’t recognize, Burmese and others. Aussies. They are fighters.”

  “What there are left of them. They had it rough in France. On the other hand, Bradley reports a lot of French Foreign Legion troops fighting for the Germans. Some appear to be Americans.”

  “So they reconstituted the French Foreign Legion as mercenaries?”

  “Or Penal Battalions. We get different stories.”

  “I should have been on that, but I suppose Bradley is a big kid now.”

  “You work for Hodges. No more side trips. Not without explicit orders.”

  “Tell me about it. That was a very bad move on my part. I apologize.”

  “Not to me, you don’t. To yourself if anybody. You were not ordered to stay in your HQ. Now, you are. That’s an order. Hodges told me twice. Want me to tell you three times?”

  “No, I understand. So, if I may ask, where is my headquarters going to be?” A vagrant memory made me chuckle, then that almost turned into a sob. “Remember how McClellan told Lincoln he had his headquarters in the saddle? And Lincoln said he had…”

  “His headquarters where his hindquarters should be? Funny, but appropriate. The General plans to make his HQ in an armored train, and you will be in another.”

  “What about dive bombers? Trains will be sitting ducks for those bastards. I saw them in action. They are not any kind of a joke.”

  “Are a danger, but we will not be on the front lines, we will be well back, on fortified sidings, in tunnels, wherever we can be safe.”

  “Communicating by radio…”

  “Telegraph and teletype too. Telephone as fast as we can string the wires.”

  “Sounds like a plan. You just say when.”

  “The Transportation Corps are laying track now, the world’s record, from 1869, was ten miles and fifty-six feet in one twelve-hour day.”

  “And we have electric lights these days.”

  “And welded track, track-laying machines, and this terrain is flatter than they had on the Central Pacific. The big hold up will be ties, but Bradley has locals on that job.”

  “No shortage of timber in Siberia.” I remembered.

  “So we will move up as fast as the track goes down and the wires go up. Be ready to move in two weeks.”

  “Sir.” He saluted, and left me with my thoughts.

  >>>>>>>>

  They call that marching orders. So? March.

  I went back up to the Office, gathered Peaches, Hanson, Frances, Browning, Lupo, and Isis together, gave them the word. “They said two weeks, but as we know, Army time is not the same as calendar time. We better be ready to go on twenty-four hours’ notice. Any ideas?”

  “The files and the radios are the important part,” Peaches said, “We could work out of a railroad car early, keep the duplicate files there. A Pullman if we can get one. Be ready to roll. I’ll check on that. The radios we can run with, if we have to. Just a car load. I will find some more typists, start copying the files.” She might look like a battered boxer, covered with tattoos, but
she was the best man we had. She was an ex-Army Nurse, had been through complete hell in France, even worse than most of the rest of us. The ones who had it worse than that were in nice green fields over there, under pretty white crosses with nice words on them.

  “Good thinking.” Then it was back to working your ass off, as usual. Stuff was starting to come in concerning Quebec. I hadn’t really realized, but a lot of French refugees had settled in the Francophone parts of Canada, and they were not real happy with Germans, Brits, Americans in general, and Patton in particular. There seemed to be a good-sized insurgency underway, aided and abetted by any number of other people who had been screwed by the Peace Treaty, mostly the Irish and the Scots. Lots of Azoreans and Portuguese in New England, and they were on the Fucked List too. A very long list.

  Lupo came out of his office, or bedroom, with a thick stack of neatly typed papers he and Olga had worked most of the night on, from the looks of the pile. I tried to skim the gist out of it, but it was heavy going. She was not any sort of a newspaper person, wrote like a school teacher. Lupo was looking worried, like I was going to cuss him out, but I took pity. “Look, tell Olga that she is not writing a school report. We need to know the important facts first, on top, like in newspapers, sabe? Headlines, subheadings?” I could tell he had no idea what I was talking about, so I said, “You just tell me in your own words what you learned last night, then go out and find me somebody that worked on a newspaper. They have bilingual… Newspapers in Spanish and English both, right?”

  “Si, yes, I will. We, she, got through grammar school, I only learned the read and write, the sums, you call matemáticas? No?”

  “Yes, correct. Exactly similar. Mathematics. So, what’s the scoop?”

  “Nothing good. They are rounding up my people, and sending them over here, the ones that live. Very bad. Muy malo. I have no words. Whole cities have been what you call cleaned? Cleaned of Mexicans, Salvadorians, Cubanos, Puerto Ricanos, they make no difference, round them up and put on boats. Speak Spanish, deported. They say many people die, thrown over the side of the ship, leave to drown. Is war.” He stopped, swallowed his bile, added, “Guerra total. Complete war. No mercy.”