American Front gw-1 Read online

  Afterwards, just as efficient, he helped her dress again, those clever hands doing up hooks and buttons with accurate, unhurried haste. He stuck his head out into the hallway to make sure she could leave the compartment unnoticed. Now he did say, with a knowing smile, "A pleasure to have met you." As soon as she was on her way, he shut the door behind her.

  She was almost back to her own seat when, ignoring her body's happy glow, she stopped so suddenly that the old man behind her stepped on the heel of her shoe. She listened to his apologies without really hearing them.

  "That sneaky devil!" she exclaimed. "He planned the whole thing." And Kimball had done it so smoothly, she hadn't even noticed till now. She didn't know whether to be furious or to salute him. She, who'd manipulated so many people so successfully over the past few years, had been manipulated herself tonight. Then she shook her head. No, she hadn't just been manipulated. She'd been, in the most literal sense of the word, had.

  Sergeant Chester Martin looked down at the three stripes on the sleeve of his green-gray tunic. He didn't delude himself that he'd done anything particularly heroic to deserve the promotion. What he'd done, and what a lot of people-an awful lot of people-hadn't, was stay alive.

  He looked back toward Catawba Mountain. Coming down it had been almost as bad as righting his way up it. The Rebs moved back from one line to another, and made you pay the butcher's bill every time you attacked.

  "Dumb fool luck," he muttered. "That's the only reason I'm here, let alone a three-striper."

  "You bet, Sarge," said Paul Andersen, who was using a wire-cutter to snip his way into a can of corned beef that let out an embalmed smell when he got it open. He wore a corporal's chevrons now himself, for the same reason that Chester was a sergeant. "A machine gun, it doesn't care how smart you are or how brave you are. You get in front of it, either you go down or you don't. All depends on how the dice roll."

  "Yeah." Martin tore his eyes away from the scarred slopes of Catawba Mountain and looked east, toward the Roanoke River and Big Lick. He didn't stand up for a better look; you were asking for a sniper to blow your lamp out for good if you did anything that stupid. The lines were quiet right this minute, but what did that mean? Only that the Rebel snipers, who were used to shooting for the pot and reckoned men deliciously large targets, had plenty of time to get ready to take advantage of any chance you gave 'em.

  He knew what he'd see, anyhow. Big Lick, or what was left of it after end less shelling, still lay in Confederate hands, though a lot of the iron mines nearby had the Stars and Stripes flying over them now. But the last big U.S. push had bogged down right on the outskirts of town, and after that the Rebs had counterattacked and regained a mile or two of ground. One of these days, he expected, the Army would try another push toward the river. He was willing to wait-forever, with luck.

  He dug in his own mess kit and chose a hardtack biscuit. Hard was the word for it; it might have been baked during the War of Secession. And at that, troops were better supplied than they had been at the start of the campaign. Railroads were snaking out of West Virginia to the front, to bring in food and ammunition faster and in bigger lots than horses and mules and men could manage.

  "Now if we could only put the Rebel trains out of action," he said. That was a big part of the reason the brass had attacked Big Lick in the first place. But the tracks remained in Confederate hands, though repeated bombardment meant the Rebs tried running trains through only at night.

  "Good luck, Sarge," Andersen said. Now he pointed east. "'Stead of earthworks, they got their niggers runnin' up new lines out of range of our guns, anyhow. Don't seem fair."

  Chester Martin nodded gloomily. Captain Wyatt had been grousing about those lines, too. But the captain's grousing wasn't what worried Martin about the Confederate tracklaying. Sure as hell, the brass would want to push guns up close enough to pound the new lines. And who'd have to do the dirty work to make that happen? Nobody he could see but the infantry.

  As if thinking of him had been enough to make him appear, Captain Orville Wyatt stepped into the firing pit Martin and Andersen were sharing. He tossed each of them a chocolate bar. "Courtesy of the cooks," he said. "They had so many, they didn't know what to do with 'em, so 1 liberated as many as I could. They'll probably eat the rest themselves."

  "Yeah, who ever saw a skinny cook?" Martin said, peeling silver paper off the bar before he crammed it into his mouth. "Mm-thank you, sir. Beats the hell out of biscuits and corned beef." Wyatt was a damned good officer- he looked out for his men. If your captain took care of things like that, odds were good he'd also be an effective combat leader, and Wyatt was. He was also up for promotion to major, for most of the same reasons Martin and Andersen had seen their ranks go up.

  Wyatt dug a much-folded newspaper out of his pocket. "This came up to the front on the last train-only four days old," he said; he believed in keeping minds full along with bellies. He gave the sergeant and corporal the gist of what was in the news: "Big fight out in the Atlantic. We torpedoed a French armored cruiser, and it went down. We sank some Confederate and Argentine freighters heading for England, too."

  "Good," Martin said. "Hope the limeys starve."

  Wyatt read on: "The Rebs torpedoed one of our cruisers, too, the cowardly sons of bitches, but we rescued almost the whole crew. And TR made a bully speech in New York City."

  That got Martin's attention, and Andersen's, too. Nobody could make a speech like Teddy Roosevelt. "What does he say?" Martin asked eagerly.

  Captain Wyatt knew nobody could make a speech like TR, too. He skimmed and summarized, saying, "He wants the world to know we're at war to support our allies and to restore what's ours by rights, what the English and the French and the Rebs took away from our grandfathers… Wait. Here's the best bit." He stood very straight and drew back his lips so you could see all his teeth, a pretty good TR imitation. "'A great free people owes to itself and to all mankind not to sink into helplessness before the powers of evil. I ask that this people rise to the greatness of its opportunities. I do not ask that it seek the easiest path.' "

  "That is good," Andersen said with a connoisseur's approval.

  Chester Martin nodded, too. Roosevelt knew about the harder path. Along with Custer, though on a slightly smaller scale because he'd been just a colonel of volunteers, he'd come out of the Second Mexican War a hero, and his stock had been rising ever since. No nation could have hoped for a better leader in time of war.

  All the same, sitting in a firing pit that had started life as a shell hole, surrounded by the stench of death, the rattle of machine guns, the occasional roar of U.S. and Rebel artillery, lice in his hair, Martin couldn't help wondering whether Teddy Roosevelt had ever walked a path as hard as this one.

  Scipio bowed and said in tones of grave regret, "I am sorry to have to inform you, sir, that we have no more champagne."

  "No more champagne? Merde!" Marcel Duchamp clapped a dramatic hand to his forehead. Everything the modern artist did, as far as Scipio could tell, was deliberately dramatic. Duchamp was tall and thin and pale and in the habit of dressing in black, which made him look like a preacher-until you saw his eyes. He didn't behave like a preacher, either, not if half-not if a quarter-of the stories Scipio heard from the maids and kitchen girls were true. Now he went on, "How shall I endure this rural desolation without champagne to console me?"

  Whiskey was the first thought that came to Scipio's mind. If it worked for him, if it worked for the Negroes who picked Marshlands' cotton, it ought to do the job for a dandified Frenchman. But he'd been trained to give the best service he could, and so he said, "The war has made importing difficult, sir, as it has disturbed outbound travel. But perhaps my mistress, Miss Colleton, would be able to procure some champagne in New Orleans and order it sent here for you. If you like, I will send her a telegram with your request."

  "Disturbed outbound travel: yes, I should say so," Duchamp replied. "No one will put out to sea from Charleston, it seems, for fear
of being torpedoed or cannonaded or otherwise discommoded." He rolled those disconcerting eyes. "Would you not agree, the risk of going to the bottom of the sea is only slightly less than the risk of staying here?"

  By now, Scipio knew better than to try to match wits with Duchamp. The artist's conversation was as confusing as his paintings; he used words to reflect back on one another till common sense vanished from them. Stolidly, the butler repeated, "Would you like me to wire my mistress about the champagne, sir?"

  "I give you the advice of Rabelais: do as you please," Duchamp said, which helped not at all. The Frenchman cocked his head to one side. "Your mistress, you say. In what sense is she yours?"

  "I'm afraid I don't follow you, sir," Scipio said.

  Marcel Duchamp stabbed out a long, pale forefinger. "You are her servant. You were, at one time, her slave, is it not so?" He waved a hand to encompass not just the dining room of the Marshlands mansion but the entire estate.

  "I was a slave of the Colleton family, yes, sir, although I was manumitted not long before Miss Anne was born," Scipio said, nothing at all in his voice now. He didn't like being reminded of his former status, even if his present one represented no great advance upon it.

  Duchamp sensed that. He didn't let it deter him; if anything, it spurred him on. "Very well. You are her servant. She may dismiss you, punish you, give you onerous duties, do as she likes with you. Is it not so?"

  "It may be so in theory," Scipio said warily, "but Miss Colleton would never-"

  Duchamp waggled that forefinger to interrupt him. "Never mind. It is in this sense of the word that you are her servant. Now, you say she is your mistress. How may you, in your turn, punish her if she fails of the requirements of a mistress?"

  "What?" Even Scipio's politeness to a guest at Marshlands, and to a white man at that (not that the Marshlands estate was likely to entertain a colored guest), proved to have limits. "You ought to know I can't do that, sir."

  "Oh, I do know it. I know it full well. Many have accused me of being mad, but few of being stupid." The artist winked, as if to say even here he did not expect to be taken altogether seriously. But he was, or at least he sounded, serious as he went on, "So how is the charming and wealthy Miss Colleton yours, eh, Scipio? You cannot punish her, you cannot control her, you cannot possess her, either in economic terms or in the perfumed privacy of her boudoir, you-"

  Scipio abruptly turned on his heel and walked out of the dining room, out of the mansion altogether. That Frenchman was crazy, and the people who'd told him so knew what they were talking about. In the Confederate States of America, you had to be crazy if you talked about a Negro servant possessing a white woman in her bedroom-even if you called it a boudoir. Oh, such things happened now and again. Scipio knew that. They always ended badly, too, when they were discovered. He knew that, too. But whether they happened or not, you didn't go around talking about them. You sure as the devil didn't go around suggesting them to a Negro.

  "Words," Scipio said in his educated voice. Then he repeated it in the slurred dialect of the Congaree: "Words." Marcel Duchamp played games with them nobody had any business playing.

  The hell of it was, this time he did make a corrosive kind of sense. Anne Colleton wasn't his mistress in the same way he was her butler. The two sides of the relationship weren't heads and tails of the same coin, the way they looked to be if you didn't think about them. Few Negroes did think about them, instead taking them for granted… which was precisely what the white aristocracy of the Confederate States wanted them to do.

  Scipio looked out toward the cotton fields from which Marshlands drew its wealth-from which Anne Colleton drew her wealth. The Negroes out in those fields were her workers, almost as they had been before manumission. But was she theirs? Hardly. In his own way, Duchamp was an influence as corrupting as The Communist Manifesto.

  And Anne Colleton hadn't a clue that was so. There were a lot of things the mistress- his mistress? — he'd have to think about that) didn't have a clue about when it came to what really went on at Marshlands. Scipio hadn't had a clue about them, either, not until he discovered the forbidden book in Cassius' cottage.

  He still wished he'd never seen it. But, to protect his own hide, he'd been reading a lot of Marx and Engels and Lincoln, and then talking things over with Cassius. The more you looked at things from an angle that wasn't the one white folks wanted you to use, the uglier the whole structure of the Confederacy looked.

  And, as if deliberately sent by a malicious God to make his misgivings worse, here came Cassius, a shotgun over one shoulder, a stick with four possums tied by the tail to it on the other. The possums, presumably, were for his own larder: Scipio tried to imagine what Marcel Duchamp would say if presented with baked possum and greens. He'd learned a little about swearing in French. He figured that would teach him a good deal more.

  Cassius couldn't wave, but did nod. "How you is?" he asked.

  "I been better," Scipio answered, as usual in the dialect in which he was addressed.

  Nobody else was in earshot, and it was normal for the hunter and the butler to stand around talking. With a sly grin on his face, Cassius said, "Come de revolution, all of we be better."

  "You gwine get youself killed, is all, you talk like that," Scipio said. "The white folks, they shoot we, they hang we. The poor buckra, they look fo' the chance every day. You want to give it to they?"

  "The poor buckra in the Army, fight the rich white folks' war," Cassius said. "Not enough leff to stop we, come de day."

  They'd gone round and round on that one, pummeling each other like a couple of prizefighters. Scipio tried a new argument: "Awright. Suppose we beat the white folks, Cass. What happen then? Ain't just we the white folks is fightin', like you say. We rise up, we give the USA the fight. The USA, they don' love niggers hardly no better'n our own white folks."

  He'd hoped he would at least rock Cassius back on his mental heels, but the hunter-the revolutionary, the Red-only shook his head and smiled, al most pityingly. "Kip, the revolution ain't jus' here. The USA, they gwine have they own revolution, right along with we."

  Scipio stared at Cassius. Whatever else you could say about him, he didn't think small. At last, cautiously, Scipio said, "They ain't got enough niggers in the USA to rise up against they gov'ment."

  "They got plenty white folks up no'th what's 'pressed," Cassius answered. "You get worked sunup to sundown, don't matter you is black or you is white. You 'pressed the same, either which way. You rise up the same, either which way. The damnyankees, they shoot they strikers same as they shoot niggers here. When the broom of revolution come out, it gwine sweep away the 'pressors in the USA the same as here."

  He sounded like a preacher stirring up the congregation. That was what he was, though he would have been furious had Scipio said so. But a lot of workers on the plantation took The Communist Manifesto as Gospel. Gloomily, Scipio said, "You gwine get a lot o' niggers killed. They rise up in the USA, lots o' they poor buckra get killed. We don' rise up together. They white, we black. Things is like that, an' that's how things is."

  "Come the revolution, black an' white be all the same," Cassius said.

  For once, Scipio got the last word: "Yeah. All be dead the same."

  VII

  Captain Irving Morrell lay between starched white sheets in an airy Tucson hospital that smelled of carbolic acid and, below that, of pus. He was sick of hospitals. The words sick to death of hospitals ran through his mind, but he rejected them. He'd come too close to dying to make jokes, or even feeble plays on words, about it.

  His leg still throbbed like a rotten tooth, and here it was December when he'd been hit in August. More than once, the sawbones had wanted to take it off at the hip, for fear infection would kill him. He'd managed to talk them out of it every time, and having a toothache down there was heaven compared to what he'd gone through for a while. He could even walk on the leg now, and with aspirin he hardly noticed the pain-on good days.

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p; A doctor with captain's bars on the shoulders of his white coat approached the bed. Morrell had never seen him before. He didn't know whether he'd see him again. The doctors here-the doctors at every military hospital these days- were like factory workers, dealing with wounded men as if they were faulty mechanisms to be reassembled, often moving from one to the next without the slightest acknowledgment of their common humanity. Maybe that kept them from dwelling on what they had to do. Maybe they were just too swamped to invest the time. Maybe both-Morrell had learned things were seldom simple.

  The doctor pulled back the top sheet. He peered down at the valley in the flesh of Morrell's thigh. "Not too red," he said, scribbling a note. The skin of his hands was red, too, and raw, cracked from the harsh disinfectant in which he scrubbed many times a day.

  "It's the best I've ever seen," Morrell agreed. He didn't know whether that was true or not, but he did know how much he wanted to get out of here and return to the war that was passing him by.

  The doctor prodded at the wound with a short-nailed forefinger, down at the bottom of the valley where a river would have run had it been a product of geology rather than mere war. "Does that hurt?"

  "No." The lie came easily. Morrell's conscience, unlike his leg, hurt not at all. Compared to what he'd been through, the pain the doctor inflicted was nothing, maybe less. I really am healing, he thought in some amazement. For a long time, he'd thought he never would.