Walk in Hell gw-2 Read online

  Carsten admired the deep blue sea. He admired the even bluer sky. He heartily approved of the tropic breezes that kept it from seeming as hot as it really was. The sun that shone brightly down from that blue, blue sky…

  Try as he would, he couldn’t make himself admire the sun. He was very, very fair, with golden hair, blue eyes, and a pink skin that turned red in any weather and would not turn tan for love nor money. When he was serving in San Francisco, he’d thought himself one step this side of heaven, heaven being defined as Seattle. Honolulu, however pretty it was, made a closer approximation to hell. He’d smeared every sort of lotion known to pharmacist’s mate and Chinese apothecary on his hide. None had done the least bit of good.

  “Far as I’m concerned, the damn limeys were welcome to keep the Sandwich Islands,” he muttered under his breath as he swabbed a stretch of the Dakota’s deck. He chuckled wryly. “Somehow, though, folks who outrank me don’t give a damn that I sunburn if you look at me cross-eyed. Wonder why that is?”

  “Wonder why what is?” asked Vic Crosetti, who was sanitizing the deck not far away and who slept in the bunk above Carsten’s. “Wonder why people who outrank a Seaman First don’t give a damn about him, or wonder why you look like a piece of meat the galley didn’t get done enough?”

  “Ahh, shut up, you damn lucky dago,” Sam said, more jealousy than rancor in his voice. Crosetti had been born swarthy. All the sun did to him was turn him a color just this side of Negro brown.

  “Hey, bein’ dark oughta do me some good,” Crosetti said. No matter what color he was, nobody would ever mistake him for a Negro, not with his nose and thick beard and arms thatched with enough black hair to make him look like a monkey.

  Sam dipped his mop in the galvanized bucket and got another stretch of deck clean. He’d been a sailor for six years now, and had mastered the skill of staying busy enough to satisfy officers and even more demanding chief petty officers without really doing anything too closely resembling work. Crosetti wasn’t going at it any harder than he was; if the skinny little Italian hadn’t been born knowing how to shirk, he’d sure picked up the fundamentals in a hurry after he joined the Navy.

  Carsten stared off to port. The destroyer Jarvis was frisking through the light chop maybe half a mile away, quick and graceful as a dolphin. Its wake trailed creamy behind it. The Jarvis could steam rings around the big, stolid Dakota. That was the idea: the destroyer could keep torpedo boats and submersibles away from the battlewagon. That the idea still had some holes in it was attested by the repairs just completed on the Dakota.

  Crosetti looked out over the water, too. “Might as well relax,” he said to Carsten. “Nobody in the Navy’s seen hide nor hair of the Japs or the limeys since we got bushwhacked the last time. Stands to reason they’re mounting patrols to make sure we ain’t goin’ near the Philippines or Singapore, same as we’re doing here.”

  “Stood to reason last time, too,” Sam answered. “Only thing is, the Japs weren’t being reasonable.”

  Crosetti cocked his head to one side. “Yeah, that’s so,” he said. “You got a cockeyed way of looking at things that makes a lot of sense sometimes, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Maybe,” Carsten said. “I’ve had one or two guys tell me that before, anyway. Now if there was some gal who’d tell me something like that, I’d have something. But hell, gals here, they ain’t gonna look past the raw meat.” He ran a sunburned hand down an equally sunburned arm.

  “If that’s the way you think, that’s what’ll happen to you, yeah,” Crosetti said. “It’s all in the way you go after ’em, you know what I’m saying? I mean, look at me. I ain’t pretty, I ain’t rich, but I ain’t lonesome, neither, not when I’m on shore. You gotta show ’em they’re what you’re after, and you gotta make ’em think you’re what they’re after, too. All how you go about it, and that’s a fact.”

  “Maybe,” Sam said again. “But the ones you really want to hook onto, they’re the ones who won’t bite for a line like that, too.”

  “Who says?” Crosetti demanded indignantly. Then he paused. “Wait a minute. You’re talkin’ about gettin’ married, for God’s sake. What’s the point to even worrying about that? You’re in the Navy, Sam. No matter what kind of broad you marry, you ain’t gonna be home often enough to enjoy it.”

  Carsten would have argued that, the only difficulty being that he couldn’t. So he and Crosetti talked about women for a while instead, no subject being better calculated to help pass time of a morning. Sam didn’t really know how much his bunkmate was making up and how much he’d really done, but he’d been blessed with either a hell of a good time or a hell of an imagination.

  An aeroplane buzzed by. Sam looked at it anxiously: following a Japanese aeroplane had got the Dakota torpedoed. But this one bore the American eagle. It had been out looking for enemy ships. Carsten guessed it hadn’t found any. Had it sent back a message by wireless telegraph, the fleet would have changed course toward any vessels presumptuous enough to challenge the USA in these waters.

  “You really think the English and the Japanese are just sitting back, waiting for us to come to them?” Sam asked Crosetti. “They could cause a lot of trouble if they took the Sandwich Islands back from us.”

  “Yeah, they could, but they won’t,” Crosetti said. “When the president declared war on England, I don’t figure he waited five minutes before he sent us sailing for Pearl Harbor. We caught the damn limeys with their drawers down. They hadn’t reinforced the place yet, and they couldn’t hold it against everything we threw at ’em. But we got more men, more ships there than you can shake a stick at. They want it back, they’re gonna hafta pay one hell of a bill.”

  “That’s all true,” Carsten said. “But now that we’ve got all those men there and we’ve got all those ships there, what are the limeys and the Japs going to think we’ll do with ’em? Sit there and hang on tight? Does that sound like Teddy Roosevelt to you? They’re going to figure we’re heading out toward Singapore and Manila sooner or later unless they do something about it. Even if they don’t land on Oahu, they’re going to do their damnedest to smash up the fleet, right?”

  Vic Crosetti scratched at one cheek while he thought. If Sam had done anything like that, he probably would have drawn blood from his poor, sunbaked skin. After a bit, Crosetti gave him a thoughtful nod. “Makes pretty good sense, I guess. How come the only stripe you got on your sleeve is a service mark? Way you talk, you oughta be a captain, maybe an admiral in one of those damnfool hats they wear.”

  Carsten laughed out loud. “All I got to say is, if they’re so hard up they make me an admiral, the USA is in a hell of a lot more trouble than the Japs are.”

  The grin that stretched across Crosetti’s face was altogether impudent. “I ain’t gonna argue with you about that,” he said, whereupon Sam made as if to wallop him over the head with his mop. They both laughed. Crosetti grew serious, though, unwontedly fast. “You do talk like an officer a lot of the time, you know that?”

  “Do I?” Carsten said. His fellow swabbie-at the moment, in the most literal sense of the word-nodded. Sam thought about it. “Can’t worry about chasing women all the damned time. You got to keep your eyes open. You look around, you start seeing things.”

  “I see a couple of lazy lugs, is what I see,” a deep voice behind them said. Sam turned his head. There stood Hiram Kidde, gunner’s mate on the five-inch cannon Carsten helped serve. He had plenty of service stripes on his sleeve, having been in the Navy for more than twenty years. He went on, “Go ahead, try and tell me you were workin’ hard.”

  “Have a heart, ‘Cap’n,’” Carsten said, using Kidde’s universal nickname. “Can’t expect us to be busy every second.”

  “Who says I can’t?” Kidde retorted. He was broad-faced and stocky, thick through the middle but not soft. He looked like a man you wouldn’t want to run into in a barroom brawl. From what Sam had seen of him in action, his looks weren’t deceiving.

  �
��Petty officers never remember what it was like when they were seamen,” Crosetti said. He looked sly. “’Course, it is kind of hard remembering back to when Buchanan was president.”

  Kidde glared at him. Then he shrugged. “Hell, I figured you were gonna say, when Jefferson was president.” Shaking his head, he walked on.

  “Got him good, Vic,” Carsten said. Crosetti grinned and nodded. They went back to swabbing the deck-still not working too hard.

  Jefferson Pinkard kissed his wife, Emily, as she headed out the door of their yellow-painted company house to go to the munitions plant where she’d been working the past year. “Be careful, honey,” he said. He meant that a couple of ways. For one, her usually fair skin was still sallow from the jaundice working with some of the explosives caused. For another, riding the trolley in Birmingham, as in a lot of cities in the Confederacy these days, was something less than safe.

  “I will,” she promised, as she did whenever he warned her. She tossed her head. These days, she’d cut her strawberry-blond hair short, to keep it from getting caught in the machinery with which she worked. Jeff missed the braid she’d worn halfway down her back. She kissed him again, a quick peck on the lips. “I got to go.”

  “I know,” he said. “You may get home a little before me tonight-I got to vote, remember.”

  “I know it’s today,” she agreed. She gave him a sidelong look. “One of these days, I reckon I’ll be voting, too, so you won’t have to remind me about it.”

  He sighed and shrugged. It wasn’t worth an argument. She’d come up with more radical ideas since she started working than in all the time they’d been married up till then. She hurried off toward the trolley. He stood in the doorway for half a minute or so, watching her walk. He would have forgiven a lot of radical ideas from a woman who moved her hips like that. It gave him something to look forward to when he came home from work.

  Because the company housing was only a few hundred yards away from the Sloss foundry, he didn’t have to leave as soon as his wife did to get to work on time. He went back in, finished his coffee and ham and eggs, set the dishes to soak in soapy water in the sink, grabbed his dinner pail, and then headed out the door himself.

  As he walked into the foundry, he waved to men he knew. There weren’t that many, not any more: most of the whites in the Sloss labor force had already been conscripted. Every time he opened his own mailbox, Pinkard expected to find the buff-colored envelope summoning him to the colors, too. He sometimes wondered if they’d lost his file.

  Along with the white men in overalls and caps came a stream of black men dressed the same way. Many of them, nowadays, were doing jobs to which they wouldn’t have dared aspire when the war began, jobs that had been reserved for whites till the front drained off too many. They still weren’t getting white men’s pay, but they were making more than they had before.

  Pinkard had been working alongside a Negro for a good long while now. Though he’d hated the notion at first, he’d since come to take it for granted-until the uprising had broken out the month before. Leonidas, the buck he was working with these days, had kept right on coming in, uprisings or no uprisings. That would have made Pinkard happier, though, had Leonidas shown the least trace of brains concealed anywhere about his person.

  He went into the foundry and out onto the floor. The racket, as always, was appalling. You couldn’t shout over it; you had to learn to talk-and to hear-under it. When it was cold outside, it was hot in there, hot with the heat of molten metal. When it was hot outside, the foundry floor made a pretty good foretaste of hell. It smelled of iron and coal smoke and sweat.

  Two Negroes waited for him: night shift had started hiring blacks well before they got onto the day crew. One was Agrippa, the other a fellow named Sallust, who didn’t have a permanent slot of his own but filled in when somebody else didn’t show up.

  Seeing Sallust made Jeff scratch his head. “Where’s Vespasian at?” he asked Agrippa. “I don’t ever remember him missin’ a shift. He ain’t shiftless, like that damn Leonidas.” He laughed at his own wit. Then, after a moment, he stopped laughing. Leonidas was shiftless, and, at the moment, late, too.

  Agrippa didn’t laugh. He was in his thirties, older than Pinkard, and right now he looked older than that-he looked fifty if a day. His voice was heavy and slow and sober as he answered, “Reason he ain’t here, Mistuh Pinkard, is on account of they done hanged Pericles yesterday. Pericles was his wife’s kin, you know, an’ he stayed home to help take care o’-things.”

  “Hanged him?” Pinkard said. “Lord!” Pericles had been in jail as an insurrectionist for months. Before that, he’d worked alongside the white man in the place Leonidas had now. He’d been a damn sight better at it than Leonidas, too. Pinkard shook his head. “That’s too damn bad. Maybe he was a Red, but he was a damn fine steel man.”

  “I tell Vespasian you say dat,” Agrippa said. “He be glad to hear it.” Sallust sent him a hooded glance. Pinkard had seen its like before. It meant something on the order of, Go on, tell the white man what he wants to hear. Very slightly, as if to say he meant his words, Agrippa shook his head.

  The two black men from the night shift left. Jeff got to work. He had to work harder without Leonidas around, but he worked better, too, because he didn’t have to keep an eye on his inept partner. One of these days, Leonidas would be standing in the wrong place, and they’d pour a whole great crucible full of molten metal down on his empty head. The only things left would be a brief stink of burnt meat and a batch of steel that needed resmelting because it had picked up too much carbon.

  Leonidas came strutting onto the floor twenty minutes late. “Lord, the girl I found me las’ night!” he said, and ran his tongue across his lips like a cat after a visit to a bowl of cream. He rocked his hips forward and back. He was always talking about women or illegal whiskey. A lot of men did that, but most of them did their jobs better than Leonidas, which meant their talk about what they did when they weren’t working was somehow less annoying.

  Pinkard tossed him a rake. “Come on, let’s straighten up the edges of that mold in the sand pit,” he said. “We don’t want the metal leaking out when they do the next pouring.”

  Leonidas rolled his eyes. He couldn’t have cared less what the metal did in the next pouring, and didn’t care who knew it. Without the war, he would have had trouble getting a janitor’s job at the Sloss works; as things were, he’d been out here with Pinkard for months. One more reason to hate the war, Jeff thought.

  He kept Leonidas from getting killed, and so wondered, as he often did, whether that made the day a success or a failure. Pericles, now, Pericles had been a good worker, and smart as a white man. But he’d also been a Red, and now he was a dead Red. A lot of the smart Negroes were Reds. Pinkard supposed that meant they weren’t as smart as they thought they were.

  When the quitting whistle blew, he headed out of the foundry with barely a good-bye to Leonidas. That was partly because he didn’t have any use for Leonidas and partly because he was heading off to vote and Leonidas wasn’t. Given what Leonidas used for brains, that didn’t break Jeff’s heart, but rubbing the black man’s nose in it at a time like this seemed less than clever.

  Sometimes a couple of weeks would go by between times when Jefferson Pinkard left company grounds. He spent a lot of time in the foundry, his friends-those who weren’t in the Army-lived in company housing as he did, and the company store was conveniently close and gave credit, even if it did charge more than the shops closer to the center of town.

  The polling place, though, was at a Veterans of the War of Secession hall a couple of blocks in from the edge of company land. He saw two or three burnt-out buildings as he went along. Emily had seen more damage from the uprising than he had, because she took the trolley every day. He shook his head. Steelworkers armed with clubs and a few guns had kept the rampaging Negroes off Sloss land; the black workers, or almost all of them, had stayed quiet. They knew which side their bread was butt
ered on.

  A line of white men, a lot of them in dirty overalls like Pinkard’s, snaked out of the veterans’ hall, above which flapped the Stars and Bars. He took his place, dug a stogie out of his pocket, lighted it, and blew out a happy cloud of smoke. If he had to move slowly for a bit, he’d enjoy it.

  By their white hair and beards, the officials at the polling place were War of Secession veterans themselves. “Pinkard, Jefferson Davis,” Jeff said when he got to the head of the line. He took his ballot and went into a booth. Without hesitation, he voted for Gabriel Semmes over Doroteo Arango for president; as Woodrow Wilson’s vice president, Semmes would keep the Confederacy on a steady course, while Arango was nothing but a wild-eyed, hot-blooded southerner. Jeff methodically went through the rest of the national, state, and local offices, then came out and pushed his ballot through the slot of the big wood ballot box.

  “Mr. Pinkard has voted,” one of the elderly precinct workers said, and Pinkard felt proud at having done his democratic duty.

  He walked home still suffused with that warm sense of virtue. If you didn’t vote, you had no one to blame but yourself for what happened to the country-unless, of course, you were black, or a woman. And one of these years, the way things looked, they’d probably let women have a go at the ballot box, no matter what he thought about it. He supposed the world wouldn’t end.

  Emily came out onto the porch as he hurried up the walk toward the house. “Hi, darlin’!” he called. Then he saw the buff-colored envelope she was holding.

  III

  Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid raised a forefinger. “Another cup of coffee for me here, if you please,” the Confederate cavalry officer said.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Nellie Semphroch said quickly, before her daughter Edna could. Edna glared at her. Half the reason Kincaid came into the coffeehouse the two women ran in occupied Washington, D.C., was to moon over Edna, his eyes as big and glassy as those of a calf with the bloat.