Drive to the East (4 page)

Forrest slowly nodded. He looked like a man trying to show nothing on his face at a poker table. Did that mean he or whoever’d come up with the notion hadn’t thought so far ahead? Potter would have bet it did. He almost asked, but checked himself. That might have looked like showing off.

One other thing did occur to him, though: “You know they’ll do the same thing to us? They just about have to, if for no other reason than to make us as scared of our own shadows as they will be.”

“I’ll . . . take that up with the President,” Forrest said. Were the raiders in Yankee uniform Jake Featherston’s idea? Potter wouldn’t have been surprised; Featherston had a genius for making trouble in nasty ways. He also had the gifted amateur’s problem of not seeing all the consequences of his troublemaking.

This long war, for instance. He really thought Al Smith would make peace.
Potter muttered unhappily. If only the Yankees would have quit. Jake Featherston would have gone down in history then, no doubt about it. Things wouldn’t be so easy now. He asked Forrest, “What do you think of Charlie La Follette?”

“We’ll just have to see,” the chief of the General Staff replied. “So far, he sounds like Smith. But who knows what he’ll be like once he gets out from under the other fellow’s shadow? How about you? You probably know more about him than I do.”

“I doubt it. Who pays attention to the Vice President?” Potter said, and Forrest laughed, again for all the world as if he’d been joking. He went on, “I think you’ve got it about right. Doesn’t look like he’s going to pack in the war.”

“No, it sure doesn’t. Too bad. It’d make our lives easier if he did, that’s for damn sure,” Forrest said—one more thing Potter thought he had about right.

T
hey’d pulled Armstrong Grimes’ regiment, or what was left of it, out of the lines in Utah for a while. The corporal and his buddies had to march away. The powers that be saved most of their trucks to haul men to and from fights they thought more important than the one against the Mormon rebels.

Marching out meant he and his fellow survivors tramped past the men coming up to take their places in Provo. Telling who was who couldn’t have been easier. The new fish had fresh uniforms, and carried very full packs on their backs. They were clean-shaven. They looked bright and eager.

Armstrong and the rest of the veterans stank. He couldn’t remember when he’d last bathed or changed his underwear. He was as whiskery as any of the others. His uniform had seen better days, too. He carried nothing he couldn’t do without. And his eyes went every which way at once. They were the eyes of a man who never knew which way trouble was coming from, only that it was coming.

Most of the soldiers pulling out had eyes like that. The rest just stared straight ahead as they trudged along. The thousand-yard stare belonged to men who’d seen and done too much. Maybe rest would turn them back into soldiers again. Maybe nothing would. The way war was these days, it had no trouble overwhelming a man.

Some of the veterans jeered at the rookies: “Aren’t you pretty?” “Aren’t you sweet?” “Do your mothers know you’re here?” “Where do you want your body sent?”

The men going into the line didn’t say much in return. They eyed the troops they were replacing like people in a zoo eyeing tigers and wolves. But no bars stood between them and the veterans. They plainly feared they’d get bitten if they teased the animals. They were right, too.

“Got a cigarette, Sarge?” Grimes asked. He was a big man—he’d been a second-string lineman on his high-school football team what seemed a million years ago and was actually just over one. Under the whiskers, his face was long and oval like his mother’s, but he had his old man’s dark hair and eyes.

“Here you go.” Rex Stowe pulled one out of a pack.

“Thanks.” Armstrong lit up and sucked in smoke. He was named for George Armstrong Custer; his father had been born in the same little Ohio town as the hero of the Second Mexican War and the Great War. Armstrong was born in Washington, D.C., where Merle Grimes settled down and married after a war wound from which he still limped. He’d had a comfortable postwar career as a minor government functionary. He and the rest of the family probably weren’t comfortable now. Washington was too close to the border with the CSA to be safe, though as far as Armstrong knew his father and mother and younger sister were well.

A middle-aged woman and a couple of little kids stood in the rubble by the side of the track and watched the U.S. soldiers go by. Silent hatred burned in their eyes. Of itself, Armstrong’s Springfield swung a couple of inches toward them. Plenty of Mormon women fought alongside their husbands and brothers and sons. Plenty of kids threw homemade grenades and firebombs—Featherston Fizzes, people called them. You never could tell, even with people behind the lines.

“They don’t like it that you’re smoking,” Stowe said.

No mere cigarette could have made them look like that. They wished him straight to hell. If they’d had weapons, they would have done their best to send him there.

Every civilian he saw looked at him like that. He knew there were people in Utah who weren’t Mormons. The Mormon majority called anybody who wasn’t one of them a gentile. Even Jews were gentiles here. One of Armstrong’s buddies was a New York City guy named Yossel Reisen. He thought that was funny as the devil.

But a lot of the so-called gentiles had joined their Mormon neighbors in rising up against the USA. Armstrong had trouble figuring that out. What had the U.S. government ever done to
them
? Had they hated the way Utah was treated so much that they wanted to leave the USA? Weren’t they a little crazy, or more than a little, if they had? Yeah, the rebels were brave, no doubt about it. But bravery had only so much to do with anything when it ran up against superior firepower.

The rebels were taking a while to lose, because the United States had other things to worry about and weren’t giving them anything like their full attention. But the Mormons and their pals had to be chewing locoweed if they thought they had a Chinaman’s chance of bailing out of the USA.

Rex Stowe said, “The way things are around here, I don’t even know if I want to come out of the line. Aren’t they likelier to jump us when our guard is down than when we’re looking for it?”

“Who says our guard’s going to be down? I don’t know about you, but I’m still watching all the goddamn time,” Armstrong answered.

Stowe considered, shrugged, and nodded. “You’ve got something there.”

On they slogged, past buildings pulverized in the slow, brutal U.S. advance. Armstrong wondered if there’d be enough Mormons left alive to keep their faith going after this rebellion finally got smashed. There had been the last time around, which struck him as a damn shame.

He marched for a solid day to get back to the recuperation center that had sprung up in Thistle, southeast of Provo. That put it out of range of Mormon guns—unless the rebels got sneaky, which they might well do. Barbed wire and machine-gun nests around the center made the place seem like a prisoner-of-war camp, but the guns faced out, not in.

Once inside the perimeter, Armstrong followed signs to a bank of showers and then to a delousing station. The showers were cold. His father had talked about hot water as part of the delousing process, but times had changed. They sprayed him with something that smelled like poison gas instead of boiling him or soaking him or whatever they’d done in his old man’s day.

“What is this shit?” he asked the guy doing the spraying.

“It’s like Flit, only more so. It
really
kills bugs,” the other soldier answered, and sprayed the naked man in line behind him.

They didn’t bother trying to get his uniform clean. That would have defeated Job’s patience. They issued him fresh clothes instead, from long johns on out. He felt like a new man.

The new man got a feed of bacon and real eggs and hash browns and toast and jam. Most of what he’d eaten lately had come out of cans or cartons. This felt like heaven, especially since he could pile as much as he wanted on his mess tray. After about three breakfasts’ worth, he said, “That’s a little better.”

Rex Stowe had eaten at least as much. “Yeah, a little,” he agreed. “I expect I’ll be able to handle lunch, though.”

“Oh, fuck, yes.” Armstrong took that for granted.

Yossel Reisen sat on Armstrong’s other side. He’d also put away a hell of a lot, though he skipped the bacon. He often swapped ration cans, too, so he wouldn’t have to eat pork. He gulped down a big white china mug full of coffee pale with fresh cream. “Damn good,” he said—he was at least as foul-mouthed as anybody else.

“Ask you something?” Armstrong said to him, and waited for him to nod. “You already did your conscript time, right? And then they sucked you back in?”

“Yeah, that’s true. You know it is,” Yossel answered. “So what?”

“So how come I’m a corporal when I’ve been in less than a year and you just made PFC?” Armstrong asked. “They should’ve given you two stripes the minute you came back, and you ought to be at least a sergeant by now.”

Reisen shrugged. “You know who my aunt is.” It wasn’t a question.

“Well, sure,” Armstrong said. Everybody knew Yossel’s aunt had been married to the President and was a Congresswoman herself. “You don’t make a big deal out of it, the way a lot of guys would. But that ought to get you promoted faster, right, not slower?”

“I don’t want it to.” Yossel Reisen spoke with quiet emphasis. “I don’t want anybody giving me anything on account of Aunt Flora. I just want to be a regular guy and get what regular guys get. I know damn well I earned the stripe I’ve got. If somebody handed it to me, what would it be worth?”

Armstrong was chewing a big mouthful of bacon, so he couldn’t answer right away. If he were related to somebody famous, he would have milked it for all it was worth. A cushy job counting brass buttons five hundred miles away from guns going off sounded great to him.

Yossel went on, “When my Uncle David got conscripted in the last war, my aunt was already in Congress. She could have pulled strings for him. He wouldn’t let her. He lost a leg. He’s proud of what he did. He wouldn’t have it any different.”

He’s out of his fucking mind,
Armstrong thought. And yet his own father was unmistakably proud of his war wound, too. No doubt he’d screamed his head off when he got it, just like anybody else when a bullet bit him. Memory did strange things, no doubt about it.

“Have it your way,” Armstrong said when at last he swallowed. “You pull your weight. Anybody tells you anything else, kick his ass for him.”

“Thanks,” Reisen said. “You, too.” Armstrong followed the bacon with a swig of coffee. Till he got in the Army, he’d always been half-assed about things, doing enough to get by and not another nickel’s worth. You couldn’t do that once you put on the uniform, though. It might get you killed. Even if it didn’t, it would make your buddies hate you. If you let your buddies down, they’d let you down, too—and that
would
get you killed. Having somebody he cared about tell him he was all right felt damn good.

After they ate, they went over to a barracks hall. It was cheap plywood, and probably better suited to prisoners on the U.S. side. Armstrong wasn’t inclined to be critical. He threw his few chattels into a footlocker at the end of a real cot with a real mattress and real bedding. Then he took off his shoes and threw himself down on the mattress. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” he said ecstatically. A real bed. The first real bed since . . . He’d tried to remember not so long before. He tried again, harder. He still couldn’t.

Nobody told him he had to get out of it. He was full. He was clean, in a clean uniform. Nobody was shooting at him or even near him. He allowed himself the luxury of taking off his shoes. Then, blissfully, he fell asleep.

As far as he could tell, he hadn’t changed position when reveille sounded the next morning. He yawned and stretched. He was
still
tired. But he wasn’t weary unto death anymore. He was also starved—he’d slept through the lunch that had sounded so inviting and dinner, too, damn near slept the clock around.

By the way the rest of the men in the hall rose, they’d done nothing much in the nighttime, either. Some of them had had the energy to strip to their shorts and get under the covers instead of lying on top of them.
Maybe tonight,
Armstrong told himself.

He made an enormous pig of himself again at breakfast. Then he went back to the barracks and flopped down again. He didn’t fall asleep right away this time. He just lay there, marveling. He didn’t have to go anywhere. He didn’t have to do anything. He didn’t have to have eyes in the back of his head—though having them doubtless was still a good thing. He could just ease back and relax. He wondered if he still remembered how. He aimed to find out, for as long as he had in this wonderful place.

J
efferson Pinkard hadn’t been in Texas since he headed home to Birmingham after the Great War ended. He’d fought north of where he was now, but the country around Snyder wasn’t a whole lot different from what he’d known half a lifetime earlier: plains cut by washes, with low rises here and there. The sky went on forever, and the landscape seemed to do the same.

Bulldozers were kicking dust up into that endless sky right now. Along with their diesel snorting, the sounds of saws and hammers filled the air. Camp Determination would seem to go on forever when it got finished, too. Jeff had run Camp Dependable near Alexandria, Louisiana, for years. Once Determination got done, you’d be able to drop Dependable into it and not even know the older camp was there.

The barbed-wire perimeter stretched and stretched and stretched. A lot of people would go through Camp Determination. It had to be able to hold them all. And Pinkard had to make sure nobody got out who wasn’t supposed to. Guard towers outside the walls had gone up before the barracks inside. Machine guns were already in place inside the towers. Anybody who tried to escape would be real sorry real fast—but probably not for long.

Stalking along outside the perimeter, Jeff looked up at each tower he passed. He’d climbed up into all of them, checking their fields of fire. If you wanted something like that done right—hell, if you wanted anything done right—you were better off doing it yourself.