Walk in Hell (8 page)

“Yes, sir,” Cooper said, and disappeared.

Pompey spoke up: “I never done nothin’ bad to you, did I, Marse Jake?” His voice didn’t have the mincing lilt it had carried when he served as Captain Stuart’s man. He’d put on airs then, as if he were something special himself because of who his master was.

Before Featherston could answer, Potter’s voice cracked like a whiplash: “You keep your mouth shut until I tell you to speak.” Pompey nodded, which Jake thought wise. The major was not the sort of man to disobey, most especially not if you were in his power.

Will Cooper came back with Captain Stuart a few minutes later. The captain bore a strong resemblance to his famous father and even more famous grandfather, except that, instead of their full beards, he wore a mustache and a little tuft of hair under his lower lip, giving him the look of a seventeenth-century French soldier of fortune.

“Captain,” Major Potter said, as he had to Jake Featherston, “is this nigger here your man Pompey?”

“Yes, he’s my servant,” Stuart replied after a moment; he’d needed a second look to be certain, too. “What is the meaning of—?”

“Shut up, Captain Stuart,” Potter interrupted, as harshly as he had when Pompey spoke without his leave. Jake’s eyes widened. Nobody had ever addressed Jeb Stuart III that way in his presence. Jeb Stuart, Jr., wore wreathed stars on his collar tabs and was a mighty power in the War Department down in Richmond. But Potter sounded utterly sure of himself: “I’ll ask the questions around here.”

“Now see here, Major,” Stuart said. “I don’t care for your tone.”

“I don’t give a damn, Stuart,” Clarence Potter returned. “I was trying to sniff out Red subversion among the niggers attached to this army last year—
last year,
Stuart. And I got information that your nigger Pompey wasn’t to be trusted, and I wanted to interrogate him properly. Do you remember that?”

“I did nothing wrong,” Stuart said stiffly. But he looked like a man who had just taken a painful wound and was trying to see if he could still stand up.

“No, eh?” The major from Intelligence knocked him down with contemptuous ease. “You didn’t talk to your daddy the general? You didn’t have me overruled and the investigation quashed? You know better than that, I know better than that—and the War Department knows better than that, too.”

Till now, Jake had never seen Captain Stuart at a loss. Whatever else you said about him, he fought his guns as aggressively as any man would like, and showed a contempt for the dangers of the battlefield any hero of the War of Secession would have envied. But he’d never been threatened with loss of status and influence, only death or mutilation. Those latter two might have been easier to face.

“Major, I think you misunderstood—” he began.

“I misunderstood nothing, Captain,” Potter said coldly. “I was trying to do my duty, and you prevented that. If you’d been right, you’d have gotten away with it. But this nigger was taken in arms with a band of Red rebels, and every sign is that he wasn’t just a fighter. He was a leader in this conspiracy, and had been for a long time. If I’d questioned him last year—but no, you wouldn’t let that happen.” Potter’s headshake was a masterpiece of mockery.

“Pompey?” Stuart shook his head, too, but in amazement. “I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it.”

“Frankly, Captain, I don’t give a damn,” Potter said. “If I had my way, I’d bust you down to private, give you a rifle, and let you die gloriously charging a Yankee machine gun. Can’t have everything, I suppose, no matter how much damage your damn-fool know-it-all attitude cost your country. But your free ride to the top is gone, Stuart, and that’s a fact. If you drop dead at ninety-nine and stay in the Army all that time, you’ll be buried a captain.”

Silence stretched. Into it, Pompey said, “Marse Jeb, I—”

“Shut up,” Potter told him. “Get moving.” He shoved the Negro on his way. Jeb Stuart III stared after them. Jake Featherston studied his battery commander. He didn’t quite know what he thought. With Stuart under a cloud, life was liable to get harder for everybody: the captain’s name had been one to conjure with when it came to keeping shells in supply and such. On the other hand, as an overseer’s son Jake wasn’t sorry to watch an aristocrat taken down a peg.
More chances for me,
he thought, and vowed to make the most of them.

The USS
Dakota
steamed over the beautiful deep-blue waters of the Pacific, somewhere south and west of the Sandwich Islands. Sam Carsten was delighted to have the battleship back in fighting trim once more; she had been laid up in a Honolulu dry-dock for months, taking repairs after an unfortunate encounter with a Japanese torpedo.

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.”