Armistice Read online

  Anyway, though, his Chinese stopped almost as soon as it started. He didn’t understand the American propaganda, which only made it more annoying. But every so often, he caught the name Stalin, so he could make a pretty good guess as to what all the too-loud blathering was about.

  We just turned your best friend in the world into a charcoal briquette, the guy on the record would be saying. We turned his whole goddamn country into a charcoal briquette. If you don’t want to turn into a charcoal briquette yourself, come on over to our side.

  But the Red Chinese had loudspeakers of their own. The propaganda duel could get as ferocious as the one fought with 105s and 155s. The American piece hadn’t been going on for very long before the other side started yelling back in English.

  “Chairman Mao has declared that, come what may, the revolutionary struggle will continue till ultimate victory,” the enemy propagandist thundered. He sounded like an American from the Midwest. Maybe he had a gun to his head, or maybe he really believed the crap he was spewing. He went on, “The victory of the proletariat against capitalism and imperialism is inevitable. Setbacks may come, but the cause goes ever forward.”

  “Boy, what a crock of bullshit,” said someone at Cade’s elbow.

  “Bet your ass it is,” Cade agreed. Only then did he turn around to see who’d delivered that verdict. “Jimmy! You know what? You sound like you were born in the States.” He wasn’t kidding. Accent, intonation—the private born as Chun Won-ung sounded as if he’d been lapping up apple pie since he had baby teeth.

  He grinned. “I born in these trenches, Captain, when you take me away from that asshole.” His English grew by leaps and bounds, but sometimes he got stuck in the present indicative.

  The asshole in question had been his company CO, Captain Pak Ho-san of the ROK Army. The Republic of Korea, the U.S. ally, wasn’t much more democratic than Kim Il-sung’s Commie People’s Democratic Republic of Korea. The peasants in the ROK Army couldn’t stand the Jap-trained aristocrats who gave them orders, and it was mutual.

  Not for the first time, Cade wondered what would happen when their unit went back to the USA—if it ever did. Would they pass Jimmy on to some other outfit staying in South Korea? (He was sure as sure could be that South Korea would have American soldiers in it for many years to come.) Or would they find some way to bamboozle the brass and smuggle him across the Pacific? Except for his looks, Jimmy already made a better American than most of the guys Cade knew who came from Florida or South Dakota.

  “Shame we don’t get Kim Il-sung same way we get Stalin,” he said now. “And Mao, he gotta be shitting himself. Forget the crap the Chinks pour out of the loudspeakers. He gotta know he next.”

  “Yeah.” Cade eyed Jimmy. He called the Red Chinese the same thing every other dogface in Korea called them. All those dogfaces called Koreans gooks. Cade hadn’t heard Jimmy say that. The guys in the regiment had pretty much quit using it since they acquired him. Anybody who called him a gook would be lucky just to lose teeth and not to end up holding a lily.

  The American loudspeakers started over again with the same shrill, incomprehensible spiel. It must have finally driven a Communist captain or major around the bend, because the enemy started lobbing mortar bombs at them. “Hit the deck!” Cade yelled, and fit action to words.

  Those loudspeakers weren’t that far behind the front line. Short rounds could easily kill his men—or him—by accident. Or the Red Chinese might decide to punish soldiers along with propaganda outlets. And Cade hated mortars anyway. They didn’t make big, loud bangs going off, and they kind of whispered in, so the bursts were liable to take you by surprise.

  Naturally, the Americans started shooting back. Naturally, because the men who ran things believed in the big stick, they didn’t shoot back with mortars alone. They started throwing 105mm rounds at the Red Chinese loudspeakers. Naturally, the slant-eyed bastards to the north started throwing 105s back. Some machine guns opened up, too.

  This wasn’t the first skirmish Cade had seen that started because of dueling liars. Whoever said Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me hadn’t visited the Korean trenches.

  An American M-2’s deep, nasty bark punctuated the rest of the fireworks. All the Red Chinese privates had to be swearing at their psychological-warfare officers. A .50-caliber machine gun was one of the deadliest man-reapers God ever made. The thumb-sized slug was made to pierce light armor. It would pierce flesh out past a mile and a half. Somebody far behind the barbed wire, far behind the trenches, far behind the damn loudspeakers that had started everything, could be walking along happy as a clam…till he walked into a gift from one of John Browning’s brainchildren. He wouldn’t do any more walking after he met Ma Deuce.

  Damn! The Chinks had a heavy machine gun of their own. They hadn’t made it themselves; they’d got it from their comrades to the north. The Russian Dushka was powered by gas, unlike the recoil-operated Ma Deuce. Nothing was wrong with the Soviet model, but the Americans had turned out far more of theirs. That Dushka on the other side of the line, though, would rearrange your face just as permanently as the heavy machine guns in the U.S. arsenal.

  Tracers from the Russian beast in Red Chinese service flew past, inches above the parapet top. The balls of fire looked as big as golf balls. They reinforced the message that those bullets really weren’t anything you wanted to get in the way of.

  Which didn’t mean you could keep lying here on the muddy trench floor or in dugouts carved into the forward wall. As soon as you figured you could simply ride out a bombardment, that would be the time the Red Chinese officers would send men across no-man’s-land if they caught you napping.

  So Cade scrambled to his feet and shouted, “Up! Gotta keep the fuckers honest!” He jumped onto a firing step and looked out across the wire-strewn moonscape that separated his trenches from the ones the Chinks infested. Sure as hell, black-haired men in quilted, dun-colored uniforms were slithering forward, deadly as so many cobras.

  The M-2 and a couple of rifle-caliber machine guns were already raking no-man’s-land. They all lived in nests strengthened with sandbags and cement. Only bombs or direct hits from heavy artillery could take them out. The Red Chinese needed to know the rest of the American trenches were also inhabited.

  Cade squeezed off a burst with his PPSh. He liked the Red submachine gun better than both the M-1 rifle and the much lighter M-1 carbine officers were supposed to carry. It was murderous out to a couple of hundred yards, and it didn’t care how you abused it. He ducked, moved, and fired again.

  Jimmy squeezed off a few rounds from his M-1. Other dogfaces were up and shooting, too. The Red Chinese had got more pragmatic about expending men than they were when they first swarmed south across the Yalu. When they saw it wouldn’t be a walkover, they pulled back. The mostly undamaged loudspeakers picked up the war again.

  —

  Marian Staley fiddled with the radio. When you lived in Weed, California, fiddling with the radio was a fact of life. Weed was too small to have a station of its own. You picked up the ones that broadcast from places like Redding to the south and Klamath Falls to the north.

  You picked them up when you could, anyhow. Their words and music often hid behind veils of static. KFI in Los Angeles was much farther away. Especially at night, though, it often came in better. It had a high-power signal, and it was what they called a clear-channel station. No other stations in the western USA broadcast on 640 kilocycles.

  Tonight, though, even KFI was having trouble. Interference ran up and down the dial. Marian wished she had a shortwave set. Then she could listen to broadcasts from all over the world. But she didn’t. She had what she could afford: this cheap, secondhand piece of junk.

  She went almost to the high end of the dial before she found a station that came in well enough to listen to. This signal started in Sacramento. The three familiar chimes told her it was an NBC station. They were playing a Glenn Miller record from the last war.
/>   Linda looked up from her dolls and stuffed animals. “Why are you dancing around like that, Mommy?”

  “I used to dance with your daddy when they played this song,” Marian answered. “I was remembering, I guess you’d say.”

  “Oh.” Linda paused. Marian thought she was going to leave it there, but she didn’t—she said, “I miss Daddy.”

  “So do I, sweetheart.” Marian stopped dancing. She was still remembering, but not in a way now that made her want to sashay around the living room. “So do I, every single day. I guess I always will.”

  “Me, too,” Linda said. Marian doubted that. By the time Linda grew up, she’d barely remember Bill Staley. If she’d been just a little younger when the Russians shot down his B-29, she wouldn’t remember him at all.

  And maybe it wouldn’t have been such a horrible thing if she didn’t. Bill hadn’t been in that Superfortress to drop chocolate and roses on the Reds. They’d killed him before he could bathe some town of theirs in atomic fire. Marian hadn’t thought about that—hadn’t had to think about it—till the Russian A-bomb hit Seattle.

  Nothing like a smashed house and a mild dose of radiation sickness to make you understand what your husband did for a living, she thought bleakly. Even if Bill had come home, she wasn’t sure she could have lived with him again, knowing what she knew. How many lives had he taken before losing his own? He wouldn’t have thought of it like that. He couldn’t have, not if he wanted to stay sane. To him, they would have been cities, or maybe just targets.

  But if you’d been just outside the bull’s-eye yourself, what an A-bomb hit wasn’t a target any more. It was you. It was personal. The people in the bomber way up there were murderers.

  Her husband had been a murderer. The government had paid him to be a murderer. How could she have looked the other way?

  “Mommy?” Linda said.

  “What is it, honey?” Marian was glad for something to distract her from her own dark thoughts. She hadn’t even noticed that the Glenn Miller record was over and the radio was plugging White King D.

  “Do you dance to that song with Mr. Tabakman now?”

  “I…never have,” Marian said slowly.

  “Do you want to?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe one of these days,” Marian answered, more slowly still. “Maybe not to that song. Maybe to another song. When I hear that one, it reminds me how your daddy’s not coming back.”

  “Does Mr. Tabakman have a song he doesn’t want to dance to with you, too?” Linda asked.

  “I’m not sure, but he probably does.” Marian remembered that Linda was in the first grade. Little pitchers have big ears, she thought. She and Fayvl had done a lot of talking in Camp Nowhere, especially after Bill got killed. Of all the people Marian knew, Fayvl best understood what she was going through. How not, when the Nazis gassed his family at Auschwitz?

  The three NBC chimes sounded again on the almost-forgotten radio. A neutral tone followed. “It’s exactly eight o’clock,” the announcer said, “and it’s time for the network news.”

  After another brief pause, a different voice said, “This is Lowell Thomas, with the NBC news on the hour.” Thomas had a deeper, richer voice than the Sacramento announcer. NBC picked the best to deliver the news the whole country listened to. He went on, “President Truman has offered Russia and Red China the same peace terms the late Joseph Stalin refused: return to the status quo ante bellum.”

  “What does that mean?” Linda asked.

  “It means the way things were before the war.” Marian was glad to field a question that wasn’t so personal.

  “So far, no answer has been received from Lavrenti Beria. No one in the United States can yet be sure how tight Beria’s grip on power is,” Thomas said. “In his statement, the President urged the new Soviet leader to consider an old nursery rhyme:

  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

  Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

  He warned that, if the fighting should go on much longer, the whole world would be as smashed as Humpty Dumpty.”

  Linda laughed. “How come they’re talking about Humpty Dumpty on the news? Humpty Dumpty isn’t real! They’re silly!”

  They were and they weren’t. FDR wouldn’t have talked about Humpty Dumpty. Marian was certain he wouldn’t, not in a Fireside Chat and for sure not in a diplomatic communication to another country. But Harry Truman was the kind of man who called a spade a goddamn shovel.

  And the comparison fit only too well. America had lost cities up and down the West Coast, and in the Northeast. Next to Europe and the USSR, the USA was still in good shape. The Suez Canal and the Panama Canal were gone. No one had any idea how many millions of people had died.

  The really scary thing was, it could get worse. The H-bomb that finally settled Stalin’s hash was even bigger than an A-bomb. The United States had to be building more of them. The Russians had to be working on them, too, as hard as they could. Drop a few of those, and what did you get?

  All the king’s horses…

  Fighting in Germany, fighting in Korea, uprisings in East Europe—the news went on. A pitcher for the St. Louis Browns hit three home runs in a game. His teammates were calling him H-Bomb Garver. Marian didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when she heard that.

  Like the government, the stock market had relocated to Philadelphia. What there was of it had, that is. It had sunk like a stone since the A-bombs wrecked Washington, New York City, and Boston. Lowell Thomas reported it had lost another four and seven-eighths points today.

  Marian thought that was too bad, but it wasn’t as if she had money in the market herself. Like so many people who’d made it through the Depression, she looked at stocks the same way she looked at sticking quarters into the one-armed bandits in Las Vegas or Reno. They at least fed you free drinks if you stuck a lot of quarters into the slots. From everything she’d heard, Wall Street—or whatever they called the stock market now that it was in Philly—wasn’t so generous.

  Another commercial came on, this one plugging Old Golds. Half the country’s up in smoke. Why not send your money the same way? Marian shook her head. The slogans she came up with wouldn’t send Madison Avenue wild. She wondered what had happened to Madison Avenue, and where the surviving advertisers were plying their trade these days.

  Music returned, this time a song by a bluesman named Fats Domino. It was too raucous for her taste. “C’mon, Linda,” she said. “Time to start getting ready for bed.”

  “Aww, Mommy! Another half hour?” Linda said, and the nightly dicker began anew.

  —

  A car door slammed in front of the house on Irving. Aaron Finch looked out through the curtains on the living-room window. “Here’s Roxane and Howard,” he said, as temperately as he could. When you married someone, you married her whole family. Ruth’s first cousin and her husband didn’t always fill him with delight.

  “Be nice,” his wife said. “And you’d better not start singing ‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead!’ You hear me? Just don’t.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Aaron said, as he might have to the skipper of one of the merchantmen he’d sailed on during the last war. He’d tried to join the Army right after Pearl Harbor, but he’d turned forty not long before and he wore Coke-bottle specs. The recruiters laughed at him.

  And so he’d faced the U-boat wolfpacks in a bunch of wallowing tubs. One of the ships he’d crewed had shot down a German plane in Anzio harbor. He’d had as many scares and close calls as your average Navy guy, in other words. In exchange for those scares and close calls, his grateful government had allotted him exactly no benefits. That disgusted him, but what could you do?

  Howard and Roxane Bauman had politics well to the left of his. Howard, an actor, had had trouble finding work since he declined to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee whether he was now or had ever been. Aaron didn’t think Roxane ever had carried a card, but she was more strident than her husband. As far as she was c
oncerned, the war was all America’s fault.

  Would they regret Joe Stalin’s death? Oh, just a little. That was what Ruth’s warning was all about.

  Leon, on the other hand…Aaron and Ruth’s son had just turned three. They’d read him The Wizard of Oz and as many other Oz books as they had. He’d seen the movie when it got rereleased early this year. And he started singing “Ding-dong, the witch is dead!” at the top of his lungs just before the doorbell rang.

  “Make him stop!” Ruth exclaimed.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Aaron said as he opened the door. Roxane and Howard wouldn’t know why Leon was singing that particular song just then. Even Leon didn’t know why he was singing it just then. He enjoyed making as much noise as he could, that was all. He was one hell of a smart three-year-old, but he was a three-year-old.

  Aaron shook hands with Howard and hugged Roxane. Ruth’s cousin was about her age but, in Aaron’s perfectly unbiased opinion, not nearly so pretty. No matter how abrasive she could get, Aaron tried not to hold it against her. She’d brought Ruth over to his brother Marvin’s place while he was staying there after the last war ended. That was how the two of them met and, indirectly, how Leon came to be.

  Howard’s nostrils twiched. “Something smells good,” he said.

  Ruth stuck her head out of the kitchen. “Beef stew,” she said. “Be ready in about half an hour.”

  “Sounds great.” Howard rubbed his stomach in anticipation. Aaron wondered how well he was eating these days, with parts few and far between. Roxane was bringing in some money because she could type and file, but nobody got rich on that kind of work. He suspected Ruth invited her cousin and Howard over as often as she did so she could feed them square meals.

  “Can I get you guys something to drink?” he asked. Had it been up to him…But it wasn’t up to him. He tried to think of it as charity, like sticking pocket change in the pishke for Hadassah. And sometimes that worked, and sometimes that didn’t.