American Front gw-1 Read online

  She drew herself straighten All right. Life wasn't simple. Up till now, she'd always revelled in complication, and profited from it, too. Nostalgia belonged to the last century. If you didn't look ahead, you were in trouble.

  Then all such worries vanished from her head. Here came the motorcar, kicking up a cloud of dust from the red-dirt path that led up to the mansion. The Negro driver stopped the automobile, leaped out of it, and got out Tom Colleton's bags. Then he opened the door to the rear seat and let out Tom, who handed him a silver coin that sparkled in the sun. Tom picked up his own bags and carried them to Marshlands' front door.

  He wouldn't have done that before the war started, Anne thought, and then, an instant later, with concern more maternal than sisterly, He's gotten so thin.

  She hurried to the door. Scipio somehow got there ahead of her; he shared with cats the ability to leave later than you did but to arrive sooner anyhow, and without seeming to have crossed the intervening space. He opened the door, letting in the warm May air, and said, "Welcome home, Captain Colle-" He stopped, for a moment looking quite humanly surprised. Tom Colleton wore a single star on each collar tab. Scipio corrected himself: "Welcome home, Major Colleton."

  Anne threw herself into her brother's arms. He dropped his bags and squeezed her tight. After the joyous hellos and I-love-yous and good-to-see-yous, Anne said indignantly, "You didn't tell me you've been promoted again."

  Tom shrugged. "We've seen a lot of casualties. Somebody has to step up and do the work." When he'd joined the Army, bare days after war broke out, he'd put a fancy plume in his hat and gone off gaily, like a knight heading out on a Crusade. Now he sounded both tired and altogether matter-of-fact about his business, more like a cabinetmaker than a cavalier.

  He looked tired, too. His forehead had lines that hadn't been there the year before-he was eighteen months younger than Anne-and he carried dark circles under his eyes. His cheeks were hollow; a long, pink scar seamed one of them. Hesitantly, Anne reached up to touch it. "You didn't tell me about this, either."

  Her brother shrugged again. "Got kissed by a shell fragment. Battalion doctor's assistant sewed it up. I didn't lose any duty time, so I didn't think it was worth talking about."

  "You've changed," Anne said, perhaps more wonderingly than she should have. The young man who'd gone off to war had been the little brother she'd always known: witty, easygoing, not too effectual-certainly not effectual enough to want to put in any work at operating Marshlands when his sister seemed happy enough doing it all. And that had suited Anne fine; she rejoiced in the power it gave her. But when she looked into the eyes of the lean near-stranger who was her own flesh and blood, she didn't know what she saw. It flustered her. Tom had always been so easy to read, so predictable.

  Scipio scooped up the bags. "I shall put these in your room, sir," he said.

  "My room," Tom echoed, as if the phrase were in a foreign language. Slowly, he nodded. "Yes, go ahead and do that, Scipio." The butler carried the bags into the mansion. Tom took one step to follow him, then stopped, still outside. "Very strange," he murmured. "Unbelievable."

  "What is?" Anne asked. She wasn't used to being unable to follow his train of thought.

  "That all this"-Tom waved at the Marshlands mansion-"and all this"-the next wave encompassed the many square miles of the Marshlands estate-"is mine-part mine; excuse me, dear sister. And excuse me for sounding not quite like my old self. For most of the past nine months, my horizons have been limited to a hole in the ground and whether there'd be enough beans in the pot for my men and me. Coming back to this is like falling asleep and dreaming you've gone to heaven."

  "It should be like waking from a nightmare," Anne said. "This is where you live. This is where you belong." At least for as long as you don't get in my hair while you're here. You never used to. Will you now? Harder to tell.

  Her brother's mouth set in a hard line: another expression she'd never seen on his face till now. "I'm going back to the front in three days' time," he said, his voice flat. "Till the war is done, this is the dream. And when the war is done, it's liable to disappear like a dream, too."

  "What are you talking about?" Of all the people in the world, Anne should have been able to keep up with-to keep ahead of-her brother. Ever since they were tiny, she'd been the clever one, the dominant one, in the family. She'd taken that so much for granted, it had never occurred to her things might change.

  "Never mind." Tom stepped past her, into the hallway. His grin was more like the one she'd known, though not quite the same. "Feels good to get out of the sun." He kept on walking, and looked up toward the second-floor galleries. Like the grin, his chuckle had something new in it-restraint, maybe. Pointing, he said, "Still got the funny pictures hanging on the walls, do you?"

  "Some of them," Anne said; he'd teased her about the exhibition ever since she'd had the idea for it. "Marcel Duchamp is still here, too."

  "Is he?" Tom's lips thinned again. "Do we have any liquor left, and how many yellow babies are due?" That wasn't teasing, it was cold contempt, one more thing she wasn't used to hearing from him. That it matched her own feelings about the Frenchman was, next to the unaccustomed harshness, a small thing.

  She decided taking Tom literally might be the best way to defuse the situation: "There's enough whiskey left for you to have a drink, if you want one." When her brother nodded, she called for Scipio. As usual, he answered the call faster than should have been possible. "Two whiskeys over ice," she told him. He bowed and disappeared again.

  "Ice," Tom said. "Saw plenty of that this past winter. Not in my drink, though." He shook himself, as if realizing at last he really was away from the trenches of the Roanoke valley. "I heard from Jacob not long before I hopped on the train down here. He's well, or was then."

  "I got a letter from him just the other day," Anne answered. "He said it looks like the Yankees are up to something in Kentucky, but nobody seems to know what it is or when the storm breaks."

  "Won't be long now," Tom said. "Roads should all be dry. They can build their supply dumps up to as big as they want them, put their reserves in place. As soon as they're ready, they'll hit us." He spoke again like someone discussing the ins and outs of a business he knew well. Musingly, he went on, "Show probably would have started there already if they hadn't had to pull men to deal with the revolt in Utah."

  Anne nodded. "Between the Mormons and the Socialists, they have so much trouble inside their own borders, it hurts them when they try to fight us." She spoke with vindictive relish. Scipio returned then, two tumblers full of amber whiskey gleaming on a silver tray. Ice clinked gently. Anne took one drink, Tom the other. She said, "It's not like that here, thank God. We all stand behind the cause."

  To her amazement, her brother threw back his head and laughed. "This is the dream, all right," he said, and knocked back his whiskey with a flick of the wrist. "You're not living in the real world, that's certain."

  Being the object of her brother's scorn angered her. "Who in the Confederate States throws bombs and rises up against the government?" she demanded, and then answered her own question: "No one, that's who."

  "No?" Tom set the tumbler down hard on the tray Scipio still held. "These past few months, they've executed a couple of dozen niggers in my division alone. Reds, every last one of 'em, out-and-out Reds. Worse than plain old Socialists and Mormons put together, if you ask me."

  "That's not the same as-" Anne began.

  Her brother cut her off, one more thing he wouldn't have done-wouldn't have dared do-before the war. "And that's just in my division alone. Others, it's been worse. And God only knows how deep the rot has spread, away from the front."

  "I've heard that. I don't believe it," Anne said firmly. "It's not a problem here, I can tell you that much."

  When she used that tone of voice, it was supposed to make Tom shut up and knuckle under. It always had in the past. It didn't any more. "Everybody says the same thing-till they get their noses rubbed in it
," he told her. "A plantation this size, if there's not a Red cell somewhere on it, I'll eat my hat." He pointed to the brown felt he'd hung just inside the door, and turned a hard and thoughtful gaze on Scipio.

  That was too much for Anne. "Tom, stop this at once, or you'll make me sorry you've come home," she said. "Scipio has raised both of us since we were babies. The idea that he could be a Red-it's disgusting. That's the only word I can find for it."

  "Things change." Tom Colleton swung back toward her. He leaned forward a little. The implied threat of attack made Anne take half a step back before she realized what she'd done. And her brother did attack, though only with words: "You're the one who's always going on about change. It's not as much fun as you make it out to be, not all the time it isn't. And if you think it can't happen right here at Marshlands, you're deliberately blinding yourself."

  Anne stared, first at him, then at Scipio. Her brother's face was grim and intent. Scipio showed nothing of what he thought, but then, he never did. Anne finished her whiskey, then, even harder than her brother had done, slammed the tumbler down onto the tray the butler was holding. A chunk of ice jumped out, leaving a little wet trail as it skidded across the polished silver surface.

  "Get me another drink, Scipio." She kept her voice low, but it was brittle with fury even so. The butler hurried away. When he came back a moment later with the second whiskey, she drank it fast, too. She could feel the liquor building a transparent wall between her and the world, but even that numbing could not disguise the fact that her kid brother's homecoming, far from being the celebration she'd expected, looked more like a disaster.

  Percy Stone was dressed in his flying togs and had his camera by his side, but that hadn't kept him from sitting in on a poker game while he waited for Jonathan Moss to finish getting ready to fly. By the expression on his face, it hadn't kept him from losing money to Lefty the mechanic, either. He was in good company there; almost everybody rash enough to sit down with Lefty ended up sadder, if not necessarily wiser.

  "Oh, thank God-duty calls," Stone said when Moss came in. "I think I'd sooner go up there and get shot at than stay here and get skinned." Amid laughter, he studied his cards, then tossed a big silver coin into the pot. "Raise a dollar."

  "And other one." The mechanic named Byron tossed in a folded bill.

  Two other players threw in their hands with various noises of disgust. Lefty said, "I'll see those and bump it another three." He made his five dollars with a gold half-eagle.

  "That's enough for me," Stone said, and folded. Byron looked harassed, but called-and promptly regretted it. Chuckling, Lefty scooped up the pot.

  "I could have told you not to play cards with Lefty," Moss said as Stone picked up the camera and the two fliers walked out to their Wright 17. "As a matter of fact, I have told you not to play cards with Lefty."

  "It's the Socialist in me," Stone answered. Moss let out a questioning grunt. The observer explained: "I make more money than Lefty does, but at the poker table we redistribute the wealth." He shook his head. "I wouldn't mind it so much if the redistribution went my way a little more often."

  Moss blew air out through his lips with a snuffling noise, like a horse. "I'm a Democrat," he said. "Always have been, probably always will be. If I earn something, I figure it's mine, and I want to keep it. I don't much like riots, either, so Socialism was a hard sell for me even before the Remembrance Day horrors."

  "That was pretty bad, if you believe what you read in the newspapers," Stone agreed. He lifted the camera into his cockpit, then climbed in after it. Once he'd set it in the mount, though, he added, "Of course, if you believe what you read in the newspapers, we've already won the war four or five times by now, which does make me wonder what the two of us are doing, going up in this contraption." He slapped the doped linen fabric covering the side of the fuselage. It was taut, and thumped like a drum.

  He had such a disarming manner to him that even political arguments that could have turned hot and heavy in a hurry got defused. "Earning our salaries, so you can give yours to the ground crew," Moss replied, scrambling into the forward cockpit.

  "You have less faith in my card-playing than I do, and I didn't think that was possible," Stone said. He whacked the pilot on the shoulder with a length of rubber tubing to which a cheap tin funnel had been attached. "Stick this up to your ear and let's see how it does."

  The rubber tubing was of the sort that ran from the speedometer to the pitot tube out at the far end of the wing. Moss undid the funnel and stuck it through one ear hole of his flying helmet, then fixed it to the tube again. Stone tossed him another length of rubber tubing with funnel. That one Moss left in his lap; his observer would have the other end pressed to one ear.

  Stone's voice sounded metallically in his ear: "Can you hear me all right?"

  Moss spoke into the funnel of the second tube: "Yeah, sure, down here when it's quiet. How we'll do at eight thousand feet with the engine going is liable to be a different ball of wax." He chuckled. "This isn't a whole hell of a lot fancier than tying a couple of tin cans to a string, the way we did when we were kids."

  "Sure isn't," Stone agreed. "They don't pay off for looks, though, not in this man's army they don't. If we can make it work, somebody else'll make it pretty, sooner or later."

  The ground crew men came out to help them get the two-seater started. Lefty grinned through gibes about bulges in his trousers that had more to do with his financial endowments than his masculine ones. He spun the prop. The Wright's motor buzzed to life at once.

  Tachometer, gasoline gauge, gasoline-flow indicator, gasoline feed system pressure indicator, oil gauge, oil-pressure gauge, radiator temperature indicator-all the instruments were good. Moss waved to the ground crew men. Byron and another mechanic, a fellow named Edwin, pulled the chocks away from the wheels. Moss advanced the throttle. The Wright 17 bounced down the airstrip. After enough bounces, it didn't come back to earth.

  Percy Stone's voice sounded in his ear: "Can you hear me?"

  He shifted the other tube to his mouth. "I sure can. Can you hear me?" When the observer assured him he could, Moss went on, "Say, this is great. We can really talk to each other now." Percy Stone promptly started singing " America the Beautiful." Moss made a hasty amendment: "Maybe it's not so great after all."

  Both young men laughed, pleased with their ingenuity. More seriously now, Stone said, "We have to spread the word about this. Biggest problem two-seaters have is that the pilot and observer can't talk back and forth."

  "I've seen that with us working together," Moss agreed. "Now that we know pitot tubing makes a good speaking tube, we could come up with better earpieces and mouthpieces than these funnels, I bet. Playing with them makes me feel like I'm home from school on summer vacation."

  "That's not bad," Stone said. "Better than thinking about this like it is school, anyway. If you flunk here, they don't make you take the class over. You get expelled-for good."

  "Yeah," Moss said; it wasn't anything on which he cared to dwell. He peered ahead. "Front's coming up. Get ready for some hate."

  Land over which the American and Canadian armies had already fought was barren, chewed to shreds, as if an insane giant had gnawed on it for a while and then, deciding it wasn't to his taste, spit it out again. Over the front itself, smoke and dust rose high into the air, a legacy of the shelling the two sides kept trading. Percy Stone said, "You'd think we'd have fired enough shells by now to kill all the Canadians there are, by hitting them over the head if no other way."

  "Don't I wish we had," Moss said, "them and the Englishmen both." British reinforcements for the dominion hadn't come in any great numbers, but the ones who had come had stiffened the Canucks' will to keep fighting in spite of being outnumbered and outgunned by the USA. And, in spite of being outnumbered and outgunned, the Canadians were a long way from out for the count.

  As soon as the Wilbur flew over the front, the Canucks proved that. They gave the American aeroplane all the h
ate anyone could want. Black puffs of smoke filled the sky all around the Wright machine. The ones that burst close sounded like big, mean dogs barking: waugh! waugh! waugh!

  "Nice to know they love us," Stone said. Moss laughed. He sped up and slowed down and turned now off to the left of his course, now off to the right, all in an effort to keep the gunners down on the ground from putting a lucky shell right where the aeroplane would be. He had never been sure dodging and changing speed did that much to improve the odds, but they couldn't hurt.

  "The front hasn't moved much for a while," he said sadly. He'd expected things to pick up with the coming of spring, but it hadn't happened yet. He knew, from seeing the mud back at the aerodrome, how thick and clinging it was. Trying to advance in it was anything but easy. The Canuck and British offensive south from Winnipeg had started off alarmingly well, but the enemy proved to have no easier time advancing through muddy, broken country than did the Americans.

  Once he flew past the reach of American artillery, the towns and rich farmlands of southern Ontario gave him much more attractive things to view than he'd had till then. The farms glowed green with early growth: the Canucks not yet at the front were getting in what crops they could.

  Even the farmlands, though, bore scars. Looking down and seeing the same thing, Percy Stone said, "They're digging in for a long fight." Digging in the Canadians and British certainly were. Trench lines drew dark brown furrows across green fields every mile or so, with zigzag communication trenches running back from one set to the next. Just as in the Niagara Peninsula, if the U.S. Army blasted them out of one position, they'd fall back to the next and keep on fighting.

  "They fight hard, too," Moss said, giving the foe grudging respect. "I go to bed every night getting down on my knees and thanking God for not making me an infantryman."