Joe Steele Read online

  He scowled and drank some more Wild Turkey. By the evidence, they didn’t.

  In the front room, Esther was chatting excitedly with her mother. Every so often, she’d slip out of English and into Magyar, of which Charlie knew not a word. He got, and used, some Yiddish. Anybody from New York did. Esther certainly did. But she’d learned the Hungarians’ language even before English. She’d told him the hardest thing she had to do was stop rolling her r’s. To this day, she could sound like a lady vampire when she wanted to.

  But then she said, “Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t know you’d heard about it.” A beat, and then she went on, “Of course he’s doing everything he can.” After that, she added something in Magyar that sounded as if it ought to sterilize frogs. Charlie hoped she wasn’t saying anything that sounded like that about him. She must not have been, because after she said her good-byes she gave him a kiss and told him, “That’s from my mother.”

  “How about one from you, babe?”

  “How about that?” she said. The second kiss was a good bit warmer than the first. But she made a face afterwards. “I don’t like bourbon—or bourbon doesn’t like me—now even secondhand.”

  “That’s a crying shame.” Charlie liked bourbon just fine. And two stiff drinks put more pathos in his voice than he could have got without them. “A whole bunch of things are crying shames.”

  “Let’s put you to bed,” Esther said firmly, and steered him in that direction.

  “How do you mean that?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “We’ll both find out,” she said, and they did.

  * * *

  Mike looked at the palms of his hands in amazement and dismay. He’d done so much typing that he’d worn the fingerprints off the tips of both index fingers. He’d had a writer’s callus, too, next to the nail on his right middle finger. But for those, his hands had been soft and smooth.

  They had been. They weren’t any more. Swinging an axe and working with a variety of saws had turned his palms all blistered and bleeding. John Dennison advised him to rub them with turpentine as often as he could. Dennison even called in a favor to get some so he could. It sounded horrible, but the stuff cooled and soothed the burning.

  “I wouldn’t have believed it, not in a million years,” Mike told him.

  He shrugged. “That’s one I knew before I got here. They didn’t send us here to have fun, but we don’t got to make it worse’n it already is.”

  “I guess not. It’s bad enough anyway.” Mike yawned. He was always tired. No, he was always exhausted. They didn’t give you enough time to sleep. When he first saw the bare bunks in Barracks 17, he’d wondered if he could sleep on slats. Now he was convinced that, if they told him he had to hang by his feet like a bat, he’d still get as much shut-eye as they let him have. He’d never worked so hard or so long in his life.

  He was always hungry, too. They didn’t feed the wreckers enough for the labor they had to do. Watery oatmeal in the morning, a cheese sandwich on bad bread to take to the woods, stew and more bad bread in the evening. Sometimes the stew had bits of creature in it; sometimes it was full—but not full enough—of beans. Mike had to hold up his pants with a length of rope.

  The only thing that ever made him forget being hungry was how tired he was. The only thing that made him forget being tired was how hungry he was. They rigged things so you couldn’t win.

  Here he was, for instance, in some of the most beautiful country God ever made. The encampment wasn’t far from Yellowstone National Park. There weren’t geysers and hot springs and such things here, but there were mountains and trees as far as the eye could see. The sky was as enormous as Montana’s nickname promised.

  And Mike hardly ever saw, or got to pay attention to, any of it. A mountain was something he had to stumble up and down, not something he could admire from a scenic distance. Trees were things he had to knock over and chop up, not things he could look at and savor. The sky? He didn’t have time to see the sky. The guards growled if you slowed down for anything.

  The guards in the camp were easygoing. They could afford to be. They carried guns. The wreckers had nothing. Out on work details, things were different. The men doing the labor needed tools. They weren’t beavers, to chop down trees with their front teeth. They had to have those axes and saws.

  But tools were also weapons. A wrecker who decided he had nothing left to lose could start swinging an axe and try to chop down some guards before they filled him full of holes. From what Dennison said, they’d got a few guards right after the encampment opened up. The GBI bastards hadn’t figured out all the angles then themselves.

  They had now. Any time a wrecker approached, he had to come slowly and not get too close. Mike got used to having a Tommy gun aimed at his brisket, even when he was asking for something as harmless as permission to go behind a pine and crap. The guards didn’t know he was just going to do that. They didn’t take chances, either.

  Now . . . Now Mike rolled a cigarette. He still wasn’t as good at it as John, but he was a lot better than he had been. Custom hath made it in me a property of easiness, he thought. Hamlet still sprang to mind, here where the nearest hamlet that wasn’t a labor encampment was miles away.

  He offered John the makings, too. He kept his tobacco in a metal box that had held throat lozenges. “Thanks,” Dennison said. “Nice box. Where’d you get it?”

  “Found it by the infirmary,” Mike answered. “A doctor must’ve chucked it out a window or something.” No wrecker would have been so prodigal. You could use a little metal box for all kinds of things.

  John didn’t ask where Mike had got the tobacco. That was just as well. His pride had gone before a smoke. In the outside world, he wouldn’t have dreamt of polishing another man’s boots. Here, he’d made a guard’s shine almost as if by a light of their own. And he’d got his reward. The guard, one of the more nearly human ones, didn’t even make him beg like a dog getting up on its hind legs in hopes of a scrap.

  Another guard, this one from the venomous school, scowled at the two of them. “Playtime’s over, youse guys,” he said. “You better finish that trunk by the time we go back if you know what’s good for youse.”

  “Sure thing, Virgil.” John didn’t sound angry or flustered. He just wanted to get along with as little trouble as he could.

  After Virgil went off to inflict himself on some other wreckers, Mike asked John a low-voiced question: “How do you let that asshole roll off your back like that? It was everything I could do to keep from giving him the finger and telling him to go fuck himself.”

  “Thing of it is, you’re still a scalp,” John answered placidly. Mike ran a hand through his hair. He could do that again; he had enough hair to run a hand through it. But the man with WY232 on his jacket and pants just chuckled. “You’re still a scalp inside your own head, I mean. You let things get under your skin like a tick’s mouth. Virgil ain’t worth getting excited about.”

  “Not to you, maybe,” Mike said.

  “Well, shit, what can you do about him that won’t get you killed? Nothin’, that’s what. So you can roll with the current or you can try and buck it. Rollin’s a lot easier.”

  That made good, logical sense. When you wanted to see your axe bite into the back of someone’s head instead of lopping branches off a fallen lodgepole pine, logic went only so far. Come to that, Mike was just glad his axe hadn’t bitten into his own leg or foot. He was better with it than he had been when he got here, but not so much better as he was at rolling cigarettes. Rolling cigarettes mattered to him. How good he was with an axe mattered only to the guards. To be fair, axe work was also harder than cocooning tobacco in paper.

  He and John chopped away at the pine. John could make an axe do everything but stand up and sing “Let Yourself Go.” But he didn’t move any faster than he had to, and he didn’t do much more work than Mike (though he wore himself ou
t much less doing it). He’d mastered the age-old, glacial pace of the prisoner . . . or the slave.

  Mike hadn’t. He didn’t want to. He still felt he ought to be fighting, not coasting through the days. As John Dennison reminded him, he was still a scalp, a greenhorn, a beginner.

  XIII

  When Charlie got home after another day chasing around Washington after stories that might or might not mean anything to the rest of the country, he found Esther bouncing around as if she had springs in her shoes. She waved a small cardboard rectangle at him. “Look!” she squealed. “Look!”

  “I can’t,” he said irritably—he was beat. “Hold it still, why don’t you?”

  She did. It was a plain postcard, creased and battered. But the message was welcome. Hey, Charlie, the familiar script said. Just a note to let you know I’m doing all right here. Hard work, but I can do it. Let Stella and the folks know I’m okay, please. I get one card a month. Wrote Stella last. Your brother, Mike. Under that was an unfamiliar number: NY24601.

  Stella hadn’t let Charlie know she’d heard from Mike. The earlier card might not have got to her. Or she might still have been mad at Charlie for not getting Mike out of the labor encampment. Wouldn’t she have told his folks, though? Of course, they might not have been happy with him, either. Everybody thought he had more pull with the administration than he really did.

  “It’s good news,” he said to Esther. “Or it’s news as good as you can get when the news is bad.”

  She nodded. “That’s just what it is.” Then she tapped the number with the red-painted nail of her right index finger. “Isn’t this terrible? It’s like they’ve taken away his name.”

  Charlie hadn’t thought of it like that. “It’s for the file clerks,” he said. “Plenty of guys named Mike Sullivan—some parts of some towns, about one in five. But there’s only one NY24601.”

  “It’s like a prisoner’s number. It is a prisoner’s number. I think it’s disgusting,” Esther said.

  Since he couldn’t tell her she was wrong to feel that way, he did the next best thing: he changed the subject. “How are you doing, babe?” he asked.

  She answered with a yawn. “I’m sleepy. I’m sleepy all the time,” she said. “And I tossed my cookies about twenty minutes after you left, just before I was gonna go out the door.”

  “Well, they call it morning sickness,” Charlie said.

  “I don’t care what they call it. I don’t like it,” Esther answered. “I wasn’t doing anything much. But I just barely made it to the bathroom in time. I’ve done more puking the last couple of months than in my whole life before, I think.”

  He had no idea what to say to that. He was only a man. Morning sickness was as much a mystery to him as anything else that had to do with pregnancy. Cautiously, he asked, “Do you think you’ll be okay for dinner?” Calling it morning sickness didn’t mean it couldn’t come on any old time. He’d found that out. So had Esther, from painful experience.

  She shrugged now. “Who knows? I was fine till about half a minute before I had to heave this morning. Then I was running for the pot.”

  She did manage to keep the dinner down. It was ground round without onions. Sometimes anything spicy would make her give it back. Sometimes she’d give back the blandest food. Sometimes she could eat anything at all and stay fine. Her insides might understand why, but she didn’t. Neither did Charlie.

  He called Stella while Esther did dishes. He’d done more long-distance calling since Mike got sent West and Esther found out she was in a family way than ever before. It was expensive, but it was quick.

  “No, I didn’t get that card,” Stella told him. “I would’ve let you know if I did.”

  “Okay,” Charlie said, and some of the weight of worry fell from his shoulders. His sister-in-law didn’t hate him as much as she might have, anyhow. “Maybe the next one will be to you, too. He says he gets one a month.”

  “That’s awful,” she said. “Is there a return address or anything, so I can write to him?”

  “Lemme see.” Charlie picked up the card. “It just says ‘National Labor Encampment System.’ If you write care of them, maybe he’ll get it. I bet it’d help if you put his number on the card.”

  “His number?” Stella echoed in dismay.

  Charlie gave it to her again—he’d read it when he read the rest of the message, but it must not have sunk in. Then he said, “Listen, I’m gonna get off the line. I’ve got to call Mom and Pop, let them know what’s going on.”

  “I’ll do it if you want, save you the money of another long-distance call,” Stella said.

  “Would you? Thanks!” Charlie didn’t want to talk to his mother, who would probably answer the phone. She’d just start crying again. And he pinched pennies harder than ever now that Esther was going to have a baby. You never knew what would happen day after tomorrow. The economy wasn’t as bad as it had been at the bottom of the Depression, but it was a long way from booming. Lose a job and God only knew when you might land another one.

  There were other things to worry about, too. That NY24601 pretty much summed them up. A couple of people had vanished from the AP office into the encampments. Charlie didn’t think either Scriabin or Joe Steele disliked him enough to send the Jeebies after him. His stories about the administration stayed upbeat. Unlike Mike, he knew where the line was and didn’t try to cross it.

  But you never could tell.

  * * *

  A guard tossed Mike a big burlap sack. “Thanks,” Mike said. His voice was less sardonic than he wanted it to be. The guard checked his number off the list on his clipboard. He jerked a thumb at an enormous, fragrant pile of sawdust from the mill. Mike went over to it and started filling the sack with a shovel. Blowing sawdust made his eyes water and went up his nose to set him sneezing. He didn’t care. He worked away with more vim than he ever showed felling trees. That was for the camp and for the government that had stuck him in the camp. This was for himself.

  “Don’t get it too full!” a guard shouted, as he did every couple of minutes. “You’ll need to flatten it out, remember!”

  “Yes, Mommy,” John Dennison muttered from a couple of feet away. No guard could have heard him. Mike hoped his own giggles didn’t set the screws wondering what was up.

  When they’d finished filling their sacks, they tied them shut with lengths of twine another guard doled out. Then they went into the supply building in a ragged line, each wrecker with his sack full of sawdust slung over his right shoulder. Yet another man inside also checked off each man’s number before reluctantly issuing him a blanket.

  Mike’s was thinner than he wished it were, and almost as coarse and scratchy as if it were woven from steel wool instead of the kind that came off a sheep. Again, though, he said “Thank you” with more sincerity than he’d intended to show. The bastards who ran the camp didn’t want the wreckers to freeze to death—or at least not all of them, not right away.

  Back to Barracks 17 he and Dennison went. Snow still lingered in places that didn’t get much sun. It had started in early October, which was horrible enough. Pretty soon, from what the man with WY232 on his clothes said, it wouldn’t melt back. It would just stay there, most of the way through spring. Mike had seen cold weather before, but not cold weather like that.

  It would get down below zero, too. And it might stay that way for days if not for weeks. So . . . blankets and these sacks of sawdust. Mike laid his on the slats where he’d been sleeping since the Jeebies sent him here. He thumped and pounded on the burlap to get it as even as he could. Then he climbed into the bunk to use his body as a steamroller to flatten the cheap makeshift mattress some more.

  Cheap. Makeshift. Thin. Lumpy. All those words applied. Still, this was the most comfortable he’d been in there since he came to the camp. He wasn’t the only one who thought so, either. “Welcome to the fucking Ritz!” another wrecker ex
claimed.

  Mike lay back. He put his hands behind his head, fingers interlaced. Another minute and he would have fallen asleep. He could sleep anywhere these days, even, sometimes, standing up while the prisoners were being counted.

  He didn’t get the minute. A guard thumped in. The Jeebies’ boots sounded louder than the wreckers’. Mike didn’t know why, but they did. “Come on, you lazy, good-for-nothin’ bums!” the guard yelled. “Y’all don’t git the goddamn rest cure this mornin’!”

  Like a lot of the GBI men at the encampment, this guard came from somewhere between North Carolina and Arkansas. Mike couldn’t have said why the Jeebies got so many volunteers from that part of the country, but they did. The Southern guards were often rougher on the men they held than Jeebies from the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line, too.

  Nobody told this fellow where to go. Doing that to somebody with a Tommy gun wasn’t the smartest stunt you could pull. Even an insult would set some guards shooting. Mike had never yet heard of any Jeebie getting in trouble, no matter what he did to a wrecker. And a wrecker’s word was worth nothing when set against a guard’s.

  Out the men came. Mike sent a longing, fretful look back toward his bunk. Just because the wreckers had so little, that didn’t keep them stealing from one another. Things you didn’t keep an eye on had a mysterious way of walking with Jesus.

  They were taken to the woods to hack down more lodgepole pines. Snow lingered there more than it did inside the encampment. It crunched under Mike’s boots. He and John attacked a tree.

  “You know,” Mike said between strokes with the axe, “we shouldn’t take stuff from each other. We should be solid. We should make a waddayacallit, a popular front—us on one side, the Jeebies on the other.”

  “We should do all kinds of shit,” John Dennison said. “One of the things you should do is run your mouth less, y’know? All kinds of finks who’ll rat on you for half a pack o’ Luckies.” Thunk! His axe bit into the trunk. The sap smelled halfway between turpentine and maple syrup.