Joe Steele Read online

  Mike spat. He swung the axe again. He didn’t blister so much any more; calluses were forming where the blisters had been. “They should have an accident or something,” he said. “Yeah, or something.”

  “Sometimes they do, when they get bad,” Dennison said. “But then somebody new starts feedin’ the GBI the dope. That’s a bad time, ’cause you don’t know who to trust or whether you can trust anybody.”

  The lodgepole creaked. It started to sway. Dennison pointed the direction in which it would fall. Mike sang out: “Tim-berrr!”

  Wreckers scrambled back. Down came the tree, pretty much where John Dennison had said it would. Snow flew up off its branches and from the ground. After the cloud subsided, Mike and John started lopping branches off the trunk.

  “I don’t want to do this,” Mike said.

  “Nobody wants to do this,” Dennison answered.

  “I know that. I mean, I don’t want to do it now. I want to go back to the barracks and see what sleeping on a mattress feels like.”

  “Why? You won’t sleep any longer or any harder than you did without the goddamn thing,” John Dennison said.

  He was bound to be right about that. Mike couldn’t sleep any longer, because he’d have to tumble out of his bunk when reveille sounded tomorrow morning. And he could only sleep harder if he died after the lights went out and before reveille drove him upright again.

  “I’ll be more comfortable. I won’t be so cold,” he said.

  “That counts a lot for the half a minute before you fall asleep and for the five seconds between when you wake up and when you got to get up,” John said. “Otherwise, you won’t notice. So why get excited about it?”

  “Gotta grab all the fun here you can,” Mike answered. Most of the time, John Dennison was a quiet man who didn’t draw attention to himself. Now he laughed like a loon. After a minute, so did Mike. When you got right down to it, the idea of fun inside the labor encampment was, well, pretty goddamn funny.

  * * *

  Wire and radio reports poured in from the other side of the Atlantic. Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht—renamed as he entrenched himself in power—had marched into Austria, joining it to Germany. The Anschluss wasn’t violent. By the way things looked, most Austrians who weren’t Jewish loved it. Violent or not, though, it rearranged the map of Europe. The new, enlarged Germany was the biggest country west of Russia. It was also the strongest. And now it surrounded western Czechoslovakia on three sides. With the Führer screeching that he wanted to annex the Germans in the Sudetenland, too, that wasn’t good news for the little Central European democracy.

  Charlie tried to make sense of the fast-breaking story. He tried to break it down into pieces that Americans in, say, Kansas, many of whom couldn’t have found Czechoslovakia on a map if their lives depended on it, might possibly understand. He feared it was a losing effort, but he did his best.

  The phone on his desk jangled. He grabbed it. “Sullivan, AP.”

  “Hello, Sullivan, AP. This is Sullivan, your wife. Things have started. I just called a taxi. I’m heading for the hospital.”

  “Oh, God,” Charlie said. He’d known the day would come soon. But you’re never ready, especially not the first time. “Okay, hon. I’ll see you there. Love you.”

  He finished the story he was working on. Luckily, he was almost done. He took it out of the typewriter and set it on his editor’s desk. Then he said, “I’m gone, boss. Esther just called. She’s on her way to the hospital. I’ll see you in a few days.”

  “Okay, Charlie,” the editor said—an advantage of being able to set things up in advance. “Shame it has to happen just when all hell’s breaking loose in Europe.”

  “I know, but . . .” Charlie shrugged. “It’s not our fight, and it is my kid. I’ll worry about the world again when I get back.”

  “I hope it all goes well for your missus and the baby,” his editor said. “And if you have a boy, for God’s sake bring in some good cigars, not the stink bombs the last couple of guys with sons handed out.”

  Laughing, Charlie said, “Promise.” He grabbed his hat and topcoat and hurried away. He flagged down a cab without much trouble.

  At the hospital, he filled out papers promising he wouldn’t spirit away mother and baby without paying his bills. They allowed that he would be able to pay things off on the installment plan. That would spread his pain, as opposed to Esther’s, over some considerable stretch of time. He didn’t like the installment plan, but he liked digging deep into his savings even less.

  Once papers were signed and hands shaken, they led him to a waiting room. Two other almost-fathers already sat there. One looked barely old enough to shave, and was shaking in his shoes. The other, close to forty, smoked a cigarette and leafed through a magazine. “This is our sixth,” he said. “Not like we never done it before.”

  “I guess not,” Charlie said. “Just my first, though.”

  The guy about his age waited till the nurse went away, then pulled a half-pint of scotch from his jacket pocket. “Have a knock of this, buddy. It’ll calm you down.”

  Charlie didn’t go for scotch most of the time. Today, he made an exception. “Thanks,” he said, and swigged. It tasted like medicine, the way he remembered. It was medicine right now.

  By the time anyone came into the room for him, the dose had long since worn off. He’d stepped out to buy more cigarettes, having gone through the ones with him, and to eat lunch and dinner at the hospital’s sorry cafeteria. If that place was any indication, all the nasty cracks people made about hospital food were not just true but understatements.

  Kid number six for his benefactor turned out to be a girl, which evened his score at 3-3. Kid number one for the nervous youngster was a boy. The nervous guy let out what had to be the closest thing to a Rebel yell since Appomattox. Another father-to-be came in and stared at the pale green walls with Mike.

  Just before midnight, a tired-looking doctor came in with his face mask down around his neck and said, “Mr. Sullivan?”

  “That’s me!” Charlie jumped to his feet.

  “Congratulations, Mr. Sullivan. You have a fine, healthy baby girl. She’s twenty and a half inches long, and she weighs seven pounds, nine ounces. Your wife is doing well, too. She’s worn out, but that’s to be expected.”

  “A girl,” Charlie said dreamily. “We’re gonna call her Sarah.”

  “Yes, that’s what your wife said.” The doctor nodded.

  “Can I see them?” Charlie asked.

  “That’s one of the reasons I came in here. Follow me, please.” The doc held the door open so Charlie could. They walked down the hall to a room with MOTHERS AND NEWBORNS neatly stenciled over the door. The doctor opened that one, too.

  Charlie went in. Esther lay on one of those hospital beds where you could crank up the top or bottom half. The top half was partway up. She had the blanket-wrapped baby cradled in her left arm, and was giving it her breast.

  “How you doin’, babe?” Charlie asked, trying not to sound nervous. She looked as if she’d just run five miles and gone a few rounds with Max Schmeling. Sweat matted her hair. She was pale as cottage cheese, except for dark circles that made you think she had a mouse under each eye.

  The baby, or what Charlie could see of it, didn’t look all that hot, either. Sarah was kind of pinkish purple, with squashed features and a funny-shaped head. A little hair crowned that head, but not much.

  “Like I got run over by a truck, that’s how,” Esther answered. “And hungry enough to eat a horse, too. They wouldn’t give me anything except some water while I was in labor, and hardly any of that, either. They said if I had anything much in my stomach I’d throw it up.”

  As if on cue, a nurse came in through a side door with a tray. The roast beef on it looked tough enough to have peeled off an auto tire. “Here you are, dear,” the nurse said, as proud as if she
’d brought something that was actually good.

  “Thanks,” Esther said, and then, “Can you hold the baby, Charlie, while I eat?”

  “I guess so,” he said warily. The nurse helped him, showing him how to support the baby’s head. Esther attacked the overdone roast beef and squashy boiled vegetables like a lion devouring a zebra. They disappeared in nothing flat. Sarah kicked and wiggled and screwed up her face and started to cry.

  “I’ll take her,” Esther said. Charlie quickly gave her back. He knew he’d get used to holding a baby, but he hadn’t done it yet. His wife went on, “You know what? That was the best lousy dinner I ever ate.”

  “Our dietary department has a good reputation.” The nurse sounded offended.

  Esther laughed. “Heaven help the places they’re comparing it to, in that case. But I don’t care. How long will I be here?”

  “Usually a week or so, if there are no complications after birth,” the nurse replied.

  “Okay. I won’t complain about the food again—promise,” Esther said. “And Charlie will have the chance to get everything ready for when I come home . . . and when Sarah does.”

  “Yeah.” Charlie made himself nod. When he saw the baby there in Esther’s arms, the notion of being a father turned real. A roll in the hay wasn’t always just a roll in the hay. Sometimes it had consequences nine months down the line. In a week or so, a squawky, wiggly consequence would be coming home. High school class of 1956, Charlie remembered. Try as he would, he still had trouble imagining that.

  Not quite idly, he wondered whether Joe Steele would still be President.

  * * *

  It was April. By the calendar, it was supposed to be spring. Trees should have been turning green. Flowers should have been popping out here and there. Birds should have been singing their heads off.

  As far as Mike could tell, this stretch of Montana had never heard of calendars. He couldn’t prove it knew anything about spring, either. The lodgepole pines were the same almost-black color they’d always been. No flowers. No birds except ravens and a few gray jays.

  No letup from winter, either. It was still snowing, with no sign of rain or even sleet ahead. The snow was wetter now than it had been in January. It didn’t sandpaper your face the way it had when it blew then. The wind didn’t howl down out of the north quite so savagely. But it still hadn’t warmed up to even a bad New York City winter’s day.

  One man from Mike’s gang got lost when they went out to chop wood in a blizzard. The guards and bloodhounds found him three days later. He was frozen hard. A couple of other wreckers had just quietly lain down on the job and died. If you gave up here, you wouldn’t last long.

  Mike had been tempted now and again. Freezing seemed a pretty easy way to go. You were cold, then you stopped caring, then you were dead. It probably didn’t hurt much. You might not even have the energy to stay scared for long.

  But he didn’t want to give Joe Steele the satisfaction. He wanted to get back to the world outside the labor encampments. And he wanted to spit in the President’s eye when he did.

  Of course, he knew he would have to stand in a long line to get what he wanted. He also knew Joe Steele would be soaked—if not drowned—by the time he got to the front of the line. He didn’t care. He was ready to wait his turn and take his best shot when it came.

  Most of the other wreckers in the labor encampment felt the same way. He knew that, even if there wasn’t a whole lot of talk about it. You never could be sure about who would squeal on you to the guards. And what the bastards who ran the encampment called willful failure to reform could add years to your stretch here. Not even the most dedicated masochist wanted that.

  Most of the wreckers couldn’t stand the President, no. But there were a few . . . Four or five guys in Barracks 17 were certain their sentences were just what they deserved. “I love Joe Steele,” insisted a sad-eyed little bookkeeper named Adam Bolger. “I just couldn’t do the work my firm needed from me. If that doesn’t make me a wrecker, I don’t know what would.”

  “What don’t you put a fucking sock in it, Bolger?” somebody in a top-tier bunk called. “Nobody wants to listen to your shitass sob stories.”

  “All of us are guilty,” Bolger said. “Nobody works as well as he ought to all the time. That makes everyone a wrecker.”

  “Then they should chuck everybody into one of these goddamn encampments, let all the people see how they like it,” his critic said. “Me, I’m in here on account of some asshole told the Jeebies lies about me. Ain’t no other reason.”

  Several other men chimed in with loud, obscene agreement—in the encampment, there was usually no other kind. If you admitted you’d done anything to make yourself belong here, you won the GBI’s battle for it. So Mike thought, along with the majority.

  He didn’t chime in tonight. They’d be blowing out the lanterns pretty soon. He lay in his bunk, atop the joke of a mattress and under the joke of a blanket. The stove was hot, but not much warmth reached this far. The only clothes he’d taken off were his boots. They made a crappy pillow, but they were the only pillow he had—he’d wrapped his tattered Outside clothes around his feet to help keep them warm.

  He yawned. He wondered how Stella was doing. Every once in a while, most of the time when he least expected them, loneliness and horniness pierced him like a stiletto. More often than not, though, he was too weary or too hungry or—most of the time—both to conjure up anything but a shadow of the feeling he knew he ought to have. The slow extinction here reminded him too much of the beginning of death.

  The other choice, of course, was an extinction not so slow. A man who’d had all he could take would try to sneak through the barbed wire without trying very hard to be sneaky. Or he’d go after a guard with an axe or a rock or his bare hands. And he’d wind up dead, most of the time without laying a glove on the Jeebie. Some wreckers said guards got bonuses for killing wreckers. That, Mike didn’t believe. Were it true, a lot more of the sorry so-and-sos with numbers on their clothes would have been holding up a lily.

  Even with all the snow on the ground, some optimists—or jerks, depending on how you looked at things—ran away when their work gang went out to the woods. Then, of course, the evening count was off. As soon as the count was off, the search was on. Mike had never yet heard of anybody who got away.

  Some people died trying. As long as the guards found the bodies, that didn’t worry them. A body made the count work, too. Some would-be escapees realized how far they were from any human beings who didn’t live in labor encampments. They gave themselves up. That also made the count work.

  As far as Mike could see, dying was better. The encampment had a punishment barracks next to the administration building. The cells there were too small to stand up or lie down in. The punishment barracks had no stoves for heat. Rations were bread and water—piss and punk, in the jailhouse slang that lay behind so much encampment lingo. They didn’t give you much, either. By the time they let you out, you were like an inner tube with a permanent slow leak.

  Mike yawned again. But what could you do? Not much, not so far as he could see. John Dennison had the best way. Take it one day at a time, get through that, and then do it again when reveille sounded the next morning. Mike leaned out of his bunk for a second. He couldn’t spot the carpenter from Wyoming, not in the dim red lamplight.

  A guard banged a steel bar hanging from a rope with a hammer. That was the lights-out signal. The wreckers blew out the kerosene lamps. Only the hot embers in the stove reminded the barracks that darkness wasn’t absolute. Mike thrust his hands into the pockets on his jacket to keep them as warm as he could. His eyelids came down like garage doors. He slept.

  * * *

  Hitler kept screaming about the Sudetenland. As far as Charlie could see, Hitler screamed about everything, like a three-year-old throwing a tantrum. Nobody’d paddled his fanny for him when he was a t
hree-year-old, so he still thought he could get away with that kind of nonsense. The Rhineland and the Anschluss with Austria sure hadn’t shown him he was wrong.

  The only way he wouldn’t jump on Czechoslovakia with both feet in hobnailed boots to get back his pet Germans was if somebody either stopped him or handed him those Germans on a silver platter. The countries that would have to stop him, if anyone did, were France and England. Neither had its heart in the job.

  Joe Steele and Leon Trotsky cheered them on from the sidelines. If war broke out, Red Russia and the USA wouldn’t have to get sucked into the fighting. Russia bordered neither Czechoslovakia nor the Third Reich; Romania, Poland, and the Baltic republics shielded Trotsky from consequences. And not only the broad Atlantic but also the Western European democracies stood between the United States and the Führer.

  Charlie thought it was funny that the President and the guy the papers called the Red Czar were both cheering for the same thing when they loathed each other so much. Here more than twenty years after the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik takeover, the United States still refused to recognize the Reds as Russia’s legitimate government. That pretty much meant the USA recognized nobody as overlord of the biggest country in the world. The real Czar and his family were dead, deader, deadest. Kerensky remained in exile in Paris with so many other Russian émigrés, but not even Joe Steele, Trotsky-hater though he was, could take Kerensky seriously.

  Charlie thought Joe Steele and Trotsky singing in chorus was funny till Daladier and Chamberlain, instead of fighting to save Czechoslovakia, did hand Hitler the Sudetenland on a silver platter at Munich. Hitler promised it would be his last territorial demand in Europe. If he was telling the truth, wunderbar. If he wasn’t, things didn’t look so good.

  But all that was a long way away. Charlie had other things on his mind, things closer to home. Sarah was teething, which left him and Esther both even lower on shuteye than usual. And a couple of more desks near him had nobody sitting behind them. Two reporters had vanished almost without a trace. Where were they now? Somewhere between New Mexico and North Dakota—that was as much as anybody knew.