Drive to the East (79 page)

“It’s filthy, all right,” O’Doull agreed. “And you know what’s even worse? I bet you anything the engineer who came up with it got a bonus.”

“I won’t touch that,” McDougald said. “If you look at it the right way—or the wrong way, depending—it’s almost the perfect weapon. Who’d want to maybe trade his family jewels for a hundred-yard advance?”

“I’m just glad they don’t have many of those little toys here,” O’Doull said. “And we’ve got all their airstrips under our guns now, so they won’t be bringing in more.”

“Always parachute drops,” McDougald said helpfully. But there weren’t many of those anymore. Pittsburgh had cost the CSA a god-awful lot of transports. No more than a handful tried to make the trip these days; U.S. Wright fighters ruled the skies above western Pennsylvania.

Outside the hospital, the thunder of U.S. guns went on around the clock. O’Doull hardly noticed it. He might have looked up in surprise if it stopped. Incoming rounds were growing scarcer. That Confederate Army might have got into Pittsburgh. It didn’t look as if it would get out.

“How are you doing there?” McDougald asked after a while.

“Oh, he’ll live. I’m not so sure he’ll think that’s doing him a favor, though,” O’Doull said. “I
think
he’ll have a penis that works, even if he won’t get much fun out of it. I sure hope it works—otherwise, it’s catheter time.”

“Ouch.” McDougald winced. “Don’t even want to think about that.”

“It’s a bitch.” O’Doull used the smallest needles and finest catgut for his sutures. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done such delicate work. He wished he could have done more for the wounded soldier, but the essential parts were gone.

At last, the job was done. McDougald surveyed the site. “Well, I think you did about as much as anybody would have been able to,” he said.

“Yeah.” O’Doull gave back a somber nod. “I wish I could say more. I wish I had a drink, too.”

“Don’t blame you a bit. Why don’t you, once you get out of the OR?”

“When I come off, maybe I will,” O’Doull said. “Don’t want to do it now—odds are I’ll be operating again before long.”

“There is that,” McDougald allowed. “I’ll tell you something, though—I’ve known plenty of docs that wouldn’t have stopped for a second, let alone a minute. Some of the old-timers in the last war, the guys who’d been in the Army since 1880—hoo-boy!” He rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, I ran into some of those fellows, too,” O’Doull said. “This one surgeon named Schnitzler—I don’t think he drew a sober breath all the time I knew him. But put a wounded man in front of him and a scalpel in his hand and he’d do as good a job as anybody you’d ever want to meet. He could operate in his sleep. I think he did sometimes.”

“That’s the kind I mean,” McDougald said. “There’s the drunk who goes and drinks till he passes out. And then there’s the other kind, the guy who gets a buzz in the morning and stays buzzed all day long, and as long as he is, he’s fine.”

“Till his liver craps out on him, anyway,” O’Doull said.

“Oh, sure.” By the way McDougald said that, he took it for granted. “Of course, there are some of the first kind, too. Part of the way I learned surgery was when one of the docs who should have been doing it got too toasted to see, let alone operate. If I didn’t cut, this soldier was ruined for sure. If I did, maybe he had a chance. So I did, and he made it—and I thought,
Son of a bitch! I can do this shit!
I was hooked.”

“It grows on you, all right,” O’Doull agreed. “What happened to the drunken doctor?”

“He kept at it whenever he was sober enough to work,” McDougald answered. “After a while, people said I was doing better work than he was. I don’t know about that. He had the training, after all, and I was amateur city. But I sure was doing
more
work than he was, ’cause he got loaded more and more often.”

“They should have discharged the fool.” Though a Catholic, O’Doull had more than a little New England Puritan sternness in him.

Granville McDougald shook his head. “It was a war, Doc. If he was only a quarter of what he should have been, that was still a quarter of a surgeon more than they would have had if they canned him. Hell, he may be in the Army yet. He may be in the OR next door, for all I know.”

“He probably killed patients he should have saved,” O’Doull said.

“So have I,” McDougald said. He didn’t ask if O’Doull had. That was generous of him. Like any doctor, O’Doull had buried some of his mistakes. It came with being human. The most important thing was trying not to make the same mistake twice.

H
otel Street in Honolulu was a raucous, drunken place twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Sailors who had liberty got drunk and got laid, caring about nothing but the moment. George Enos, Jr., knew exactly how they felt. He should have—he was one of them.

He’d drunk enough to make the sidewalk seem to sway and twist under his feet like the
Townsend
’s deck in a heavy sea. But the pavement wasn’t listing—he was.

“Where do we go now?” he asked Fremont Dalby. He’d pretty much given up thinking on his own. If the gun chief could manage it, George would follow along.

Dalby made a production out of pondering. He’d taken plenty of antifreeze on board, too. “Well, do we want to drink some more, or do we want to screw?” he asked.

George frowned. He didn’t want to decide anything. He wasn’t sure he could decide anything. Fritz Gustafson settled things by walking through the next open door they passed.

If it had been a brothel, they would have done their best there. But it was another gin mill. The air smelled of cigarette smoke and spilled beer and vomit. A record player was cranking out Hawaiian music much too loud. George’s head started to ache, and he wasn’t even hung over yet. That would come tomorrow morning, and tomorrow morning might as well be ten years away.

He and his buddies from the
Townsend
elbowed their way up to the bar. A couple of the men they muscled by gave them sour stares, but nobody threw a punch. “What’ll you have, gents?” the barkeep asked.

“Whiskey,” Fremont Dalby said. George nodded. So did Fritz Gustafson. The man behind the bar poured the booze into three glasses, added ice, and waited till he saw money before sliding the drinks across the bar. Dalby gulped his. So did Gustafson. George went a little slower. By himself, he would have stuck with beer. He liked it better. But when he was out with friends, whiskey got him drunk faster. On a forty-eight-hour liberty, speed mattered.

He wasn’t sorry this had turned out to be a bar, not a cathouse. He always felt bad about being unfaithful to Connie. Oh, not while he was in the act—it felt wonderful then. It always did. How could it not, even with a bored Chinese floozy who chewed gum while you pounded away? But he never failed to feel guilty afterwards.

“Drink up, George,” Dalby said. “The night is young, and you are—hell, I ain’t drunk enough to think you’re beautiful.”

George laughed. He knocked back his drink, then coughed two or three times. The rotgut in the glass was smooth as sandpaper. Gustafson pounded him on the back. “Thanks,” he wheezed.

“Sure,” the loader said. Even pretty well lit up, he spent words as if he paid for them out of his own pocket.

“Another round,” Dalby told the the bartender.

“Coming up.” The man’s gray hair said he’d been around a while. So did his faint British accent. The Sandwich Islands had belonged to the limeys before the USA took them away in 1914. A lot of the old-timers had been here since the Union Jack flew alongside the flag of the Sandwich Islands, which joined it to the Stars and Stripes in what had been the old Kingdom of Hawaii’s doomed effort to keep everybody happy.

George would have loved to spend the rest of his life in the Sandwich Islands. He didn’t suppose many people who came here didn’t want to stay. After the winter he’d just been through, he would never look at January in Boston the same way again. He wouldn’t look at the North Atlantic in January the same way again, either. Oh, they had swells here. But nothing he’d seen came within miles of the Nantucket sleighride. And you’d never have to worry about working on deck in the middle of an ice storm.

Again, Dalby and Gustafson poured down their drinks in nothing flat. Again, they waited not too patiently for him to finish his. He was about to go bottoms up when a brawl broke out behind him.

He never knew what started it. An argument over a barmaid? Two sailors from the same ship who didn’t like each other? Sailors from two ships that didn’t like each other? The roll of the dice at a corner table?

Whatever got it going, it was everywhere fifteen seconds later. Nobody tried to stop it; everyone just joined in. If that didn’t prove there were a lot of drunks in the place, nothing ever would have.

Somebody swung at George: a big, burly machinist’s mate. The haymaker would have knocked him into the middle of next week had it landed, but it missed by at least a foot. George threw what was left of his drink in the other sailor’s face. The man roared and rubbed frantically at his eyes. George hit him in the belly. He folded up with an explosive, “Oof!”

Oh, shit!
The bartender was probably yelling it, but George had to read his lips to understand it. Everybody in the joint was shouting at the top of his lungs. The noise of things breaking didn’t help.

Somebody took a swing at Fremont Dalby. The gun chief ducked so the punch caught him on top of the head. That hurt the puncher much more than it hurt Dalby. One of the things you learned in a hurry was not to punch bony places. By the way the sailor clutched his wounded hand, he’d probably broken a knuckle or two. A heartbeat later, he had other things to worry about. Dalby, a barroom veteran, didn’t waste time fighting fair. He kneed the sailor in the crotch. The man howled like a wolf.

George stopped a punch with his forehead. He saw stars. It probably hurt the other guy worse than it hurt him, but that didn’t mean he enjoyed it. Plenty of sailors got into fights for the fun of it. George didn’t understand that. Watching a fight was fun. Getting punched and kicked and elbowed? That wasn’t what he called a good time.

He hit the other guy in the ribs. He’d aimed for the sailor’s solar plexus. If he’d hit it, that would have taken the SOB out of the brawl till his motor started working again.

But a shot to the ribs just pissed the sailor off. He gave George a punch identical to the one he’d just taken. George grunted and swore. That would leave a bruise, and he’d probably be sore whenever he breathed for the next week.

Nobody in a barroom brawl played much defense. George slugged the guy in front of him again. Then Fritz Gustafson hauled off and belted the sailor in the chops. The man went down like a felled tree. With a small smile, Gustafson displayed a set of brass knucks. He would have made a hell of a Boy Scout. He was prepared for anything.

Halfway down the bar, somebody who didn’t have brass knuckles improvised. He picked up a long-legged stool and swung it like a flail, felling whoever he could reach. Maybe the rising and falling screech that burst from him was intended for a Rebel yell. Maybe it just meant he was enjoying himself.

Whatever it meant, the screech abruptly cut off. Someone coldcocked the stool swinger from behind with a beer bottle. The bar stool crashed to the floor. So did the sailor, bleeding from a scalp wound.

A fighting knife gleamed in the hand of a Marine in a forest-green uniform. George didn’t see the leatherneck stick anybody. All the same, he decided he was up way past his bedtime.

Getting out of a brawl without getting a name for running away from brawls wasn’t so easy, though. George didn’t want to skip out on his buddies. And so he stayed there and took some punches and dealt out a few more. Dalby and Gustafson both seemed happy enough where they were.

Then somebody yelled, “Shore patrol!” That sent everybody surging toward the door. George hoped the bartender had shouted out the warning to get the sailors to quit tearing his place to pieces. No such luck. The Navy equivalent of MPs waded into the fray, nightsticks swinging.

George counted himself lucky—he didn’t get hit in the head. He did get hit in the ribs, which made the punch he’d taken there seem a love pat by comparison. Fremont Dalby got a bloody stripe over one eye. Fritz Gustafson knocked a shore patrolman ass over teakettle with his knuckleduster. That could have won him a pounding to end all poundings, but none of the shore patrolman’s pals saw him do it. Some people had all the luck.

Gustafson’s luck didn’t keep him—and George, and most of the rest of the people in the bar, including the barkeep—from getting grabbed and tossed into one of the paddy wagons that pulled up outside.

The SPs had a brig set up a couple of blocks away. It had probably been there for years, but George hadn’t known about it. They found out he and Dalby and Gustafson had legitimate liberty papers, and they found out the three men from the
Townsend
hadn’t started the fight. When they discovered Gustafson’s persuader, they took it away from him. He looked aggrieved, but he didn’t say anything. Under the circumstances, that was bound to be smart. Of course, Gustafson never had much to say.

Another paddy wagon delivered them to their ship and two more men to the destroyer tied up next to her. The officer of the deck eyed them as if he’d found them in his apple. “Well, well,” he said. “What have we got here?”

“Drunk and disorderly, sir,” a shore patrolman answered. “Tavern brawl on Hotel Street.”

“All right. We’ll take care of them,” the OOD said.

And they did. No one got very excited about it. Captain’s mast was something that happened now and again. George had never come up in front of one before. He might have been more worried if he were less hung over. That made him think more about internal miseries than any the
Townsend
’s skipper would inflict.

By their expressions, Dalby and Gustafson also had a bad case of the morning afters. Lieutenant Commander Brian McClintock glowered at each of them in turn. “Anything to say for yourselves?” he growled.

“No, sir,” Dalby said. George and Fritz Gustafson shook their heads. George wished he hadn’t. It only made the throbbing behind his eyes worse.