Authors: Kathleen Ann Goonan
Tags: #Fiction, #Alternative History, #Science Fiction, #General
In War Times (10 page)
In this desolate windswept place, Sam felt Keenan’s presence, as he did more and more often as anger and anguish continued to occupy him. Keenan had been in the Navy for years. Perhaps he had sailed this route. Certainly he had stood watch on many frigid nights such as this.
Keenan was like Wink. Irrepressible. Keenan was the first to walk the railroad trestle over the Puzzle River. Once, he’d dangled from supports below the track as a train roared inches above his head. All the kids, including Sam, watched in horror, certain he’d drop to his death at any second. He came back laughing.
Sam wished for another cup of the electrifyingly strong hot chocolate that was brought to those on this shift, and composed, in his mind, his latest update, which he would write when he went off-shift. His missives were rough; he planned to go over them when they were finished, put them in context, smooth out the rough edges. He had ceased to anticipate that Keenan would remember everything he had known, if another world was leading him in a direction this one had taken; he went back and added details, sometimes, details about the flavor of the times, the tiny things.
The lounge is spacious, the grand piano grand; a suitable instrument for a concert or for Art Tatum. The lounge would accommodate a dance band, but there’s no hope that one will take the stage on this particular cruise. It lacks a dance floor, but no doubt one will surely appear once the last dogface steps off the gangplank.
Instead, the room is nicely furnished with easy chairs and couches and is well populated with readers. In my visits two memorable piano players held forth—a black fellow with long supple fingers who was content to emulate Tatum, and a white boy with short stubby fingers who was more a Fats Waller type. They didn’t seem to compete; just seemed to enjoy the opportunity to make use of a great instrument before an appreciative audience.
After the pianists left, the mundane silence demanded music. Sam unpacked his sax. Wink arrived with his violin case.
Everyone groaned when Wink opened it up. “Not that classical crap!” someone shouted.
But when Wink cut loose with a surprising unpredictable solo on “Take the ‘A’ Train,” then backed up Sam on some Beiderbecke standards like “In a Mist,” he raised appreciative whistles and commanded relative silence.
As Sam played, visions assailed him, as they always did when he got to playing this way. Keenan running toward the guns on the
Arizona
, his passage blocked by fire. Newsreel images of London Docklands bombings, smoke rising from fires breaking out everywhere. A green field rushing toward him as he fell. A split-second mathematical realization he would never recapture. The stamping feet and whistles in the interval before their next piece seemed distant, as behind glass.
Sam wished that at least one of the pianists had remained. Maybe tomorrow night.
But he never saw either of them again.
They reached Scotland. As the ship entered the Firth of Forth’s calm waters, low, bare yellow hills came gradually into view, as well as bits of land that proved to be islands as the ship passed them. The
QE
was not perturbed by the light chop whipped up by the brisk, cold wind. Eventually the fog burned off to reveal an estuary narrowing to the mouth of the River Clyde.
The uncertainty of the future was strangely exhilarating. They were safe from German subs now; underwater nets protected the firth, and Glasgow was out of range of German bombers. This would be their first staging area and his first taste of another continent. So far the war had been only newsreels, newspapers.
And Keenan.
Now it was without a doubt his war. Operation Overlord was the name of the invasion plan, and Company C was there to facilitate it.
But Scotland at dawn was peaceful. Large gray herons flew overhead and gulls in the thousands hovered over the
QE
, its welcoming party, and the only interruption of the hush. The smell of land was surprisingly distinctive after five days at sea. Civilians were up on deck now, leaning on the railings, and a deep mechanical thrum sent vibrations through the ship. Far off, a ruined stone tower caught the light of the sun.
Relinquishing his gun to the British gunner at the end of his watch, Sam grabbed a mess hall breakfast and hurried back on deck to watch the process of anchoring at the mouth of the River Clyde, still thirty-two miles from Glasgow. Standing at the wooden railing, he absently ran one hand over it, feeling the indented initials American soldiers had carved in the wood when they got tired of looking at the empty ocean.
Then Wink was there. “Glasgow’s a helluva good drinking town. By all reports.”
“We’ll have to conduct some research.”
Their first night on leave they found Teacher’s Pub, where the bartender put out an hourly supply of Teacher’s and sold no more until the next hour.
The pub’s low roar consisted of the unintelligible English of Glaswegians. Sam caught the bartender’s eye. “Another wee heavy and pale ale.” Sam had no head for whisky, and avoided it, but he had discovered this local specialty. It was indeed heavy, subtly spicy, without any flavor of hops. The bartender poured the contents of the three-ounce wee heavy bottle into a pint glass and filled it to the top with India Pale Ale.
The guy next to him at the bar said, “You’re a Yank too, eh?”
“Sam Dance. Company C. Ordnance.”
Beneath a crumpled corduroy fishing hat, his barmate’s face was lined with resignation; his eyes were far-focused, for an instant. He had apparently been allowed to grow a beard, black streaked with gray, though he wore some sort of U.S. uniform.
Sam asked, “You one of the Dirty Dozen?”
He returned from wherever he had been and turned to look at Sam. “Nah. Met ’em, though. There’s actually thirteen of them, paratroopers. Thirteen is how many jump, in a stick. They are foul. Got free range on account of most of them are going to die, I guess. They’re in England now. I’m Angelo Rafferty, 4-F. Tried to join up a couple times but as far as they’re concerned I’m not Army material. Bad back, they say.” He polished off the second shot of Teacher’s lined up in front of him, leaving one to last till the clock struck. “So I’m USO. Accordion. Been opening for Ella Logan.”
“Doesn’t she do that jazzy ‘Loch Lomond’?” Sam had a hard time wrapping his mind around the notion of an accordion, which was inextricably linked to polkas, opening for her.
“Big hit. Million-seller. She’s in town. We just got in from North Africa.”
“What’s it like there?”
“Hot as hell. Italians strafed us while we played. I buddied up with some paratroopers and they let me jump. Back’s still the same as far as I can tell, works fine. Goddamned doctors. Don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.”
The clock struck two, the bartender put out amber fifths of Teacher’s, and filled the three shot glasses sitting empty in front of Angelo. Behind them pressed a crowd, thrusting empty glasses toward the bartender on either side of Sam, getting theirs before the supply ran out. Angelo tossed one back, chased it with an ale, and started nursing the second. Sam looked around for Wink. He was over in a corner, romancing a Glasgow girl, who was laughing in the dim light.
“Where’s Logan playing?”
Angelo shrugged. “Dunno. I’m hoping we’ll move on to London soon. I’m itchin’ to be in France when it happens.”
“Want to be up front, eh?”
“And kill those Nazzy bastards, you bet.”
In Sam’s opinion, the accordion would make an excellent weapon in the right hands. He envisioned Angelo squeezing out vast accordion riffs, fingers flying over the keys, knocking the SS dead in swooning rows.
Wink touched his shoulder. “How about a party? She’s got a friend.”
Outside, as they walked, fine drizzle gathered density until it dripped from their hats. Sam’s girl linked arms with him. “What’s it like to be a soldier?” she asked; or at least that’s what he thought she asked, given her accent.
“Interesting.”
“Ha! I’d wager you’re the only one to think so.”
The streets were not empty. People were leaving pubs, singing in the streets. Shouts and whoops echoed from the next block. They walked uphill for quite a ways and turned onto a side street. Reaching a tall, narrow town house, they were greeted by faintly musical bellows which grew louder as they climbed stairs. He and Wink were introduced to the father of Wink’s girl and three of his roaring-drunk friends. Sam accepted a whisky and played the piano to enthusiastic applause. They even applauded his singing. Wink’s girl sang along with him and had quite a nice voice, though her timing was off. Cold, damp air came in through an open window. The father, who had a better voice, pushed another whisky on him. “Play, man, play!” Oh, he was sheer genius, he was. He felt it; they heard it; Wink and his girl danced energetically, shaking the floor. They all sang, loudly, with unsurpassed gusto, and went
dah dah dah
when they didn’t recall the words, which became increasingly often.
When Sam’s horrendous headache woke him, he found that he had been maneuvered sideways onto a single bed; his legs hung over one side and his head hung back over the other. Rain beat at the small window.
He decided, once again, that whisky was not his drink.
Sam haunted pubs and read playbills for a week before he found out that Glasgow was Logan’s hometown. It was probably the last place she’d play. She had friends and family to visit.
Sam and Wink’s battalion had about nine hundred personnel but only twelve or so of them went to Glasgow to guard the shipment—four-million-dollars’ worth of equipment and tools.
The two men spent their days ticking off invoices and organizing the cargo for transport. An officer noticed them riding the crane hook down into the lighter’s hold; thereafter, they walked when he was around.
It took a week to transfer their several tons of ordnance in stages from the lighters which ferried the cargo upriver to “goods wagons”—small British boxcars—for the journey to Tidworth.
What kind of town could be named “Tidworth?”
A very small town, indeed.
JANUARY I944-JANUARY I945
Surely music (along with ordinary language) is as profound a problem for human biology as can be thought of and I would like to see something done about it. A few years ago the German government set a large advisory committee to work on the question of what the Max Planck Institute should be taking on as its next scientific mission. The committee worked for a very long time and emerged with the recommendation that the new M.P.I. should be dedicated to the problem of music—what music is, why it is indispensable for human existence, what music really means—hard questions like that.
—
L
EWIS
T
HOMAS
Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s
Ninth Symphony
Tidworth, England
January 1944
A
BOUT HALF THE
time I spent in England was during cold weather. Coal was rationed. Pub owners were terribly embarrassed that they didn’t have the means to keep beer warm in winter. They never really believed that Yanks preferred cold beer. “It’s the war. Can’t do anything about it; can’t heat the basement.”
We were living just outside of Tidworth, a village of a couple hundred. Lugershall was two miles away; county of Wiltshire. We could go to Andover, ten miles away or to Winchester, twenty-three miles to the south toward the coast. These were the nearest big towns with movies and dance halls. We’d take the Wilts and Dorset bus to Andover, go to the railroad station, and buy a ticket to London for a modest fare. It was about ninety miles—or may have been sixty. Anyway, it was a three-hour trip.
Our first barracks in Tidworth was a big corrugated gymnasium with a seventy-five-foot ceiling. There were a few windows up high. It was pretty dark; if you wanted to read in a bunk you had to use a flashlight.
We rented bunks from the Brits, double-deckers with a two-by-four frame and chicken wire on the bottom of the bunk. You got a cotton sack you filled with straw. The second time you got straw you were careful—you didn’t move the first night so that it formed around your body and was then reasonably comfortable.
The gymnasium was turned into a field hospital for the invasion. They treated the lightly wounded there until they got better; then they were put in the repple depple, the replacement depot. Those men didn’t return to their original company. Instead, they were slotted in wherever needed. This was an unpopular system.
We got evicted to a bunch of Quonset huts. They were attached by corridors so you could go between them. We stayed under cover for days. The fighter planes were looking for soldiers to strafe. The Army was a big proponent of the adage that “idle hands make idle people and idle people get into trouble.” In the States, we’d spent hours in close order drill or doing calisthenics. All that stuff was off the books in England. At Tidworth, early in the war, a company performing calisthenics got severely strafed and suffered high casualties.
As soon as our equipment rolled in our work schedule jumped to twelve hours a day, six days a week. Sunday was a day of rest: we worked only eight hours. W. and I set up a battery shop, a fuel handling shop, shops to work on spark plugs, air cleaners, all kinds of welding equipment, gas and electric, for chassis repairs. The idea was to get equipment ready and to turn it around fast if it was out of duty.
We received all radar equipment that was used at that time. My main job was to take delivery of M-9 Directors. A crew uncrated and assembled the components of the M-9, as well as the four-wheeled trailer. They bolted the computer to the trailer, put the housing on top, and sent it up to us. We would plug it into an electric source, fire it up, and check out.
Test settings were built in. You turned it on and everything would go wild inside, revolve, settle down to humming radio tubes and lights. In eight to ten seconds it would be waiting for you to do something.
One turn of the dial put it in a factory-built situation with the answer printed in the manual. You check out dial one and it might show 130 mph south, 27 mph west, 2 mph down. If it was within specs you went on to the next test. If it never settled down you looked for what was loose or missing—open circuits, unheated tubes that needed reseating. Tubes were shipped separately, 130 of them. You kept a log about what you were doing, what the outcome of the tests were. Let it sit a while to see if it changed. Troubleshooting was specialized search and rescue. They’d been through a sea voyage and rough handling.
We did this for three or four months and finally got to the point where the pressure was lessening. We had the troops well supplied and were doing maintenance of ordnance coming back from the field that needed repair. Work loosened up and we were allowed to take two days off every twenty days.