Drive to the East (11 page)

“It’s good for both,” Gustafson said, which quelled that in a hurry.

Some of the barmaids were white, others Oriental. They were all female, and wore low-cut white blouses and short black skirts. Seeing them reminded George how long it had been since he’d set eyes on a woman, let alone touched one. He stared down at his glass of beer. He didn’t want to be unfaithful to Connie—but he didn’t want to go without loving, either.

The facsimile of loving you could buy for money wasn’t as good as the real thing. You didn’t need to be an egghead to figure that out. It was a lot better than nothing, though. Was it enough better than nothing to make him decide to do it?
That’s the question,
he thought, and chewed on it as hard as Hamlet had grappled with
To be or not to be.

He didn’t have to choose right away. They weren’t going anywhere for a while. Some of the sailors had already knocked back their whiskeys. They were waving their glasses for refills. George didn’t feel like drinking that fast. If he drank that fast, he’d get drunk. If he got drunk, he’d do something stupid. He could feel that coming like a rash. And if he did something stupid and he wasn’t lucky, he’d end up with a goddamn rash, too.

But his glass emptied, as if by magic. “You want another?” a slant-eyed, tawny-skinned barmaid asked. George found himself nodding. The next beer appeared in short order. It vanished in short order, too. So did the one after that, and the one after
that.
About then, George stopped counting them.

Fremont Dalby got to his feet. Considering how much he’d put down, that he could get to his feet proved he was made of stern stuff. “The time has come,” he declared, “and we’re damn well going to. Drink up, you bastards.”

George knew all the reasons he didn’t want to go to a brothel. He knew, all right, but he’d stopped caring. Connie was five thousand miles away—a lot farther if he had to sail it. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. Dalby’s words came back to him, handy as could be. Everybody who went to stand in one of those lines told himself the same thing. If he drank enough beforehand, he might even make himself believe it.

The line moved forward at a good clip. “They hustle guys in and out, don’t they?” George said. The rest of the gun crew laughed as if that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. George had to listen to himself before he realized what kind of joke he’d made. Then he laughed, too.

It cost three dollars, payable in advance. He didn’t even get to choose a girl. He got assigned a cubicle. He went to it and there she lay, already naked on the bed. She was plump, and had black hair; she might have been part Oriental. “Hurry up,” she said. “You only got five minutes.”

He wondered if he’d drunk too much to perform. He quickly discovered he hadn’t. And, speaking of quickly, it was over almost before it began. He didn’t need to worry about spending too much time in the nasty little room.
That was it?
he thought as he did up his pants.
I got all hot and bothered about
that
?
He had, too.

Whoever had designed the place knew his business. The exit funneled customers into a pro station. Taking care of prophylaxis against venereal disease—something new for George—proved nastier than the brief coupling had been enjoyable. When he said so to a pharmacist’s mate, the fellow shrugged and asked, “Would you rather have VD?”

“Couldn’t be worse than this,” George said.

“Shows what you know. Shows you never tried pissing through a dose of the clap, too.” The pharmacist’s mate jerked a thumb toward the door at the far end of the room. “I ain’t got time to argue with you. Go on, get the hell out of here.”

Out George went. The sordidness of what he’d just been through far outweighed the pleasure. The spasm of drunken guilt he felt didn’t help, either.
If Connie ever finds out, she’ll murder me. I’ll have it coming, too.

Most of the other men from the gun crew were already out on the sidewalk. Some of them seemed as subdued as George. Not Fremont Dalby, though. “Twice!” he bragged.

Two times nothing is still nothing,
George thought. Then he blinked. He’d never been anything special in school. He wouldn’t have bet he remembered how multiplying by zero worked, not in a million years. Things came back in the strangest ways.

T
here were times when Brigadier General Abner Dowling suspected he must have been a fire brigade in some past life. Not a member of a fire brigade, but a whole brigade all by himself. That was the only thing that could explain how many fires he’d put out in his long career in the U.S. Army.

More than ten years as adjutant to General George Armstrong Custer made a good start—or a bad one, depending on how you looked at things. Custer was the hero of the Great War, but no man was a hero to his adjutant, any more than he was to his valet. Dowling knew too well how vain, how stubborn, how petulant the old fool was . . . and how those qualities went a long way toward making him the man who, in spite of everything—including himself—made the decisions that ended up beating the Confederate States.

After the Army finally put Custer out to pasture—over his vehement and profane objections—what had Dowling’s reward been? Eagles on his shoulders, eagles and the post of commandant of Salt Lake City. Trying to hold the Mormons down was even more fun than trying to hold Custer down had been. Dowling had been in General Pershing’s office when a sniper assassinated Pershing. No one had ever caught the murderer—the Mormons took care of their own. And after that, Utah was Abner Dowling’s baby.

He’d kept the lid on. The permanently rebellious state had even seemed quiet enough to persuade President Al Smith, in his infinite wisdom, to lift military occupation and restore full civil rights to the inhabitants. When Dowling left, the War Department gave him stars on his shoulders. He was immodest enough to think he’d bloody well earned them, too.

And his reward for that? He’d been sent to Kentucky to hold down Freedom Party agitation. There’d been times when the Freedom Party maniacs made the Mormons seem a walk in the park by comparison. Then President Smith, infinitely wise again, agreed to Jake Featherston’s demands for a plebiscite. Afterwards, Dowling got to preside over the U.S. withdrawal over Kentucky and the Confederate reoccupation.

War, plainly, was right around the corner then. They’d put Dowling in Ohio, which turned out to be the Confederate
Schwerpunkt.
The U.S. War Department had always had trouble seeing west of the Appalachians. Dowling didn’t have enough barrels or airplanes to counter Confederate General Patton’s armored onslaught. He still thought he’d put up the best campaign he could, given what he had to work with.

Maybe the War Department even agreed with him. They recalled him from Ohio after it fell, but they didn’t quite—make him the scapegoat for that fall. After a spell in Philadelphia counting rubber bands and making sure everyone’s necktie was on straight, they’d put him back to work. Oh, he wasn’t an army commander anymore, but they did give him a corps under Major General Daniel MacArthur for the great U.S. counterstroke, the move against Richmond.

Forward to Richmond!
was a rallying cry in the War of Secession. It didn’t work then. It didn’t work so well this time as the USA hoped, either. It was the obvious U.S. rejoinder to what the Confederates had done—obvious enough for Featherston’s men to have anticipated it. They hadn’t stopped the U.S. attack, but they’d slowed it to a crawl.

And Abner Dowling, commanding MacArthur’s right wing, had had to face a second armored attack from General Patton, this one aimed at his flank. Patton, plainly, had wanted to roll up the whole U.S. force facing him, but he hadn’t brought it off. He wouldn’t, either.

But was it any wonder Dowling felt the weight of the world on his broad shoulders?

Yes, those shoulders were broad. His belly was thick. He had a series of chins cascading down to his chest. He was, all things considered, built like a barrel. If he took to food to shield himself from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, well, it was a wonder he hadn’t taken to drink.

He sighed and stretched and yawned. He hated paperwork. He’d earned the right. He’d done too much of it for too many years, first for Custer and then on his own hook. The more rank he got, the more paperwork went with it. He’d got good at the bureaucratic infighting, too, the sort of quiet warfare that measured itself as much by things prevented as by those accomplished.

That thought made him look east toward Warrenton, where Daniel MacArthur had his headquarters. MacArthur had wanted to pull one out of General McClellan’s book from the War of Secession, land at the mouth of the James, and go after Richmond from the southeast. It could have been a good plan in 1862 had McClellan pursued it with energy—a word not often associated with his name. In 1942, against aircraft and the C.S. Navy, it would have been an invitation to suicide.

Well, it wouldn’t happen now. A quiet coded message from Dowling to the War Department had made sure of that. He’d got good at what he did, all right; MacArthur wasn’t sure even yet who’d put paid to the project he thought so wonderful. But Dowling remained convinced he’d prevented Western Union messenger boys from delivering a lot of Deeply Regrets telegrams in a campaign that wouldn’t have been worth them.

His own headquarters were in Washington, Virginia, a town with nothing to recommend it that he could see. U.S. soldiers walked through the place in groups of five or six or by squads; even traveling in pairs wasn’t enough to keep them from getting knocked over the head and having their throats cut. The locals kept chalking
FREEDOM
! and
CSA
! on light walls and painting the slogans on dark ones. There were rumors the local women of easy virtue deliberately didn’t get their VD treated so they could pass it on to U.S. soldiers. For once, the brass hadn’t started those rumors. The men had.

Dowling went outside. The sentries in front of the house he’d commandeered came to an attention so stiff, he could hear their backs creak. “As you were,” he told them, and they relaxed—a little. Relax too much in hostile territory and you’d relax yourself right into the grave. “Anything seem strange?” he asked them.

They looked at one another. At last, with unspoken common consensus, they shook their heads. “No, sir,” they chorused.

“All right. Good, in fact,” Dowling said. Enlisted men had a feel for such things that all the fancy reports from Intelligence often couldn’t match. They listened to what the locals said, and to what they didn’t. If they’d been in enemy territory for even a little while, they got good at adding two and two—and sometimes even at multiplying fractions.

Guns boomed off to the south and east. Corps headquarters was supposed to be out of artillery range of the front. So were divisional headquarters. Dowling had noticed, though, that the most effective divisions were the ones whose COs ignored that rule. The closer to actual fighting an officer got, the better the feel for it he came to have. Dowling did his best to apply that rule to himself as well as to the officers who served under him.

The guns boomed again, and then again. Dowling cocked his head to one side, studying the sound. After due consideration, he nodded. That was just the usual exchange between a couple of U.S. batteries and their Confederate counterparts. It was liable to smash up a few unlucky men on each side, but it wouldn’t change the way things turned out if it went on for the next million years. It was just part of the small change of war.

Somewhere overhead, airplanes droned by. Dowling wasn’t the only one who listened to the sound of their engines with a certain concentrated attention, or who glanced around to see where the nearest trench was in case he had to dash for cover. Not this time. One of the sentries delivered the verdict: “Ours.”

“Yeah.” Another man nodded. “Sounds like they’re going to drop some shit on Featherston’s head in Richmond.”

“Good,” Dowling said.

The sentries nodded again. “We nail him, we win big,” one of them said, and then, meditatively, “Asshole.”

“Chrissake, Jimmy,” hissed the soldier who’d spoken first. “You don’t say that in front of a general.”

Jimmy looked abashed—or rather, worried that he might get in trouble. “Don’t get yourself in an uproar about it, son,” Dowling said. “I guarantee you I have seen and worked with and worked for more people of the asshole persuasion than you can shake a stick at.”

“Like who, sir?” Jimmy asked eagerly.

Abner Dowling could have named names. The question was, could he stop once he got started? He was tempted to let all the resentment out at once, in a great torrent that would leave the sentries’ eyes bugging out of their heads. He wouldn’t get in trouble for that; a man with a silver star on each shoulder strap was allowed his little eccentricities. That was what they called them for generals, even if a lot of them would have landed lesser mortals in the stockade. But it took a hell of a lot to make the powers that be decide to jug a general.

So it wasn’t fear of consequences that kept Dowling’s mouth shut. It was more the fear of seeming like a four-year-old—a fat four-year-old with a white mustache—in the middle of a temper tantrum. Dowling remembered too many times when he’d had to calm General Custer down after one of his snits. What was distasteful in another man might also be distasteful in him.

He wagged a coy finger at Jimmy and the other soldiers. “That would be telling.” The men looked disappointed, but not too—he didn’t suppose they’d really expected him to spill the beans. He took out a pack of cigarettes and stuck one in his mouth. Then he held out the pack to the sentries. They accepted with quick grins and words of thanks. The Raleighs—spoil from a dead Confederate—bore Sir Walter’s face above an enormous, and enormously fancy, ruff.

“Damn, but these are good,” Jimmy said after his first drag. “Stuff we call tobacco nowadays tastes like an old cowflop.”

“A
real
old cowflop,” one of the other sentries added. “One that’s been out in the sun for a while and got all dried out.”