American Front (62 page)

Vespasian shook his head. “No, suh, he ain’t sick,” he answered. He sounded tired unto death, not just because of the night’s work but also from a lifetime’s worth of weariness. A moment later, the words dragging out of him one by one, he went on, “No, suh, like I say, he ain’t sick. He in de jailhouse.”

“In the jailhouse? Pericles?” That caught Pinkard by surprise. “What the devil did he do? Get drunk and go after somebody with a busted bottle?” That didn’t sound like Pericles, a sober-sided young buck if ever there was one.

And Vespasian shook his head again. “No, suh. He do somethin’ like that, we can fix it. He in de jailhouse for—sedition.” He whispered the word, pronouncing it with exaggerated care.

“Sedition?” Now Jefferson Pinkard frankly stared. Vespasian was right, he thought. You could fix a charge of brawling against a black man easily enough—provided he hadn’t hit a white, of course. If he was a good worker, a couple of words from his boss to the police or the judge would get him off with a small fine, maybe just a lecture about keeping his nose clean. But sedition—that was another ball of wax.

Neither Vespasian nor Agrippa said much more about it. They waited till it was time for them to go off shift, then left in a hurry. Pinkard didn’t suppose he could blame them. When one of your own got into trouble, you didn’t spend a lot of time talking about that trouble with an outsider.

He had to start his shift by his lonesome, which left him too busy to think about anything else. About half an hour into the shift, a colored fellow who introduced himself as Leonidas joined him. Jeff hoped to high heaven Leonidas wouldn’t take Pericles’ place for good. He was strong enough, but he wasn’t very smart, and he didn’t remember from one minute to the next what Pinkard had told him. Jeff kept him from getting hurt or from messing up the job at least half a dozen times that morning. It was more nerve-racking than doing everything by himself would have been, because he never knew ahead of time when or how Leonidas would go wrong, and had to stay on his toes every second.

When the lunch whistle blew, Pinkard sighed with relief—half an hour when he wouldn’t have to worry. “See you at one, suh,” Leonidas said, taking his dinner bucket and heading off to eat with other Negroes.

“Yeah,” Pinkard said. He wondered if Leonidas could find some way to kill himself when he wasn’t anywhere near the foundry floor. He wouldn’t have been a bit surprised: the Negro was an accident waiting to happen, and probably could happen any old place.

Pinkard opened his own dinner pail. He had a chunk of cornbread and a couple of pieces of roasted chicken in there: leftovers from the night before. He’d just started to eat when a couple of middle-aged fellows in gray police uniforms came up to him. “You Jefferson Davis Pinkard?” asked the one who wore a matching gray mustache.

“That’s me,” Jeff said with his mouth full. He chewed, swallowed, and then asked more clearly, “Who’re you?”

“I’m Bob Mulcahy,” the policeman with the mustache answered. He pointed to his clean-shaven partner. “This here’s Bill Fitzcolville. We’re looking into the matter of a nigger named Pericles. Hear tell he’s been working alongside you a while.”

“That’s a fact,” Pinkard agreed, and took another bite of chicken. They weren’t going to hold things up on the floor because he was talking with police. If he didn’t feed his face, he’d have to go hungry till suppertime.

“This Pericles, he been a troublemaker, uppity, anything like that?” Mulcahy asked.

“Not hardly.” Pinkard shook his head. “Didn’t cotton to the notion of workin’ with a nigger, not even a little bit, I tell you. But it ain’t worked out too bad. He does his job—did his job, I guess I oughta say. This nigger Leonidas, buck they gave me instead of him, he ain’t fit to carry guts to a bear, doesn’t look like. But Pericles, he pulled his weight.”

Fitzcolville scribbled down his words in a notebook. Mulcahy shifted a good-sized chaw of tobacco from right cheek to left, then asked, “This nigger Pericles, he a smart fellow or a dumb one?”

“Nothin’ dumb about him,” Jeff answered. “You show him somethin’ once, you tell him somethin’ once, you don’t need to do it twice, on account of he remembers it and does it right his own self.”

“Uh-
huh
,” Fitzcolville grunted, as if Pinkard had said something altogether damning.

Mulcahy kept on with his questions, steadily, imperturbably: “He ever talk about anything
political
while the two of you was working together?”

“Political?” Pinkard paused for a bite of cornbread. “What the hell kind of politics is a nigger supposed to have? It ain’t like he can vote or nothin’.”

“Oh, niggers have politics, all right,” Mulcahy said. “
Red
politics, too damn many of ’em. This Pericles, he ever talk about how the war was going or how the war was changing things here back at home?”

Red politics. Emily had said something like that, and he hadn’t taken it seriously. The Birmingham police did, Jeff said, “We was talkin’ one time about how, after Herb Wallace got hisself killed in the war, the Sloss folks threw his widow out of factory housing here. Pericles didn’t reckon that was fair.”

“Uh-
huh
,” Fitzcolville said again, and scrawled more notes.

“You gonna call him a Red for that?” Pinkard demanded. “You better call me a Red right at the same time, ’cause I think it stinks like shit, too, what they done to Daisy. Here her husband’s gone and got killed for the sake of the fat cats up in Richmond, and they throw her out of her place like a dog. You call that the way things oughta be?”

He’d gone too far. He could see it by the way the two policemen stared at him—stared through him, really. “Maybe you
are
a Red,” Mulcahy said, “but I doubt it. Most of the ones who are have too much sense to run off at the mouth like you do. ’Sides, white men can pretty much say what they please—it’s a free country. Niggers, now, we gotta watch niggers.”

“I been watchin’ this crazy damnfool nigger Leonidas every goddamn minute of the mornin’ shift,” Pinkard said. “You give me a choice between him and Pericles, I’ll take Pericles every goddamn time. When he’s here, he does his job. I don’t know what he does when he ain’t here, and I don’t care.”

“That’s not your job,” Mulcahy said. “It is our job, and we’ve found this nigger tied up in all sorts of stuff niggers got no business sticking their noses into.”

“Whatever else he is, he’s a steel man.” Jeff answered. “Steel he’s helped make, I reckon it’s done more to hurt the damnyankees than anything else he’s done has hurt us.”

The two policemen looked at each other. Maybe they hadn’t thought of it like that. Maybe, too, they just didn’t care for the idea of a white man speaking up for a black. That second maybe soon proved the true one, for Mulcahy said, “You like that nigger pretty well, don’t you?”

Pinkard surged to his feet. “Get out of here,” he said, his voice thick with anger and cornbread both. Both policemen gave back a step, too. The foundry floor was no place for anyone unused to it to feel comfortable, either. Jeff had an advantage, and he used it. “You got a lot o’ damn nerve, you know that? Callin’ me a nigger-lover like I ain’t a proper white man. Go on, get the hell out.”

“Didn’t mean it like that, Pinkard,” Bob Mulcahy said. “Just trying to get to the bottom of who all this damn nigger’s been messing with.”

“He ain’t messed much with me, and he know what he’s doin’, too, not like this lamebrained halfwit they saddled me with now that you took him away,” Pinkard said, “Pretty soon, way things look, they’re gonna drag my ass off to war—hell of a lot o’ white men gone already. You want to keep makin’ steel, it’s gonna be niggers doin’ the work, mostly. Maybe you ought to think about stuff like that a little more often, ’fore you start haulin’ hardworkin’ bucks off to the jailhouse for no reason at all.”

“We’ve
been
thinking about it,” Bill Fitzcolville said, proving he did have more words in him than
uh-huh
. “Don’t like the answers we get, neither.”

“But this here Pericles, we got him dead to rights,” Mulcahy said. “Found all kinds of subversive literature at his house: Marx and Engels and Lincoln and Haywood and I don’t know who all else. Niggers ain’t allowed to have that kind of stuff. He’ll spend a while cooling off in jail, that’s for damn sure. We’re trying to track down how much damage he’s done, is what we’re doing here.”

“Like I said, he ain’t done me any damage I know of,” Pinkard said. The policemen shrugged and left. But he didn’t think that meant he was going to get Pericles back any time soon. He’d just have to go and see if he couldn’t turn Leonidas into something a little bit like a steelworker. The odds were against him; he could see that much already. He sighed. Life could be a real pisser sometimes, no two ways about it.

XVI

Captain Elijah Franklin stuck out his hand. “We’re going to miss you here, Moss,” he said. The pilots and observers in Jonathan Moss’ squadron all nodded. So did the mechanics. Moss knew why Lefty would miss him: no more easy pickings at the poker table.

“I’ll miss you, too, sir, and everybody else here,” he said, “But I’ve been sort of a fifth wheel ever since Percy got hurt, and when this chance to transfer came along, it looked too good to pass up.”

“Fighting scouts? I should say so,” Stanley McClintock said. He twiddled with one of the waxed spikes of his mustache. “You never did like the idea of company in your aeroplane, did you?”

“Why, darling, I didn’t know you’d miss me
that
way,” Moss said archly. The laugh he got let him slide over the fact that McClintock had a point. He’d been the one who’d complained longest and hardest about the introduction of the two-seater Wright 17s. In the old Super Hudsons, you had nobody but yourself to blame if you made a mistake up there. The new fighting scouts were like that, too. You did what you did and, if you did it right, you lived and you got to keep on doing it. If not, it was your own damn fault, no one else’s.

People crowded round him, pressing chocolate and flasks of brandy and whiskey into his pockets. They slapped him on the back and wished him luck. McClintock wasn’t the only one who looked jealous. If you did your job in a two-seater, your observer took his pictures and you came home and got them developed. If you did your job in a fighting scout, you shot down enemy aeroplanes, and soldiers in the trenches shouted their heads off for you. So did reporters. If you shot down enough enemy aeroplanes, people back home shouted their heads off for you.

“Come on, let’s go,” Lefty said. Moss shouldered his duffel bag and climbed into the Ford that did duty as squadron transport. Unlike models that came off the assembly line, this one had been modified to boast an electric starter button on the dashboard. Lefty mashed it with his thumb. The engine thundered to life. As they rolled away from the aerodrome, Lefty handed Moss a pair of dice. “You ever get in a hot crap game where you need some sevens in a hurry, these are the babies to have.”

Moss stared down at the ivory cubes in the palm of his hand. Lefty doubtless meant them for a thoughtful going-away present. They made him thoughtful, all right. He thought about what a profitable time Lefty had had ever since the squadron went into Canada.

As if reading his mind, the mechanic said, “I never use ’em myself, and nobody’ll ever be able to prove I do. Same goes for poker, Lieutenant, in case you’re wondering. Know what you’re doing and you’ll never need to cheat.”

By which, he was saying Moss didn’t know what he was doing at cards or dice. He probably knew what he was talking about, too.

The Ford rattled along. The road was nothing to boast about, which made the motorcar’s big wheels and high ground clearance all the more valuable. Nothing in American-held Ontario was anything to boast about, though. Every inch had been fought over, every inch wrecked. What had been little farms by the side of the road were now cratered ground and rubble, with hardly a house standing. Here and there, skinny people came out of ruins to glower at the automobile as it rolled past.

Lefty pulled off the road and onto a new track made by U.S. vehicles after the war had passed this stretch of Canada. The fighting scouts, having shorter range than the observation aeroplanes, were based closer to the front. The strip on which they took off and landed had so much fresh dirt on it, it had pretty obviously been shelled not long before, the land then releveled by tractors or more likely by lots of men working hard.

Alongside the strip sat the Martin single-deckers. Next to the bulky Wilburs he’d been flying, they looked little and low and fast. Next to the Curtiss Super Hudsons, pushers with more wires and struts than you could shake a stick at, they looked like something out of the 1930s, maybe the 1940s, not merely next year’s model.

“You got to hand it to Kaiser Bill’s boys,” Lefty said, stamping on the none too effective brake to bring the Ford to a halt (when you needed to stop in a hurry, stamping on the reverse was a better idea). Puffy summer clouds drifted lazily across the sky. “They know how to make aeroplanes, no two ways about it.”

“Yeah,” Moss said with a small sigh. The Wright brothers might have flown the first aeroplane in 1904, but the machines had evolved faster in Europe than in the USA. The single-decker was a straight knockoff of the Fokker monoplanes now flying above France and Belgium. Also a knockoff was the machine gun mounted above the engine, almost the only bulge marring the smooth lines of the aeroplane. “Good to know somebody finally figured out how to build a decent interrupter gear. Even if it wasn’t us, we get to borrow it.”

“That’s right, Lieutenant,” Lefty said. “Chew the hell out of the Canucks and the limeys for me, you hear?” He stuck out his hand. Moss shook it, then grabbed his duffel bag and jumped down from the Ford. Lefty took his foot off the brake, gave the motorcar more throttle with the hand control, and
putt-putted
away.

Shouldering the bag, Moss made for the canvas tents that housed his new squadron. Such arrangements were all very well now, with the weather warm, but could you live in a tent in the middle of winter? Maybe the war would be over and he wouldn’t have to find out. He clicked tongue between teeth. He’d believed nonsense like that the year before. He was a tougher sell now.

Somebody came out of the closest tent and spotted him. “Moss, isn’t it?” the man called with a friendly wave. “Welcome to the monkey house.”

“Thank you, Captain Pruitt,” Moss said, letting the bag fall so he could salute. Shelby Pruitt lazily returned the gesture. Moss had already gathered he’d have to get used to a new style here; Captain Franklin, his CO since the start of the war, had been the sort who dotted every i and crossed every t. Pruitt didn’t seem the sort to make much fuss over little things, as long as the big ones were all right.

Now he said, “Come along with me. We’ll give you someplace or other where you can lay your weary head.” He didn’t particularly look like a flier—he was short and dark and on the dumpy side—and his southwestern accent made him sound almost like a Reb. When you watched him move, though, you got the idea he always knew exactly where every part of him was at every moment, and that was something a pilot certainly needed.

He led Moss along the row of green-gray canvas shelters till he flipped up one flap. “Ah, thought so,” he said, “We’ve got room at the inn here.”

Peering in, Moss saw the tent held four cots, the space around one of them conspicuously bare and empty. One airman sat on the edge of his bed, writing a letter. He looked up at Moss and said, “You’re the new fish, are you? I’m Daniel Dudley—they mostly call me Dud.” He shrugged resignedly. He had a pale, bony face and a grin that was engaging even if a little cadaverous.

“Jonathan Moss,” Moss said, and shook hands. He set his gear down on the empty cot. Pruitt nodded to him, then went off on whatever other business he had. Moss understood his offhandedness: he wouldn’t really be part of the squadron till he’d flown his first mission.

Dudley made a small production out of sticking the cap back onto his fountain pen. That let him effectively do nothing till Captain Pruitt was out of earshot. Then he asked, “What do you think of Hardshell so far?”

Moss needed a moment to grasp the nickname. “The captain, you mean?” he asked, to make sure he had it right. When Dudley didn’t say no, he went on, “He seems all right to me. Friendlier than the fellow I’m leaving, that’s clear. What do
you
think of him?”

“He’ll do, no doubt about it.” Dudley took a panatela out of a teakwood cigar case. He offered the case to Moss, who shook his head. The pilot bit off the end of his cigar, lighted it, and sighed with pleasure.

“Who else sleeps here?” Moss asked, pointing to the other two cots.

“Tom Innis and Luther Carlsen,” the other pilot answered “Good eggs, both of ’em. Luther’s a big blond handsome guy, and thinks he’s a wolf. If the girls thought so, too, he’d do pretty well for himself.”

“That’s true about a lot of guys who think they’re wolves,” Moss said, to which Dudley nodded. Moss turned serious in a hurry, though. “What can you tell me about the Martin that I won’t have picked up from training on it?”

“Good question,” Dudley said. A wide smile only made him look more skull-like than ever, but he couldn’t help that. “We’ve just been flying Martins a month or so ourselves. They don’t have a lot of vices that we’ve found: good speed, good view, good aerobatics.” He paused. “Oh. There is one thing.”

“What’s that?” Moss leaned forward.

“Every once in a while, the interrupter gear will get a little bit out of alignment.”

“How do you find out about that?”

“You shoot your own prop off and you shoot yourself down,” Daniel Dudley answered. His face clouded. “That’s what happened to Smitty, the guy who used to have that cot. If it does happen to you, the beast is nose-heavy. You have to watch it in your glide.”

“Thanks. I’ll remember.” Moss started unpacking his bag. “When do you suppose they’ll let me up in one?”

“Tomorrow, unless I’m all wet,” Dudley answered. “Hardshell doesn’t believe in letting people sit around and get rusty.”

He was right. Captain Pruitt sent Moss up as tail-end Charlie on a flight of four Martins—himself and his tentmates—the very next morning. His scout aeroplane was factory-new, still stinking of the dope that made the fabric of wings and fuselage impenetrable to air. But the mechanics here had modified it as they had the other three Martins of the flight: by mounting on the left side of the wooden cockpit frame a rearview mirror like those on some of the newest model motorcars. Moss found that a very clever idea, one that would keep his neck from developing a swivel mount.

The rotary engine kicked over at once when a mechanic spun the prop. Castor-oil fumes from the exhaust blew in his face. The in-line engine in the Wright he had flown had been petroleum-lubricated, which had made his bowels happier than they were liable to be now.

One after another, the four single-deckers took off. Moss tried to get a handle on Innis and Carlsen by the way they flew their aeroplanes; he hadn’t had much chance to talk with them the day before. Carlsen was always exactly where he was supposed to be in the flight, which Dud Dudley led. Captain Franklin would have approved of that precise, finicky approach. Innis, on the other hand, was all over the place. Whether that bespoke imagination or carelessness remained to be seen.

Up to the front they flew. Dudley swung the nose of his Martin so that he flew parallel to the front, on the American side of the line. The rest of the flight followed, Innis frisking a little, up and down, from side to side. They were under orders as strict as Captain Pruitt could make them not to cross over to enemy-held territory no matter what. Neither the Canadians nor the British yet had a working interrupter gear, and nobody in the USA wanted to hand them one on a platter.

Flying a combat patrol was nothing like being trained on a new aeroplane. Moss had discovered that when he’d made the transition from the Super Hudson to the Wright 17, and now found out all over again. When you were in training, you were concentrating on your aeroplane and learning its idiosyncrasies. When you were up here on patrol, all you cared about was the other fellow’s aeroplane, with your own reduced in your thoughts to a tool you’d use to shoot him down.

He spotted the Avro in that newfangled rearview mirror. It had probably been flying a reconnaissance mission on the American side of the line, and was now heading back toward Canadian territory with its pictures or sketches or whatever it had. Moss peeled off from the flight and gave his Martin single-decker all the power it had as he raced toward the Avro.

Its pilot spotted him and tried to bank away, which also gave the observer a better shot at him. He dove and then climbed rapidly. All he had to do was point his aeroplane’s nose at the enemy and squeeze the firing button on his machine gun. He’d practiced shooting during training, but having the bullets miss the prop still seemed half like black magic to him.

The Avro was still trying to maneuver into a position from which it could effectively defend itself. He kept firing, playing the stream of bullets as if they were water from a hose. All at once, the Avro stopped dodging and nosed toward the ground. As he had with his first kill, back when the war was young, he must have put the pilot out of action. The observer kept shooting long after he had any hope of scoring a hit. Martin respected his courage and wondered what he was thinking about during the long dive toward death.

He looked around to see if he could spot any more British or Canadian aeroplanes. He saw none, but all his flightmates were close by. He hadn’t noticed them coming to his aid; he’d been thinking about the Avro, nothing else.

Dudley, Innis, and Carlsen were waving and blowing him kisses. He waved back. He might not have fully belonged in his new squadron the day before, but he did now.

The U.S. Army sergeant doing paymaster duty shoved a dollar and a half across the table at Cincinnatus and checked off his name on the list. “You get the bonus again today,” he said. “That’s twice now this week, ain’t it? Don’t usually see Lieutenant Kennan actin’ so free and easy with the government’s money.”

Don’t usually see him give a Negro anything close to an even break
, was what he meant. Cincinnatus had no doubt that was true. But—for a white man, for a U.S. soldier—the paymaster seemed decent enough. Figuring he owed him an answer, Cincinnatus said, “Whatever you do, you got to do it as good as you can.”

“Yeah, that ain’t a bad way to look at things,” the sergeant agreed. “But you made Kennan notice how good you’re doin’ it—you got a black hide and you manage that, you got to be doin’ awful damn fine.”

“My wife’s gonna have a baby,” Cincinnatus said. “Extra half-dollar now and then, it means a lot.” He cut it short after that; no point to getting the laborers in line behind him angry.